I’m just doing it to wave my mechanical dick at you.
Nah, honestly, I’ve been out of pc-gaming for more than half a decade because of an incredibly old rig and even now and then there’s one or two titles that catch my interest and I would like to play without, at long last, automatically setting all graphic options to either low, really low, or DudeGetANewFuckingMachineAlready.
There’s Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations II, Team Fortress II, Making History, Civilization IV, Battle for Wesnoth, there’s emulators, retro games, and there’s games in development, like Elemental: War of Magic.
Kingston.com is useful for finding compatible RAM. If you go with theirs that is.
Be aware that a 32-bit OS can’t utilize more than 3.5GB RAM. You can physically have 4GB+, but the OS will only be able to access 3.5GB. If you want to be able to access the whole 4GB, you’ll have to use a 64-bit OS.
I get the theory behind it, but have no practical experience with it: How much of an issue is going up to 64-bit? As in, do you encounter too many compatibility issues, unavailable drivers, etc, or is it mostly a negligible difference?
Heroes of Might and Magic V, King’s Bounty: The Legend, the better versions of Counterstrike, Portal, Team Fortress (well, just about any multiplatform FPS), Empire: Total War, Company of Heroes, and yes, Emulators from Gamecube and PS2 down (sadly, no good ones for Xbox) to the earliest consoles and computers.
I mean what are you gonna get that can’t just as easily be played on a shitty machine. Emulators don’t count.
Well, I bought Fallout 3 after hearing that it was quite good, only to find out I didn’t meet the minimum reqs, with a midgrade laptop bought one month prior. There are also MMORPG alternatives to WoW that shitty machines have trouble with.
It mostly works just fine, the issue is more that you have to use Windows Vista than that it’s x64.
Crysis? And there are a lot of other PC exclusives that take a lot of power.
Contributing:
I have this setup (Cost me 700 smackers just three weeks ago, but my previous machine was at it’s break point anyway and even if I had bought from the cheapest retailers, the delivery costs would’ve made it that high anyway), self-assembled and all.
Can go ULTRA HIGH with Fallout 3. Previous machine with a GF7600GT had to have minimum settings to even start, and even 4-year old games like Battlefield 2 turned into a slide show if I happened to be under an artillery strike.
Mobo: P5Q Pro
E8400 Core 2 Duo
Sapphire Radeon 4870
500Gigs of HD
Some SATA DVD drive
Built into a Sonata Antec III case with a 500w power and decent (read: Quiet when I want to) fans.
4 gigs of DDR2 ram (@800mhz), in case 7 or Vista ever show up on my machine.
I could’ve saved on the DVD drive, but my previous one had a case of thinking it was a Formula One race car. Well, at least I had a router, a monitor (19") and speakers ready.
Hades: Certain video formats also require quite the beast if you’re into high definition video. (Hell, I had h264 encoded videos lagging behind the audio.)
Get something with 4 gigs of RAM , a 256mb vid card, a few hundred gigs of HD space and whatever motherboard nulani says is good. This shouldn’t cost you much and you’ll run most things on decent settings for a few years to come.
Its pretty much what my laptop has and it runs Left 4 Dead on the highest specs better than everyone I know.
Crucial RAM is cheap. You can get 4 gigs for 100ish easily. 256mb vid card will also not cost that much. An internal HD with 250 gigs will cost 100 or less.
I’d go with what most everyone else has said. You wanna get good stuff, but not pay a buttload of money for it. I had some friend try to build his own PC and spent several thousand dollars doing so (not to mention making payments to his sister for said money…he was very stupid).
Reading all this makes my laptop feel shitty in comparison. Though I’ve already been through one hard drive after my 1st burnt out on me. (Too much WoW?)
and note that not all 256mb video cards are the same. and some 512mb cards may be worse than some 256mb cards.
I got a 256mb ati x600xt back in 2004 for cheap I remember, even a now old card like that is better than some of the older 256mb cards out there. Be careful.
Okay, this is going slower than I thought since I have to hunt down these guys one by one, but using these as a vague estimate:
Question Number 2: Power Supply.
How much power do I need on average for a machine using the stuff I mentioned? I’m not planning on overclocking, but I’d still like to play it safe with anything related to electricity.
It won’t use much more than 200W, but I’d still go with around 450W, or at least 380W. Have you decided on a case yet?
No, not yet. Piecing this thing together at prices relatively close to sanity implies going all over my province harassing people that can connect me with other people who import this stuff wholesale. I haven’t yet confirmed if the first stuff I mentioned is available, so I’m just checking to have a general idea of what I’ll need later.
Any particular things to watch out for when chosing a case? Other than size, that is?
It is fairly common that they do include a supply, which is why it’s normal to pick a case before you pick a supply. That’s why I asked.
That depends. Some cases are more noisy than others, so if noise is an issue, that’s one thing.
Ah, I see what you meant. The supplies included in the cases here are, barring bizarre ocurrences, all for standard office-work PCs. I’m asking because I know there’s a 99% chance that I’ll have to hunt down something bigger than what they’ll offer me.
Alright, the thing is taking shape now. I’m going for a supply around 500W just to be sure. However, finding a video card is proving difficult and I realize I didn’t pick too many options, therefore:
Question Number 3: Video Card
My choice was the GeForce 9800 GTX+, hard to find here. What I’m asking for are suggestions on alternatives, be them equivalent or reasonably higher/lower capacity, or just generally stuff on the medium/high end you’ve had good experiences with. I don’t need nor can afford any monster card, just a nice good one.
ATI Radeon HD 4770, ATI Radeon HD 4890? They seem to be about equivalent.