How To Buy A Gaming PC

When trying to justify your new PC you will probably tell everyone you need it for business use or schoolwork or to further your studies, but secretly you might just want it to play games! If you are going to spend the money you need to make sure that you get a good gaming PC. Here is some advice on how to pick a machine that can blast those aliens with the best of them.

The first and easiest option when buying a gaming PC is to get one from a gaming specialist like Alienware. Since this Dell subdivision concentrate solely on gaming you are pretty much guaranteed to get a smooth gaming experience. The only wrinkle is that the cheapest Alienware desktop starts at £1,099 which might be a little more than your budget.

So if you are going to shop around for a cheaper more generic PC with the hopes it can handle the latest games here are a few things you need to watch out for.

The four main components when considering your gaming PC are the graphics card, the processor, the memory and the hard drive. They are all important for a great gaming machine but if you need to save money then get the best graphics card you can and the best CPU.

Graphics
There are two main suppliers of graphics cards today, nVidia and ATI. They both offer a wide range of graphics cards from the cheap and cheerful to the mega expensive. Both companies also offer a technology which allows you to run two graphics cards simultaneously and so split the gaming burden over two Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). nVidia’s technology is called SLI (for Scan Line Interleaving which worked originally by making one GPU processes the odd lines and the other the even lines but now is more complex). ATI’s is called CrossFire and is very similar to SLI in many ways. To use SLI or CrossFire you need a machine with PCI Express but that is almost guaranteed nowadays.

Another recent innovation is the inclusion of dual GPU cards which effectible brings the technologies of SLI and CrossFire onto a single card. The most expensive cards from nVidia (e.g. GeForce GTX 295) and ATI (e.g. ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2) cost between £250 and £350. If those prices are too high for you, consider something like the GeForce GTX 275 which goes for about £175.

CPU
When considering the CPU the minimum you want is a dual core processor like the AMD Athlon II X2 or an Intel Core 2 Duo. The old idea of the higher the megahertz the greater the speed doesn't quite apply today as there are other factors like amounts of cache and bus speeds, but in general the faster the processor speed the better and the greater number of cores the better. If you want a real nice processor for your gaming beast opt for the Intel Core i7.

Memory
When looking at memory you need to think about two things, the amount of memory (i.e. how many GB) and the speed of the memory. For the amount I would suggest a minimum of 4GB and 8GB if you can afford it. For more than 4GB you need to make sure that the processor is 64 bit enabled which all the CPUs mentioned above are. When it comes to speed there are a whole range of options and your choice of CPU will partially dictate what memory you can use. Memory is expressed in standard (like DDR2) and speed (800Mhz). As a minimum you should be looking at DDR2-800 but DDR2-1066 is better. There is also DD3 memory which can be more expensive but offers greater performance. If you want great speed go with DDR3-1600.

Hard Drive
The last component which can be easily overlooked is the hard drive. Games take up a lot of hard drive space and when loading new levels or watching cut scenes loading time will be dependent on the hard drive. You should get at least a 500GB drive like the 500GB Seagate 7200.12 SATA or for 1TB try the Samsung SpinPoint F1.

Final Comments
If you can find an off the shelf PC with these types of components you should get many hours of gameplay fun and the only frustration you should feel is when you can’t complete the level you are on.