To me, PC systems are getting expensive to upgrade and maintain for gaming. Personally I went to a Mac for home computing and a PS2 mini for playing games.

Systems today are running into performance problems due to heat. The people I know that have purchased or built machines in the last two years have all been having similar problems. Between the processors, GPU's, Ram, and other cards in smaller and smaller cases, heat is the greatest problem.

One of my friends that actually does work for a game studio say's they are buying Falcon northwest machines for high end testing. However, the down side is that they are rather expensive.

OMG HAHAHAHHA. At www.voodoopc.com check out the "Digital Creation" under the desktop "Omen" HAHHA. You can configure that thing up to $35,000 ahahhahah. You can get dual dual core processors hahahahaa. Dual video cards and quad 15,000 rpm hard drives ahahhaah. They even have a 46 inch 8ms gaming LCD hahaha. There is even an option for a $510 paint job ahahhaha. So uncalled for... Check it out lol.

no no no.

Dual core's are a waste of money for gaming.

The fast majority of games are programmed single threaded.

so one of your cores would be running 100%, and the other core would be idle.

To me PC's are getting much cheaper than they used to be since they've become popular with the masses a decade ago. It used to cost 10k just to get a crap PC that'd only be useful for work (about 20 years ago), then that dropped to about 3k for a machine that could play games but not as well as dedicated consoles (15 years ago), to machines that cost 2k but played games well thanks to 3dfx (about 10 years ago) .. nowadays you CAN pick up a gaming machine for 500GBP if you make many compromises & don't go for the high-end all the time.

As for Macs, yes I must admit I do love OSX, I think it's the best of the current-gen desktop OSs no doubt about it :-). But I've got a lot of x86 apps that I need to run, so for me I'm waiting for the x86 versions .. hopefully they'll be as good as their recent Macs (high-end & not that much more expensive to PCs).

But I'm not really into console games (beat-em-ups, non-FPS shoot-em-ups, platformers etc). I prefer flight sims & FPSs & adventures, and PCs are better for these genres at the moment. There's no technical reason why consoles couldn't run these types of games (xbox1 was basically a PC!), but they don't aim at these genres, and even on PCs flight/adv/etc are dying breeds, since most people don't like them :-(. I have absolutely nothing against consoles per se, but the next-gen consoles don't look that appealing to me compared to an easily upgradeable PC with a fast CPU/GPU/PPU. There's no way PCs can compete with consoles in hardware costs, since MS/Sony discount the hardware (MS lost billions on XB1) and make up the cash on selling a licence per game sold etc. But if you wait a year or so after the next-gen systems launch you could get a better specd PC at a bit more cost that will play games aimed at those consoles for a few years! But for me, a console just doesn't replace my PC gaming needs .. I wish it did, but I doubt it ever will!

I don't think there's any need to spend huge amounts of money just to play games on PCs unless you want to continuously stay on the cutting edge for some reason, and maybe that'd only be necessary if you were competing in tournaments professionally/commercially or something like that, if you know what I mean.

I can understand why your friend's game dev co wants a cutting edge machine at the time of game release so they can make sure that's where they aim their top specs at (it's a bit pointless trying to sell a game no one can play yet, and that by the time they can it'd have been superceded ;-)). But they are doing it to make money, not for playing games per se. Personally, I'd only spend a lot of money on a PC IFF there was a financial payback from it (either now or in the near future), but that's just me .. I'd feel too guilty trying to justify a high-price just for gaming, unless an insurance company was paying for it for me of course ;-).


Er, heh, I thought I'd seen it all ... now there's a famous gaming company trying to sell a PC the price of a small car ... that's just nuts to me. I'd never spend that much (in GBP) on a car to go from A to B, let alone a PC just to play games & program code/type docs etc!!

Large screens at those response times are usually low-res ones. That kinda defeats the purpose of a monitor to me .. that's more like a 1080p TV, so it should cost so much more than TVs normally cost on average ;-). They say it's a Samsung with a pathetic 1366x768 (not even 1080p!) resolution yet costing 9000USD!!! You'd have to be demented to pay that much for a screen that'd be useless for watching HD movies or tv in the near future!

500USD just for cosmetics ... I'd rather go down to my local garage and get them to do a metallic paint job (sure non of this angle colour changing stuff .. but is it worth 500USD of your own money when that's the price of a half decent CPU?!). Just doesn't make sense to me ... unless I was a rich kid & it was my parents' money & I had no idea of the value of money ;-). No harm in dreaming though!

2000USD loading it up with 2TB of HDDs ... again there are much better ways of spending money than on loads of HDDs, and you can always simply add drives when you run out of space at which point those prices would've dropped .. so to me I'd rather start with just 1 or 2 & try to use cheap optical for bulk files like videos.

Basically, there are ways to have a decent systems for most peoples' needs whilst not breaking the bank, but it involves being ultra conservative and minimalistic .. and doing lots of small minor upgrades but only when necessary .. rather than aiming high at the start!

Again it's my own opinions .. just my 2c's wrt what I've found myself from making some dumb mistakes along the way in buying at the high-end once or twice for a few components and usually regretting it! I've not regretting spending on decent monitors since they're worth it wrt you can use them for a decade, but a high-end graphics card just for 1 game definitely isn't to me, if you can manage to hold out on buying until the next versions come out so you can then buy the previous gen at half the initial price ;-). Again, if you're using them for work, then it's a totally different issue!

I remember their old advertisement for the paint was the "Lamborghini Paintjob" hahaha.

Check out their laptops, they have $210 decals lol.

I have no idea how that enhances gaming but yeah...

On another note...

http://www.go-l.com/super_computers/index.htm
http://www.go-l.com/capsula/index.htm

Lol........

Zotac 8800GT
Whats A High Quality Gaming PC Specs

I already buy a graphic card zotac 8800gt..I tried it because it clock high at 700mhz and more powerful than xfx 8800gt...But I didn't know if this type of graphic card has a problem...Anyone can help me?right now I face the problem when I play assassin creed..It not responding when 30 minute I play the game..I tried play back the game and 30minute it happen again...

-reply by hooligans85

CPU: Intel Quad Extreme
RAM: 8GB
VGA: Geforce 9800 X2 & Sli
That's what you need to play games in the next 5 years

With Multi-core, other stuff can use the other core if one is taken up by games. I hope they know to use most of the other one, but doubt it.

With Multi-gpu (SLI), I think it's all done lower down, so OpenGL/Directx doesn't need the programmer to direct it about.

I wanna make a quad-core, quad-card PC, hopefully on something small like microATX.

The current average gamer configuration in 2008 is any of the combination:
- Quad Core
- At least 4GB RAM
- 500GB SATA HDD
- ATi Radeon HD 4xxx series or NVIDIA GeForce 9xxx series

There are so many parts that you can mix and match to make your desktop to your liking.

xboxrulz