if you want to play all them cool games but dont crap money here's a little helper
I will not post any specific parts only a few general rules, as it would be outdated before I would be done writing this
3 things you want to spend money on
Mainboard
RAM
Powersuply
Mainboard
The reason you want a good mb is that this is the bottleneck of the entire system, bad mainboard = bad system no matter what else you plant in there. A mainboard with 3-4 RAM-slots and fast chipset is the basic to any good PC
RAM
a pc with loads of RAM and a lesser cpu > kickass cpu and no ram.
fast and much RAM takes job off cpu and gpu (most expensivs) which will allow you to save a lot of money. Buy many smaller modules, i.e. 2 1024er sticks cost less than one 2048er, it may be a BIT slower, but cheaper, and if one of the sticks should fry (which hapens now and then) you still got a working gig working.
You can never have too much RAM, everything else are lies!
*i would use at least 1gig to play bf, 2 is even better if its in the budget
Powersuply
Nothing sucks more than running out of power. You notice this in 2 ways:
1. your pc reboots out of nowhere or doesnt boot at all
2. your powersuply goes boom after a certain time.
now 2nd is not a joke, it hapend to me once, burnt down house fuses and everything, luckily no other parts in pc were damaged. Ask your local dealer how much power each part uses, add it up and then buy a powersuply with 100W more, as this will leave you with place for upgrades
USB eats power so do all form of drive.
other (costy) parts
CPU
Gfx card
soundcard
HDD
CD/DVD
CPU
Don't get screwed here... dealers like to sell too much. usualy CPU's at about 65% of the maximum available is what you want (f.e. 2ghz is the ownage, then you want round 1.4ghz)
dual core is nice to have, but costs very much, just make sure you meet the minumum requirements of game.
gfx-card
this is the most tricky part, there are like millions of difrent chipsets in this jungle. But also here you can stick to the RAM=power rule, BF2 runs on a ATI Radeon 9600xt, piss old card but it has 256mb of VRAM, old cards dont nesercairly suck, just make sure it's got anti-aliasing, pixelshader and all else you need for this (maybe someone can help me here and add up) as well as enough VRAM.
soundcard
nice to have, also here dealers like to sell you 12.1 capable cards, but no. if the card costs more than 30$ there's something wrong with it.
HDD
SATA, not only nice to have, but this I would recomand even if it's a bit more expensive. its faster and i'd say its worth the extra cash.
CD/DVD
1 DVD drive is enough... despite people selling pc's with 2DVD writes and an extra CD drive.
a few maintenance tips (for advanced users), if you got the posibility make your C drive for OS ONLY,
nothing else. D drive for the rest, also when you got a perfectly working installation make a ghost image of your C on you D drive. remember, things installed after the image was made will not work anymore, but you dont need to image everytime. just regularly export your registry file.
If you should fuck up your OS, play the working image back, as you ONLY have OS files on your C drive you will not lose anything else, except for the registry links, which is why we have saved them :p but only insert single keys, copy them out of the big file, paste em into a new notepad document. title it whatever.reg and import.
Otherwise you might risk "reinstalling" the bug which made you play the image. By using only the single keys you will not delete the spyware, but it wont know its there because of the missing registry link, so you can easily run a spyware scan. which will kill it.
Anti virus software on D drive, as you will update it and dont want to lose the updates.
last thing, unless you are perfectly sure, your virus software is up to date and running, DO NOT launch windows with ANY access to Internet.
This way you can get a nice little pc for not too many $'s and keep it up to shape to do a good job for many years. I hope this will help people who need it.
I will not post any specific parts only a few general rules, as it would be outdated before I would be done writing this
3 things you want to spend money on
Mainboard
RAM
Powersuply
Mainboard
The reason you want a good mb is that this is the bottleneck of the entire system, bad mainboard = bad system no matter what else you plant in there. A mainboard with 3-4 RAM-slots and fast chipset is the basic to any good PC
RAM
a pc with loads of RAM and a lesser cpu > kickass cpu and no ram.
fast and much RAM takes job off cpu and gpu (most expensivs) which will allow you to save a lot of money. Buy many smaller modules, i.e. 2 1024er sticks cost less than one 2048er, it may be a BIT slower, but cheaper, and if one of the sticks should fry (which hapens now and then) you still got a working gig working.
You can never have too much RAM, everything else are lies!
*i would use at least 1gig to play bf, 2 is even better if its in the budget
Powersuply
Nothing sucks more than running out of power. You notice this in 2 ways:
1. your pc reboots out of nowhere or doesnt boot at all
2. your powersuply goes boom after a certain time.
now 2nd is not a joke, it hapend to me once, burnt down house fuses and everything, luckily no other parts in pc were damaged. Ask your local dealer how much power each part uses, add it up and then buy a powersuply with 100W more, as this will leave you with place for upgrades
USB eats power so do all form of drive.
other (costy) parts
CPU
Gfx card
soundcard
HDD
CD/DVD
CPU
Don't get screwed here... dealers like to sell too much. usualy CPU's at about 65% of the maximum available is what you want (f.e. 2ghz is the ownage, then you want round 1.4ghz)
dual core is nice to have, but costs very much, just make sure you meet the minumum requirements of game.
gfx-card
this is the most tricky part, there are like millions of difrent chipsets in this jungle. But also here you can stick to the RAM=power rule, BF2 runs on a ATI Radeon 9600xt, piss old card but it has 256mb of VRAM, old cards dont nesercairly suck, just make sure it's got anti-aliasing, pixelshader and all else you need for this (maybe someone can help me here and add up) as well as enough VRAM.
soundcard
nice to have, also here dealers like to sell you 12.1 capable cards, but no. if the card costs more than 30$ there's something wrong with it.
HDD
SATA, not only nice to have, but this I would recomand even if it's a bit more expensive. its faster and i'd say its worth the extra cash.
CD/DVD
1 DVD drive is enough... despite people selling pc's with 2DVD writes and an extra CD drive.
a few maintenance tips (for advanced users), if you got the posibility make your C drive for OS ONLY,
nothing else. D drive for the rest, also when you got a perfectly working installation make a ghost image of your C on you D drive. remember, things installed after the image was made will not work anymore, but you dont need to image everytime. just regularly export your registry file.
If you should fuck up your OS, play the working image back, as you ONLY have OS files on your C drive you will not lose anything else, except for the registry links, which is why we have saved them :p but only insert single keys, copy them out of the big file, paste em into a new notepad document. title it whatever.reg and import.
Otherwise you might risk "reinstalling" the bug which made you play the image. By using only the single keys you will not delete the spyware, but it wont know its there because of the missing registry link, so you can easily run a spyware scan. which will kill it.
Anti virus software on D drive, as you will update it and dont want to lose the updates.
last thing, unless you are perfectly sure, your virus software is up to date and running, DO NOT launch windows with ANY access to Internet.
This way you can get a nice little pc for not too many $'s and keep it up to shape to do a good job for many years. I hope this will help people who need it.
