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The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs

The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs

Suggestions - YouGamers Examples

When speccing out the following systems we tried to remain vendor-neutral where possible. The actual manufacturer of your video card, motherboard, hard drive or optical drive is mostly up to you - just look at the general reputation of the vendor and then make your pick based on price, warranty and whatever bundled software is included. These days you can often find free games or even a free copy of 3DMark Vantage bundled with some components.

When picking a case it comes mostly down to aesthetics - pick one that looks good to you as long as it takes a standard ATX motherboard. If you have no intention to continuously tinker with the system or add multiple hard disks, almost any case will do. More expensive models tend to offer quieter fans and easier access to the guts of the PC, so it may be worth paying a bit more than the $50 we specced for a generic case.

For most of the components it may be worth penny-pinching and going for the cheapest possible you can find, with one exception. Never ever "save" by picking a cheap power supply. Just don't. The savings are minor - usually $30-40 at most - and those "savings" feel silly if a cheap PSU goes up in smoke and ends up taking out the rest of the expensive bits inside your system. Always go for a trusted brand, and when in doubt, go for the one that costs more. In PSUs you can almost always use the price to indicate quality, as the market is so competitive. There are no such thing as good sub-$50 power supply and the example used on the low end system - an Antec 550W unit - is the absolute minimum I would stick into a gaming system. For the YouGamers Recommended and YouGamers Extreme systems we added a serious PC Power & Cooling 750W unit as an example. There are other brands that are just fine as well, but expect to spend at least $100 on a 750W or 850W model that is worth buying.

Low End - YouGamers Minimum

For our low end system, the goal was to spec out a system that plays any game out there today at 1680x1050 (20" or 22" widescreen) without resorting to horrible compromises with graphics settings. A system like this can be expected to serve you about two years before you run into issues and you can probably add another year to that by upgrading the video card along the way.

We broke the "it's time for a quad" rule with the low end system to save money. It's the obvious place to save and pretty much required if you want to keep the system truly affordable. Besides, it's hard to beat Core 2 Duo E7400 in price/performance at the moment. It's pretty damn impressive for a $120 CPU.

Video card is arguably the weak link in this system. If you have any extra money to spend, the first bit I would swap out would be the Radeon HD4830. It's phenomenal value at around $110 but if you can afford it, a  GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB at around $160 is a nice upgrade to this setup.

When compared to the 2008 YouGamers Minimum setup, this system manages about 2000 points more in 3DMark06 while costing about $140 less.

Midrange - YouGamers Recommended

For our midrange setup, the goal was to build a cost-effective system that would run any game today without breaking a sweat even when paired with a 24" 1920x1200 widescreen display. For CPU we picked the new AMD Phenom II X4 920 as a basis for the system. It offers quite impressive value for money at around $200.

If you insist on Intel, you could swap the CPU to  Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 and pair that with a  Intel P45-based motherboard, but that would add more than $50 to the total cost of the system without really affecting the performance at all - the new Phenom II really does offer a real option to the recent Intel Core 2 domination if you look at the value for money.

For video card, GTA IV set the bar for video memory requirements at 1GB, and I doubt it will remain an isolated incident, so it's time for a 1GB card. Radeon HD4870 1GB is currently the most cost-effective high end video card, so that's pretty much a no-brainer. The NVIDIA option would be  GeForce GTX260 896MB (the new one, with 216 cores) at around the same price, but it offers a bit lower performance and (slightly) less memory, so strictly speaking the ATI offering is a better deal.

When compared to the 2008 YouGamers Recommended setup, this setup also manages about 2000 points more in 3DMark06 while costing about $120 less.

High End - YouGamers Extreme

At the high end, things get a lot more expensive. Intel Core i7 series is obviously the fastest CPU right now, and when going for the top, there is little point at sticking with the cheapest model unless you plan on overclocking - so Core i7 940 it is. That dictates the X58 chipset motherboard and to fully take advantage of the memory bandwidth, a triple-kit of 2GB DDR3 memory modules resulting in 6GB total.

At this level you also might want to spend a bit more on the case for looks and better cooling and $100 will buy you a solid offering from any number of "premium" case manufacturers. I also added in a Blu-ray drive - it's about $90 extra and allows you to watch Blu-ray movies on your PC. If you prefer to watch your movies on a dedicated player or PS3, it's easy to swap that back to a DVDRW drive for some savings.

For video card, I briefly considered going SLI or Crossfire, but the fact is that the driver problems are still there, especially with brand new games. If you want to go even more extreme, both  Radeon HD4870X2 2GB and  GeForce GTX295 2GB are fine two-chip cards that offer impressive performance figures at around $500 - just make sure you have at least a 1920x1200 display to go with one of these or you may end up seeing no tangible benefits beyond benchmark scores.

On the subject of hard disks, if you really want to go for it, it may be worth it to look at the new Solid State Drives (SSD) as drive for the operating system - they offer quite incredible peformance. In most cases hard disk performance matters very little in games, but a fast SSD will make general tasks a lot more snappier. The downside is the price and the fact that you'd still need a normal hard disk for mass storage due to the limited size of SSDs. It should also be noted that SSD prices are currently falling very rapidly and what you buy today may look very foolish in just a few months. SSD for 2010 YouGamers Gaming PC? Most likely, but for 2009 they are still beyond extreme.

When compared to the 2008 YouGamers Recommended setup, this YouGamers Extreme system manages about 5700 points more in 3DMark06 while costing a bit over $700 more - and that's while still staying with somewhat reasonable components.

Page 1: Introduction, Look at 2008Page 2: Looking Ahead: 2009 and DirectX 11Page 3: CPU, Video Card, RAM, OS...Page 4: 2009 YouGamers Gaming PCsPage 5: Closing Comments, Future Hardware

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