Hey guys new to astahost.com had a break in not too long ago and lloking at getting new pc currently running old AMD-K6 350MHZ 128Mg ram lol. previous gaming computer got stolen. Looking at buying a new gaming system but not fluent with system specs and hardware items price not an issue as insurance is covering can anyone help me out. Sinister Shadow

Reply

I'm using a p4 2.6, 512 ram, 80 gb hard drive, FX 5700 videocard. It's about 2 years old but runs the games of today fairly well. I bought this computer for about 800$ then, so it can be very cheap now. If you want a great system for a decent price, check out www.cyberpowersystems.com
You can customize what you want, the way it looks, what hardware / software is in it and everything. Best part is they deliver it right to your door. Just talk to someone that knows computers well before you add parts, just in case they arn't compatible. Hope it helps, later bro, good luck.

Reply

CPU: Athlon F57 (or a 3700+, or maybe a Dual Core 4800+).
Memory: Gskill 1Gb Low Latency TCCD (2-2-2-5 timing at 200Mhz)
HDD: 2 Raptor in RAID for programs and 160Gb SATA hdd for data/back-up
VidCard: 2 GeForce 7800GTX in SLI
Watercool is to keep it silent.

That's high quality, but high priced to, expect something like $2000-3000

Reply

I haven't had experience with these but Dell's XPS systems are supposed to be good.

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/seg...s=19&l=en&s=dhs

Configure one with the top specs, if the price is too much start tuning it down.

Make sure you tune video card, Memory and processor last as those are what you need a majority of when gaming.

Reply

my design for a *almost* perfect gaming machine

Athlon 64 X2 4800+
Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
Asus Extreme N7800 GTX-2DHTV in SLI Mode Graphics Card
At least 2Gb DDR400 from Kingston
Western Digital Raptor 74Gb/10k RPM Primary Disk
Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500Gb Secondary Disk (never runs out of space)
(more disks could be in but i would stick to aditional 7K500 HHDs... no more trouble with 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

Ye... That would be a heck of a machine

Reply

Reasons the posts above are not really good.... their to expensive.

I use this

2.0 Ghz Celeron
256 Fx5500 Pci Card
768 Ram
60 Gig hard Drive
17" LCD monitor

Like its cheap and you can play games, for under 500 bucks its a dream machine for people who want to play games, but cant really afford it.

If your in canada here are a few good places

www.futureshop.ca
www.bestbuy.ca
www.tigerdirect.ca
www.a-link.ca (BC)

If your in america here are a few good places

www.newegg.com
www.tigerdirect.com
www.bestbuy.com
www.circuitcity.com

Reply

Sinistershadow's saying money's not an issue since the insurance co will pay for it ... so go for broke! I agree with the above, only things I'd add would be ..

MB: a decent NF board that supports overclocking (adjustable multipliers, memory frequencies & timings, etc independent of the PCI bus frequencies ;-)) if you go the FX route! Ideally two PEGx16 slots.

CPU: Athlon FX's are the best gaming CPUs since they are the highest clocked (get the highest available .. FX57), have large caches and are multiplier unlocked (for overclocking). X2's if gaming is not the most important thing to you, if running something complex in the background is something you think you'd like to do often & if software MPEG transcoding is important to you .. but with recent GPUs helping out that's less of an issue.

RAM: 2GB of CAS2 DDR500 (now supported by some AMD chips)!
GPU: two (SLI) GF 7800 Ultra
HDD: bunch of SCSI Seagate drives RAID'd.
...

Reply

or simply ... sadly ... dump ur pc .. buy a good notebook and save for an xbox360 ... since all stupid companies are rushing next generation games on consoles ... many of them won't see daylight on pc ..

gears of war ... burnout ... fifa 06 : road to world cup ... etc etc

Reply

I'd take skorv setup (if I'd had te money ) and change the swap the mobo with a DFI NF4-SLI mobo, 2Gb of TCCD memory (GSkill), 2 Raptors in RAID0 for apps and games and 2 200Gb HDD in RAID1 for data.
Then I'd take a 3stage DD cooler for the CPU and chilled watercooling for the GPU's and NB and OC the hell out of the machine.

Damn, that would be sooo sweet

Reply

I'd suggest staying away from any major PC distributor, actually. Especially if the insurance is covering a new system. I dunno if they'll really pay for anything, but I'd suggest checking out a smaller PC Build/Repair shop near you. Why? Well at least at the PC shop I work at we put a lot of emphasis on taking good care of our customers. Little business can't really afford a bad reputation, or even a minorly bad one. You'll probably get better service at a lower cost, too. Once again, the little businesses can't afford to just ignore their customers like the bigger ones.

Also, whatever you do stay away from the big "brand name" manufacturers. HP, Dell, Vaio, etc. From a repairmen's standpoint they are not fun to repair. These manufacturers set their computers up (obviously) to work best with the hardware they put inside, and often times it seems only with that hardware. If you're going to be upgrading and such it's a pain in the butt, majorly.

Another thing you ought to pay attention to is cooling. The side fan and processor fan will not be enough. The new IBM Fans are crap, to be honest. A step backwards. The last few PCs I've done with them have had major cooling issues. The processor runs pretty hot and the fan doesn't do enough to help it.

Err, what else .. you'll probably want a dual core processor, those are pretty sweet. Also, I think someone said double HDs configured with RAID. I suppose it depends on how much hardcore gaming you do. Harddrives are relatively cheap, so you may wanna consider it if you've got the money.

I'm not very up to date on Graphics Card so I can't help you there. Uhh, so yeah. Basically the most important thing of all I said is that you should really consider having a small business build it for you, or maybe build it yourself. Once you've got the parts putting them together is like a really easy puzzle. Heck, they even give you an instruction book with the answer to how the pieces fit.

 

 

 

Reply