The Video Game Revue

$2000 Dream Machine

Hey, this is post #100. Hooray for me. Anyway, today I want to talk about PC hardware, which calls for an important disclaimer: I'm not some kind of hardcore PC hardware guru who really knows what he's talking about. I'm a console gamer at heart, and the only reason that I can put together a gaming PC is because just about any idiot can order PC parts online and assemble a working system--most of the parts don't even fit together unless they're meant to. That having been said, I do know a little bit about computer hardware, but you shouldn't take my word as being the final authority on anything or buy a particular piece of hardware just because I mentioned it. I'll do my best to only mention good stuff, but my best might not be good enough.

I noticed today that my current gaming PC at home--which I've been meaning to replace for over a year now--is getting to be radically out of date. The CPU's AMD Athlon 2200, a socket 754, and I think the RAM is clocked at either 200 MHz or 333 MHz--but certainly no more than that. The video card is a budget Saphire Radeon 9600. It's hard to believe that I play games like F.E.A.R. and Oblivion on this thing, especially given what $2000 will buy you these days.

Socket 939 is out, and the new Socket AM2 is in. Of course, everyone knows about dual-core processors and such. Personally, I often doubt their true value--I was always taught that having a single processor running at, say, 20% extra speed (over each of the dual processors) will tend to work better for most apps than having two processors. Besides, two processors just fight over memory access anyway, don't they? Maybe things have changed since I was last educated on the subject, but it seems to me that memory access has tended to be the bottleneck in computing for more than a few years now.

That's why DDR2 memory clocked at 800 MHz is such a great thing. A year ago, I would have been willing to pay $400 for 1 GB of something like that, and now you can get 2 GB for roughly $200. Where gaming PCs--or even PCs in general--are concerned, memory is as important as your CPU, and yet most people (myself included) are still stuck with 512 MB sticks of slow RAM that cost $55 each.

There's also these freaky new physics accelerator boards out. That is definitely a hot idea; I ranted back when Half-Life 2 came out that in-game physics were becoming as important a feature of game graphics as poly counts, and I figure that these physics accelerator boards could one day be the difference between "Half-Life 3" chugging at 12 FPS or screaming at 60 FPS. As for the here and now, there are no games (that I know of, at least) that support physics accelerator hardware, and $300 is a lot to ask for something that only plays demos. If I did get one of these things, it would only be to experiment on as a programmer.

That's enough of a pre-amble. Now I'm going to get right into the heart of the matter with a raw listing of the hardware that I'd put into my $2000 PC if I were to buy it right now:

- Thermaltake Armor JR. Tower Case (don't forget the OCZ 520W power supply, sold separately)
- ASUS M2N-E ATX AM2 Nforce 570 Motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor Socket AM2 Windsor 2.0GHZ
- OCZ Platinum XTC PC2-6400 2GB DDR2-800 Dual Channel Memory Kit
- Sapphire Radeon X1900 XT Video Card

Those are the interesting components, anyway. Some of the highlights of this particular setup include the following:

- AM2 socket CPU
- Nforce 5 motherboard chipset
- PCI-E 16X
- DDR2 800 MHz dual-channel RAM, and plenty of it

I figure that just about any rig packing those features can't go horribly wrong. If you're less budget-minded, you can easily step up on the CPU and the graphics card; similarly, if you're more budget-minded, you can skip out on the dual-core CPU and go for a single core AM2 CPU (I'd be tempted to save a couple hundred bucks that way, myself.) Another way to save/burn extra money is to go with a different case: the Antec Sonata II will save you cash (you can do away with the separate power supply), while Lian-Li cases will get you better quality at the cost of more cash.

Matt prefers nVidia's GeForce series products over Radeon, from what I've heard. I've also heard that the Radeon X1900 XT holds its own against the GeForce 7900 GT and then some (the benchmarks I saw were for a Diamond Radeon X1900 XT and a eVGA GeForce 7900 GT, as published in Maximum PC magazine.) Similarly, at the level of Radeon X1900 GT versus GeForce 7800 GTX, it's a toss-up, although GeForce is reportedly better at running Doom 3 and Quake 4. Personally, I'm not particularly attached to either GeForce or Radeon cards at the expense of the other--they're both great. :)

So there may not be much happening this summer in terms of new releases, but with a brand new gaming rig, all of my old PC games would suddenly be like new again. It's a crying shame that I don't have $2000 to spare at the moment, but my day will come. Oh yes, it will happen one day.

posted by Parappa @ 10:16 PM