Looking to buy a new PC mostly for gaming, what specs should I go for, so that it can still perform reasonably well in a few years’ time?
Ta
Get the best 8600s in SLI. Get the 2.13 Intel Dual Core Duo. Its clockspeed is low but it’s great for overclocking. Maybe just get the 2.4.
Get a 20’ Widescreen Untrasharp Dell Monitor. Whatever your opinion on Dell is, at least they make good monitors. If you get larger than 20, your graphics card will go out of date sooner since you’ll have to downgrade your resolution faster.
Don’t bother with an expensive soundcard. At most get the basic Xidigy Soundblaster or whatever then new name is. I forgot but you know what I’m talking about. Get a massive power supply from a well known company. You won’t regret it. Don’t waste your money on the Physix card. Don’t get a Blu-Ray drive just yet. It’ll cost you more than its worth. But be ready to buy one in 2 years when it becomes then new format. Get a nice motherboard and get at the very least 2GB of ram.
Question is, how much are you willing to spend?
I’m building a nice 3D Graphics machine in the next month for work and I’ve done it up for £1200. It’s a Quadcore Q6600 Intel with 4gb Ram and lot of other goodies.
Get a squat rack.
[quote]Airtruth wrote:
Get a squat rack.[/quote]
EliteFTS Colligate Rack, Chains, Weights, and a Bench Probably costs the same as a Voodoo PC.
If you want a machine that’s going to be good for a few years I suggest waiting on the video card for a few months. The new DX10.1 cards are coming out which have upgraded hardware that the current DX10.0 cards do not have. The current DX10.0 cards are not compatible with future “DX10” games.
Also, at the moment you can get Q6600 CPU’s cheap. I also suggest 2GB of RAM if you’re using XP, 4GB if you’re using Vista (and if you get Vista, definitely get x64 version). I don’t suggest getting an xFi soundcard with Vista because it has a lot of hardware problems, even with the recent fixes people are still reporting problems.
Definitely spend a bit of money on a quality PSU (if you’re spending less than $75 on your PSU you’re taking a risk). If you get a new generation video card and a quad core I don’t suggest anything under 750Watts with 83%+ efficiency.
I couldnt help but chime in on this one since I’m an IT nerd.
First, buy a squat rack.
Second, but a Wii. They are fun.
But if you want a PC then:
Graphics card - spend your cash on this first. If you really want an uber games PC this will be half your outlay. You’ll want at 512MB or 1GB card. Otherwise I dont know shit anymore on these. SPEND THE MOST CASH ON THIS.
CPU - 64bit. Otherwise everything these days is dual or quad core. This will not be the limiting factor for games.
RAM - At least 2GB. RAM is the limiting factor for games (more so on the graphics card itself). 4GB is a waste due since 96% of the time your machine is only going to be able to address 3GB. I would buy 3GB if I wanted an uber PC. I can talk geak and explain memory addressing if you wish or you can take my word for it 
RAM is cheap! RAM is always going to be the limiting factor! Buy the most uber RAM possible (which used to be DDR - not sure these days. You’ve got dual and quad pipelines and shit. Talk to some geeks in the shop).
Motherboard - Hmmm. You’ll need one with all the connectors for you shit (you’ll need PCI-Express slots, SATA connectors, 5.1 audio, 1G ethernet, the list goes on…). You can go as cheap as possible on the MB in my opinion. Make sure you get a beasty power supply to run your graphics card.
Hard Disk - Go large to store all your shit! Can never have enoguh disk. Speed is going to effect playing movies and loading games but again you can go cheap on this without really affecting your uber PC status. Disk speeds of 7,200RPM or 10,200RPM. You’ll want SATA drives, SCSI if you can afford it.
I haven’t played a PC game in years btw and I last built a PC 2 years ago. A lot has changed since then.
But spend you money in order roughly:
Grpahics card - 1/2
RAM - 1/4
CPU - 1/4
Motherboard - 1/4
Everything else - 1/4
One last thing. If you can - buy Windows XP.
Vista is shit until a service pack comes out in 12 months. Its also got nust DRM and crap.
Hope that helps.
I just realised my fractions dont add up. You get the point though. Half on grpahics card. Rest evenly distributed on everything else.
Oh if you really want uber you’ll need to get a RAID controller and multiple hard drives. This is costly though. But image a hard disk exploding and no data being lost! Also makes data read/writes faster.
RAID 5 is idiot proof and good mix of performance versus redundancy. You’ll need at least hard disks though (and you only get the space of one).
RAID 0 or 1 costs you just two drives but you can only choose either performance or redundancy not both.
Vista’s SP is actually already on its way and if you purchase the 64bit Vista you’ll definitely want 4GB of RAM.
But to each their own.
[quote]robbiminator wrote:
Looking to buy a new PC mostly for gaming, what specs should I go for, so that it can still perform reasonably well in a few years’ time?
Ta[/quote]
Video card is the most important part. Get an 8800 from Nvidia.