Help choosing a Gaming PC

[AirborneForever]

^^ get that one but upgrade the CPU to a quad core.

You will help future proof yourself for a year or two as well as save some money, and if you want to play the newest games they will be optimised to run better on quad cores than duals.

Thanks for the information man.

[AirborneForever]

^^ get that one but upgrade the CPU to a quad core.

You will help future proof yourself for a year or two as well as save some money, and if you want to play the newest games they will be optimised to run better on quad cores than duals.

Thanks for the information man.

CPU: Intel® Core 2 Quad Q8200
+£27.10
How's that CPU?

[Jigsaw]

That'll do fine.

[AirborneForever]

Sweet

[SocketMan]

I'd get the phenom 940 that you mentioned earlier,faster at stock speed and comes with unlocked multiplier for easy overclock.

[05grottim]

tbh if ur only paying £500 for a system then the cooling in it will not be great. The AMD chips get hot as it is without overclocking- they do perform better but if ur getting a cheap system then i wouldnt recommend it. I had a laptop with an AMD chip in it and it melted without me even overclocking- that was probably a bad experience but for processors i would always go Intel.

[SocketMan]

I think I'll get a better PSU, and GFX card then. I want Operation Flashpoint 2 when it comes out.

If you want to be able to improve your video performance in the future (if needed)without getting another system all together/spending 600$ on a dual chip GPU -you'd want a motherboard with 2 or more PCIe 16 slots for either
SLI or Crossfire.The easiest way to upgrade a cpu is to get a faster cpu that fits your
motherboard (socket).So buying a socket 775 motherboard now - will only
allow you to use a socket 775 cpu,the i7 (or i5 that's coming out later this year)
wont physically fit.A year from now you'd be able to buy any socket 775 cpu that is available now -as there wont be any future cpu coming for that socket design.
Doing that makes little to no sense to me,other then the prices will drop
for the Intel QX9xxx lineup.
Another bonus of having an extra PCIe slot is that you can put in any G force
(88xx+) and run the PhysX (for the games that supported)

I'd get "something" like MSI GD70 (4 PCIe slots) and any AM3 Phenom/Athlon
(keep in mind that games like Arma2 needs at least 3 cpu cores to run decently) -with some DDR3 ram and 4890,then (few month later) get another (2 or 3 )
for 99$ or less.Don't rush either -I spend a few weeks researching my
(future) components before actually buying them.They don't go bad,only get cheaper.