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Ping Paul
Hi, any good suggestions on building a good gaming PC for around $1000 or
less? Thanks, Buffalo PS: Yes,I realize I will have to upgrade from Win2000ProSP4. If I go to Win7, should I go for 32bit or 64 bit (I still like to play Q3 Arena online) PPS: I don't believe I will be able to use any of the components in my old system, except the monitor, keyboard and mouse. |
#2
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Ping Paul
Buffalo wrote:
Hi, any good suggestions on building a good gaming PC for around $1000 or less? Thanks, Buffalo PS: Yes,I realize I will have to upgrade from Win2000ProSP4. If I go to Win7, should I go for 32bit or 64 bit (I still like to play Q3 Arena online) PPS: I don't believe I will be able to use any of the components in my old system, except the monitor, keyboard and mouse. i5-3570K 4Core 4Thread 6MB L3, 3.4GHz $230 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116504 i7-3770K 4Core 8Thread 8MB L3, 3.5GHz $320 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116501 The difference there, is one has Hyperthreading turned on, the other has it turned off. Price diff is $90. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Intel Core i5-3570K @ 3.40GHz 7,128 Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz 9,641 Double the execution threads, gives 1.35x in that benchmark. In the first generation when Hyperthreading came out, it was good for about 1.05x on average. ******* There are a ton of LGA1155 motherboards out there. Just get one with the peripheral chips on it you really want. (Gigabit NIC for sure, USB3 is good to have for the future, ESATA if you had a lot of ESATA external drives, Firewire if you had some kind of camcorder and needed video transfers, and so on.) There are some features that only seem to be of interest to the manufacturer, as they never seem to come up in conversation. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157293 ******* Q3 Arena shouldn't need much of a graphics card. Some of the Intel processors have built-in graphics. You can use ark.intel.com to check for that. http://ark.intel.com/products/65520/...up-to-3_80-GHz "HD4000 graphics". If the motherboard has the graphics connectors on the back, and you're not ready to purchase a video card yet, you can test and bring up the system using the processor built-in graphics. ******* The OS choice, depends on your taste in memory. If you're the kind of person who buys a 4x4GB kit for your new computer, then a 64 bit OS will make best usage of the 16GB total memory. If you buy a 2x2GB kit of memory, then a 32 bit OS will be a good fit for that. W7 x64 does not support 16-bit stuff, like some older installers. Whereas, the x32 version, does support x16 installers and more of your older programs. I haven't looked lately, but in the past Microsoft had compatibility checkers or web pages with lists of known-to-work products. You could try that route. It'll be a bit harder to find some of that stuff, because Microsoft generally pitches everything when they move to their new OS. Sometimes, I have to use www.archive.org to find older reference material. Some Adobe products now, are 64 bit only. If you have gazillions of dollars to spend on things like Photoshop or the Adobe movie editor, then you should give more serious consideration to the 64 bit OS. A 4GB address space used on the 32 bit OS, will be a bit restrictive for gaming. Especially if you buy a video card which has a lot of onboard memory. This might be an issue for something like Microsoft Flight Simulator, or some other program which is resource intensive just so it can be resource intensive. But if Q3 Arena was your only objective, then the 32 bit OS should handle it. I have W7 x64 on my laptop, and so far that hasn't provided me any additional functionality. So in terms of "happy surprises", I can't say it's done anything for me. But, I don't use older programs with 16 bit installers on there, and I also don't have a gazillion dollars for Adobe products. So I hardly qualify as a "discerning user" :-) YMMV. Paul |
#3
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Ping Paul
Paul wrote: Buffalo wrote: Hi, any good suggestions on building a good gaming PC for around $1000 or less? Thanks, Buffalo PS: Yes,I realize I will have to upgrade from Win2000ProSP4. If I go to Win7, should I go for 32bit or 64 bit (I still like to play Q3 Arena online) PPS: I don't believe I will be able to use any of the components in my old system, except the monitor, keyboard and mouse. i5-3570K 4Core 4Thread 6MB L3, 3.4GHz $230 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116504 i7-3770K 4Core 8Thread 8MB L3, 3.5GHz $320 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116501 The difference there, is one has Hyperthreading turned on, the other has it turned off. Price diff is $90. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Intel Core i5-3570K @ 3.40GHz 7,128 Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz 9,641 Double the execution threads, gives 1.35x in that benchmark. In the first generation when Hyperthreading came out, it was good for about 1.05x on average. ******* There are a ton of LGA1155 motherboards out there. Just get one with the peripheral chips on it you really want. (Gigabit NIC for sure, USB3 is good to have for the future, ESATA if you had a lot of ESATA external drives, Firewire if you had some kind of camcorder and needed video transfers, and so on.) There are some features that only seem to be of interest to the manufacturer, as they never seem to come up in conversation. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157293 ******* Q3 Arena shouldn't need much of a graphics card. Some of the Intel processors have built-in graphics. You can use ark.intel.com to check for that. http://ark.intel.com/products/65520/...up-to-3_80-GHz "HD4000 graphics". If the motherboard has the graphics connectors on the back, and you're not ready to purchase a video card yet, you can test and bring up the system using the processor built-in graphics. ******* The OS choice, depends on your taste in memory. If you're the kind of person who buys a 4x4GB kit for your new computer, then a 64 bit OS will make best usage of the 16GB total memory. If you buy a 2x2GB kit of memory, then a 32 bit OS will be a good fit for that. W7 x64 does not support 16-bit stuff, like some older installers. Whereas, the x32 version, does support x16 installers and more of your older programs. I haven't looked lately, but in the past Microsoft had compatibility checkers or web pages with lists of known-to-work products. You could try that route. It'll be a bit harder to find some of that stuff, because Microsoft generally pitches everything when they move to their new OS. Sometimes, I have to use www.archive.org to find older reference material. Some Adobe products now, are 64 bit only. If you have gazillions of dollars to spend on things like Photoshop or the Adobe movie editor, then you should give more serious consideration to the 64 bit OS. A 4GB address space used on the 32 bit OS, will be a bit restrictive for gaming. Especially if you buy a video card which has a lot of onboard memory. This might be an issue for something like Microsoft Flight Simulator, or some other program which is resource intensive just so it can be resource intensive. But if Q3 Arena was your only objective, then the 32 bit OS should handle it. I have W7 x64 on my laptop, and so far that hasn't provided me any additional functionality. So in terms of "happy surprises", I can't say it's done anything for me. But, I don't use older programs with 16 bit installers on there, and I also don't have a gazillion dollars for Adobe products. So I hardly qualify as a "discerning user" :-) YMMV. Paul The only reason I mentioned Q3Arena was that I was wondering if it would work on Win7 64 bit, or would you have to have a second OS? No, I'm not into Adobe either. I want to try to build a PC that will still work with most of the newer games for a few years anyways. My last build was (is) my ECS K7s5a rev 3.1 with a Honey X bios, a 7600gt AGP 256MB DDR3 vid card, single 7200rpm 120GB HDD, cheap sound card, DVD RW, 1GB Ram, and an Athlon XP mobile 2500 (266MHz bus) cpu running at 2 GHz. I have a 27" LED monitor and a wired kb and mouse (MX510) running Win2000ProSP4 as an OS. I doubt if I could use any parts off my system except for the monitor and the mouse. Yep, I do plan on putting in a video card. Thanks for your input. Buffalo PS: My first build was an Asus P2b and a 300MHz celeron cpu (oc'd to 450) and a Riva TNT vid card, I believe, and I had Win95c and 128MB of ram. |
#4
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Ping Paul
Buffalo wrote:
The only reason I mentioned Q3Arena was that I was wondering if it would work on Win7 64 bit, or would you have to have a second OS? No, I'm not into Adobe either. I want to try to build a PC that will still work with most of the newer games for a few years anyways. My last build was (is) my ECS K7s5a rev 3.1 with a Honey X bios, a 7600gt AGP 256MB DDR3 vid card, single 7200rpm 120GB HDD, cheap sound card, DVD RW, 1GB Ram, and an Athlon XP mobile 2500 (266MHz bus) cpu running at 2 GHz. I have a 27" LED monitor and a wired kb and mouse (MX510) running Win2000ProSP4 as an OS. I doubt if I could use any parts off my system except for the monitor and the mouse. Yep, I do plan on putting in a video card. Thanks for your input. Buffalo PS: My first build was an Asus P2b and a 300MHz celeron cpu (oc'd to 450) and a Riva TNT vid card, I believe, and I had Win95c and 128MB of ram. 32 bit code does work on 64 bit systems. But sometimes the problem is, the program itself is 32 bit, while the *installer* program is 16 bit. So you get stuck while trying to install the program, rather than the program itself failing to run. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions "All editions support 32-bit IA-32 CPUs and all editions except Starter support 64-bit x64 CPUs. (64-bit installation media is not included in Home Basic edition packages, but can be obtained separately from Microsoft)." There are very few pictures I could find, of the "box contents" of a Windows 7 software purchase. A couple show two DVDs, one perhaps labeled 32 bit, the other labeled 64 bit. But the pictures were blurred on purpose, and aren't worth the time of day. And it's pretty hard to verify which version really does come with two DVDs versus just the one DVD. If you had both DVDs, you could change the installation on the day that you needed to. http://solutions-24.com/media/images/popup/298.jpg I suspect the OEM versions might include only one of the DVDs, like just the 64 bit one. But with so little information to go on, I can't prove that to you. ******* The motherboard graphics, give you an option to use, before you get a video card. They might even be fast enough for Q3 Arena, because that game happens to be very light on resources. Paul |
#5
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Ping Paul
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#6
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Ping Paul
geoff wrote: good gaming PC http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...pler,3280.html Thanks for that link. I have been searching the web for gaming pc's under $1000.00 also. Paul is one sharp person also. Buffalo |
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