TwistedBishop's forum posts
The current one I'm planning on making comes to $1200 including shipping from NewEgg, with an E6400 and 8800GTS 320MB and 2GB DDR2. You could upgrade the CPU to an E6600 and the 8800GTS to 640MB for that same $1400.
PC gaming hardware is pretty simple at its core. Your video card is God. Your CPU and RAM closely follow. Your power supply needs to be able to handle your video card. That's about all there is to it.
Being you have a Dell, changing your cpu isn't really the easiest thing. And overclocking is impossible.
That leaves you with three tasks.
1) Find out what wattage your power supply is, and what it's combined +12v rating is. This is crucial for your video card upgrades.
2) If you don't have 2GB of RAM, you'll want to upgrade to that. Just match the ram that came with your PC, ie DDR2-533 or whatever.
3) Get a new video card about every 1-2 years. Google up some benchmarks for the latest cards and read forums like these.
Eventually you'll want to upgrade your CPU. However, considering you currently have a Core 2 Duo, that's a very low priority for the future.
Google is really your best friend in this whole process. I particularly like the Anandtech reviews of PC hardware myself. Just be careful that you don't fall into the trap of obsessing over hardware at the expense of actually playing games. You can make yourself sick looking at benchmarks after a while.
If you have a PS2, get them a Nintendo DS Lite. That should take care of everyone in the family regardless of age or gender.
I'd spend the remaining $270-300 on a 7900GT (approx. $220). Video cards should come before all else. You could maybe buy a better power supply with what's left over. If I were you I wouldn't. Try out the new video and see if it runs into issues with not getting enough current first. You could save the remaining $50-80 dollars towards an AMD X2.
Investing in a new motherboard would be a better course of action for the future, if you can afford it. Whether it be a 775 socket for the Core 2 Duos (the E6300 costs as much as the 4400+ and performs far better) or an AM2 socket for the new AMDs. The killer here is you're looking at ~$100 for the motherboard and then ~$180 for 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Adding that on top of the CPU and 8800GTS will bring you to about $800.
Microcenter had a coupon for the E6400 for $159.99. These CPUs are all about to start dropping. TaijiquanHave a link?
The stuff I've seen points to April for Core 2 price cuts.
http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?tid=735045
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