I’m coming into a little bit of money, and I’ve always wanted to have a top-of-the-line PC. I’ve never been able to afford it before, but if I save for a few months, I’ll have enough to get one. So I’m looking for opinions. Should I build my own (for the record, I’ve built PCs before), or buy one pre-assembled. Also, if I do buy one, who would you recommend in terms of both price and quality?
Definately buy one on your own. It will be very hard to find a pre-built system that will have the specs you want and combines that with a good price, specially when it comes to gaming rigs.
For online vendors I’d say newegg.com is the way to go. What I typicially do is find the hardware I want on there, then wait around fo rmy local computer fair to show up and compare prices. I usually end up getting 3/4 of my stuff from newegg, and the rest from the fair.
Some tips:
Don’t scrounge on the power supply.
Think ahead when making purchases, you end up saving more money in the end if you future proof your rig as much as possible.
If you go SLI You’ll never go back. Trust me on that. If you want to save money, buy the single, most powerful vidoe card you can afford now, and buy yourself a matching one a year or so from now fo rthe added performance boost. I decided not to do that and went full SLI purely for (nerdy) bragging rights, and now there is no way I’ll ever want to go back to a single card. I’m addicted.
Don’t bother with the super fast hardrives. Save some money.
I love building my own. That way, you get exactly what you want. Skimp in some areas, splurge in others. I don’t care about sound so I usually will just put a soundblaster 16 card in it. Right now I’m saving up to build a SLI computer. I’ll probably start this summer and the way I’ve specced it out now, it will run me about $1500, probably lower by the time I actually build it.
I’ve done it both ways, and at this point in my life there’s no way I’d build one myself.
High end gaming machines are extremely customizable, and unless you’re interested in building machines as a hobby, the money you save versus the time put in is negligable. I just bought a new machine from Falcon Northwest; I priced out building it myself, and the cost savings was $200-$300. For me, that’s not enough to give up a weekend to build it, or to not have tech support to call if anything goes wrong.
Keep in mind I’m someone who doesn’t find screwing around with hardware fun in the least. I’ve done it far too much in the past, and the minute I have to start crawling under the desk, I 'm in a bad mood. That said, I’d build one if I could save in the neighborhood of $1000. For less than that, forget it. There’s no reason not to buy from any of several excellent game machine companies. You can customize until the cows come home, their markups aren’t huge, and you get a tech support phone number.
Hmmm, I don’t know, it never takes me more than a day (and usually a few hours to build my machines. Certainly worth the $400 to $600 (checking out falcon west, a system similar to my current one would have cost me $800 more!) I typically save over brand names like Falcon West and Alien Ware.
But yes, if you’re not into this then I wouldn’t recommend it. The OP mentioned having built his own systems before, which is why I definately suggest he go for it.
One final piece of advice:
Avoid the 7900GT and GTX. Either wait for the next generation or go ATI. Some of the 7900’s are currently suffering from… something, no one is really sure but I had to RMA 4 7900 cards and finally switched to ATI, I know of several similar stories from people I know, and the internet boards are buzzing over these problems. Seem slike a majority of the cards are fine, but not an insignificant slice are having serious problems (do a search for nvidia 7900 artifact).
Good luck!
Yeah, but don’t buy a ATI X1900XTX if you intend to run crossfire, there are no XTX mastercards and so the X1900XTX card will downgrade and run as a plain old X1900XT in combination with a X1900XT master.
Unless you have a screen capable of huge resolution (21" or greater) a single X1900XTX or even a single 7900GTX will be plenty.
My top tip for building a gaming rig is to not skimp at all on the monitor, get the biggest and best you can afford. Afterall you’ll spend the majority of your gaming time staring at it. I love my Dell 24" widescreen, which in combination with my X1900XTX gives an absolutely fabulous gaming experience.
It’s also worth looking at the dual core AMD Opteron line of processors, the increased level 2 cache (2mb instead of just 1mb as found in the Athlon64 X2 line) makes a difference. And they’re very good overclockers.
Also, although no one’s mentioned it yet, it’s not worth buying an AGEIA PhysX PPU card just yet… probably best to wait for CellFactor and UT2007 and other games that actually make good use of the technology (the first round of games seem to be horrible withregards to PhysX) before investing.
If I ever do a completely new PC again, I will buy from Falcon Northwest, VoodooPC, GamePC, or another similar outfit that caters to gaming PCs only. The interiors of a Voodoo are works of art. Unfortunately for me, ever since my second PC, I have never done a 100% new PC. I’m always recycling parts to cut costs.
I will never build a PC for family members again. I hate being tech support for others who don’t understand my tech support approach (bang my head against it until the problem goes away or I have enough brain damage to not notice it). I’ll let them deal with some Indian for anything I can’t diagnose in less than 15 minutes.
Hmmm Doesn’t the new ATI Crossfire 3200 North bridge solve this problem by not requiring a master card? Or did I misread?
Nevermind I did misread.
The Ars Technica Buyer’s Guides have specific recommendations for a Gaming system now. The forums there are a good source for information as well.
(Not that you’re not getting good advice here, it’s just a good resource, especially since it gets updated reasonably often).
I’ve had no issues with my nVidia cards, and have read glowing commentaries of the 7900 series by users, not pros (see the forums on www.sfftech.com). I’ve got a 7800 GS in my Shuttle.
With regards to SLI, you might want to look at the 7950 SLI on a card solutions.
As for your data, get yourself a decent RAID card and mirror a pair of disks.
Well, I went back there this morning and what do I see but an advisement of loads of problems with certain models of the 7900. So I’m a :wally