How To Comparison Shop For A Gaming Computer
In order to search for a good gaming computer, you need to know what you’re looking for. The basics of a good gaming PC revolve around performance, cooling and expandability. A high-speed, cool and expandable computer will give you in-game performance for years.
Computer performance and speed is usually measured in processor usage, paging and frame rate. Let’s take a look at each of them.
Processor usage measures how hard a processor has to work in order to run a very complex game. As a general rule of thumb, most games today are processor hungry – even those that are multi-player online. Since the processor is one of the most expensive parts of the computer – you should buy the best you can afford. Most people are not comfortable replacing the processor on a motherboard, so many of you will just go out and buy a gaming computer when the processor you have is no longer able to shoulder the load. We want to avoid this as long as possible to give your gaming computer maximum shelf life. You should shop for a dual core or quad core processor with 2.5GHz or higher. Keep in mind, most games today were coded to take advantage of a dual core processor, and may actually slow down a bit on a quad core because they weren’t programmed to take advantage of it. That is changing, and you will see many newer games with quad core compatibility. So plan ahead.
Paging is when the computer can’t store everything it needs to access in it’s RAM (memory). It has to move something out of RAM and back to your hard drive and retrieve the file you need. For this reason I recommend going with the most amount of memory you can – which, in Windows 32 bit systems is 4 GB. That should keep paging to a minimum. To quicken your loading speeds, you may also want to consider SATA3 hard drives – they are currently the fastest widely available – moving information at about 3 Gigabits per second. Another trick is to get 2 hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Basically, RAID 0 takes two identical hard drives and writes the information to both of them in stripes of data, so that information can be retrieved from both drives at the same time. The speed increase is going to depend on your hard drive RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) speed, but it will always be much faster than a single drive alone.
Frame Rate is how fast your monitor refreshes your picture. It’s generally measured in FPS (Frames Per Second). In gaming computer, video cards are a necessity for a gamer needing high FPS. The question is what size video card do you need to maximize your FPS? Most veteran players would agree that right now a 512MB card would be sufficient for all but the most demanding games. Now remember, we’re trying to plan ahead so you don’t have to do this again anytime soon, so I’m going to suggest 2 options: I would suggest going with a single 1GB video card or two 512MB cards hooked together with an interlacing technology like ATI’s Crossfiring. Crossfiring takes two video cards and makes them work together. The most common way is to have card 1 draw the even frames on your computer screen and card 2 draw the odd ones. It’s not going to double your frame rate – but you will see a marked increase in most situations.
Let’s move on to cooling your gaming computer. This is where you’re going to have trouble with many pre-canned gaming computers. Heat is the number one killer of high end parts and equipment. It would do you absolutely no good to go out and buy everything we’ve talked about here if it wasn’t adequately cooled. Over time, the parts would burn out from heat and you’d be left with one expensive junk pile. There are three versions of cooling being used on the market today: oil submersion, liquid cooling and air cooling. The one you should be most concerned with is air cooling. Air cooling uses fans to push air over hot components, forcing the heat outside of your computer case. Look carefully at the case of any computer you’re considering. How many fans does it have? Most stock-built gaming computer have three (including the power supply fan) – which is inadequate for gaming computers. you will need to have at least one side intake fan, one front intake fan, and one rear exhaust fan in addition to your power supply fan. When you look inside the case there should be a large fan assembly over the processor as well to deal with the additional heat it will be putting out during demanding games.
The last thing you’re going to want to look at is expandability. This is basically what determines how long you’re gong to be able to play without having to shell out for a whole new gaming computer. There are a few things you should consider depending on your level of comfort installing upgrade parts. PCIe slots come in many speeds, and you’ll see them listed on the tech specs. You should be looking for multiple PCIe x16 (which is the fastest currently available). Make sure you have at least two on your motherboard. A good way to increase performance later is to add another video card and interlace them. It’s a cheap upgrade (considering the price of buying a complete new computer)and relatively easy to do. Another PCI slot you’re going to be looking for is a PCIe x8 – most gaming computers don’t come with a sound card – but adding one later in this slot will boost your FPS by about 10%. You’re also going to be sure the motherboard supports at least 8 GB of RAM with a 64-bit operating system. We are slowly transitioning to that and having that built in extends your shelf life even longer.
Those are the basics on how to buy a gaming PC. A gaming computer is the largest purchase that I know of that is still considered “disposable”. By looking for a few key parts, you’re going to save yourself a lot of time, money and frustration. Thanks for reading and good luck in game.
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