Beginner's Guide to Buying a Gaming Computer

Whether your playing single player or online games buying a simple $500 dollar machine will not cut it. If your building or buying one you can still get one for less than $2000. If you was to build one it would cost you around $800 to $1000. To buy one would cost you a little more reason being cause of warranties and such. In this article I will give you tips on getting your hands on a good gaming machine.

Case, motherboard, and CPU

Every computer starts right here. These components are the most important and will decide how good your machine will run. Most gaming machine starts with a case and a power supply. Don't get a case with a power supply less than 400W. If you get one with at least 400W you will have no problem driving all the components.

Your motherboard and CPU combo will depend on if you want an AMD processor or Pentium. If you go AMD purchase a motherboard that will handle at least AMD 64 3800+ or better. This will make sure you are able to play most everything out there right now and anything new for the next couple of years. If you go with Pentium you will want at least Pentium IV 3.0 or better. You don't have to buy a duo core processor. They are rather expensive and are not needed to get a good adequate game machine. Stay away from Celeron processors they do not make good gaming computers.

Memory

You will want at least 1GB of memory 2GB would be better. Make sure your machine has some expandability down the road. Your memory will help a lot when it comes to playing games online.

Without good memory your machine will bog down and load very slowly. Make sure your motherboard supports a minimum of DDR memory of 400mhz. If it supports DDR2 than all the better.

Hard drive

Games take up a lot of space so make sure you have at least 250GB or better hard drive space. If your a big time games the more storage you have the better. Make sure your motherboard supports SATA and get a SATA hard drive. SATA performs slightly better than IDE hard drives. So this is one thing you will want to consider for your gaming computer.

Video Card

To play games, especially those online, you will want a good video card. On board video is not adequate for games. Playing online games with an on board video card will have tremendous lag. This is one reason why you want a power supply of 400W or better so that your video card performs good. With less than 350W most computers with high end video cards will not even boot up. So this is important to have a new machine instead of trying to add a good video card to an old computer.

Sound card

Its a good idea that you have a good sound card and speakers instead of trying to play games on an on board sound card. Your games will just play and sound a whole lot better.

These are the main important components in a gaming computer. The rest are necessary but not as important. If you buy one or decide to build your own these are the components that you will need to consider.