The Best Gaming PC Money Can Buy

SlappingOysters writes "Gameplayer has gone live with their best PC hardware configurations for Q1 2009. They've broken it into three tiers depending on the investor's budget. And while the prices are regional, it is comparative across the globe. The site has also detailed the 10 Hottest PC Games of 2009 to unveil the software on the horizon which may seduce gamers into an upgrade."

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Winckle]

It's articles that really do pc gaming a disservice. All you need to get pc gaming at reasonable resolutions is a decent mid range card like a 9600 or 9800. I have an 8800 GTS 512 and even on the absolute newest games I still achieve great framerates on good looking settings.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Phantasmagoria 2
Gazillionaire
Diablo 2
Burn:Cycle

And that is what I found in the first day of using Vista64

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Mprx]

You can easily tell the difference between 100fps and 10000fps by looking at high contrast fast motion. Human eyes don't see in frames, but the point where increasing framerate won't cause any perceptible difference is probably in the thousands of fps.

Here's a good explanation of the issues of motion reproduction:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx [microsoft.com]

Whatever temporal sampling rate you choose, it's unlikely to be fast enough
There is no practical frame rate high enough to properly portray all the motion typically encountered. It is necessary to pick a sensible rate that is slow enough to allow the video signal to be stored, routed around, and of course broadcast.

Re:I would buy a Mac

[v1]

I'm a little surprised they haven't added macs to reviews like that. This one was apparently not too intelligent, they look like they went shopping to see how much money they could spend on a system, not really looking to make sure they got the best hardware configuration possible. Macs do tend to be more expensive on the average, and there's a lot more shiny expensive options available at their store, so this would have probably helped them with the direction they were headed.

Lets play...

- 8 core (dual quad) xenon at 3.2 ghz
- 32gb PC6400 (800mhz) RAM
- hardware raid card (we don't want software raid to slow the monster down!)
- 4 x 1tb SATA drives to feed to that raid card
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB VRAM
- dual 16x superdrives (or you can aftermarket a pair of BR drives from mcetech.com)
- pair of 30" cinema displays of course
- wireless keyboard and mouse (tho you'll need to find some $250 controller too I'm sure)
(I think we'll skip the modem option)
(also even for this I think we can skip the fiber channel card and xsan, I can't justify it here)
- may as well install server on it, you're going to be pushing game updates to your lan buddies right?
- at this point the 2 yrs of added warranty is a great value since it doesn't price based on config

$22,195. But that doesn't cover the controller.

There are a wide variety of ways to cut corners. Sony displays instead of apple's, buy your own memory and hard drives since apple's markup on them is insane, forego server, you can drop it down to about $7500, but you'll have to get the displays and ram separately. But this was just to see how much you could drop on a system.

Re:What a crock...

[El Capitaine]

I agree, Blu-Ray is not really necessary for a gaming machine (are any PC games Blu-Ray yet?) And to have two BD burners...(going from first post - article is slashdotted)...this seems less like a gaming rig and more like a video production machine.

Also, Blu-Ray is abbreviated to BD, for Blu-Ray Disc. All of the abbreviations for the format use BD, not BR, such as BD-J, BD+, BD-ROM, BD-R.

"Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA)"
Taken from http://www.blu-ray.com/info/ [blu-ray.com]

Re:6GB of ram?

[adachan]

3 Cards in SLI does not mean 6 screens. It does mean 1 screen that runs games really fast (or so Nvidia wants us to think). For a gamer, I think faster FPS is better than more screens (which very very few games support).

Cost Perception

[jgtg32a]

The problem with just about every computer review is that the reviewers think that running a game at anything less than 1920Ã--1080 (1080p) is absolutely unacceptable.

I game on my HD TV in the basement which can only do 720p, a single 4850 will get you about 30 fps in Warhead maxed out.

Re:What a crock...

[tha_mink]

A grand is not "budget."

Of course, 1000 AUD is about $700 USD.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Spatial]

Graphics cards are cheap. You can get one that plays every single available game nicely for 130 dollars (the 8800GT/9800GT for example).

Stop getting your ideas from stupid guides like this and check out a thread full of advice from people who aren't insane. [somethingawful.com]

Re:FFS

[drinkypoo]

"Investment" means "trying to grow your money."

Maybe you should consider utilizing a dictionary occasionally. In particular, the American Heritage Dictionary defines sense three of the word as "Property or another possession acquired for future financial return or benefit." Pleasure is a benefit. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Re:FFS

[evol262]

Read dictionaries much? Familiar with basic grammar? The "benefit" is explicitly financial the way that definition is phrased, else it would be "Property or another possession acquired for personal benefit or future financial return".

Re:What games

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried GTA4? That badly-ported mess needs every bit of power to make it not look like ass.

Re:What a crock...

[FortKnox]

well, as the title of the article says, this is a gaming box. Quad isn't used in gaming, so you can get a duo with a higher clock speed at that price. They are spending like $200 on an AMD quad. With that price, you can get a top of the line intel at 2.4 or 2.6GHz that you can overclock the crap out of. For games, you need 2 cores and major clock speed, not a quad core and mediocre clock speed.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[ccozan]

I fell obliged to serve this link http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm/ [100fps.com]. Short story: 500fps.

Re:What a crock...

[travbrad]

Actually a few games are beginning to take advantage of quads (GTA4 is probably the most notable), but they are the exception. Most games will still be faster on a higher clocked dual-core. That's why I decided to get an E8400 (which can go to 4ghz relatively easily), rather than a quad core. Also, dual cores are cheaper and consume less power. I do some video encoding too, but my preferred programs are still only dual or single-threaded, so the quad wouldn't have made sense. One would hope/think developers will find a way to make use of more and more cores as time goes on though, since that's the direction the CPU makers are headed.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Cowclops]

What computer had 4MB of ram but only a 20MB hard drive? By the time I had 4MB of ram, I had a 340MB hard drive to go with it.

(But your point still stands, lol)

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Zan Lynx]

I bet I know the problem. Serious Diablo 2 gamers run a cracked version. (Game CD? What? Under some pile back of the closet.)

The original copy protect junk probably dies on 64-bit.