in fact its my first ever PC ive built myself!!!!!

here are my starter specs:

AMD Athlon II x2 270 - 6 GB DDR3 1333 ram - HD 5670 1GB DDR5 - 500 GB HDD - MSI 760G FX mobo

what i wanted to know, will i be able to run some of the newer titles or not? im not really after everything on high settings but rather it still looks and plays good, after xmas i may be upgrading the graphics card with possibly pulling out the 2 GB ram and replacing with 4 GB

to complete it i just need a usb 3.0 to 2.0 converter, instalation of windows, new monitor and a new desk

i needed a new pc and have built this for under £200 including the keyboard, mouse etc

how is the best way i can improve my system going forward? im kinda new to setting up your PC for games

Not with that Athlon X2. The rest of your system is fine, just throw in there at least an Athlon II X3 and you'll be okay for upcoming games. You'll gain a lot of performance for just that one extra core.

Wow that's a cheap comp. Get back to us when you have some games installed and tell how you like it.

Depending on how many games you want, you might want a bigger hard drive. It would be worth the investment.

If you don't plan on having that many games, 500 GB should be fine.

You don't need a USB 3.0 to 2.0 converter, the standards are fully backwards compatible.

If you wanted to improve the system, drop in an AMD FX 8120 (Can be found cheap, oveclocks like a champ), jump to 8Gb of Ram and drop in a Radeon 7850 or better. :)
Of course you would need a better power supply unit on top of it to power it all.

I feel ur aiming too low (unless u plan on playing casual MMORPGs/light indie games).


You should atleast double the money, imo best performance/value is usually found in £400-600 range. My comp cost me about £420 in total 2 years ago and it still can max some games 1080p with some added anti-aliasing while pretty much playing everything comfortably. You should be quite set to play atleast all multiplats coming to the next gen consoles, so your comp should have a very long lifecycle this way.


I'd recommend getting atleast a quad-core processor, lot of games benefit from 4x cores nowadays. And I think even more will once the new consoles hit, so 2 cores just might not cut it anymore.

Why 5670 particularíly btw? It's quite old and very weak at this point. Wouldn't propably pay more than 20$ for that one myself. 7770 is drastically better and not that expensive. Really good entry-level gaming card. 7850 if u are willing to pay bit more for competitive graphics with the consoles.

8gb of ram, propably best to squeeze the additional 2gb since ram is quite cheap. Doesnt really matter whta ram it is as long as its DDR3.

Get some simple cheap case that is spacious enough for the parts. And do not skimp on powersupply, quality starts at 50$ area with coolermaster/corsair/XFX/antec and some other well known brands. If you dont invest into a trusty PSU model. Low quality PSUs worst case scenario is, they will die and fry other parts with them when they blow up.

ive got my system up and running, im actually quite happy with it. bought a wired xbox 360 pad its suprising how well crysis 1 runs on it, i plan to get a HD7750 later on

Kudos.

My only recommendation would be to skip the 7750 and go for the 7790. It's $130, and it's a solid card for 1080p gaming. The only concern would be the amount of RAM since the 7790 has 1GB of RAM so you may run into some issues running the latest and future releases. With that said, if you can prefferably buy the 7850, then you'd be better off since it packs a bigger punch with 2GB of RAM; it's currently available for $150 to $170 depending on the manufacturer on Newegg.

Also, and more importantly, AMD is announcing the successor Volcanic Islands tomorrow, and there may be a graphic card in that family that can offer solid price/performance for you if you are willing to wait until they hit the market.

ive just installed crysis 2 with direct x 11 patch. its a huge leap from the ps360 renditions using the fraps app it hovers 40-50fps

i think il be using my new pc much more often now. im a convert :)

What hardware did you settle for?