Computer Spot

If you are someone who loves to play games like Fate, Diablo, Law & Order, Chainz, Luxor, Zuma, Mah Jong, etc. and don’t need anything overly fancy, then you might not be faced with the need of purchasing over-priced gaming machines and any decent configuration should suffice.

However if you are a hard-core gamer, who needs extreme graphics support and high-end configuration then you need to consider many aspects in your gaming PC.

Rendering 3D graphic environments and displaying complex animations requires enormous processor power and memory.

So even though your PC works fine for everyday tasks like e-mail, Web browsing, and playing music, it might not be able to run many of the latest games.

But don’t worry many ways you can tweak your system so it can rise to the challenge.

For all the diehard net users, a very high-end configuration isn’t really worth the money, and mostly the cost of the PC goes up when you try to upgrade your graphics card, RAM and put-in additional things, that make your system a GAMING PC rather than just a PC!

The internet users may go for a PC net book rather than a desktop or a high-end laptop!

The latest Lennovo net-books and acer-aspire one are surely a viable option, but things vary greatly when it comes down to selecting a gaming PC!

So here’s what you need to know about your PC before buying a game:

• The CPU type and speed (for example: AMD Athlon, 2.2GHz)
• How much RAM (memory) you have
• How much hard disk space is available
• Version of Windows XP and upgrade level (like Windows XP Home Edition, SP1 etc…)
• Graphics card information
• Sound card information

The video or graphics card is the most important component of a gaming PC’s. Some systems use dual SLI (NVIDIA) or CrossFire (ATI) cards, and as the graphics card gets older, it struggles to play the latest PC games at the highest screen resolution and graphics-detail settings.

So while setting out to buy a PC for high-end gaming it’s very much essential to buy the one with the latest graphics card configuration, so that you don’t get outdated in the race pretty soon!

But having said that, unless it has enough RAM (about 2-3GB) to be able to run wholly from it, a gaming computer with a fast processor and a good gaming video card that had a slow hard disk drive, working at only about 5200RPM, would be a hell of a joke!

The midrange video cards, such as those that are built around the ATI Radeon 9600 graphics chip, can all play the latest games, but you won’t experience the same level of graphical detail as you would with a state-of-the-art card, such as those that are built around ATI’s Radeon and NVIDIA’s GeForce high-end graphics chips.

For instance, with a Radeon 9600 video card displaying on a 17″ LCD monitor, set to its native resolution of 1280×1024, you would have to turn down the game-detail settings such as the colour depth from 32-bit to 16-bit colour, or possibly switch off the card’s post processing image enhancement capability.

But none of those restrictions would apply if the video card used a Radeon 9800 XT chip.

Dell’s XPS systems are supposed to be good in this regard…

AMD Athlon FX’s are the best gaming CPUs since they are the highest clocked, so try to get the highest one available possibly the FX57, as this category of powerhouse CPU’s have large caches and are multiplier unlocked for preventing over clocking.

You may consider the X2′s if gaming is not the most important thing to you, but still you need a gaming machine!

However running something complex in the background is something you think you’d like to do often & if software MPEG trans-coding is important to you then surely it’s a good choice, not to mention the recent GPUs helping out everyone in the cause.

My design for a perfect gaming machine would be

• Athlon 64 X2 4800+
• At least 2Gb DDR400 ( possibly from Kingston)
• Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
• Asus Extreme N7800 GTX-2DHTV in SLI Mode Graphics Card
• Western Digital Raptor 74Gb/10k RPM Primary Disk
• Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500Gb Secondary Disk (never runs out of space)
• DVD-R and DVD-ROM Drives from LG
• Thermaltake Armour Black Casing with BigWater SE water cooling system
• Turbo-Cool® 850 SSI 850W PSU
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty™ FPS Sound Card
• Creative GigaWorks™ S750 Speaker System
• Probably LG M1940A 17″ LCD Monitor

Like its cheap and you can play games, for under 500 bucks it’s a dream machine for people who want to play games, but can’t really afford it.

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