The Best Gaming PC Money Can Buy 360
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."
What a crock... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tom's Hardware does these, and the budget is usually closer to the $600 mark, with the mid range around $1200.
And the fact that they put two optical BD burners on the extreme one (one on each page) makes me think that this article was slapped together instead of fully investigated. Where's the benchmarks? The proof that you built a good machine?
Looks like a buncha kids opened up newegg and built themselves machines in their head...
Re:What a crock... (Score:4, Funny)
And the fact that they put two optical BD burners on the extreme one (one on each page) makes me think that this article was slapped together instead of fully investigated. Where's the benchmarks? The proof that you built a good machine?
Looks like a buncha kids opened up newegg and built themselves machines in their head...
Why the hell would you want to benchmark one of those beauties? It's like a wife. Your supposed to spend money on it, care for it and look but not touch.
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How? Are you a dildo?
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But she said I was the only one for her.. {sigh} I'll have to start playing "pool boy" for a less "active" lonely house wife. :)
Re:What a crock... (Score:5, Funny)
You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.
Re:What a crock... (Score:4, Funny)
You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.
There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.
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You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.
There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.
Where is your irony tag...
Re:What a crock... (Score:4, Funny)
You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.
There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.
Where is your irony tag...
Guys! I found it:
[/irony]
Re:What a crock... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tom's is way better. If I want to upgrade my PC or video card, they actually do proper benchmarks and realistic budgets. I may never have triple SLI, but only because I don't feel like dropping another $500 on video cards for relatively minimal fps gains.
I dropped a grand on a new i7 system last week. Primarily because I was tied of my old Opteron 170 rig, but a good deal because I'd been influenced by the Tom's hardware midprice build. A grand is not "budget."
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A grand is not "budget."
Of course, 1000 AUD is about $700 USD.
Re:What a crock... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What a crock... (Score:5, Funny)
Yo dawg, I heard you like burning, so we put a burner in your burner so you can burn while you burn.
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Sharky Extreme used to do these (not sure if they do it anymore), and it sounds like the budgets are similar (though I think they had 4 tiers - budget, mid, high, and extreme). The budget machine there was also $1000, but that includes some stuff like Monitor that isn't always included in other PC building guides. The extreme guide usually had the disclaimer that "if money was no object...," so I say "only 2 blue ray burners? Why not 4?" I can't tell if they're similar due to the slashdotting.
I'd questi
Re:What a crock... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What a crock... (Score:5, Informative)
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:What a crock... (Score:4, Interesting)
Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Half-life2: Orange box engine games/mods
Nowadays you've basically got a choice between a 3.4ghz quadcore and a 3.4-3.8ghz dualcore (4ghz is still a little out of range for the average overclocker). I'd rather have another 2 cores and a slower clockspeed than a slight boost in clockspeed. Then again maybe that's because I'm not an idiot that relies on the false logic that just because it's not immediately the absolute best thing out there that it won't be very useful to have for the next few years.
Pffft. (Score:5, Funny)
These PC's are low-end when compared to my overclocked Commodore 64.
Re:Pffft. (Score:5, Funny)
The flames that are coming out of the back isn't a case mode then.
Re:Pffft. (Score:5, Funny)
Your overclocked Commodore 64 can't beat my overclocked CoCo3.
The thing about these machines is (Score:2, Interesting)
...there's not actually any games that needs anywhere near the horsepower they pack. I'm rarely impressed by a machine that with full details at super HD resolutions can run any game....at 400fps. Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.
Oh, and in 1-2 years comparable hardware can be picked up at a tenth of the price.
Still, I'm all for the advancement of benchmarking science, so this is still a good thing.
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:5, Interesting)
Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.
It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.
Now granted many people don't care otherwise there wouldn't be people like you that think "80 FPS is enough for anyone." Gunny how that number keeps creeping upwards. First it was 24 FPS (because that was all the eye could see), then 30, then 60, now you're saying 80. LOL
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:5, Insightful)
Bump your PC spending to $1800, and the extra $1000 gives you better graphics, maybe 120 fps, maybe 200, whatever. But unless you have money to burn, that extra grand wasn't well spent. Just put it into the bank, and buy another $800 machine in 3 years.
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:5, Funny)
See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS.
The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:5, Funny)
The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.
Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
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What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
Over 6 billion cores and counting...
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Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
Remember that your perception of passage of time is determined within he universe machine itself, so the universe machine need not be powerful, just have the proper amounts of (real) time, memory, and energy.
Actually, that assumes it's running in a universe like the one it's simulating.
Mod parent up recursively. (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly: we don't know if real time is running at real time. If we're being simulated post-singularity using reversible computations (to provide an unbounded number of simulated frames by running the simulation slower as the energy density of the universe decreases) real time would be running asymptotically slower than real time over time, but we'd never be able to detect that even after we start running our own reversible computation engine to computationally extend our own apparent time into the apparent
Re:Mod parent up recursively. (Score:4, Funny)
Upgrade your head.
64.0 fps should be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Funny)
64.0 fps should be enough for anyone!
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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What say we all universally switch to a 300fps system for now. It divides by 20, 25, 30, 50, 60, and 100, so it would convert most of the old signals smoothly. And I bet OLED technology would allow it.
At a push maybe even 600fps, so that 24fps would divide also.
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:4, Interesting)
I know because I have both running on a Core 2 Quad Q9550 with 2 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 and a Geforce 9800GT. Warhead runs smoother on higher settings.
Re:The thing about these machines is (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong. Mine, which is specced to run Duke Nukem Forever, runs your game at that resolution just fine.
GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the Extreme 4 GB of Video RAM? Seriously?
Someone please Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're mapping 4GB of video RAM you'll not be able to run a 32 bit OS. Given that this is a gaming PC, wouldn't this be a deal breaker? I mean even the uber gamers occassionally like to run older games right?
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Also, for software which supports 64bits it should be faster than it's 32bit equivalent, which is quite important for modern gaming.
Also, there is a 64bit version of XP.
Also, Vista really isn't that slow if you give it enough RAM - which clearly is not an issue in this case.
As of the time of writing, for a brand-new top-of-the-line gaming machine you'd want Vista 64 on there.
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I'm curious why you think that "for software which supports 64bits it should be faster than it's 32bit equivalent" ?
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I think nethack can be compiled to run on a 64 bit system. If not, it's open source, so you can modify it yourself.
What games don't run in 64-bit Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, I'm honestly curious. I'm a huge PC gamer and I run Vista 64-bit. All 32-bit Windows apps, which accounts for most games made in the last 10 years or so, seem to run great natively. For older DOS games, well those don't run well in 32-bit Windows. You get no sound, video problems, etc. The NTVDM isn't really good fro games. So what you do is fire up DOSBox, which runs them great. However that runs just as well in 64-bit as it does in 32-bit.
Thus far, I don't see any gaming problems with a 64-bit OS. So if you know of some, I'd be interested in what they are.
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Gazillionaire
Diablo 2
Burn:Cycle
And that is what I found in the first day of using Vista64
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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.
Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, I'm honestly curious. I'm a huge PC gamer and I run Vista 64-bit.
No offence, but maybe a Wii Fit would be a good investment, then? I'm just sayin...
Mod parent up (Score:2)
This had me roffling on the floor lolling out loud.
Or something.
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Games which utilize PunkBuster fuck up pretty badly in 64-bit systems. PB just doesn't like the environment for some reason, though that's not surprising given how invasive it is as a low-level system scanner. Since PB doesn't yet have a 64-bit binary, until it does it will continue to misunderstand the 64-bit architecture and kick/unauthenticate players.
This is from what I've read rather than personal experience so if my info is out of date I'll gladly suck a lemon.
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Not sure how the programming interface for graphics cards has changed, but the SVGA graphics cards used a 64K 'memory window' to make the contents of the video framebuffer available to the CPU. You could write a value into the page register which would indicate which bank of video memory the CPU should read and write to.
Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP? (Score:4, Funny)
On the Extreme 4 GB of Video RAM? Seriously?
Someone please Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're mapping 4GB of video RAM you'll not be able to run a 32 bit OS. Given that this is a gaming PC, wouldn't this be a deal breaker? I mean even the uber gamers occassionally like to run older games right?
The kernel should deal with that. If you request some memory address, paging assigns a virtual address for the physical memory so that you can access -any- 4 Gb of data in some order.
You can still only access 4 Gb at one specific time per process, but that should be enough for most purposes, no?
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Don't some operating systems map the kernel's code and data into one end of every process's virtual address space? I believe that's why programs can't readily use the whole 4 GB for their own purposes.
I believe this is remedied by using the x86 PAE extensions, or just by switching to a 64-bit operating system and recompiling your programs as 64-bit programs. (Although I think that on current Intel chips, you still only get something like 48-bit virtual addresses and 36-bit physical addresses.)
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Yes and no. 32 bit windows has a mode called PAE, It will let you acces sa ful 4 gigs of RAM and then deal with video (and other hardware) memory separately. The catch is, hardware compatibility with pae mode windows is fairly low, since a lot of hardware manufacturers don't test their drivers in pae mode.
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You're giving me flashbacks of the "good old days", when memory was outrageously expensive, and there was a program to let you use some of that extra video memory for the system. Some kids, who could afford systems with (oh my gosh) 4Mb RAM, would use 2Mb for a ramdrive to run the game in, since it was so much faster than their 20Mb hard drive, and the rest would be used for the game itself.
I know we can still do silly things like that in Linux, but I don't know what's availab
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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)
6GB of ram? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Noobs.
If I played that damn game, I'd run windowed instances in multiple VMs. ;)
FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong, per se, with buying such things; but the notion that you are "investing" in them is patent nonsense.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Funny)
In 1 years time, it will be worth 40% of what they paid for it. That's an investement, isn't it? Heck, it's not even a bad investement these days.
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Ack! stop the investment word use!. It's an expense. It's a liability. It's not an investment.
I really want to beat to death the guy that started talking about expenses as investments. Because it furthers the financial stupidity that plagues this nation.
something that loses value != investment.
Buying real estate can be an investment, but that gaming computer will never EVER be an investment.
Buying stocks can be..... well... Stocks are an expense and liability right now, I think scratch off tickets are a
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A good firearm can be worth 10% or more than the purchase value in a year.
I purchased an "affordable" .45 (name brand, just not hugely expensive) several years ago for $300. Last time I checked, in good/used condition it is worth about $500.
I picked up another one, of a better brand name for about $600 about 3 years ago. Now it's worth about $800.
I built out some very nice computers for myself over the years. They each cost about $2,000, using v
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(Does anyone want to buy some SCO shares?)
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong, per se, with buying such things; but the notion that you are "investing" in them is patent nonsense.
This. You put central air/heat into your house, you're investing it. You put money into a company, you're investing it. You fork out about $3000 to build a computer that is completely overkill, you're NOT investing it. An investment is when you'll see some sort of profit from it, so unless if you're a professional gamer and it will make your frag count increase by 23.2%, it's not an investment.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
An investment is when you'll see some sort of profit from it, so unless if you're a professional gamer and it will make your frag count increase by 23.2%, it's not an investment.
So I take it you put a fairly low value on personal enjoyment and satisfaction? BACK TO THE SALT MINES WITH YOU, SLAVE!
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"Investment" means "trying to grow your money." Nobody says "I'm investing in an ice cream cone," no matter how much they enjoy it.
There's nothing wrong with spending money on what you enjoy. But let's not corrupt the meaning of words.
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"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.
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MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL (Score:4, Insightful)
If investing for you means exclusively monetary returns, then you forgot the reason you need money in the first place. You failed to invest in your life.
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Happiness isn't profit? Since when does it have to be a monetary return?
Happiness also doesn't require money down. It's a terrible thing that it seems to be required though, however that's a whole other discussion.
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So you'll see profit from putting central air/heat in your home? Any more than buying a computer?
Indeed. It increases the value of the home itself.
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So you'll see profit from putting central air/heat in your home? Any more than buying a computer?
Indeed. It increases the value of the home itself.
That's the point I was going for with it. We did it and we saw a profit on it.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Funny)
next up on article series ... (Score:5, Funny)
How does this look? (Score:2)
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16064 [techreport.com]
How does that setup look for a current setup? Also, if there were further performance improvements to this setup, what would you change?
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So other than a pair of x2's crossfired instead of just 4870's crossfired, you don't think there's much else? Or are you saying get a 4870x2 instead of 4870's in crossfire? If so, why even?
What about a jump to 12G of ram instead of 6G? Matched triple-channel again.
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I wouldn't really bother with 12gb of ram unless you were going to make an 8gb ramdisk to load the entire game into RAM.
Not worth it (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering how few high-end PC games actually come out, getting a flashy PC just to play them isn't worth it.
Hardware issues aside, serious gameplayers need to be where the developers are, which at the moment means the Xbox 360. A Nintendo Wii or DS is optional, for those people who want to see some of the more innovative designs. (PC gaming diehards can now interject the usual comments about FPS controls and real-time strategy games and mods.)
And, yes, I'll point out that a 360 + Wii + DS + several years of Xbox Live is still cheaper than the PC mentioned in the article.
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Xbox dev is identical to PC dev very little needs to be changed to do a quick port from one to the other.
The PC in the article is a waste of money.
the site hasn't been slashdotted (Score:2)
it is an Australian site - it's been "Conroyed"
---
(I accidentally posted this in response to an incorrect article a minute ago - don't I feel stupid)
Don't do it! (Score:2, Redundant)
Then why do you keep posting them?
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For the lulls (in actual news).
What games (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but I haven't seen a lot of "heavy" new PC games that would require an "ultimate gaming rig" these days.
That's not to say that some good games/additions/etc haven't come out or aren't on the boiler, but what's out-or-coming that would require or make use of a souped-up gaming rig VS just a decent machine (with a decent graphics card)?
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I agree entirely; I've got a moderately specced PC: Core2 E6400, 320Mb nVidia 8800GTS, 2Gb RAM, XP 32-bit and I've not played anything on it that I haven't been able to run at 1280x1024@72Hz on High detail (Even Crysis).
I know it's supposedly "all about the 2560x1600 at 200fps" these days, but a) I hate widescreen monitors and b) I'm happy with 1280x1024 (Maybe 1600x1200 if I can find a reasonably priced 4:3 LCD that does it).
I have a feeling... (Score:3, Insightful)
That these machines would not run half as well as some system that would cost half as much but built by someone with a clue. Not just someone who went down line and picked out parts based on how much they cost.
For anyone really interested in performance rigs spend some time on a overclocking site. Those guys and gals really will show what it's all about. I know I'm damn amazed at some of the stuff they pull off and have learned a bunch just browsing.
Title (Score:2)
"The Best Gaming Politically-Correct Money Can Buy"
So they have some kid of new money that removes all references to God and the All-Seeing Eye? Hmmm.
Site is slashdotted (Score:2)
But I was able to see a couple of pages before it went down. Did anyone notice the links to other stories at the bottom? I'm pretty interested in seeing which are the top 10 games to play while stoned.
Phenom II line (Score:2)
Isn't the Phenom II line launching within days? If you believe the hype, they'll stand up to all the Intel offerings, and if tradition dictates, the AMD procs will be cheaper. I'm curious to see how they really perform.
Re:Too rich for my blood (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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100% true. When it costs more to buy a current video card than to buy a whole game console, you know you're in trouble. The only games left on the PC are going to be simulation games, and sooner or later someone is going to allow arbitrary HID input devices on a game console and solve that problem too. (If you need multiple monitors, you can theoretically have multiple game consoles, which cost about the same as a high-end graphics card, anyway - so the simulation crowd should not be at all be put off by ha
Cost Perception (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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]
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Tell me about it, I built a new PC earlier this year having been playing mostly XBox 360 games for the past 2 and a half years.
I spent £1,600 (equivalent to $3,200 US at the time) on my new machine. I bought high end named RAM (something I never usually do), I bought a high end gaming motherboard (again, I always used to just go for any old board) etc. etc. So imagine my display when as soon as it was built I fired up Crysis to find it would not run smoothly anywhere even close to highest detail at 19
Re:Why best gaming machine? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Unreal 3 engine and others happy put two cores to use. On top of that you still have OS processes and services running while you are gaming (unless you are playing some hot old DOS games off a boot floppy!). While I agree that for a "budget" style PC quad core is way over kill, dual core is far from being a silly investment. Once you consider the cost of a AMD Athlon X2 or something it is a no brainer.
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Bzzt! P4s are terrible, even a single core of the lowest end Intel quad core (Q6600) will crush most, if not all P4s.
Re:Why best gaming machine? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who spends that kind of money on hardware to play last gen games is a fool.
Plenty of current and next gen games when they arrive utilise 4 cores, it seems to make sense if you're spending money on a PC like that for it to be able to still play the games of tommorrow than to play the games of yesterday that can be run perfectly well even if using only 1 of 4 cores anyway.
To create an example to make this point clear:
Game A is out now
- it can be run on a single core higher clock speed CPU at 150fps
- or a lower clock speed quad core CPU utilising only one of them at 140fps
The difference will be narrow (or may not even exist in fact) because the OS still utilises multiple cores to ensure the game has a core to itself whilst single core has to share the core with the OS and background processes so even if the game doesn't use 4 cores, the OS does. Then onto the next scenario, a new game:
Game B comes out in a month
- it can be run on a single core higher clock speed CPU at 20fps due to not supporting the latest SIMD extensions etc.
- or it can be run on a quad core CPU utilising all cores, with the latest SIMD extensions and such at 200fps
So tell me, if you're laying down this kind of cash for a PC that you'll probably want to last for a while, what makes the most sense to go for?
Only a fool uses the "quad core is pointless, existing games don't use them all" argument when spending the amount of cash required for a high end gaming PC.
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Tell that to the GMA950 in my Core 2 Duo Mac mini. :p
Yes the GMA950 sucks at 3D, but otherwise the computer is more than enough for what I need to do.
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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 qu
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Never say never when it comes to statements like that. Remember those guys who said back in 93: "You'll never play a blood soaked slugathon like DOOM on a kiddie console". Or the ones who said a few years later "You'll never have internet play on a console".
There are two console MMORPG's, both PS2 games (though FFXI has an Xbox port), both with keyboard support. Past trends prove that there will be more, it's only a matter of time.