It’s very likey that this coming christmas, I will be getting my own computer. And there will be much rejoycing.
The problem is, I know JACK about computer shopping, and my parents know much much less. So I need some advice.
I don’t want a whole lot of bells and whistles. What DO want is a decent sized hard drive (About 20 gigs would be great), a really good video card (I’m gonna be getting Warcraft 3 and Unreal Tournament), a 17" monitor, and everything else should be decent at least. And I’m looking for moderately priced stuff too…something in the range of 4 to 5 hundred. I WON’T be needing a new modem…I belive that it can be networked (I think that’s the right term) off this machine.
So basicaly…any general tips for smart computer shopping would be appreciated.
If you want to play games you’ll want more than a 20gb hard drive. You can get a 40gb for not much more. One thing that you can do is go to stores that sell computers websites’ and look at the prices they have. You can usaully put in what specs you want or a price range (price range would probably be your best bet since you mentioned a price range). Warcraft 3 and nreal Tournament don’t need too high of video cards. Heck, my 4 year old laptop played Warcraft 3 fine and laptops have lower specs than deaktops at a time. Almost every computer now has a modem and network card so that isn’t really an issue.
Since you are looking at desktops, that PowerMacG5 is god. But the compaq is good too, since you dont seem to be running to many huge applications. The compaq is pretty affordable too, and its a nice computer, my brother just got one for <strike>porn</strike> School Work.
I’m a hardcore PC gamer and I always want the works with my computers. I want one with enough computing power to figure out what’s wrong with me and run Planetside with uber graphics at the same time.
At LEAST 1.7 gHz, preferably 2 gHz
At least 40 gig drive, preferably 60 gig drive
At least 512 megs of ram, preferably 1024
At least 52x CD Rom drive, preferably DVD
At least a Radeon 9000 Graphics card, preferably 9800. Don’t go GeForce, you pay too much for the name.
The biggest frikkin fan you can find.
Try these specs on for size… this is what I think is sensible and at the same time a good comp for gaming and other uses:
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
Radeon 9700 Pro 128
512 Crucial2 DDR
180 gig HDD Western Digital 7200rpm 8M cache
The rest I do not reveal since it’s really up to you what you want for motherboard, sound card, drives and so forth… If you go for that, you shouldn’t have to pay an astronomical price and this is still pretty far ahead in the gaming industry since most games that are coming out usually don’t go over 2ghz requirement. My opinion is that you don’t need to get a super powerful processor if you plan on getting a high-end graphics card. The card will more than make up for the loss of cpu power… That’s my opinion anyways and I got a couple people who support my arguments and opinions ^^
Are you looking for a computer just for games, or for other stuff? If for games, I would suggest www.alienware.com , computers made for playing games. But then again you have to be uber rich to buy them.
I don’t want to reccomend components for a gaming PC. I don’t play a lot of games myself, so I wouldn’t really know what is good and what is bad. You might be so unlucky that I’d reccomend something with a VIA Eden ESP CPU, and those have a maximum clock speed of 1 gHz. At least it’s quiet: Since it doesn’t have a fan, and you get to say you have an Eden Inside. And it comes on a really small and cute mainboard, that’s a plus.
In any case, due to personal experiences I will reccomend that you stay away from AMD. And buy a Seagate harddisk: They’re reliable and really quiet.
If you haven’t realized it till now, to me the soundlevel is more important than how mush gHz and gB it has.
