The Winter 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs
Contents1. Introduction, Trends2. CPU, Video Card... 3. ...OS, RAM, Storage 4. Winter 2009 YouGamers Gaming PCs 5. Peering to the Future Windows 7 arrived and made Vista and XP obsolete overnight, giving a good reason to look at a potential PC upgrade. If you have to start over with a fresh OS install, might do something to the hardware at the same time. New shiny processors and video cards keep on coming and the fight over marketshare is more fierce than ever. NVIDIA looked invulnerable an year ago - today they are trying to come up with plausible excuses why it isn't a big deal that their DX11 hardware is not yet on the market. On the CPU market, AMD just refuses to give up, nibbling away Intel's marketshare at the low end. We'll take a look at the market today, spec out a few Windows 7 gaming PCs and look at what is coming up in early 2010. YouGamers has already specced out gaming PCs twice, most recently with The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs and it is interesting to see how things have developed since last spring and how well our predictions hit. In some parts of the market a lot has happened, in others... well, Core i7 is best we have. While the Extreme Edition has been upgraded from Core i7-965 to Core i7-975 (a "massive" 133MHz speed boost), it is still effectively the same CPU that was already available in November 2008. Now, before we dive in - a word 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. In practice, this means that we won't be suggesting a cheap CPU with expectation that you'll "of course" overclock it to the moon. Personally I think overclocking is a nice hobby, but for rock solid day-to-day operation you want a "stock" system that just works. Our suggestions aim for such systems. Looking back at 2009It has been nine months since we published our 2009 Gaming PC Guide. How well did our crystal ball work out? First of all, we predicted that consoles would hold back PC games. This has unfortunately turned out to be true. At the same time, poor adoption of Vista (which can mostly be blamed on bad early press) has kept DX10 out of the mainstream in games. Pretty much every piece of hardware sold in the past year already supports it, but game developers are still afraid to commit fully since half of the market is still clinging onto Windows XP. So, most of the PC releases are console ports - some ugly, some with notable improvements but none really pushing the state of the art. There are some rare exceptions, Futuremark's Shattered Horizon (requiring DX10) being the most obvious example, but in general games have stuck to demanding hardware that is comparable to the Xbox 360. Our prediction that DX11 would not cause any major ripples early on appears to be true - the biggest benefit is that the first DX11 hardware runs DX9 and DX10 games faster than anything else on the market. We also predicted that we might start hearing about new consoles in late 2009 - that prediction went wide off the mark. It looks like both Sony and Microsoft are going to stick with the current hardware for at least another two years with the 2010 holiday season perhaps seeing re-branded versions spiced with Wii-inspired motion controls (Sony having a Wiimote-style wand controller while Microsoft banks on their highly advanced "Natal" motion control system). New consoles? Not in 2010.
On the PC hardware front, we predicted that "any quad core is fine" for 2009 and that turned out to be a safe bet. Some games already push the limits of slower dual core CPUs but at the same time multithreading is now everywhere and it is actually hard to find a modern game that can't multithread. We also predicted that GPUs would be more importand and that "...it continues to be a good idea to save money on the CPU rather than on the video card." - another one right on the money. One reason why AMD has recovered a bit is that when building a gaming PC on a budget, the most obvious combo has been to get a cheap Phenom II X4 and a fast video card. Intel has been in trouble at the midrange due to the high price of Core i7. Only recently have they re-entered the fight with Core i5 . Overall, Intel still wins on the high end, AMD dominates in the low end and the midrange is where a battle is ongoing, with Core i5 currently swaying the fight for Intel. With video cards, 2009 turned out to be ATIs return to the fight. Year ago, ATI was on the ropes and in our early 2009 story we noted that the then-new ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB was going to put ATI back in the game. It did and while GeForce GTX 285 could beat it, HD 4870 (and later HD 4890) competed with price, causing terrible damage to NVIDIA's margins. Our prediction was that "while minimum requirements may go up over the next year, on the high end there won't be that many video card busting titles". Sadly this was perfectly on the mark - minimums crept up a bit and cards that could marginally run multiplatform titles are getting obsolete, yet nothing really topped GTA IV in graphics card requirements. Our prediction that HD 4870 and GTX 260 would serve your well was pretty much true - you can still play any game on them, even if in some cases you may not be able to max out all the eyecandy. YG Recommendation CheckWhen we look back at our recommended setups from February 2009, the "2009 YouGamers Minimum" (Core 2 Duo E7400, Radeon HD 4830 512MB, 4GB, Vista 64Bit) is still doing quite okay and could easily work as ultra-cheap gaming PC even today. Granted, you can get faster parts for only a bit more as previously high end cards have crashed down in price, but if you are using such a setup today, it is going to do just fine well into the next year - running just about every game quite acceptably. The "2009 YouGamers Recommended" setup (Phenom II X4 920, Radeon HD 4870 1GB, 4GB, Vista 64Bit) is doing even better and is actually pretty close to what we'd recommend as a budget setup today. It can take pretty much anything you can throw at it and there is absolutely no need to upgrade anything at this point for such a system. We also had high end rig, a "YouGamers Extreme" configuration (Core i7 940, Radeon HD 4870 1GB, 6GB, Vista 64bit) is still pretty extreme - save for the obvious DX11 video card upgrade and a minor CPU speed bump, the current recommendation is almost the same. Notable addition to the mix comes from the introduction of second generation SSD drives. Nine months ago, SSD was experimental stuff. Today, SSD is here and should not be ignored when building a high end PC. Figuring out 2010 and BeyondDigging out our battle-hardened crystal ball, a couple of bits about the future. To make a guess on what PC games will demand in the future, we have now have two factors - consoles and Windows 7 acceptance, which is coupled to the death of Windows XP. Consoles still affect things a lot for multiplatform games, but the state of the art on the PC is rapidly moving away from the consoles. Games that receive a proper PC port with graphical upgrades can go far beyond what a direct Xbox 360 port can do, and this may entice some developers to spend extra effort on the PC. At the same time, console hardware cycle seems to be frozen - I'm sure both Microsoft and Sony already have internal top secret work ongoing to draft future hardware but with the economic downturn dragging on, they are in no hurry. Current consoles are "good enough". Maybe we'll see something about a new console generation in 2011. Maybe.  Windows XP is the biggest factor holding back PC games today - bigger than the consoles. On the PC side, as long as XP and DX9 lives, things are being held back. For games developed to run on XP, new video cards can only offer small performance increases and higher resolutions. A lot depends on Windows 7 uptake. Early on, Vista sucked. Later, Vista got fixed but the stigma of a bad launch remained. Windows 7 is the ultimate fix to Vista and should finally turn the heads of many XP hold-outs - it is just that good. Should that happen in practice, we could see a very rapid shift to DX11 in PC development as vast majority of gaming systems become DX10/DX11 enabled (in essence, all Vista/Win7 systems, as hardware has been DX10 for years now) Use of DirectX 11 has another quirk going for it - DX11 does not rule out the use of DX10 level hardware. As soon as people drop XP, development can hop to DX11. Even if a game is programmed on the DX11 API, it can still have code paths for DX10 level hardware as well. You may get a few extra effects and some extra performance if you also have DX11 hardware, but earlier XP/Vista DX9/DX10 type big divide should not happen as DX11 libraries are available for both Vista and Windows 7. Throwing all this together, if your system can meet the practical minimum requirements of Xbox 360-derived multiplatform games on the PC (multi-core CPU, 2GB RAM, decent Shader Model 3.0 or 4.0 card) you are most likely good through 2010 if you don't mind downgrading the visuals below maximum. There may be a game or two that won't run and a bunch that will require low settings but you can still play. We may see some true DX11-based games appearing late next year, but at that time we'll have another generation of DX11 cards on the market, so there is no absolute need to upgrade for DX11 hardware just yet. DX11 hardware may be a good buy due to price/performance, but not because of DX11 games as there really are none yet. Those already good for DX10 - a recent SM 4.0 card, Vista or Windows 7 and a fast dual core or quad core will be able to play anything that we'll see during 2010 and there is no real need to upgrade unless you run at ridiculously high resolutions or want to take advantage of ATI Eyefinity triple screen stuff which is pretty hardcore even for a dedicated PC gamer.
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