Keeping up with PC games

[Ghostrida]

I have been PC gaming since Doom on dial-up. Building your own PC became a must real quick in order to be able to play competitively. The last PC I built, which was needed for Half-Life 2, was 2.2 Ghz Socket A CPU and a ATI Radeon 256 Mb video card and 1 gig of DDR ram. All the bells and whistles included it ran me about $900. I have trouble running CS Source by now due to lack of system resources.

Unreal Tournament 2k6 is coming out soon and it looks as if my current PC won't be able to touch it. How does one keep up with the higher and higher requirements of the newest games without staying in debt?

 

[beedubaya]

This is why most people are jumping ship to PS2 and XBOX360.

Don't upgrade now, wait until UT2007 comes out and read reviews on what plays best with it. If you were to build a UT2007 system now, you would need not one but 2 video cards, a dual-core processor, and a physx card which isn't available yet. Do you know what ATI Radeon 256MB card you have?

 

[Ghostrida]

9800 Pro I believe... really wanted a GeForce but funds were lacking...lol... I have a Soyo KT880 Dragon 2 motherboard that I am not really sure about. Motherboards however are my weakness, I know nothing but to make sure there is plenty of ram space and is PCI compatible with your card.


I have since learned that Socket A processors are not very upgrade oriented. I think the top Socket A upgrade I can do is like 2.6 or something. Any suggestions on which motherboard manufacturer is best for online gaming?(socket type also)

 

[003]

You don't need SLI to play UT2007. Those specs were fake.

 

[BColes]

You don't need SLI to play UT2007. Those specs were fake.

Right. My grandma told me you need SLI SLIed... so that 4 video cards, 2 physics cards in Crossfire, and dual quad core CPUs. That should just about get you 10fps at lowest quality.

 

[PZEROFGH]

no you need the SLI quad SLI which would be 8 7800GTX 512MB 4 physics card in quad SLI, then dual quad CPUs with 16GB of ram :-D

 

[BColes]

^^ haha, well that's for medium settings. i forgot to mention that you'll need a terabyte of harddrive space in RAID 0,1 so you'll need an extra harddrive or 8.

 

[ilovesocks]

I have since learned that Socket A processors are not very upgrade oriented. I think the top Socket A upgrade I can do is like 2.6 or something. Any suggestions on which motherboard manufacturer is best for online gaming?(socket type also)

Everyone will tell you a socket 939 DFI lan party board. And ooh, a 256mb 9800 Pro, eh? That's not horrible, even today. You won't be able to use it with your new motherboard though because AGP is dying.

 

[maroon1]

Ghostrida - i think u could play UT2007 with ur specs, but ofcourse not on high setting, maybe u would able to play it on low or mid setting.