Gaming PC a few questions

ptitterington

Posts: 253   +0
Hello, its been a little while, I always used to build my computers and it was a challenge a few years back. Personally I mainly use my PC now for work and surfing.

My eldest daughter is pretty into her games and she had an alienware laptop that was a pile of rubbish but when it did work was pretty impressive.

She wants a gaming desktop to play very latest games and I have had a quick look and think £1250-£2000 is way too much. I see some have dual Graphics cards that cost £250 each but all the rest of the stuff in there is not all that expensive is it.

A few tips would be much appreciated from folk up to date with what would be needed.

Thanks
 
Well right now the new Intel Sandy Bridge is a good processor choice but if you can wait AMD is coming out with brand new cpus with new architecture this June. I would wait to see what they have to offer.

By the way, what games does she like to play/want to be able to play on a PC? What is your budget?

Because AMD is about to release new cpus their certain current Phenom II Quad-cores and Thuban 6 cores are dropping significantly in price. There are those that say why spend money on soon to be outdated but depending on what she wants to do with the system and the fact you can get really good video cards it might be very doable price wise and still have a great gaming system.
 
Thanks for this, one of her friends brothers said he could make a very good PC for around £1650. Any idea if this is good for what she wants?

Basically
6 core processor, overclockable to faceremoving levels
8 gig ram
60 gig Solid state drive, which gives no waiting for anything awesomeness, with a 2 terebyte drive for photos, music and films etc
24 inch really nice monitor,
overkill keyboard and mouse, they may already have a preference
the most powerful graphics card at the time of quote

Coolermaster HAF922 black midi tower
AsusM4N98TD EVO, NF980ASLI S AM3 PCI-E 2.0x16 DDR3 1066/133 etc.
AMD Phenom II x16 100T black edition Thurban S AM3 3.3ghz 9mb cache Ht4000MHz
1536MB Point of View GTX 580 TGT Charged 40nm 4050mhz GDDR5 GPU 810 Shader 1620MHz 512Cores
2TB Samsung HD204UvZ4 Samsung 5400
60GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E 2.5 Sandforce SSD MLC flash Read 258MB/s Write 275MB/s
8GB (2x4gb) Corsair Twin pack Vengeance DDR3 PC3-14900
900w Antec HGC 900 High current gamer 135mm fan.
??
 
If you plan to overclock it, drop down to the 1055T Phenom, and just overclock it to past 1100T levels. It will save you some money, and you'll have something faster for it.

I would also recommend at the very least an aftermarket cooler if your spending that much money. The Coolermaster V8 CPU coolers, or a Corsair H50 water radiator cooler setup as well recommended.

If you don't plan to overclock, go with the Phenom 1100T, but still purchase a decent aftermarket cooler to keep the temperatures as low as possible, as the thermal cutoff on these CPUs are fairly low.
 
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