The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs
The Age of Quad Cores Quad cores - now actually useful. A year ago, a properly multithreaded game was a nice surprise. Now it's pretty much a rule and that means more cores. While cheap dual core CPUs are still doing just fine in most games and keep on doing so for perhaps another year or two, the age of quad cores is unavoidably here. It's no longer reasonable to build a new gaming PC around a dual core CPU as the list of games benefiting from more than two cores is going to grow rapidly in 2009. If we want to look ahead and build a system that is good for at least two years, DX11 and it's improved multithreading support is going to perform the last rites on the old paradigm of "give me fast single core performance and a second core for some helper threads" that has been the norm for the past couple of years. Every major game engine in use today already supports threading at least to some degree and the trend is clear - so today's rule for picking a CPU would be "any quad core is fine". You might deviate from this, but you really should do that only when building on extremely tight budget. In the last six months, both Intel and AMD have rolled out new products. Intel's Core i7 series is the undisputed king of the hill at the moment, but it's also priced accordingly with the added "hidden" price of the X58 chipset pushing the CPU-X58 motherboard combination firmly to high end systems. AMD's first Phenom series was a disappointment, but the new Phenom II is a whole different matter. It's no match for Core i7 but it finally provides some real competition to the Core 2 Quads, offering comparable performance at a very affordable price point. As games still tend to concentrate on maxing out your GPU (GTA IV being the exception that proves the point), even as we move to quads, it continues to be a good idea to save money on the CPU rather than on the video card. Speccing Out the Video CardIn early 2008, it was enough if your video card could push around Shader Model 3.0 (DX9) stuff and the only reason to buy a DX10 card was the simple fact that they offered superior DX9 performance. In that regard nothing has changed and DX10 and Shader Model 4.0 is still mostly unused and the rate of "DX10 enhanced" games has actually died down as Vista adoption rate became apparent. For 2009, we'll know more by summer as the usual expo season kicks off, but for now it looks like the situation is unchanged - DX10 features remain unused, yet it's now completely silly to buy anything but a DX10 card. NVIDIA and ATI-AMD continue battling it out for the supremacy in the video card arena. A year ago, ATI was in the ropes, barely managing to put a showing in the low end. What difference a year makes. While NVIDIA technically holds the crown in both single and dual-chip cards with GTX285 and GTX295, the sheer price/performance offered by Radeon HD4870 has firmly put ATI back in the fight.
A year ago games were pushing hardware hard - there were some games that wouldn't run well at maximum settings on any card. Since then, the real game requirements have mostly stayed put while video card technology has advanced somewhat. My personal guess is that while the minimum requirements may go up over the next year, on the high end there won't be that many video card busting titles. Publishers have become more conservative as it's clear that games designed to run properly only on the fastest PCs won't sell nearly as well as those developed to scale properly. Bottom line: While it's still true that your video card is far more important than your CPU in gaming, there is less need to go for the fastest possible card - you'll do fine even with the bit slower model - both Radeon HD4870 and GeForce GTX260 are solid cards and offer quite impressive price/performance ratios while the practical need for GTX280/285 or dual chip cards like HD4870X2 and GTX295 just isn't there unless you game with a 30" 2560x1600 display. Operating Systems and RAM - The Age of 64bitThere has never been a system that has "too much RAM" and luckily memory modules are absolutely dirt cheap these days, so 4GB is the obvious minimum (2x2GB modules, giving you commonly the option to add another 4GB later) and for now it is pretty much the optimal amount at least until 64-bit applications become common as no game can ask for more than 4GB before that. For Core i7-based systems, the standard is 6GB as the memory controller inside Core i7 supports triple-channel DDR3 - and three times 2GB is 6GB. Nothing exactly prevents you from installing just 2 modules (4GB) on a X58-based Core i7 motherboard, but you would effectively be cutting the memory bandwidth by 33% if you do so - a bit of a silly move if you are building a high end rig. RAM and operating system choice are interlinked due to the 32/64 bit issue. In the last year, 64-bit Vista got polished to a point where it is easy to declare 32-bit operating systems dead. They were always limited to maximum of 4GB addressable memory, and in practice that meant 4GB systems would end up showing only between 3GB and 3.5GB of accessible RAM, depending mostly on the amount of address space eaten up by the video card. With the advent of 1GB video cards, you could actually end up with less than 3GB of usable memory. That's just madness, so as 32/64 compatibility issues have all but vanished, the recommendation here is clear. For any new system, get a 64-bit OS, and since 64-bit XP driver support just isn't what it should be, get 64-bit Vista. It's not perfect, but since Service Pack 1 it has been quite usable. Applications still are 32-bit, so the benefits from gobs and gobs of RAM tend to be limited to multitasking (that pesky 32-bit 2GB-per-application limitation), but as more and more systems are built with 6GB or 8GB, developers may start moving to 64-bit applications in the next two years simply because that's the only way to use all that memory. If only Microsoft would skip 32-bit version of Windows 7 completely... in any case, 32-bit operating systems belong to the pages of history and 32-bit Windows 7 is a piece of hilarious comedy in my books. If you are running a 32-bit OS today, great, keep on truckin' until it's time to rebuild your system, but buying one for a new system is pretty silly. What About Windows 7?The question of Windows 7 is a tough one - if you have no urgent need to replace your current system, it may be worth it to wait on that complete rebuild until the upgrade coupon campaign starts to roll. Otherwise you may end up paying once for Vista today and again for Windows 7 in less than a year. Even if Windows 7 won't appear until late 2009 the earliest, just like back when Vista release was imminent, Microsoft will inevitably start offering free Windows 7 upgrade coupons with Vista sometime in the summer. You get Vista in the box and a Windows 7 upgrade in the mail for the cost of shipping & handling when it's released. Bottom line: 4GB is the amount of RAM you want today and 64-bit Vista is the OS of choice on new builds until Windows 7 becomes available, but neither is a reason to upgrade a system that is otherwise doing fine. Prebuilt? Laptops? Alienware is one of the manufacturers doing real gaming laptops - at a price. Okay, then to the practical side - buying a new gaming PC. The easiest way is obviously to pick a factory built PC from a big manufacturer like HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens etc. The hard part is to find one that contains a good balanced mix of parts for gaming. In my experience these companies tend to split their offerings into three categories - and none really fit the bill. I mean, more often than not you get to pick between business PCs sporting crappy integrated video chipsets completely unsuitable for gaming, home PCs that tend to save money on the video card while offering a CPU that is often pure overkill (thanks to marketing incentives from the CPU manufacturers) and dedicated gaming PCs that almost universally venture into the land of overkill with things like Extreme Edition CPUs and SLI setups. Not bad if you have too much money floating around, but these days, who does? Now if you manage to find a model that actually breaks out of the mold and offers a smart combination of CPU and GPU, why not? The only real downside tends to be the loss of upgradeability due to non-standard components and weak power supplies, often carefully calculated to run just what's inside and that's it. On the subject of laptops, I have a personal motto - "Laptop + Gaming = Fail" - and I pretty much stick to it. There have been some attempts at reasonable gaming laptops but the fun has always ended when you look at the price point. Better get a good ultra-portable laptop for serious stuff on the road and game on a separate desktop. If you insist that you must get to play on the move, the advice is simple: when picking the laptop model, concentrate on the video chip used, accepting only the latest Mobility Radeon or GeForce M models - GeForce 9800M GTS/GTX or Mobility Radeon HD4850/HD4870. Even then you have to take all the promotional hype with a grain of salt as laptop chips always lag well behind their desktop counterparts. As an example, a laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 and GeForce 9800M GTX can be expected to score about P4300 in 3DMark Vantage - below the score that the "YouGamers Minimum" system can pull off - yet such a gaming laptop can easily cost around $2000. Building from ComponentsMost gaming PCs tend to be either self-built or built-to-order. This is usually the most cost-effective solution and you get to pick exactly what you want to have inside your system. Examples of US-based companies offering built-to-order systems include iBuyPower, CyberPower or Velocity Micro, and I'm sure there are many others. You may even find some locally, saving you the cost of shipping. If you choose to go for a self-built system but have never built a PC, there are some pitfalls along the way that may end up causing grief, so make sure you know what you are doing before diving in or get a friend to teach you the basics. Even if you have a confirmed set of compatible components picked by an expert, accidentally frying a motherboard (or worse) when putting it all together is an expensive way to learn... On the other hand, once you learn the basics, tinkering with the guts of your PC can be a fun hobby as well. But let's get down to practical advice - what to buy?
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