[alex]

Originally Posted by merton123

Jackoff, i am in your situation, i want a good gaming pc but want to save money (coz i aint got any lol) so dont build it yourself is my theory. warranty being the main reason. you want all the bits from one place and want it to be done and dusted. your warranty may be affected on some products if you are building. i may get banned for this as i did on another forum but anyway. use this custom build site and built a premium AMD machine. fiddle about till you get a good price without compromising your specs you need. www.dinopc.com is the site. they are worth buying from because fo their support and warranty.
hope this helps and hope you get it soon

You got banned for mentioning a pc builder's site? on a pc forum? Yeah, nice.

Nah, you won't get banned for that on here Merton. Only way we'd ban someone for that was if they were affiliated with the site they were mentioning as that would fall under the heading of spam.

You actually get a better warranty on individual components when you build yourself and you don't pay through the nose for an 'extended' warranty.

Warranty's from builder's are only useful for buyers who don't know how to troubleshoot problems with their own builds, but that's what forums are for.

Just my 2 pence.

I know you've said your cousin purchased a unit from Dinopc, but please only quote a site if you can catagorically state that they are 1) Good at pricing and 2) Good at service. Because what you have to remember is that this guy may part with his hard-earned based upon your statement and if the site turns out to be crap then ultimately he's going to feel short-changed and that you're responsible.

If your cousing has had some problems and they've corrected them quickly and without hassle and also kept your cousin informed, then great. But if he hasn't had to make use of the servicing side of the site then you need to quote that rather than "they are worth buying from because of the their support and warranty".

Their warranty's aren't that great when compared to a lot of the other sites you can buy pre-built pc's from. The bronze, silver and gold warranties quoted on the site are all RTB (return to base) warranties which means Jakk will have to pay any carriage charges, to and from, Dinopc should his pc need to get sent back. To be fair though they do pay it for the first 30 days but still, there's many a builder out there that offers free RTB warranties without passing on any extra cost to the buyer.

[Hybr!d]

Good post mate, well said.

[merton123]

man i bet you never loose any arguements :D. yes i can see the benefits now but i am unsure about building myself. thanks

[sirantonycartwright]

Hey-up! What mobo do you have?
Is it actually upgradable?
Whats its ram capabilities?
whats the model number?

[jim999]

As you said, that you have got a bit low budget, i think going ahead with upgrading with be a better idea and i think you should go away with quality and should install the best hardware........but i i am curious to know your exact budget.

[Jakkoff]

Hi guys! It's been a while and STILL gettin feedback! That's what I liek to see =] Another little question...Graphics cards. I know there are AGP, PCI, PCI-E. But is there anything else I should look out for on a graphics card eg. power supply etc.? Thanks alot guys xD

[alex]

Originally Posted by Jakkoff

Hi guys! It's been a while and STILL gettin feedback! That's what I liek to see =] Another little question...Graphics cards. I know there are AGP, PCI, PCI-E. But is there anything else I should look out for on a graphics card eg. power supply etc.? Thanks alot guys xD

HI Jakkoff

The first (and most important thing) to be looking for when choosing a graphics card is what card you need (and how much you need to spend) to play games at the native resolution of your monitor be it 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050 or, without getting silly, 1920x1200. The more pixels a monitor has the harder a card has to work.

But you also need the card to produce good frame rates. Regarding this the minimum frame rate is the most important. I personally consider 25 fps (frames per second) to be the absolute minimum a card should produce playing a particular game because anything lower and your eyes will recognise stuttering (for want of a better word). This detracts from the gaming experience.

You also need to take into account that games should be played at max detail settings because this is how the writer's of games have produced the game to look. The majority of games currently available can look a tad bland with detail settings turned down. They only incorporate detail 'sliders' within the game menu's to allow less powerful cards to run the game therefore widening the market for game's players.

Again, personally, I also consider a that a card should be able to play a game at a minimum of 2xAA (Anti Aliasing) and 4x AF (Anisotropic filtering). Anti-aliasing is there to get rid of jagged edges but it can also help with rendering a clearer image in the distance in a particular scene of a game. Anisotropic filtering enhances image quality on textures and also gets rid of blur at off-centre viewing angles.

Nowadays most of the work when gaming is done by the gpu on the card but the cpu still has to deal with some aspects like A.I (artificial Intelligence) in games. Lets say you play command and conquer. The card will take care of the textures of the land, the units and buildings etc but the cpu will work out how to move the tank you've just selected to move from point A on the game map to point B.

That's just one example, but I've used A.I to make the point that it's still very important to ensure you get a balance between the cpu and gpu AND of course the monitor's native resolution.

Regarding slot-types. AGP preceded PCI-E, technically PCI-E can produce a higher bandwidth (hence 8x/16x) than AGP but I've yet to see card make full use of this.

But as PCI-E is now the industry's standard I'll mention this type of card only.

When choosing a DX9 card (windows XP) you need to be looking at the following things:

ROP'S (Render Output Unit) - These output the produced pixels to the screen.
Pixel pipes - These produce pixel's and textures to be sent to the rop's.
Vertex pipes - These add special effects (such as explosions) to objects being produced for the screen.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) speed - Bit of an obvious one really, the faster it is the faster it can calculate operations.
Memory controller bit width - You'll see these as quoted as 64bit, 128bit and so on. The wider the better as this basically moves the finished product from the pixel pipes, vertex pipes etc through the ram and onto the screen. The wider a bit width is the more it can move at any given time.
Ram - Depending on how powerful a card is using the headings above dictates how much ram you need. Also, if you want to play a game with AA the ram amount comes into it. This is one of my focuses regarding cards. If you've read some of my previous posts you'll see that 256mb of ram is the absolute max you'll need on a card when gaming at today's standard resolution of 1280x1024 (1440x900 if using a widescreen monitor). At 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 you'll need 512mb. BUT if a card that is low end in the gpu, rop, vertex stakes has 512mb of ram then it makes no sense as the card will not be able to produce enough pixels etc to be able to game at the higher resolutions in the first place, so fitting enough ram to do that makes no sense whatsover except as a selling point as inexperience people will see the higher number and assume its a better card.
Ram speed - When looking at a card you'll see this quoted at an effective speed. This isn't marketing. Because ram on a card is controlled in parallel (say 2 banks of 128mb each) you'll have each bank running at say 700mhz but running together as they do they have an effective speed of 1400mhz or 1.4ghz.

For a DX10 (Windows Vista) card you need to be looking at:

All of the above except for the pixel pipes and Vertex pipes.

Architectural changes to cards now have mean that Stream Shaders on a card of this type do the same job that both pixel pipes and vertex pipes did.

This has one advantage in that wheras before (on a DX9 card) when the gpu is rendering some complex geometry (processed by vertex pipes) the pixel pipes sat idle. This meant that the game frame rates may slow down because there has always been a disparagy between the amount of both pixel and vertex pipes on a particular card, there's usually more pixel pipes. So for any shader intensive rendering your card might be running the game fine and then all of a sudden the frame rates could drop right down.

But with the new DX10 cards, there is no disparagy and theres never any part of the card sat idle.

Regarding ram amount on a DX10 card, again, the max you need at 1280x1024 is 320mb, at 1680x1050 its 512mb (ATI) or 640mb (NVidia), at 1920x1200 it's 1GB (ATI or 768mb (Nvidia). But I don't think even 1gb of ram will save the ATI 2900XT at that resolution.

Tips:

1) There is a plethora of factory overclocked cards out there, but be advised (especially with DX9 card) these overclocks only make about a 5-10 frame difference per second to the stock speed cards. BUT (there's always a but isn't there) if this frame rate takes you over the 25fps i mentioned earlier then it's worth the difference in price.

2) Let me re-iterate again, there is absolutely no point getting a low to midrange card with bags (512mb) of ram. None. It's a selling point. A con.

3) Check the power requirements needed from your psu for a particular card. A lot of DX9 cards can be run directly from the pci-e port but the majority do need a 6-pin plug directly from your psu so ensure that A) you have this plug (usually black) and b) your psu can produce enough voltage and amps on this dedicated 12v line.

Hope I haven't missed anything out that you want to know Jakkoff and that this is helpful. :)

[Hybr!d]

Thanks mate, advice and posts like that are something to be proud of fella.

[alex]

Cheers Dave.

Been wanting to type something like this for a while, just never got round to it.

Jakk's post just gave me the opportunity. :)

[Hybr!d]

We're lucky to have you mate! :D

[Razer]

Good point there. If you can wait to play games, i advise you do and get a purpose built gaming pc. If you need to upgrade NOW then its RAM, graphics and maybe a bigger hard drive wouldnt go amiss if you have any cash left over but this isnt necessary. Bottlenecks will be a problem if you get a good amount of RAM and a good graphics card because your Processor will struggle to keep up. obviously a new processor would take up all of your budget and wont make much of a difference on its own so i would suggest going on th intel website and downloading the Hyperthreading identification tool and see if your processor can be hyperthreaded. In this situation i would leave the build and the upgrade and save up for a new pc.