best pc to buy

[wickerman]

just wondering what would be best pc to buyfor playing online games and pc games

[Chris]

That depends on what games you want to play. The best PC's are home-built, but if you absolutely cannot/do not want to build your own, I like these folks - CyberPowerPC.

If you don't want dual-core/dual-cpu, I'd say go for a Socket 939 Athlon 64 solution, as they are the clear performance leaders right now. Pentium 4 is a dead-end. Get a gig of RAM at least, and the GeForce 6600GT's & 6800's are at a nice price spot right now.

[r21vo]

I agree, for games - amd is the only choice. Speaking of ram, 512mb or 1gb should be enough, most of games doesn't require that much anyways. If we are talking about videocards, seems nvidia offers best price/performance ratio. I would go for 6800gt or 7800gt, but it depends how much money you want to spend.

[MUDASS]

Well, I'm looking for my next pc since a year, and I always found something bugging me.  This industry is treating customers like Lamas !  I was a Pentium enthusiast, but now looking forward for an amd.  Then Windows Xp is full of flaws, SP3 is coming soon... Another waste of time fixing Windows again!  Piss me off to get compatible antivirus and all extra protections.  In my opinion ; Best buy for gaming, Quality vs. Price With No Troubles = Xbox 360 or Playstation 3!  For your need to surf the Web and do some Office use ; Buy a Mac !  It never crash, virus are rare, very low extra protection needed. NO WASTE OF TIME UPDATING ! Then again, I still don't know what I'll end up with !

[secretfj]

yeah, a Mac Mini will be your friend...for a trouble free PC...

[Chris]

Originally posted by secretfj

yeah, a Mac Mini will be your friend...for a trouble free PC...

But not for gaming...

& @ mudass -
I was a Pentium enthusiast for many years also. My first real gaming rig was a Pentium MMX 233 with a Matrox PCI card. Never wanted to "touch" that "amd stuff". Always looked at it as inferior. Then the P4 comes along, with its extremely inefficient design and gradually AMD takes the lead. I denied this for quite awhile but benchmarks don't lie. For gaming, Athlon 64 takes the crown. Not even the P4 580 4ghz CPU would have fixed this problem...

Oh well, Intel is moving to the Pentium M architecture, so hopefully they'll have a competitive gaming processor out sometime next year...

& I always hated XP. Probably just me, but I couldn't stand that O/S, with it's "toy" design and numerous bug fixes every week. I moved to Windows Server 2003, tried the eval and purchased Web Edition. I'm much more happy with it. I'd still use NT 3.51/4.0 if the "modern" software/games would support it.

[MUDASS]

I've heard of Pentium M, I didn't see the scpec yet or it's advantage, only good words is heard about it.  But now with console box that you can play online for the price of a decent graphic card...
Lag free !

I became a pc gamer because I used to spent a few hundreds $$/month in arcades.   I'm getting old now to spent hours optimizing chipsets and windows for that new game lagging...  I'd rather spent more times gaming and less fixing !  And it's costly to buy all that crap to protect your pc, new windows, new antivirus... it's making me sick...  There are nothing really new, they're just selling vow !

Maybe I'll go back in arcades, It's been a long time I haven't try them !

[MUDASS]

wickerman,  to finally answer your question,  if I was to buy a new pc my self,  I would buy a box with an Asus motherboard with an Athlon cpu 3500+ or more, between 1 and 4 gig of the fastest ram (take room for future use or multi tasks)no less then an ati x800 or nvidia 6800 graphic card,  onboard sound is already dolby 5.1.  wireless mouse and keyboard to be comfortalbly playing in my lazyboy,
23 inch monitor.  That would be the basics.

[MUDASS]

I forgot to say, another aspect to look at is your hard drive.  You'll get best speed with an 8 mb cache IDE sata hard drive.  I dunno if Raid hd or scsi hd are faster.

[youkaizero]

Build your own.Don't buy any prebuilt name brand crap.