The Budget Computer Vol 6

The Gaming Machine

This is the 6th installation in the series "The Budget Computer".

The Budget Computer Vol 1
The Budget Computer Vol 2
The Budget Computer Vol 3
The Budget Computer Vol 4
The Budget Computer Vol 5

So you want to build an awesome gaming machine on a dime. The key thing to remember here is that you are looking for quality parts that are fast NOT quantity. It doesn't matter if you have 8 gigs of ram in the machine if it is the slowest ram out there. You are looking for a well tuned machine just like a race car. So here is what you should look at.

Motherboard: This is pretty much your chassis. All the parts have to mount to it so all your tunning will be based off your selection here. You will want something with a fast Front Side Bus. This will determine the max clock speed of the CPU as well as how fast all the devices on the machine can talk to each other. Also make sure that the board supports RAID 0 and the fastest ram and hard drives on the market.

CPU: Clock speed first then go quad core. Do not sacrafice clock speed for more cores. If you have room in the budget to go quad core then do it as you will see some performance gain but you will not see as much as you would by having more clock speed. Also look for something that you can overclock without too much trouble.

RAM: 2gigs is the minimum. Keep the ram an even number. This will allow you take take advantage of some of the Async properties on the motherboard. Get the fastest 2 gigs you can afford and make sure it is quality. Crucial is probably the best brand out there right now. If your budget can afford to go to 4 then do it just don't sacrafice the ram speed for more of it.

Hard Drives: Get 2 hard drives and stripe them. Make sure they are the fastest you can get 10,000rpms with a large cache is good. Also do not go above 200 gigs each. The reason for this is that the larger the drive is the longer the seek time is on the drive. By keeping the size down you will be able to load games much faster and have a an overall better experience. This is even more true if you only managed to get 2 gigs of ram. When a hard fault occurs in memory it will write the data to the hard drive for future use. Slow hard drive means this opperation will be slow.

Video Card: Get one really awesome card over 2 slower ones. Most games do not support X-Fire or SLI at this point and time. Also the simplicity of having one fast card over 2 slower ones will help the system out.

Monitor: You will want to pay attention to the Brightness and Contrast numbers as well as the refresh rate. A larger monitor with a slow refresh rate will look like crap when you are playing the games. Balance this with the rest of your budget.

Well that concludes my advice on computer building for now. I may write up a few example builds using this process.


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