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Technology PC Hardware Building a Gaming PC Technology PC Hardware Building a Gaming PC 
| Building a Gaming PC |
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| Written by azpunkazme | ||||
| Sunday, 10 February 2008 | ||||
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CPU (Processor) At the moment the fastest CPU is the Intel QX9650 quad core, but at nearly £700 it is out of most peoples budgets and should only be considered if you are absolutely stinking rich.A very good comprimise would be the intel Q6600 Quad Core (G0 revision) which comes in at around £170. If that is too expensive the core 2 duo E6750 is perfect and in all honesty you would not see too much of a difference in performance between this chip and the more expensive ones. This one comes in at £125.00 and is immensly overclockable, it's default speed is 2.66Ghz but you can get it up to 3.3Ghz no problem at all. (This actually makes it faster than a lot of the more expensive chips) GPU (Graphics Card)
it's not worth paying the price premium for the ultra over the standard 8800GTX at the moment as the ultra only gains around 3-7 FPS (frames per second) in real world gaming terms. The standard 8800GTX is an awesome card that costs around the £250 mark. Nvidia has recently released a 512Mb 8800GT card that offers performance (almost) on par with the big boys for a fraction of the cost, if you are going to be running a monitor that has a resolution below 1680x1050, this may very well be the best card in terms of price/performance. It will set you back around £170 for the standard version, going up to around £190 for a pre-overclocked version. (Get the standard version as you can overclock yourself easily using Nvidia's ntune software.) Once again here are some links to all of these GPU's 8800GTX Ultra - The ultimate graphics card! 8800GTX - Super high end GPU. 512MB 8800GT - Mid range bargain. Motherboard The motherboard is also an important component as it regulates the speeds that the various components can talk to each other. At the moment I would recommend the Asus P5K Premium (Black pearl edition) I run one of these in my gaming rig and it is awesome. It's quite pricy at around £115 but it is one of the best boards out there. If you are considering SLI, (2 Nvidia graphics cards in your machine), then the Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus is a great board to go for. It is just as fast as the higher end Asus Striker Extreme, plus get the benefit of being able to add 2 graphics cards in the one machine. Incidentally the Asus P5K premium (Black Pearl Edition can also run 2 GPU's at once (Crossfire) but you would have to get ATI branded GPU's to do this. It's really just personal preference I suppose. In my opinion Nvidia's SLI or ATI's crossfire is really overkill unless your running a 30inch screen. ASUS P5K Premium (Black Pearl Edition) ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 16 July 2008 ) | ||||
Building your own Custom Gaming PC can be a nightmare if it's your first time. Read our quick intro to get you started. 
I personally would go for an Nvidia card over anything ATI has to offer at the moment. This is purely personal preference as some of the ATI cards are pretty awesome. I just like nvidia as I think the drivers are better and more stable when gaming. The best of the bunch at the moment is the Geforce 8800GTX Ultra. Once again these are not cheap and will set you back around £420 - £600.