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the best pc gaming system for say around 2,000.00?
- Thread starter zaqaz
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butchrecon
MIS
2K? Thats a lot of casch to build a gaming system with. I would suggest Either a P4 Or Athlon thunderbird. At least 1.3Gig. Win2k with 512 meg of RAM. SCSI CDROM and 2 30 gig SCSI hard drives (one for the system files one for the swap file and gaming files. NVIDIA Geforce3 Video card (64Meg RAM). That to start would be very nice. But Everyone has their own opinion. ;-) James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP
email: butchrecon@skyenet.net
Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP
email: butchrecon@skyenet.net
Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.
check this one out.
Let me start spending that 2k. =)
I myself am on a limited budget, and I've got a pretty darn good gaming computer. Unless you truely have that kind of money to throw around, I'd say buy the second best computer out there and save yourself a significant amount of cash. I just upgraded this summer to a T-Bird 1.13 Ghz with 256meg DDR, Geforce2 GTS Pro, ATA/100, 19" Viewsonic flatface shadowmask monitor. I was upgrading from an AMD K6-2 450, Voodoo Banshee, 17" Sceptre monitor, and all the upgrades totaled about $700. This thing runs games at 1280x1024 without any slowdown whatsoever. Plus Nvidia is releasing a new driver upgrade later this week that is expected to increase the performance of all Geforce chipsets by 10-20%.
So I guess you could go with a Geforce3, SCSI-160, P4-1.7GHz, but they'll offer just marginal performance gains for twice the cash.
I myself am on a limited budget, and I've got a pretty darn good gaming computer. Unless you truely have that kind of money to throw around, I'd say buy the second best computer out there and save yourself a significant amount of cash. I just upgraded this summer to a T-Bird 1.13 Ghz with 256meg DDR, Geforce2 GTS Pro, ATA/100, 19" Viewsonic flatface shadowmask monitor. I was upgrading from an AMD K6-2 450, Voodoo Banshee, 17" Sceptre monitor, and all the upgrades totaled about $700. This thing runs games at 1280x1024 without any slowdown whatsoever. Plus Nvidia is releasing a new driver upgrade later this week that is expected to increase the performance of all Geforce chipsets by 10-20%.
So I guess you could go with a Geforce3, SCSI-160, P4-1.7GHz, but they'll offer just marginal performance gains for twice the cash.
CitrixEngineer
Technical User
The AMD vs Intel debate has been done to death on this forum, and the conclusion everyone seems to be at is that AMD gives a better price/performance ratio.
You could go for a board with built-in IDE RAID and a pair of IBM DeskStars, or even get a low-end SCSI RAID card - the Mylex offerings are pretty good - and hang a pair of Seagate Cheetahs off it.
Have a look at Ars Technica's "God Box" and "Hot Rod" systems for some more ideas - but more importantly, now you've set your budget, find out about the individual components that you plan to put in and check different sets of benchmark figures.
is a great place to start. Don't be in a hurry to part with your cash, and you'll end up with a flying rig.
You could go for a board with built-in IDE RAID and a pair of IBM DeskStars, or even get a low-end SCSI RAID card - the Mylex offerings are pretty good - and hang a pair of Seagate Cheetahs off it.
Have a look at Ars Technica's "God Box" and "Hot Rod" systems for some more ideas - but more importantly, now you've set your budget, find out about the individual components that you plan to put in and check different sets of benchmark figures.
is a great place to start. Don't be in a hurry to part with your cash, and you'll end up with a flying rig.
Look into the ECS K7S5A mobo. It is based on the new SIS 735 chipset(Athlon/Duron, DDR). SiS in not exactly known for high-quality, but according to the few reviews I've seen, it is the performance leader among Athlon/DDR chipsets. And because it's a single chip instead of two, it's much cheaper. $65 at newegg.com. Checkout Anandtech.com for some good reviews and info.
Here's a few of my picks:
Enlight 7237 Case w/300W power supply
Socket A DDR mobo
Athlon 1.4/266
512MB PC2100 DDR
60GB IBM Deskstar 7200 rpm IDE drive
GeForce3 or GeForce2 Ultra
Good 19" monitor
Here's a few of my picks:
Enlight 7237 Case w/300W power supply
Socket A DDR mobo
Athlon 1.4/266
512MB PC2100 DDR
60GB IBM Deskstar 7200 rpm IDE drive
GeForce3 or GeForce2 Ultra
Good 19" monitor
Dell sells some pretty reputable system for gaming. Their prices are pretty reasonable, and you do not have to reconfigure anything.
However,if you want an Athlon CPU to save money you may be able to save some cash at a custom shop or by building it yourself. The Intel CPU's will get to 2 Gig by the end of the Year. Sometimes if you wait just a little while the prices drop on the CPU's. Also, before Christmas I would expect to see some big sales. Many retailers target this time for big sales. You could go to a big Computer Expo if they have one in your area; sometimes you can get some really good deals if you got cash on hand or a credit card.
If you want to get lots of games go with 2 Hard Drives of large capacity. You can always just back up one hard drive onto the other. You can get hard drives from around 20 to 100 Gig in Size, but Bios may limit the size of a logical drive. I would partition the drive so the operating system runs in its own partition, and install all of the games in another partition. The IBM Deskstar is a pretty good Hard Drive line that can run at ATA 100 Speeds. ATA 100 speeds can cause extra heat in your case, because they Usually generate more heat.
You may want to get 2 CD ROM's One high speed CD for playing and another one to watch DVD and Burn copies of CD's.
I would use the GEFORCE 3 Video Card (64 Megs DDR).Operating system is up to you; either ME or Win2000k. It is worth it to get a Full Size Tower with lots of fans for good air flow.
If someone else is making your system or you are getting it retail, go to best buy and pick out the monitor yourself. I love the way they have lots of monitors in one place where you can compare them. Some monitors are way overpirced and they kill you on shipping charges that the custom shop will pass on to you for shipping one monitor. Look at the resolution values on the monitors. Ideally (1600 X ?) is a good pixel size. That is the target pixel size they test video cards for on the high end; anything more is just overkill.
For good sound get something like soundblaster live with 5.1 dolby and some good Speakers.
Asus makes good (expensive) motherboards, but there are some perfectly good FIC or EPOX boards that use the DDR PC 2100 fast memory. Get at least 256 Megs of memory. They may come out with Intel Boards that use DDR memory by the end of the year. sells High Quality memory at cut-rate prices with no delivery charges. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
However,if you want an Athlon CPU to save money you may be able to save some cash at a custom shop or by building it yourself. The Intel CPU's will get to 2 Gig by the end of the Year. Sometimes if you wait just a little while the prices drop on the CPU's. Also, before Christmas I would expect to see some big sales. Many retailers target this time for big sales. You could go to a big Computer Expo if they have one in your area; sometimes you can get some really good deals if you got cash on hand or a credit card.
If you want to get lots of games go with 2 Hard Drives of large capacity. You can always just back up one hard drive onto the other. You can get hard drives from around 20 to 100 Gig in Size, but Bios may limit the size of a logical drive. I would partition the drive so the operating system runs in its own partition, and install all of the games in another partition. The IBM Deskstar is a pretty good Hard Drive line that can run at ATA 100 Speeds. ATA 100 speeds can cause extra heat in your case, because they Usually generate more heat.
You may want to get 2 CD ROM's One high speed CD for playing and another one to watch DVD and Burn copies of CD's.
I would use the GEFORCE 3 Video Card (64 Megs DDR).Operating system is up to you; either ME or Win2000k. It is worth it to get a Full Size Tower with lots of fans for good air flow.
If someone else is making your system or you are getting it retail, go to best buy and pick out the monitor yourself. I love the way they have lots of monitors in one place where you can compare them. Some monitors are way overpirced and they kill you on shipping charges that the custom shop will pass on to you for shipping one monitor. Look at the resolution values on the monitors. Ideally (1600 X ?) is a good pixel size. That is the target pixel size they test video cards for on the high end; anything more is just overkill.
For good sound get something like soundblaster live with 5.1 dolby and some good Speakers.
Asus makes good (expensive) motherboards, but there are some perfectly good FIC or EPOX boards that use the DDR PC 2100 fast memory. Get at least 256 Megs of memory. They may come out with Intel Boards that use DDR memory by the end of the year. sells High Quality memory at cut-rate prices with no delivery charges. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
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