A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
As I have been trying to upgrade my computer recently, I've realised that it can be quite an ordeal. I was completely clueless about the various components, what to get, which ones would work etc. Therefore, I thought it might be helpful to set up a thread to give advice to others planning on upgrading their PC's, or even getting new ones. I'll be adding to this thread as I continue to learn more about upgrading PC's, and any more info anyone has would be appreciated, and immediately added to this post. Eventually, I hope it will be a simple and thorough guide for all gamers here at the Guild to refer to. You can correct me if I'm wrong anywhere.
Graphics Cards:
This can be one of the most confusing aspects when upgrading a PC. Graphics cards are necessary to improve the performance of your PC while playing games, as they will allow them to run much more smoothly and on higher settings. You need to be extremely careful the graphics card you buy is the right one to fit into your PC's slots. There are several types of slots. PCI slots are the oldest type, found in older computers when graphics were less significant. However, these slots are still manufactured in almost every computer today, and so there is a wide variety of graphics cards available for them.
As graphics became more important, AGP slots were developed, allowing more powerful graphics cards to be developed for them. As well as the AGP slots, AGP Pro slots were developed to cater for even more powerful graphics cards. AGP Pro graphics cards are longer than AGP cards, and so cannot fit into an AGP slot, although AGP cards can fit into an AGP Pro slot.
AGP slots are rapidly being replaced by PCI Express slots. These slots offer the best performance, and are SLI compatible, meaning they allow dual-graphics cards to be installed, for extremely high quality performances.
NOTE: The range in prices for the same graphics card across different sites can be incredible. 500% price increases between some sites. So, an excellent site I recommend is:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatal...ics_Cards.html
The following is a guide for PCI and PCI Express slots, based on performances for RTW:
Budget Gamers - You may want to make do with your computers integrated graphics card. However, for a pretty smooth and solid performance on low-medium settings, these cards can be found around the range of £20-£40.
GeForce 6200, GeForce 6600
HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon 7000, Sapphire ATI Radeon X1300
Casual Gamers - For those people who like to play games often, but their lives aren't dominated by them, these graphics cards will offer a largely smooth gaming performance even on medium-high settings, and are priced from £30-£70.
GeForce 7300 LE, GeForce 7300 GS, GeForce 7300 GT
HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X1600 XT
Serious Gamers - You spend a lot of time at your PC, so you want it to run smoothly and with quality. These are high-end graphics cards, allowing things to run nice and fluently on high settings, without you digging to deeply into your wallet, maybe for around £60-£100. Also, some of these graphics cards are SLI compatable, meaning if you have a PCI Express slot, you will likely be able to combine more than one of them.
GeForce 7600 GS, GeForce 7600 GT
HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X800 GTO, Sapphire X1600 Pro
Extreme Gamers - You spend most of your time parked in front of a screen, so you want that time spent well. These are the best in graphics cards - top quality performance on the top settings. Unfortunately, even on the cheaper sites I've found, its gonna cost you anything from £150-£350. Some examples:
GeForce 7900 GT, GeForce 7900 GTX, GeForce 7950 GX2
PowerColor ATI Radeon X1800 XT, ATI Radeon X1900 Crossfire Edition, Sapphire ATI Radeon X1900 XT-X
Random Access Memory (RAM)
RAM, or Random Access Memory, determines the speed of your computer. RAM will always improve your PC's performance when carrying out standard tasks, but when it comes to playing games, RAM and a Graphics Card are both required for a decent performance, one is little use without the other. Upgrading your RAM is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to effectively upgrade your PC. Its also a lot more simple than selecting Graphics Cards, but you should still think carefully about how much you really need. Apart from the really old 64 MB etc, modern RAM has ratings of 256 MB, 512 MB, 1024 MB. The higher the better. As well as this, they have a rating in Mega Hertz, which effectively shows how fast they work. The rating in MB is for showing how the RAM will cope with large or several tasks at once, and the rating in MHz shows the RAM's processing speed. So, be careful when picking RAM, remember, money saved on RAM could go towards a better Graphics Card or anything else you need. So, a quick Guide for general gaming, but based on RTW:
Budget Gamers - For a bog standard performance of RTW, 256 MB RAM will do. Most computers made in the last few years should come with it anyway. Any less than this and you have to upgrade - 256 MB RAM is an official minimun requirement for RTW. Of course, all the various forms of 256 MB RAM have different levels of quality. Budget Gamers might consider buying, for around £20, or for the latter below, up to £40:
Crucial 256 MB DDR PC3200 CAS3 (256 MB, 200 MHz)
OCZ PC 3700 Gold Series EL-DDR CAS2 (256 MB, 450 MHz)
Casual Gamers - For a solid gaming performance, with little lag and fairly slow loading times, 512 MB should have the power to offer this. Its also pretty affordable, with a wide range of choices at around £40:
Crucial 512 MB DDR PC2700 CAS2.5 (512 MB, 166 MHz)
Crucial 512 MB DDR PC3200 CAS3 (512 MB, 200 MHz)
Serious Gamers - If you want excellent gaming performance even on high settings, 1 GB RAM will do the job, as long as it has a graphics card to complement it. Having 1 GB of RAM will be increasingly useful in the future, as it is recommended to have at least 1 GB RAM to take full advantage of what Windows Vista has to offer. So, for great quality and value RAM for serious gamers, at around £70-£100 take a look at:
Crucial 1GB DDR PC3200 CAS3 (1 GB, 200 MHz)
Mushkin 1 GB DDR XP3200 (1 GB, 400 MHz)
Extreme Gamers - To allow your other components such as your graphics cards etc to be used to their full advantage, 2 GB of RAM will easily allow this. This is the best RAM available, though it is expensive at anything from £130-£. Some good choices of RAM for the extreme gamer would be:
Mushkin 2 GB DDR EM 3200 (2 GB, 400 MHz)
Mushkin 2 GB DDR XP 4000 (2 GB, 500 MHz)
Corsair 2 GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 Pro TwinX (2 GB, 800 MHz)
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Not a big fan of ATI's offerings?
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Lemur, go to sleep. You are a lemur-father, and have lots of lemur babies, hence you should act responsibly and not spend so much time on the .Org ~;)
Otherwise, they'll get the hook on you and make you a mod/assist.mod here in the Hardware & Software Forum, and you'll have no way out ~D
Oh, right, actually contribute something to the topic...
*scratches head* *engages evasive tactics*
So, Woad Warrior, are you only interested in the Graphics Card aspect, or the whole shebang ? Or you just started with the Graphics Card ?
My interest, to be honest, lies with the more exotic (perhaps) details, which are probably less important too - until you need them.
I'm interested in the SATA vs IDE, for one thing. AFAIK, none has definitely proved itself as the indubitable leader, or the better choice. Is SATA the future?
Maybe, but how "near" is this definite future ?
Is SCSI becoming a price-efficient option for the casual PC owner ?
Hmm, am I hijacking this thread ? That was not my intention. If you folks think this should be a separate topic, just say so, and I'll stop yapping about this.
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Its really just a beginners guide, don't really need to go into GeForce 6600 GT OS Turbo Cache 256 MB Memory etc. etc...
And I will update it with more stuff later.
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blodrast
I'm interested in the SATA vs IDE, for one thing. AFAIK, none has definitely proved itself as the indubitable leader, or the better choice. Is SATA the future?
Maybe, but how "near" is this definite future ?
Is SCSI becoming a price-efficient option for the casual PC owner ?
There are some definite advantages to SATA over IDE. Discounting bandwiths, SATA rules mechanically. The cables are easier to install and route through your chassis, and the small cables don't block airflow like the PITA IDE ribbon cables. With components getting hotter and hotter, the improved airflow of the SATA cables is a huge plus. You also don't have to worry about the performance hit of having multiple drives on a single ribbon cable.
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
DukeofSerbia: when you say "faaar away better", can you expand on that ?
drone: I see, I hadn't considered the airflow perspective. Thanks for that.
As for bandwidth, I've read quite a few reviews, and they were exactly why I'm saying that my impression is there is no significant difference in performance.
Any thoughts on that ?
And, pardon my ignorance, but why don't you have to worry about multiple disks on the same ribbon cable ?
Thank you.
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Actually, I think ATI's offerings in the mid to low ranger are very poor. The X850GTO and X850XT are goo cards, but seem to be going for slightly more than their GeForce equivilalnt.
But, however, thier high end offering simply blow nVidias out of the water! The X1900XTX is better than the 7900GTX, and is also cheaper to boot, and the X1900XT is still better than the 7900GTX and is even cheaper than the XTX!
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blodrast
drone: I see, I hadn't considered the airflow perspective. Thanks for that.
As for bandwidth, I've read quite a few reviews, and they were exactly why I'm saying that my impression is there is no significant difference in performance.
Any thoughts on that ?
And, pardon my ignorance, but why don't you have to worry about multiple disks on the same ribbon cable ?
Thank you.
At the moment, I think SATA beats out IDE (I guess PATA is the official term, they are both "IDE") in bandwidth, but not by much. It's probably a wash at the moment, and probably depends on the drives themselves more than the interface.
IDE/PATA cables could connect both a master and slave drive to one cable, and IIRC most PC motherboards had 2 IDE ports. A common config was to put hard drives on one cable, and CD/DVD drives on the other. By sharing a cable, bandwidth contention could occur when accessing both of the drives on the same cable. A SATA cable only supports 1 drive (but motherboards generally have more ports), so there is no cable contention. This was mainly a problem when copying data from one drive to another, or when accessing data on the second drive while your swap space resided on the first.
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
ok, thanks. I was aware of the issues with the classical IDE/PATA, but I didn't know that mobo's supporting SATA would have more ports.:bow:
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
I think most MoBos that support SATA these days have at least 4 ports (with SATA RAID support), plus one or two PATA ports as well. Not sure how many optical drives are available in SATA, Plextor has a couple, but I don't think it's that widespread yet.
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
AAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! The Guild is telling me there are twelve replies in this thread, why can I only read five of them!!!
Also why do my DST settings keep altering now I have uninstalled Panda
EDIT: Apparently now that I post, I get to see the rest of the posts...
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
For some reason, I must post in this thread to see beyond post number 5...
Re: A Gamer's Guide to PC Components
Again, I have to post to see the new posts beyond post 5...
