Building own system, need a plan...

zaayrdragon said:
Because I am also looking for a system I can modify as I see fit, that will have the capacity for further upgrades, etc.

I fell into the 'standard bulk spec' trap previously - that's why I have a 350W power supply, two internal bays, and a lot of crap I neither need nor want on the system.

Of course, I'm more educated now... :D
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Fair enough. Plenty suppliers will build a machine to your spec. though and still do it cheaper. They also provide a guarantee.
Still- it should be fun to do and you will know what you've got. Best of luck!
 
Stainless_Steel_Rat said:
I'm a big advocate of buying as big as you can, once every three years, rather than buying lesser parts all the time for that 3 years.
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Personally, I disagree. My assumption is that if your demands can be satisfied by a 2.5 year old pc (since you buy new only every 3 years), then there is no reason why you need the best right now.

As they say, at the top you pay double for a 10% performance increase. Comparing (Dutch prices, but you'll get the idea) € 120 for a A64 3000+ with € 800 for a A64 FX57, the difference will get you roughly a 50% performance increase. So if the FX57 will last you 3 years, the 3000+ will do for 2 years. Obviously, the latter is far better value for money.

Right now, I would take a 3000+ or 3200+ if the price difference is small. An Epox or Gigabyte motherboard. In my experience they deliver good quality without too many bells and whistles, for a fairly low price. ASUS is good but more expensive, and I feel MSI saves some on quality to provide more features. One 512MB memory stick now, another one as soon as possible.
All together: € 300 here, I expect some $ 300 in the US.
Of course, you'd still need a graphics card and the rest of the internals.

If you wait awhile, get an AM2 socket with cheap CPU and DDRII. Keep an eye on the market, and buy a faster CPU when AMD's next socket is introduced. I'm no fan of CPU upgrades, but I expect that jump 'll be worth it.
 
egslim said:
Personally, I disagree. My assumption is that if your demands can be satisfied by a 2.5 year old pc (since you buy new only every 3 years), then there is no reason why you need the best right now.

As they say, at the top you pay double for a 10% performance increase. Comparing (Dutch prices, but you'll get the idea) € 120 for a A64 3000+ with € 800 for a A64 FX57, the difference will get you roughly a 50% performance increase. So if the FX57 will last you 3 years, the 3000+ will do for 2 years. Obviously, the latter is far better value for money.

Right now, I would take a 3000+ or 3200+ if the price difference is small. An Epox or Gigabyte motherboard. In my experience they deliver good quality without too many bells and whistles, for a fairly low price. ASUS is good but more expensive, and I feel MSI saves some on quality to provide more features. One 512MB memory stick now, another one as soon as possible.
All together: € 300 here, I expect some $ 300 in the US.
Of course, you'd still need a graphics card and the rest of the internals.

If you wait awhile, get an AM2 socket with cheap CPU and DDRII. Keep an eye on the market, and buy a faster CPU when AMD's next socket is introduced. I'm no fan of CPU upgrades, but I expect that jump 'll be worth it.
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If it's for a gaming PC a 3000+ would give it about a year, year and a half of usage before it got to the point of needing to upgrade again, also worth looking at how much cache is on it as that can be a limiting factor. I personally would be dubious about being an early adopter for new socket types, they normally have a few early teething problems and are horribly expensive, then again it's a good time to get the old tech as the price normally drops

As for RAM, in a modern gaming PC, 1Gb minimum with another 1Gb upgrade in the near future (at that point it starts to become practical to turn off the disk caching which is another good way to increase speed in certain parts of games)

Also, coming soon is a card that'll give a boost to many gaming PCs. The Aegia PhysX engine will take over from the CPU when realtime particle physics are needed. On the shelves in May the quoted price is $300, although I expect to see that drop quickly
 
If it's for a gaming PC a 3000+ would give it about a year, year and a half of usage before it got to the point of needing to upgrade again, also worth looking at how much cache is on it as that can be a limiting factor.
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That rather depends on how demanding your usage is. But if a 3000+ will last you about a year, then an FX57 definately won't last more than two - make that one and a half. CPU performance goes up very fast over time. Compared to that, the difference between low and high end models is fairly modest.

There's a difference between a high-end and a low-end game pc. A faster CPU and expensive graphics card plus 2GB memory allow you to turn on every visual detail and play at high resolution - with AA and AF. But you don't need that to play games. You can save a lot of money if you're happy with 800*600 without all the eyecandy.
A friend of mine has 3 pc's, we go there every week to play LAN games. Obviously we can't be hassled to bring our own machines every time, and he can't be bothered to invest a lot of money in fast components. So I have a pretty good grasp of the kind of machine you need to play a fun game. For example, one of them still has only 512MB. It strains, but it's doable.

I notice a tendency among many gamers to advise systems which are simply overkill as 'minimum required', even to those on a budget. And before anyone mentions the words 'futureproof' or 'investment', there is no such thing as a futureproof computer - buy a box of pencils - and a gamecomputer is pure capital destruction. :)
 
Well, let me put it this way:

I play one on-line game, that I'm fairly obsessive about: City of Heroes. When that one bellies up - as I suspect it will - I probably won't get into MMORPGs until someone comes up with another nice space-oriented or super-oriented game (the only other one I played was Earth & Beyond).

Off-line, I usually buy games once they come down to the $20 or less range, but I did purchase Sims 2, and bought GTAIII and GTA:VC almost new (less than six months old). These three games have been a headache when I was trying to play off the on-board graphics card.

So that's my usual pattern. I'll probably buy Civ IV when Civ V gets ready to come out, probably won't buy a lot of other games (unless someone comes out with an excellent first-person spaceship shooter anytime soon), and so forth.

So 'top-of-the-line' isn't really necessary, unless CoH/CoV has plans to stay current on tech levels (and alienate over half their player base).
 
Yeah, on-board is horrible - because it is really not meant to play games there are often driver issues too.
Can't really help selecting a graphics card, I suggest you check benchmarks at www.anandtech.com and such to see how each card performs. Graphics Card Confusion Syndrome is very common, with all the similar but different names, each with its own level of performance - really horrible.
Pay attention to the type of graphics chip (like 6600GT), the amount of memory doesn't matter at all performance wise. Some low-end midrange card around the $ 100 mark is definately adequate.
 
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