Personally, I dont think PC gamers care about graphics as much as yo think, or at least not in the way you think they do. Asking if you will be able to "max out a game" is really asking how good system performance will be and how long will that hardware last you. When your buying a PC you want to know it can handle whats out there and handle it well because games are only going to become more demanding.

Plus who wants to spend a bunch of money on a machine that is just satisfactory. You want to be wowed by how great those new games look after the weeks or months of picking out parts, waiting fo the parts to arrive, and finally getting to put a new rig together. I dont think anybody cheers when their brand new machine can run new games at mid level graphics with mediocre fram rates.

[QUOTE="Mossad"]

Also, as someone else mentioned, consoles are becoming more and more like PCs. Heck the Xbox pretty much IS just a PC. Rather than PC gaming dying, I think you'll eventually see PC and console gaming converging. I dont think it will happen for many years but it will happen.

middito

thank you

How convenient. Here we're having this discussion and here is an article fresh from the presses on how the PS3 is trying to be more PC like.

[QUOTE="dragonrborn36"]Guys, just give him a freaking answer. There is no floppy version. We are now in a CD/DVD era. As I said and someone linked to, your laptop can't even run it. There is no way to install Vista off of a floppy. You do need a new computer...ZBoater

Hang on a minute, he wasn't being serious, was he? Oops.

I find it hard to believe its a serious post.

As someone pointed out, PC gaming is bigger abroad. Look at Korea for example. Professional PC gamers are huge stars over there. The U.S. is oddly backwards when it comes to computers. The U.S. is pretty much the center of technological developement. ATI, AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Sun, Apple, IBM just to name a few are all U.S. Companies. Yet when it comes to things like broadband adoption, we lag behind even Estonia. (Please note I'm from the U.S. and this is not meant as a flame against the U.S.)

Also, as someone else mentioned, consoles are becoming more and more like PCs. Heck the Xbox pretty much IS just a PC. Rather than PC gaming dying, I think you'll eventually see PC and console gaming converging. I dont think it will happen for many years but it will happen.

I seem to be on about a three year cycle. I tend to buy a new mobo, RAM, cpu, and video card every three years. Case, drives, psu somewhat less frquently. Usually when I buy I try and go top of the line but not bleeding edge. So this time around I'll probably go with an 8800GTX for example.

Note that three years seems to be about 2 generations of video cards. I went from a GeForce Ti4600, to a Geforce 6800GTX, and am planning on going to an 8800GTX. Three years between all of those.

Personally, I can't fathom why anyone would be a "gaming" laptop. Unless you are truly a nomad, say a travelling salesman, I just don't see how the loss of performance, reduced upgradability, and increased cost can be justified.

Gaming suffers from every disadvantage of a laptop and benefits from almost none of its advantages.

To me, its sort of like buying a hummer for personal transportation. A hummer is designed with one thing in mind, negotiating tough terrain. It suffers in every other category so that it can excell at this one task. Then you go drive it around on a road system thats designed to ensure that there isn't any difficult terrain and you're taking advantage of none of its strengths and suffering from all of its weaknesses. It just doesnt make sense.

I'm not saying its stupid to play games on a laptop. If you've got a laptop for school or work it makes perfect sense to load some games onto it. I'd go so far as to say you'd be stupid not to. It would be like having that hummer because you need to go off road but refusing to drive on the roads when you can. If gaming is the primary goal though I just don't get it.

It wont make a lick of difference. Well I shouldnt say that. A faster home network will let you transfer files between your home PCs will be faster and if you were to set up a lan game that would be faster. When it comes to playing games across the internet, you can only go as fast as the slowest link, which if nothing else is almost guaranteed to be your ISP. Standard highspeed connections across fiber optic lines (cable/fios ISPs) tend to be about 5 Mbps. A mid range wireless home network is going to be like 54 Mbps which means upgrading your home network really isnt going to do much for your lag times.

It really is a shame the U.S. is so far behind (I guess I should qualify that this really only pertains to the U.S. ) when it comes to broadband adoption. But thats another story.