As much as I love my laptop, I really want to build a nice gaming desktop. Problem is I have no idea where to start. Anybody have any tips or helpful sites on how to get started they could offer? Many thanks!
First off, make a checklist of what you're gonna need. Completely new rig, not saving anything from the? You'll want a: Case PSU ( Power Supply Unit ) HDD (Hard Dick Drive ) CPU ( Central Processing Unit ) GPU ( Graphic Processing Unit ) RAM ( Random Access Memory ) Motherboard CD/DVD Drive. First, decide what your needs with the new rig are, then I suggest you look on Newegg and start pricebuilding. Amazon is also known to have great deals. I bought my new rig piece by piece off Amazon.
There are a few of us that would be more than willing to help you out. It can be a bit overwhelming at first if you dont have a goal. Figure out your budget first, and what you need the computer to do. For example: -I want to spend less than $500, and it needs to play solitare or -I want to spend $2000 and want to run BF3 at no less than 60 fps on ultra settings
It was actually a dig against my mom, but she wasn't here to read what I said. I'll promptly call her up and explain myself.
Thanks for the tips, I think I'll poke around newegg and try some price building there first. is $1000 enough to build a decent rig? enough to play, say Skyrim on high settings?
At current prices, yes and no. If you already have all your peripherals (Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard, Optical Drive, Etc) then $1K should be enough to set you up. Biggest expense will be the gfx card and/or processor. There's word that AMD will be releasing a new series of processors in the next few months which will drive the current top-tier and below processors down a bit, but to be honest, processors aren't really the bottleneck for performance right now. It's Gfx, RAM, and HDD that will get you the best bang for your buck. "Skyrim on High" is a good starting point for figuring out what you want your rig to do. IF you know what minimum stats a piece of hardware needs to accomplish this feat. I'm at work and don't have my exact stats, but a 750w PSU, Core i5 2400, nVidia GTX570, 8GB of 1600 RAM, a 7200 RPM HDD, and a dinky mATX mobo cost me around $800 and does just fine on Skyrim. The total cost of my system ended up nearer $1200, but I needed a bunch of other stuff. If you need a case and other bits, the price goes up some, but only if you go for the expensive things.
ironically enough I already have an i5 2400 and 8gigs of RAM on my Laptop, my problem is that my graphics card really really sucks