I have read through alot on these boards and you guys certainly know your stuff. My question has been asked many different ways with many different answers so I'm hoping that you can give me a straight answer on this one.
I'm an avid gamer, but am running an older system, got a free emachine athlon xp 1800 768 pc2100 ram with a geforce 4ti 4200 64mb ram on it. I used the computer for everything and its now older and has never been reinstalled. So start up and restart take forever along with alt tabbing in games. So my question is this>
I've been looking at new systems and although i would really love that velocity I've seen at best buy with all the bells and whistles, it seems to me that a out of the box system with lets say amd 3200 with a gig of ddr2 ram and pci express with a simple 150 or 250 gig hard drive would be excellent if I buy it and add a new nividia 6800 or 7700 256 card?
I've read alot about building your own, but im not sure I have the knowledge to totally build it from scratch.. So here I am stuck with what to do. Buy a preset up gaming system at 2000k or buy a name brand at 800 to 1000 and put a 400 card in it. What are the downsides going the second way? What will I be missing?
I'm an avid gamer, but am running an older system, got a free emachine athlon xp 1800 768 pc2100 ram with a geforce 4ti 4200 64mb ram on it. I used the computer for everything and its now older and has never been reinstalled. So start up and restart take forever along with alt tabbing in games. So my question is this>
I've been looking at new systems and although i would really love that velocity I've seen at best buy with all the bells and whistles, it seems to me that a out of the box system with lets say amd 3200 with a gig of ddr2 ram and pci express with a simple 150 or 250 gig hard drive would be excellent if I buy it and add a new nividia 6800 or 7700 256 card?
I've read alot about building your own, but im not sure I have the knowledge to totally build it from scratch.. So here I am stuck with what to do. Buy a preset up gaming system at 2000k or buy a name brand at 800 to 1000 and put a 400 card in it. What are the downsides going the second way? What will I be missing?