I've recently fallen into the sticky situation of having to build a new system from the ground up, and fast. I'm hardly an expert at working with hardware, but have worked with my old system a bit and am pretty familiar with what to do. Anyway. My budget is going to be around $500, unfortunately, so I'd like to know what's the best system I can put together for that much.
I already have:
Monitor
Keyboard
Mouse
Case
Asus P4S800 Mobo
....aaaand that's it. :( I know this is going to be highly challenging or perhaps even impossible at this price range, but I'd ideally like to end up with a system that can at least play WoW decently and NOT have it look like COMPLETE shit. Lots of RAM is also essential as I am a video editor. Any and all suggestions are welcome, or even partial solutions if it's not possible to afford all parts for $500.
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Anonymous2006-04-03 11:03
2x512MB PC2700 RAM, cheapass Celeron processor, video card should be at least a Radeon 9600 or GeForce 6600 / 256MB AGP. Most games are far more GPU-intensive than CPU-intensive.
I recommend using a Seagate or Western Digital hard drive, nothing else. Get a small one if you have to, but don't try to save pennies by getting a Samsung or Hitachi.
The bare minimum usable optical drive these days is a DVD, and I strongly recommend paying the extra money for a DVDRW or at the very least a DVDROM/CDRW combo drive.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-03 11:20
I had a cheapass Celeron processor in my old system, and everything seemed to run like crap...I had it comboed with 256mb of RAM and a GeForce FX 5200, could THAT have been the main problem? =_= No newer games gave me even decent performance with this setup, except for Max Payne, which mysteriously ran beautifully at 1024x768 with 4x antialiasing O_o
How are Maxtor hard drives? Oh, and I forgot, I can knock optical drive out of the overhead cost; I salvaged my DVD-9 Burner from my old system.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-03 11:43
The ram and that card is why everything ran as shit.
Need at least 2x512 DDR sticks with half a decent processor 2ghz minimum with a good graphics card like 6600GT PCI-E/AGP to play recent games without sacrificing too much quality.
I played FEAR with high graphics on a Pentium 4 1,5ghz smoothly using a 6600GT.. Oddly I got VERY high frame rate too compared to most other games, but there were jerks in the game now and then because my system had slow SDRAM instead of DDR and not really a very good motherboard.
As for HDD, Maxtor drives are rather fast but noisy and also hit and miss on the QC. If you get a good one it will work. Western Digital are worse. Seagate seems to be better.
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Anonymous2006-04-03 13:51
>>3
er, Max Payne 2 that is. It woulda been REALLY pathetic if I had actually meant the 1st one.
I can get ahold of a 2.4GHz Celeron for relatively cheap I think. I guess I'll go with that.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-03 23:14
>>4
I can vouch for this, they're loud as shit when I'm playing one of the Total War games! XD
Oddly, they don't make much noise in UT unless loading. Guess it has to do with how much 'thinking' is required in small spaces.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 2:43
Assuming I need my graphics card and RAM to act as a crutch for shitty processor, what's good nowadays? I haven't really kept up, so suggestions on a few good graphics cards at reasonable prices plz.