The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs
Contents1. Introduction, Look at 20082. Looking Ahead: 2009 and DirectX 11 3. CPU, Video Card, RAM, OS... 4. 2009 YouGamers Gaming PCs 5. Closing Comments, Future Hardware PC hardware market keeps on turning and it's time to take a look at the market. What kind of a PC do you need for games today and what is known about the future. We also give some practical advice by speccing out several gaming PCs from today's components that should serve as cost-effective gaming platforms for the foreseeable future. YouGamers looked at this very issue a year ago and it is interesting to see how our predictions matched with the reality and how the gaming PCs have developed in a year. In response to some feedback, we will also expand our suggestions a bit, adding a third example setup. First one ("YouGamers Minimum") is targeted for someone who wants to build a gaming PC on a tight budget - a minimum level of sorts, without saving money by buying junk that you'll regret later. Second setup ("YouGamers Recommended") presents a sensible system that offers solid price/performance ratio without major compromises. Finally, the third setup ("YouGamers Extreme") is a look at what you can get if you want a solid high end system with latest technology that will serve you for a long time - with the budget being less of a concern. A small note about overclocking - this article concentrates on stock performance and ignores any overclocking possibilities and their potential benefits. Any overclocking gains you can get depend on your luck with the components and even then nobody can guarantee that "stable" overclock of yours is that for the lifetime of the system - so, in practice we won't be suggesting a cheap CPU with expectation that you'll "of course" overclock it to 4Ghz or something... Personally I think overclocking is a nice hobby, but for rock solid day-to-day operation you want a "stock" system that just works. These suggestions aim for such systems. Looking back at 2008 GTA IV - hands up, need your wallet for a new quad core... So, a year has passed since our 2008 Gaming PC guide, and it might be interesting to look at our predictions and check out how well they matched the reality. On CPUs, we made two predictions - "Quad core is all about future-proofing your system" and "A faster dual core CPU will give you better bang for the buck today than a slower quad core one". Both turned out to be mostly true, but the December release of Grand Theft Auto IV was a bit of a milestone in practical CPU demands. GTA IV was the first PC game that needed a quad setup for smooth performance as it was the first properly multithreaded game that got choppy with a fast dual core. You could play it on the "2008 YouGamers Recommended" system, but it was really pushing the hardware hard. Considering that we had to wait almost 11 months after building the previous recommended rig for it, I'd say we did pretty good. For video cards, we estimated that "ATI's Radeon HD 3870 and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT will very likely be valid gaming cards two years from now" and ventured a guess that it would take between six and nine months to see a real successors. NVIDIA was pretty quick - they got the GeForce GTX280 out by mid-June, even if the launch price was completely out of this world. ATI parried with the Radeon HD4850 and HD4870 a couple of weeks later at shockingly low prices, forcing NVIDIA to rapidly cut the price of GTX280 and GTX260. Both series were widely available in July - six months after the prediction. In retrospective, graphics card performance increased more than I personally expected, but Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 8800GT are still quite valid gaming cards - in fact, 8800GT is still being widely sold (with a new sticker, "9800GT", to improve sales) and you can happily run just about any game on either of them. Looking at our 2008 setup recommendations, the "2008 YouGamers Minimum" system (Athlon X2 5400+ and Radeon HD3850 256MB) is today in dire need of a video card upgrade and the CPU is very much on the borderline. Yet technically you can still play just about any game on it. Not bad for a year old low end rig. The "2008 YouGamers Recommended" system (Core 2 Duo E6850 and GeForce 8800GTS 512MB) on the other hand is still going strong and is actually pretty close to what we are suggesting as the minimum setup for 2009. As for DX10-exclusive titles - I was too optimistic. In fact, DX10 support seems to be just as rare as it was in 2007. The theoretical benefits are still there, but we still haven't witnessed a pure "DX10 only" title and funnily we may never see one - DX11 might be out before games start to require DX10 or later hardware - but more on that a bit later. The obvious reason is Windows Vista and its early problems. We suggested going with Windows XP last year and it looks like many did just that even as the retail version was officially end-of-lifed by Microsoft in July 2008.
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