TR Forums

Hi im from england stumbled across these forums in search of help.

Basically im buying a pre made gaming machine but need to know what to put in it

a few things u may wish to know

im a fan of amds cause ive got 1 now.
im a fan of ati cause ive got 1 now.

thats it basically

looking at running hl2 with a good fps
and games to come with a good fps
maybe a 64bit? 2.0 amd?
ati radeon x800 ? or is it not worrth it
1 gig ram is a must

also a question is why do all benchmarks get done with pentium 4s?

thanks in advance any advice will rock

well...I'd say

Athlon 64 of your choice, preferably the Socket 939 90nm variety if you're looking for future compatibility, otherwise whatever you can afford. Along with a motherboard of your choice, you may wish to wait till PCI-Express is available

As to the X800...matter of personaly preferrence, a lot of us here are into the 6600gt's for the value choice and 6800gt's for the mid/high end, but here's a review from here that should show you the performance of the X800/850's against 6800's

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/radeon-x850xt/index.x?pg=1

you already stated you wanted 1 gig of ram...just go with a reputable maker like crucial, corsair, kingston, mushkin, or ocz....probably left one out

Why do all benchmarks get done with P4? Pretty much depends on who's doing the benchmarking, most gaming reviews here seem to be A64 based

that should give you an idea of what I'd reccommend...try figuring out what parts you want(most of the fun of building) and post here, we'll look it over, make suggestions and such, otherwise we're telling you exactly what to get and that takes all of the fun out of it

sorry 6800 vanilla biased and amd64 biased both are great for games and CHEAP! Though get quality ram not value select something, recommend ocz performance or corsair xms. 6800 for 250 runs everything on high.

value ram is fine i have 2 sticks of Corsair Value Ram

just make sure its a reputable compnay in terms of gfx if u really must have ATI then try to wait for the X800XL or whichever one is 250 and kills everything 6800 GT and under

Another vote for the Corsair Value Select..it is good ram..not sure about kingston's value brand..but i would definitely trust Corsair's.

Ya you could wait for the x800xl but havent you waited long enough to play those games at high res... besides there are serious doubts about how much quantity will be produced anyway...Platinum edition anybody. Ah but you could always wait for a 512 vga card maybe one with 32 pipelines...
and which ati card is at the price/performance of a 6800, if there is one, im pissed

and val select is good ram for the money i have it in my laptop but if your gonna spend so much anyway i thought id throw out the idea as its come down in price

Moving this topic to General Hardware...