gaming PC

[dave brennand]

I'm thinking of getting a PC so I can run games like Doom 3, half life etc. the new stuff.
Alongside this I want to be able to do all the usual Word and Excell things.
Anyone help me with a spec or point me to a ready made machine??

Thanks

dave

[KormaChameleon]

Alienware (www.alienware.co.uk) provide some good ready made machines, but if you are prepared to build your own, you may setup a more customised spec.

If you go for standard Dell machines, for example, your choice of new powerful graphics card may fall foul of the lower rated power supply for example.

[warmfuzzies]

spec will be something like
AMD 64 3700+
1GB memory
WD Raptor HD 2x36GB in Raid config
ATI X800XT or 6800GT/Ultra

anything else will just be icing on the cake.

I have a 1GB Nforce2 XP2600+ machine with a 9800XT inside and doom 3 makes it chug a little, settings in the video are all on high.
HL2 runs 1280 1024 with no sweat all setings on high again.

[robdickinson]

Alienware are great but very expensive.

I just got an Athlon 64 3000 socket 939 winchester, 1gb PC3200 mem, Asus a8v motherboard and an MSI 6800le vid card, all for about £430 total, slapped that into my current PC chassy and away I go.

Its plenty adaquate for all todays games and for a few years too (I was playing HL2 on my 1.1 athlon/GF3 fine - tho didnt try doom3 lol).

Any 6800 series card (or 6600GT) will be good. I always stear clear of the top spec suff, 6800ultra and FX55 CPU's etc as its a stupid premium to pay for extra power that doesnt make much difference, pay 1/3rd the price for 2nd tier stuff and get something else next year...

[docevi1]

I picked up:

AMD 64bit 3500 Newcastle (130nm)
Coolermaster Hyper6 cooler
Asus A8v Deluxe Rev. 2
1 GB Geil Value PC3200 DDR RAM
250GB Seagate Baracuda SATA HDD

from www.overclockers.co.uk for a little over £520. You'd need to add a case, graphics card, PSU and sound to finish the base off. Of course you then need to worry about getting hold of a monitor and any software. I'd say you'd be looking at upwards of £1200 for a top of the range system to build it yourself.

However, Aldi were doing a stonking deal on PC's about a week ago, £699 for a machine which far exceeded the price IIRC. I'd be inclinded to see if any were left or failing that buy a pre-built box from someone like Alienware, Mesh or similar.

One thing to remember, if you are bothered about latest tech, or indeed need to wait for things to drop in price SLi boards and graphic cards are just round the corner, as is PCI-E. You'll find that the technology isn't that much more expensive but performance is rumoured to be significantly better. I bought mine a month ago and am very happy with the performance

[robdickinson]

Performance of PCIe isnt that much better than AGP for now, tho AGP is dead tech and PCIe will get faster, and enables SLI of course.

I'm using the onboard sound on my A8V Deluxe, seems at least as good as my old live value anyhow - tho setup with speakers/headphones doesnt seem to work as easily as it should.

The Aldi PC deal was a remarkable price for the spec fo sure.

Ontop of my £430 you'd need a case/PSU £60, hard drive £80-100, monitor £120ish for CRT or £250-500 for LCD and £30 or so for mouse/kb etc. Thats £900 or so without software, good spec but not stacks better than the Aldi pc.

[trooper1212]

docevi1 said:

However, Aldi were doing a stonking deal on PC's about a week ago, £699 for a machine which far exceeded the price IIRC. I'd be inclinded to see if any were left or failing that buy a pre-built box from someone like Alienware, Mesh or similar.

After spending the last 10-15 years building my own PCs for gaming, I bought one of the Aldi machines.
Very impressive and doesn't break a sweat on half-life 2 at full whack.

The self build snobs hate the machine though, but don't listen to them

[robdickinson]

trooper1212 said:

The self build snobs hate the machine though, but don't listen to them

I'm a self build snom mainly because I want the exact specific components rather than a cheap overall PC, but the Aldi one was damned good value.

I very rarely change a whole PC anyhow, often its a handfull of components tops so off the shelf doesnt do it.

[trooper1212]

robdickinson said:

trooper1212 said: The self build snobs hate the machine though, but don't listen to them I'm a self build snom mainly because I want the exact specific components rather than a cheap overall PC, but the Aldi one was damned good value. I very rarely change a whole PC anyhow, often its a handfull of components tops so off the shelf doesnt do it.

I'm a snob too and would never have bought an off the shelf machine ordinarily.

On my main machine I upgrade piece by piece as you do, but I needed a whole second machine to play games on connected to the tv, so I thought I'd take a chance on the Aldi machine. The most suprising thing was how well the software was configured out of the box, the only thing I had to do was to get the latest graphics drivers as the supplied ones were out of date by 3 weeks, and change the virus package to avast as the supplied one is a bit crappy.
Other than that, it was pretty much spot on, I was expecting to have to re-install everything to clear off all the crap, but there wasn't any crap on there.

[pmanson]

trooper1212 said:

docevi1 said: However, Aldi were doing a stonking deal on PC's about a week ago, £699 for a machine which far exceeded the price IIRC. I'd be inclinded to see if any were left or failing that buy a pre-built box from someone like Alienware, Mesh or similar. After spending the last 10-15 years building my own PCs for gaming, I bought one of the Aldi machines. Very impressive and doesn't break a sweat on half-life 2 at full whack. The self build snobs hate the machine though, but don't listen to them

I was in Tesco's last night and they had some Time (I think) machines in there for £500 IIRC. Seemed to be a good spec (512Mb RAM, 80Gig HD etc) and it came with a 17" Philips TFT!!!!!!

Absolute bargin!

>> Edited by pmanson on Wednesday 1st December 13:26

[robdickinson]

Yeah the time machine looked a good all rounder, athlon xp 3000.

But integrated sound and video would make it poor for games, the Aldi one has a more than decent 6610 nvidia card (6600gtish levels).

[pmanson]

robdickinson said:

Yeah the time machine looked a good all rounder, athlon xp 3000. But integrated sound and video would make it poor for games, the Aldi one has a more than decent 6610 nvidia card (6600gtish levels).

True but on the other hand the advantage would be you could put in a graphics card that you wanted!

[shirkin]

Im in a similiar boat, and was thinking about getting a PC from Mesh for about £1300. Anyone had any dealings with them in the past? Know how reliable they are?

[pmanson]

shirkin said:

Im in a similiar boat, and was thinking about getting a PC from Mesh for about £1300. Anyone had any dealings with them in the past? Know how reliable they are?

My old house mate has a Mesh. Seems ok, only issue was that the case was huge!

[Mr E]

A lot of over kill here.

CPU speed isn't so important. Decent AMD/Intel chip (you don't need bleeding edge).

High end GFX card (this makes the difference)

Big power supply

Gig of fast ram.

Job done.

If it helps, Rome Total War runs fine on my AMD XP3000 with 512Mb and a 256Mb FX5200

[robdickinson]

Its prehaps overkill for most of todays games (have played far cry and HL2 on my athlon 1.1 w GF3 after all) but buying now for games in 2 years time its worth getting something near the top.


£1300 is a lot of money for a PC thesedays, I'd want something special for that (compared to the cracker ALDI pc).