01-26-2012, 03:04 AM
I'm with Bolty and others - look at Dell (XPS range tends to have the gaming stuff), and spring for the 2 or 3 year on site warranty. I mean, seriously, a techo will show up at your house and replace bits if they fail... (They replaced my wife's laptop keyboard on her laptop about 5 years ago - they did some stuff for me at work back when we bought Dell's). There were a couple of XPS machines at around the $899 mark when I looked (no screen), and the warranty bump would only cost another $100-200. Even the cheap ones were way over the spec for a 2005 PC.
Looking at the spec for those machines, the disk size is a bit down on current sizes. 1TB is common now (I actually find that I can't buy anything smaller than 250GB now - I needed them for some servers I was building recently). The video will sort of work for current games, but it would need to be detuned.
Building computers is a fine hobby - but the crunch comes when you are debugging component failure. I may be a bit sensitive about that, as there are 2 desktops and one multimedia PC in the house, and they lose the plot at different times. (And you do NOT want to be around when the TV stops working in my house due to a failing hard drive - ask me how I know
).
If you want to build one. Windows 7 home premium is fine as an OS, around 1+ TB of drive(s), at least 4GB of RAM, and something around the ATI Radeon 6850 or better or Nvidia GTX 560 mark will last you for years. I'd seriously consider buying a 2nd hand or old 19" 4:3 LCD flat screen. All games will work on a 4:3 screen - but you tend to have to tweak older ones to work with a widescreen. (Having said that - new games REALLY look good in a widescreen). 22" older LCD's at 1680x1050 (16:10 ratio) cover most of the games since about 2008. Only the really new games support 1920x1080 (HD) or 1920x1200 (older 24" widescreen).
HowGozit
Looking at the spec for those machines, the disk size is a bit down on current sizes. 1TB is common now (I actually find that I can't buy anything smaller than 250GB now - I needed them for some servers I was building recently). The video will sort of work for current games, but it would need to be detuned.
Building computers is a fine hobby - but the crunch comes when you are debugging component failure. I may be a bit sensitive about that, as there are 2 desktops and one multimedia PC in the house, and they lose the plot at different times. (And you do NOT want to be around when the TV stops working in my house due to a failing hard drive - ask me how I know
).If you want to build one. Windows 7 home premium is fine as an OS, around 1+ TB of drive(s), at least 4GB of RAM, and something around the ATI Radeon 6850 or better or Nvidia GTX 560 mark will last you for years. I'd seriously consider buying a 2nd hand or old 19" 4:3 LCD flat screen. All games will work on a 4:3 screen - but you tend to have to tweak older ones to work with a widescreen. (Having said that - new games REALLY look good in a widescreen). 22" older LCD's at 1680x1050 (16:10 ratio) cover most of the games since about 2008. Only the really new games support 1920x1080 (HD) or 1920x1200 (older 24" widescreen).
HowGozit