Can you buy from New Egg? (newegg.com) If not send me your favorite site and I'll see if I can find the equivalent.

But really you can probably figure out the same. Look for a good box with expansion slots and a good (doesn't have to be the latest) CPU.

Go to Tom's Hardware and he always has recommendations for the best value video cards. Don't ever buy the latest because they are always absurdly overpriced. If they are just one model older the price drops like a rock even though the performance difference is minimal. But the same thing as in the computer; look for the card with the most onboard memory rather than getting too hung up on the GPU.

ALWAYS fill up with as much high speed ram as you can cram in. It's cheap and pays off big returns.Get a larger power supply, they're cheap anyway and that's about it. Most decent computers now have the makings of a good gamer once they have the power supply, ram and video card to give them serious video performance

.

I would say for more experience uses. You could just buy one of the new pentium dual cores E2XXX series and then overclock that to about 3.0ghz or more, ( get a nice cooling system and mobo with the extra money from buying the cheaper cpu.) The only thing you miss out on is some L2 cache.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Pentium_Dual-Core

Here are the prices. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_Dual-Core_microprocessors

God damn I need this juvenile shit. Explains why I gave up online gaming with voice chat.

For your information I work at a major teaching hospital. I have no relationship and haven't even bought that much from New Egg. I specified them only because they have some of the best prices, a huge selection; a very active customer feedback system and one of the highest ratings for online computer dealers. I don't care where anyone buys anything.

l I was trying to do was be helpful. People like you make me wish I had spent the f**king time having actual fun.As for your brother, if he spent $1500 he would expect it to perform well. I was trying to help people get equivalent performance when they don't have $1500 to piss away.

But tell him to boost the RAM and he might be able to do better.

 i probably could buy it from new egg (or possibly not, i haven't checked), but i'd much prefer to purchase the parts locally.. the company with the best AU prices here is usually msy, and their parts list is in the pdf

http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf

btw, i really appreciate threads like this, i don't know why there is so much complaint when you are just trying to help people out

@ Grampy, the computer was bought in last july, I bet I could build a $400 dollar computer equivalent. I don't even believe his brother even has this computer. He is probably going to find the best specs he can, and then say there.

If you search hard enough you can find an 8800GTS that is cheaper than most 8800GT's.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134037

Also, go with a stock video card if you are looking to save money, because the overclocked ones have the same hardware but with a larger fan. They also flash the bios, which you can do yourself, to permanently overclock the card.

Nice to have a discussion with somebody reasonable.

Yours is certainly an option and one that is popular on gaming computers. I t used to void all warranties but now has been legitimized by factory over clocking.

I personally am not a big fan. In my experience that extra heat tends to create more problems than the benefits. Especially when it comes to water cooling; I try to keep water and computers as far apart as possible

The other reason is that with modern CPUs their clock speed is seldom an issue. There is of course an easy way to check. If your computer doesn't seem able to hack it do control alt delete to get Task Manager while you’re playing the game. Click on the performance tab. That will tell you immediately if your CPU is maxxed out.

Even if it is, before giving up on it, turn off all the crap running the background. Turn off Instant Messenger Gizmos etc until the CPU shows virtually NO activity. Then play your game. The overhead on all the things going on in the background can be huge. In helping friends I have seen computers with 40% of the CPU tied up with NO programs running.

Thank you, glad to help.

 Love Australia, spent a month in Melbourne on an assignment to work with the NASA Airborne Observatory. Loved the people, their attitude just about everything with the exception of those awfully greasy bacon hoagies for breakfast at the Qantas maintenance facility. LOL Haven't you folks heard of cholesterol.

I'm looking over the parts list and will get back to you later when I've had time to digest it. I see some familiar things but some names and numbers are different. Be sure to get a reality check from someone local you can trust.By the by, do you want to build from scratch?

While I don't need a tutorial, it is always nice to see other people try to help someone else. Thanks for your thought out guide on building a new computer. I am most certain this will come in handy for at least one person. As for your little troll... well, people like him... umm what is the word... SPOIL it for everyone else?

In any case it is nice to see someone else's reasoning for building a computer the way they do.

Grampy +10