Help with building a gaming PC needed!

[Kei]

Hi,
I want to get a PC good enough to play half life 2 and doom 3 on.
The most I want to spend is on the graphics card (Probably the new nVidea one), I'm not conerced at all about the brand of the PC etc.
Are there any places where I can phone up (I'm in London) or go to where you can just tell than what components you want and they build it for you?

...............Or is it easier just to get a compaq laptop?


Any help would be appreciated!

K

[demon9k]

First things first. DON'T BUY A LAPTOP FOR GAMING!

Best advice I can give you is make sure you buy a motherboard with great stability, unless you are going to overclock then you want to go for the best overclocking one. The giga-byte ones seem to be the best for stability, the 8KNXP for P4 is a good one and so is the 8PENXP. I don't know any Althon ones.

I would go for the 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card if I were you. Its the only one of the new ones I have seen and it bloody flies. I couldn't comment on any of the other new ones.

As for processor I would buy a 2.8Ghz 800FSB P4 with the 8KNXP motherboard and you will be all set for a whole lot of gaming.

If you built that yourself it would cost you around ?560 so far.

Some other people might recommend some athlons but you say you don't care about name so just get the one that performs the highest for yourself, check out a few review websites and you will be sorted.

[Kei]

First things first. DON'T BUY A LAPTOP FOR GAMING!

Best advice I can give you is make sure you buy a motherboard with great stability, unless you are going to overclock then you want to go for the best overclocking one. The giga-byte ones seem to be the best for stability, the 8KNXP for P4 is a good one and so is the 8PENXP. I don't know any Althon ones.

I would go for the 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card if I were you. Its the only one of the new ones I have seen and it bloody flies. I couldn't comment on any of the other new ones.

As for processor I would buy a 2.8Ghz 800FSB P4 with the 8KNXP motherboard and you will be all set for a whole lot of gaming.

If you built that yourself it would cost you around ?560 so far.

Some other people might recommend some athlons but you say you don't care about name so just get the one that performs the highest for yourself, check out a few review websites and you will be sorted.

cool thanks!

I have a fujitsu lifebook and er, even Everquest has trouble running on it
I'll probably go with the graphics card and processors you mentioned.
I won't be able to build it myself though

K

[demon9k]

Have a wait and see if other people have first hand experience with the 9800XT or Nvidia 5950. They might be expensive but they might be worth it in the long run.

[Fragmaster]

Well if you HAVE to buy a laptop for gaming, get the Alienware gaming laptop, made for gaming, it performs pretty well in some benchmarks I have seen.

Oh and desktop wise stay away from the FX line, get an ATI, nVIDIA have seriously botched up the recent drivers tbh.

[Shimmyhill]

If your buying for HL2 and Doom 3 dont build it now.

Borth of the cards mentioned will run the games in lower res's only with all the tricks turned on.

Wait until PCI Express comes out because at the same time the new line of GFX cards will be out that will be much faster.

[Fragmaster]

No, the E3 test machine was running an ATI 9800 Pro, and that certainly was not running in a low resolution & it is the card all the dev team are using.

Doom 3 is another case, I am not sure, but I think that it will run at least 1280x1024

[demon9k]

The game will fine on the 9800 Pro at high resolutions. The 9800 Pro aces abosutely everything you throw at it. I can't see it having a problem with HL2 plus the benchmarks on Toms hardware show that they run at 60-70 frames a second.

[choddo]

But wait anyway cos the price will come down.

And you can build it yourself, it's a piece of piss. I wrote this quick guide, but there are others around that are better.

[Fragmaster]

Skimmed through your guide, not bad but I think you should maybe add about choosing a Monitor and adding Monitor to the list of to buy's.

[Shimmyhill]

The demo was running @ 1280 with no AA or AF on.

Neither card will run the full release @ 1280 with AA + AF on (from Valve)

Wait for PCI express which will be a massive jump in performance, Nvidia are quoting 3 times the Polygon/sec on their 1st PCI express board.

[dgnr7982]

Hi,

Are there any places where I can phone up (I'm in London) or go to where you can just tell than what components you want and they build it for you?

Find someone to build it for you, its actually very easy to build a pc. That way you'll get the exact stuff you want.

[demon9k]

There is no point in waiting for the next best thing before you build your system, you will be waiting for ages and spending so much money.

As for that tech demo, you could run it at 1600*1200 with no AA or AF it would run perfectly fine and would look better than 1280 with AA + AF on. AA and AF are well over rated. The best way to make games look better is simply to just up the resolution and you won't even need AA or AF, plus putting up the resolution doesn't even put much of a strain on the graphics card compaired to AA and AF.

I have been in this situation before. If you buy every new thing that comes out you are a. Likely to waste a lot of money and b. the computer won't work properly due to it being the first time the technology is used.

But wait anyway cos the price will come down.

Again I don't see the point in waiting cos you could be waiting for ages, then the new graphics card that is out will be the same price as the old one was when you first wanted to buy one.

The only thing I would wait for is to have all the money in cash and not take out a loan.

[Shimmyhill]

Im not saying wait as im aware things change all the time (i went from 1.7 P4 - 1.8 P4 - 2.4 P4 - 3.0 P4 and had around 10 GFX cards in the same time)

What i am saying is that if ur building a pc for a speciric game or 2 then wait until the games are out or nearly out then build. As gfx cards refresh every 6 months there will be a much better card nearer the time the game ur building the pc for is out.

It just makes sense

[DaveW]

The P4 2.4 C are the best "bang for the buck" CPU. They overclock to 2.8 with the OEM cooler, or sometimes over 3 ghz with a special cooler. CPU speed over 2 ghz is kind of overkill anyway. If you go from 2 to 3 ghz, you won't see a 50% increase in framerate, you will be lucky to see + 5%.

Remember to get plenty of ram, even 512 causes a little HD thrashing on a few games.

I agree with Demon in that Giga-byte boards are very stable and solid overclockers. I disagree with his stance on FSAA versus higher resolutions. Even at 1600x1200 I still see jaggies. They all but disappear in 4XAA in 1024x768 on a Radeon and the games run faster, even though the sample rate is technically higher.

BTW, I know a guy (not me) who had an ATI 9700 (not mine) and ran the leaked build of Halflife 2 in 1024x768 w/ 4X FSAA just fine. I don't think a 9800 XT will have any problems in 1280x1024 and 4X FSAA. Halflife 2 isn't a very taxing engine. Its basically a hax0red version of the original Halflife engine with the havoc physics engine plugged in. Plus the original halflife engine was a haxored version of the Quake engine in the first place. "#include glquake.h" is the first line in the source code.

Doom 3 on the other hand is a very hardware taxing game engine. It runs better a bit better on a GeForce fx, mainly due to it running in FP16 instead of FP24 pipelines. The fx also has better optimizations of shadows. The regular 9700s have no shadow acceleration, the 9800 and 9800 XT have some shadow HSR optimizations. D3 will be playable on todays hardware, but probably not in high resolutions with a lot of FSAA.

If you can wait until the next generation cards in 2004 it will be worth it. Only then will cards really made to handle engines like Doom 3. Shadows just kill the frame rate of todays cards. DX9 multi-sample filtering effects like motion blur and DoF also run very slowly on todays graphics cards and can't be done simultaneously with other forms of multi-sampling (FSAA), something I hope will be addressed next year.

Doom 3 I expect to see in Q2 next year. Halflife 2 on the other hand is a long way off from being finished. They can talk BS about how the hacker delayed its release, but its obvious to everyone now that they had barely even started work on it. I wouldn't be suprised if its not out until 2005. It *IS* a game by Valve afterall, since when did they release a game on time?

PCI Express is not something I would place too much importance on right now. High-bandwidth between the system ram and GPU is something that console architecture needs, when the system ram and video ram are the same thing. PC graphics cards have their own onboard ram with a very fast bus. With 256 meg of video ram you should even need to use the system memory except when loading the textures at the start of the level or map. During play, a graphics card with enough video ram should run at the same speed in an old AGP 1X slot. In practice this isn't strictly true, and there is a difference between AGP 1X and AGP4X (however its not 4 times faster, you only get an extra 10% FPS max). Microsoft has big plans for Direct X 10 and how video cards will do memory management. Basically all textures, vertices, shaders etc will be paged and swapping in and out of video and system ram as need automatically. In a way the video ram behaves like a huge L1 CPU cache, and the system ram like an L2 CPU cache. There is a white paper on this floating around the web somewhere.