Games on PC vs Consoles

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

Where are things these days? I've been really out of it when it comes to games lately and was thinking about maybe getting a game or two but what is the deal with PC games now? It seems like they are not so popular anymore? Is it just me or what? Or maybe it's that whole cyclical thing where PCs are popular for a while then consoles then pcs etc...

What kind of a machine do I need to have today to get enjoyable performance from my PC?

[R3C]

They're exactly the way they always have been, but a lot more cross-platform development is going on these days. Things often come out on the consoles now, then get an enhanced version for the PC, and if all goes well, then you get a good PC game. There are still the standard PC exclusives here and there, but with things being close enough development-wise, they can make potentially 3 times the money by being cross platform. The only complaint I have is when they don't enhance the texture size for the PC. What they should do (even if the game starts out on the console, is have larger source files for textures, etc. then shrink them for the console, then use the full-size one on the PC. For several years, there have been the "The PC is dying" people, but I haven't seen it. I think in general there are less "AAA" titles because of the required budgets to make games like this, the development time involved, etc. This is true on all platforms, however I think this round of consoles has attracted more companies than previously.

You should pick up a couple of things. You should really grab Mass Effect. It's the best game I've played in years. BioShock is great, HellGate London is cool, and I really want to get back into it. I need to finish up ME first though. Your system will do pretty well with all of these, though we may want to upgrade your video card though. If I'm not mistaken you're using the onboard chip, which isn't bad, but we could get something for less than $100 (maybe even half of that,) that would be significantly better. If you're running less than 2GB of memory we could bump that up as well.

[R3C]

Now that I've spoken with you on the phone, here are my recommendations based on our conversation...

Video Card that includes COD4...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814150296

Go with an Antec power supply 500W or so...

Look at either Lian Li (if you like aluminum,) or Antec (generally steel,) cases with 120mm fans if you want quiet...

Here's the motherboard I'm running, and looking around, there are tons of options, but it suits what you want to do perfectly:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813188024

This is the type of RAM we're all using (3nder, Me, McNevin, etc.) It's fast, cheap and reliable...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231145

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

Ok got some decent ram, albeit a bit on the costly side possibly, but seems to be pretty good specwise and I only paid $10 more than NewEgg...here is the link. a CAS latency of 5 seems to be pretty fast? I don't know it seems to go all over the place...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820145176

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

What's up with ATI cards having like 320 stream processors and NVidia having 128? what is the use of those things?

Also I was looking at the video card above and there are 5 versions of it ranging from 675mhz-760mhz core clock, 2200-2280mhz memory clock, and either opengl2.0 or opengl2.1, and all with COD4

The 9800GTX you pointed out is 720mhz core clock, 2200mhz memory clock - but they have a black version for $20 more that is the 760mhz core/2280mem - does it get hotter or is it noisier or something?

[R3C]

We've already spoken about most of this, but I thought I'd mention that that RAM looks nice. Only slightly more than the kind I usually get as well. Should work great.

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

The Corsair XMS2 DHX RAM is not working on my ASUS M2A-VM anymore...it worked for a while but the time in between failure kept increasing until the point of not really being able to do anything. I have put old Kingston RAM back in now and it works fine. Isn't that pretty much always the case that the Kingston RAM always works? Anyways...the reliability I have now with the Kingston is rock solid - heart touching really...

[enderzero]

Hmmm - I think I have an old 9800 around here somewhere. Strange it is now the best videocard again after all these years. Always was my fave. heheheh