My desktop at the moment is getting old, and i want to try some of these new fangled games like Doom, Quake, Crysis and Stalker. Oh and Supreme Commander (Got a demo of it sitting on my desk now for the past few months) too.
My friend has a good handle on these things, and as such went through dabs.com, making me a list of all the bits i need.
However, he's building to a budget i've given him, and now i've just realised... will the damn thing play modern games?
So... i thought... If i give the specs, the PC gamers can say "yeah you should be able to run x, y and z easily enough" (or not), giving me hope that i'm not going to be left in the yester-year, with a machine that dies with Wolfenstein 3d.
Specs (to be)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ AM2 2.5GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte AM2 AMD 690G ATX DDR2 A L
Ram: OCZ Technology 2x1GB 240DIMM PC2-6400 DDR2 Platinum
Graphics: ATI RADEON HD 3870 512MB PCIE DDR4
Storage: Western Digital Caviar 160GB 7200RPM S300 16MB
PSU: Corsair Memory 550W VX PSU
A liteon DVD burner, Asustek case and Zalman cooler for the CPU finish it off.
Pretty names. Means nothing to me :/
It's going to be a 'downstairs' machine, so i'll be using headphones and onboard sound, and a 22" 5ms monitor. Haven't worked out which keyboard and mouse to get (to be honest, i'm starting to faint at the cost of this lot, it's £100 over my £500 budget so far), so i'm thinking the Microsoft wireless set for now, with an eye on the logitech one later, as their mice are pretty damn comfortable (I use the MX510 now).
So. Will that play modern games? I don't HAVE any really modern games, i mostly play Dawn of War, Guildwars and City of Villains/Heroes, but i'd really like to try some of the more modern things like Stalker, Supreme, Crysis, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London and The Witcher.
I suppose the worst question to ask (most important too), is... is it worth upgrading for PC gaming? What is there on the PC barring MMOs, that's it's worth slapping down 2+ Xbox 360's worth of money for? My computer now (and the two laptops although one of them struggles on the net a little) browse the web, watch videos and do basic games ok... so i'm really planning this spending just for a 'gaming machine'.
Hmm.
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You don't have to play Crysis.
Also, don't write off Microsoft hardware, some of the best keyboards and mice I've used have been MS.
Oh, and get Steam. Immediately.
YES
Current Stuff:
TF2
Sins of a Solar Empire
All of what you mentioned
Up Comming Shit:
Spore
Fallout 3
Starcraft 2
As for the parts you listed, drop that ATI and get an 8800. Id also recommend getting an Asus motherboard instead of Gigabyte, not that Gigabyte is bad, but Asus is just the best.
Also if you dont mind spending some extra money get another 2 Hard Drives and set up a RAID 5 array, its twice as fast and you can't lose any data as a result of a hard drive dying.
Also id have a look at what Intel processors you can get for the same price as that amd64. Not that its a bad processor, just that its old, and the newer intel ones tend to be better, for the same price. You'd also need a different motherboard, and if you do go with intel, get an asus p5n-e, its cheap and good.
Other than that... if theres lots of games you want to play, you'll probably want more than 160gb of storage. Youd be surprised at how quickly you can fill it up.
In any case, that pc should run crysis at high, with some tweaking to get all the obvious very high settings. It should be playable the whole game, although that means 20fps or so. If you can play crysis, you can play anything. Except maybe hellgate london, but you dont need to play that...
But that requires a bit more of a splurge ;)