The 500 dollar gaming pc

[Final-Fan]

IllegalPaladin said:

Legend11 said:

chuckd said:

Yojimbo said:
Those 500$ computers is not really enough maybe if you want to play games on 1024* resolution and still they will not be that good at the end of 2008. But still its good computer but not for serious pc gamer. Stuff like 1GB DDR2 wont hold it specially if you have Vista you must have atleast 2GB. The graphic card is not that good either. Nobody wants to build a computer and then rebuild it again after a year if you are a pc gamer you better invest in the beginning 500$ is not enough.

 

Yeah, if you read the conclusion, it says that it's best to get 2GB of RAM and a better video card. But they were shooting for $500. It's funny how the most expensive component they chose is the power supply. However, that pc will run any game that's out right now at 1024 easily. Of course, they chose a DX10 compliant card, you can get better performance from a non-DX10 card now and just upgrade when/if DX10 becomes standard (that's what I'm doing). Also, if you can salvage some parts from your current pc (case, power supply, optical drives, hard drive etc.), you can use that cash for other stuff or just save some money. If you made the logical upgrades, it'd be more like $650. Personally, I tend to upgrade my pc about once a year with something or another anyways.

I was a little curious so I looked up a review of the card at Extremetech and it is pretty horrible. For example they use 2 gigs of ram and a Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 @2.66GHz (much faster than the processor in the $500 computer and some games could barely run at 1024x768. Call of Duty 2 ran at 22fps, with 4xAA 8xAF it ran at 14fps, Supreme Commander ran at 21fps, with 4xAA 8xAF it ran at 14fps. Of course some games ran fine like Half Life 2 but who wants a system where it's going to be hit or miss if the game will be close to slideshow, imagine Crysis on that PC.*

It's true if you spend the money you can get a PC that blows away the consoles but that's like almost everything else, the more money you have the better you can get.

*Extremetech article: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2151679,00.asp

That might just mean that the video card is running into a bottleneck because it's only so good (hence why it was made) and it can't keep up with how fast the CPU is going. A Core 2 Quad Qx6700 would be better paired with the best ATI or Nvidia cards, not their low end ones.

 So you're saying the CPU was so awesome the graphics card couldn't handle being in proximity to its awesomeness?  Sorry, that fails the common sense test.