The 2008 Guide to Gaming PC Specs
Suggestions for a Gaming PCThe following suggestions try to remain vendor-neutral where possible. The manufacturer of your motherboard, video card, hard drive or DVD drive is really up to you - personally I'd recommend looking at a couple of things when choosing a vendor, in the following order; Price, warranty, reputation and bundled software. In the case of power supplies, the model recommended is an example - any reputable brand priced around the same, rated at 500-600W will do - but do avoid cheap "500W" power supplies that go boom when you actually try to use them at their rated load. Saving $30 on a power supply can turn into a disaster should you encounter a specimen that happens to fail with a puff of smoke, taking out most of the other expensive bits inside your PC. Trust me - power supply is the one component where you do not want to save money with a low-spec generic brand model. Low budget gaming PC - "YouGamers Minimum"Unless you have a big budget, a desktop is the only real choice. As I stated earlier, the CPU is not the most important factor when looking at "bare minimum" gaming system - few games are limited by your CPU with the cheaper video cards. So when looking for a cheap gaming system, any dual core CPU will do - an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ or Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 (both priced around $130-$140) are both fine examples at the cheap end. Pairing one of these with two gigabytes of DDR2 RAM and almost any motherboard with a PCI Express x16 slot will give you a fine foundation for a budget gaming PC. Note that the prices of cheaper CPUs can fluctuate rapidly as retailers dump the older models at fire-sale prices - definitely shop around. The video card, however, is far more important - for the bare minimum in a system that you might buy today, I recommend the ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB (around $180). NVIDIA, at the time of publishing, currently has no comparable card available at this price point, and the HD 3850 offers very good value for money. NVIDIA's "official" response to HD 3850 is GeForce 8800GS 384MB, but we could not find it available anywhere just yet. No matter which one of these two you pick, it will serve you for a couple of years. You won't be able to run all games at high resolution and maximum settings due to the 256MB/384MB memory, but both will serve you well at 1280x1024 and I predict that it'll be two years before you run into a game that won't play at all - and by that time the system is already ripe for upgrading anyway. System RAM should be 2GB, and more specifically 800MHz DDR2 (PC2-6400). It's cheap, but putting in any more would effectively require a 64-bit OS, which brings compatibility woes with many games. Low Budget Gaming PC - "YG Minimum"
Estimated 3DMark06 score for this system: 8500 High end gaming PC - "YouGamers Recommended"If the budget is less of a concern, and you want a solid system - less compromises without wasting money on premium-priced parts - you need to look for the pieces that offer the best performance without venturing too close to the silly-land of Ultras and Extremely Expensive Editions. When building on a low budget, any CPU was fine (as the limiting factor tends to be on the video card side), but when you go towards the high end, you want a bit more from your processor. Current CPU pricing provides a dilemma - dual or quad core? As more and more games are going for truly multithreaded engines, the common trend is to choose quad core. On the other hand you don't need four cores for gaming today, and with the games constantly being limited by the graphics card it may be a while before you see concrete benefits from more than two cores - it doesn't really matter if you are running two cores at 80% or four cores at 40% utilization, as is common with today's multithreaded games. The current pricing also makes dual cores quite attractive. As an example, $280 will get you the top-of-the-line 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6850, the same pile of money will only buy a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, and going any faster in the quad core land will ramp up the price quickly - the 2.66GHz model is over $500 and the 3GHz quad core would set you back by a cool $1000. On the AMD side, a direct comparison is not possible, as the fastest AMD Phenom available currently is a 2.3GHz 9600 Black Edition model (priced at around $250) - good for a low budget quad core system, but not quite good enough for a high end gaming PC. If you choose to go dual core, currently I would pick an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 - it is the fastest Intel dual core CPU, and while a slower model would give you more bang for your buck, it's still reasonably priced. AMD has no comparable offering - closest dual core they produce is the 3.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition, which is a lot cheaper at around $170, but do note that even at 3.2GHz, it offers less performance than the 3.0GHz E6850 - even if the MHz numbers indicate otherwise. Quad core is a toss-up between the 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the 2.66GHz Q6700. The latter is, really, "too expensive" at over $500 - almost twice the price for just a 11% speed bump, but on the other hand going with the Q6600 limits the system in single-threaded use - unless you resort to overclocking and that goes beyond the scope of this article. AMD is unfortunately out of the running until their faster Phenoms appear on the market. High End Gaming PC - "YG Recommended"
Estimated 3DMark06 score for this system: 12000  NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 512MB currently offers best performance at a reasonable price. Video card choice is more straightforward - if you want the best high end card for a reasonable price right now, then pick the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB (about $350); availability is still tight, though, and you are going to be paying a small premium. Other options are the ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MB and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB - both are priced around $250. These cheaper cards do offer better price/performance ratios than the GTS, but as the video card is the piece that pretty much dictates the overall gaming performance, spending an extra $100 here will extend the lifespan of your system considerably. Even at the high end, 2GB of system RAM (800Mhz DDR2, PC2-6400) is a fine choice. DDR3 is still too expensive, and provides no apparent performance benefits in gaming. 4GB of RAM is an option, but that would also mean jumping to 64-bit XP or Vista, and taking on the issues that come with that. It would future-proof your system, but why buy something today so you would have it ready when you need it at some future date? You can always toss in that another 2GB later when some game or application actually benefits from it. As vast majority of the systems out there are still running 32-bit operating systems, it may be a long while until we see first games that truly benefit from tons of RAM - you also need a 64-bit games in addition to the 64-bit OS to do that. As a comparison, games consoles can get by with just 512MB, and that's shared by the CPU and the video chip.
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AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ processor with a fan
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