I’m in the market for a new desktop computer and I’m looking to the doper community for advice.
I’ll use the PC primarily to play the latest FPS games on the market. I used to play these games regularly about 5+ years ago but stopped because work circumstances didn’t give me enough time to play.
Now I’d like to get back into them but my old PC just doesn’t have the hardware performance required to run these new games.
I’d like something fairly high-end because I have the disposable income and I don’t want to mess with tweaking my hardware every year as the games get more and more resource-intensive with every iteration. I want this thing to last me another 3-4 years with no issues.
So what advice can you smart people give me? What is the newest and greatest video card out there? What’s the minimum level processor I should settle for? These are the questions running through my mind.
I expect I’ll be spending around $1,500 to $2,000 for this system (sans monitor). I realize I could do all of this legwork myself researching cnet and the like but I’m obviously looking for a shortcut here. I thank you in advance for the time you can save me to do the research.
The basic Falcon Talon configuration starts at $1400 at the moment, for an i5, 4gb Ram and an nVidia 550gtx. You could double or even quadruple the RAM, and get an i7, and still come in under your budget.
Of for $1600 you could get their even sexier Fragbox model. Same specs but a case built for lan parties.
Falcon is a legendary boutique gaming pc retailer. Their customer service is especially impressive. If you’re going to pay serious money, you deserve personal attention. You get that with Falcon. Falcon has a reputation for being ridiculously expensive but as long you don’t lose your head and sign up for the optional $700 paint job, they’re surprisingly affordable.
Not that I know of. And if they were, that particular computer would be out of your budget. For the same amount of money as a less powerful pre-built, you could order better components individually and find someone to assemble everything for you at a computer shop for $50.
I really have no idea what’s good in pre-builts because I’ve only built my own, but before you buy something, run it by me - send me a pm with the specs and price and I’ll tell you where you can shave off some cost with no loss or when an extra $50 on something would make a real difference. I’m pretty up to date on components.
Not to start a PC vs. console war, but have you considered one of the consoles? A lot of the newer games are being developed for the console platforms, and then ported to the PCs, with all that implies.
We’ve got 3 Falcons in the house now, and I’m pretty happy with them. However, I do have to point out that as of last summer, the customer service wasn’t quite as good as it used to be.
When I bought the first 2, if I had to call Tech Support, they picked up immediately, no waiting, you talked to a human.
The last one, not so much. I had a few pretty long waits (in one case, over a day) before I got a call back. That pissed me off as I use mine as my primary work machine, and every hour I don’t work, I don’t get paid.
However, once I got someone on the line, the support was, as always, wonderful. No “we need you to go through 20 minutes of diagnostics that you just told me you already did because I have to do my script” stuff like many places do. You not only get a human, you get a smart human who treats you like a smart human.
I can beat FalconNW across the board on price for equal or better parts quality… Several dopers have machines from my shop as well. I will email you an estimate today once I get to the shop. I agree with quartz, $200 cases are kinda silly in most respects.
I really don’t care what the thing looks like. I’m actually more on the minimalist end of the spectrum. I’d rather not have a UFO sitting in my office if I can avoid it.
Noise isn’t a really big concern either as I’m only using it when I’m gaming (with headphones on). I have a laptop for my everyday needs.
Size isn’t much of a factor either. I’m not going to LAN parties and I don’t want to open it up to tinker with the innards.
Yeah I know. The thing is I’m pretty stuck in my ways and I need a keyboard and mouse to play the way I want to. I tried playing Halo against my 10 year old nephew on his console and got schooled. I could try to adjust but it would be so frustrating staggering through these games when I know I could be doing a lot better. I don’t mind waiting for stuff to be ported over to the PC platform (hey I’ve got 5 years of games to catch up on!)
I’m living proof that it can be done; I went from mouse/keyboard FPS games (man, did I ever play a lot of Doom 2, Quake, and Rainbow 6: Raven Shield) to consoles about 2 years back.
It took a while, but I’m relatively better than I had been; I think the one main advantage to consoles is a more level playing field; everyone has the same memory, processor and video card, with the main variables being the network connection speed, and the skill of the player. On consoles, I was always handicapped because my PC was never a ‘gaming’ quality box.
