Really great suggestions
Chris. I am going to take a look at these further. Any suggestion on a good
gaming LCD?
Oh yeah and what about mouse and keyboard
for a gaming system. Any preferences from everyone? I remember there used to
be a specific gaming mouse called Razor or something like that it had crazy
resolution of the movement. Are those still around or even worth
it?
Ok, here you go, within your budget:
AMD64 Sock 939
3500+ - within your budget @ $280, and a big drop down below
the 3800+ at
$600 change which is too much for your overall rig.
Chaintech VNF4
Ultra - Nforce4 Ultra chipset motherboard, in ready
availability most
places. Very good performance, great driver support, PCI
Express,
Gigabit Ethernet in the southbridge, hardware firewall as part of
the
chipset, 8 channel audio, etc. $150. (I chose this instead of
either
current shipping SLI board.. too much cost to stay under $1500 and
have a
monitor). The gigabit Nforce NIC here is as good as it gets,
with it and
Intel's CSA top of the pack (IMHO) or until we see PCI-Express
NICs (that
are worth a damn)
Ram: Crucial 1GB in a 512MBx2 pair:
$155
Video card: 6600GT PCI-Express $189. Yes, you could
get a 6800, etc. but
the 6600GT will serve you well.
Case: do you
self well and get a Lian Li V1200, it's what I use, love it.
$160 :)
(ok, this is one thing you can change, but damnit, it's a gaming
rig,
right?)
Antec PS: $60
DVD Burner: forget all the arguments over
who's got what. Right now, the
LiteOn is a pretty good buy at
$64.
Forget a floppy drive. Who the hell needs it.
You can
pick up a 160G SATA Maxtor drive @ CompUSA this week for $69.
Do
that. Save money where you can if you want cheap, OR get a WD 74G
Raptor.
Love mine. $240.
19" LCD Monitor, good ones, start at
about $390.
Total Cost: ~$1,526 with the cheaper HD solution.
Obviously, you can get a
general antec type case for $70 with PS, and save
$150, which would give you
money to put into a bigger video card, that 2G
ram, etc.
Forget using RAM to make virtual drives. Just get
a fast HDD :)
As for OS Tweaks: XP SP2, kill System Restore (or tone it
way the hell down)
go through tweakXP and kill a lot of services (like
remote registry,
messenger, etc.) install ad-aware and a good antivirus
scanner,
etc.
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-----Original
Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
On Behalf Of Mesdaq, Ali
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 10:29 PM
To:
The Hardware List
Subject: [H] Ultimate Gaming System for $1500
Hey
guys I have been out of the gaming scene for a few years. But I want
to put
together a pure gaming system for about 1500 bucks. What's the
best at that
price for gaming specifically?
Motherboard
CPU
Video Card
Monitor
(I am leaning towards LCD because of space and aesthetic appeal)
Memory
(Type, brand, speed)
Hard drive
NIC
Cases
Fans
Misc
OS
tweaks
I want to game on the system along with some other friends and
then I
want to re-image the machine like once a day because I am sure they
will
find some way to get Malware on the system to slow it down. I was
also
thinking about getting about 2gig ram on the system and using part
of
that ram as a virtual drive to speed up game loading speeds for
some
games. But is it better to make a 1gig vdrive and load games faster
or
keep that 1gig for the system so it can use it during
gaming.
