Forum

I’m finally in a position where I can scrounge the cash to get a new PC, but I’m pretty clueless as to where to start as I was never particularly tech-headed, and it’s been many years since I bought anything PC related. How much am I looking to spend to get something decent that’s gonna last a while? I don’t want to just buy something that will run tf2 but then everytime a game comes out immediately have to wind down the settings, but at the same time I don’t really want to be dropping immense amounts of money into this. Rough estimates appreciated.

I hear Pentium III’s are all the rage nowadays.

i5 = how much cores? :x

i5 = how much cores? :x

4 cores, like an i7 but without hyperthreading, which is absolutely worthless in games anyway. Easy to overclock, really cheap and almost as good performance as the old i7’s (that are still very expensive).

Hasnt Xeon 8 cores?

Xeon is for servers

“Budget?”

As cheap as I can go whilst getting a PC that will be decent for a couple of years. Money isn’t really a problem, in theory I could spend as much or as little as I wanted, but I’m not looking to get the ultimate PC slayer of epic pro destruction. Just something that’ll run shit nicely.

If you want to have cpu, what you don’t have to upgrade after a year or so i’ll suggest getting a quadcore cpu. The reason is pretty obvious: all new games and programs will support multiple cores and the threading is done pretty well. For older games for example TF2 does support 4 cores already. And in games like tf2 it gives you way better fps, since the game itself is really cpu dependent.

What comes to gpu, i would go for ati’s 5 -series for DX11 support. Price/quality aint as good as it is in like 4890 or 4870, but they do support DX11. And if you don’t want to upgrade your hardware very often the 5 -series will last longer than the 4 -series.

For conclusion: get i5 or i7 cpu, good MB and ATI’s 5850 or 5870 gpu, and you’ll be able to play all the newest games. For RAM i’ll suggest 4-8 GB, depending what you do with your computer besides playing games.

graphics -> I would’nt buy the 5 series yet. When dx11 games come out the NOW GOOD dx11 cards are sucky as fuck. All the games now are not even dx10 yet, so it should take some time (a year- 2?) to get our hands on some dx11 games that arent just testing the new dx (compare to crysis). But yeah, its your money and the card itself is good but not becouse of the dx11 support.

For cpu i7 920 and a cooler (i like noctua coolers) and overclock it to the depths of hell. ~270€ i7 920 (2.66ghz) can easily be oc’d to (3.4-4.0ghz) match the speed of the much much more expensive i7 975 (3.33ghz) (700-900€?)
Of course you get better results with the 975 when you overclock it a little but dude, its 2-3 times more expensive.

Motherboard -> asus p6t-se if you plan on buying an i7

Case -> antec p193, love this one. it has like over 9000 fans in it to keep your megapowerful charizard motherfucker cpu cool

sorry about the wall of text, im at work and im bored to the point where i’d rather play table tennis against koreans

(oh look. its almost the same pc that i have) CHEERS