Ian said:
I have about $2500 to spend on a PC. I am debating on whether to
just buy a gaming computer or build one myself. If I decide to build
one. Which parts will give me the most "bang for my buck"? Any help
is much appreciated.
For the most part, when buying cheapo systems, it's best to go with a
pre-built computer. But when going with gaming systems, then most likely
you can build yourself a good-value system for half the price of buying
one of the pre-built gaming systems. That's because the pre-built gaming
systems are overkill systems, and you can go with components half their
price and still delivering over 90% of the gaming power.
Make sure you skew your spending towards the video cards rather than the
processor; central processors are much less involved in the gaming
experience than the graphics processors. Multi-GPU video systems now
come in one card (e.g. AMD 3870X2 or nVidia 9800GX2), you don't even
have to buy two cards to get multi-GPU advantages anymore. Quad-core is
nice to have but completely unnecessary as it has been mentioned that
GPUs are more important than CPUs; that being said, if you can get a
quad-core for not much more than what you paid for a dual, then go for it.
Yousuf Khan
