A good gaming pc (by parts)

ArEstus · March 19, 2011

Hey guys. I'm on a mission to get a pc that will run The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion WELL. Well enough for the textures to not be half rendered until it's off screen, and that troublesome fog to recede a bit, and at a relatively fast speed for that matter. I want to bask in the beauty of the game. Not just play it. And beyond that basically any new game. I prefer pc gaming but because of my pc I am forced to buy most new games (or old ones for that matter) on the xbox 360. But I like my operating system which is a windows xp. Here are the specs

Dell demensions DXP061

Intel® Core2 cpu

6320 @ 1.86GHz

1.86 GHz, 2.00GB of RAM

And I have a GT240 Gfx

As well as a 650 watt antec PSU

Im not completely ignorant I know my graphics card wont hold I need to sell it and get a new one. But I do need a new cpu, right? Well anyhow I have looked at a few different ones and this is what I've figured I want. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=36463 How will this be? Im pretty sure it'll run the game well. But what my real question is will it fit into my pc? I have been looking and looking and I cant find out how many chords it has. Because this will dictate whether I need a new hard drive. And for my graphics card, http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-460-us.html An nvidia gtx 460. Will these fit into my pc?

If not what do you recommend? I want a decent pc, good enough to run oblivion well. Not a crazy pc (as nice as it would be) I don't have a job I cant pretend to be able to get these awesome pcs. What should I do? I'm at a loss and I cant pretend to have the caliber of know-how to figure it out all by myself. I don't want to buy something than learn that it has too many chords to fit into my system.

Alyxx Thorne · March 19, 2011

Personally I built a pretty decent gaming PC last year.

These are the specs:

Casing: Antec Twelve Hundred Black

Motherboard: MSI 770-G45 Socket-AM3

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Quad Core, 3,2Ghz

PSU: Silver Power SP-SS500 500W PSU

RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz 4GB CL8 Kit w/2x 2GB XMS3 modules, CL8-8-8-24, 1.5V, for AMD Phenom II, 240pin

GPU: XFX Radeon HD 5770

HDD: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Disc Drive: Lite-On Blu-Ray Writer IHBS112-37

WiFi: D-Link Xtreme N PCI Express Desktop Adapter, PCIe, 802.11n (draft 2.0)

OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

Bjossi · March 19, 2011

I am confused. You want a future-proof PC but you want to stick with XP like the other cave dwellers and an old generation of dual-core processors. That just doesn't make sense bud.

Intel i7 or an AMD equivalent, 4-6 GBs of DDR3 (choose 3-stick setup for triple-channel), Windows 7 64-bit, that is fairly standard for today.

The GPU you have your eyes on is alright though but it is in the budget range. nVidia's naming scheme is not all about numbers. A 7900 GTX will outperform a budget card from the generation above it, the budget cards of 8000 may have newer graphics technology that can help them in certain situations but the 7900 GTX has the brute strength. Hence why I was not surprised when a high-end Geforce 4 outperformed my old FX 5700 LE. Just keep this in mind, in case a high-end GTX 200 series is cheaper than a budget GXT 400 series, make sure to find some benchmarks where they're tested against each other. Personally I'd rather look for a budget card in the GTX 500 series though, assuming they have arrived by now of course.

BTGBullseye · March 20, 2011

Go here to compare actual in-use product performance, even across brand names and tech generations: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

It comprehensively covers CPUs, graphics cards, and hard drives.

That said, here is a completely new system setup for ~$1700 that will run virtually any game at max settings with no choppiness... (better than 45 FPS)

Intel Core i5-2500K Processor

MSI P67A-GD65 LGA 1155 Intel P67 Motherboard

Palit GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2GB

Thermaltake V6 BlacX Edition Gaming Chassis Mid Tower

COOLMAX CUQ-1350B 1350W PSU

Kingston HyperX 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 RAM

Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Logitech G510 Gaming Keyboard

ASUS VH238H 23" Monitor

LITE-ON iHAS224-06 DVD Writer SATA Model

Windows 7 Pro x64

Sunbeam Twister 120 CW-TWI-120-SV 120mm x 2 MFDB CPU Cooler