My Phenom II 955 in combination with the GTX 560 ti made BF3 quite smooth maxed out. Metro 2033 is.. playable to say the least, while maxed out. AMD has excellent value for their CPUs. If you want a quick budget upgrade without feeling empty in the wallet, a 965 should certainly fulfill your needs. Depending on your cooling, the BE editions are quite overclockable too. My cooling's pretty terrible (stock fan, etc.), but I managed a 400-500mhz stable boost.

Each dev has their strengths. Rockstar, Valve, id and Bioware, etc. have tended to make my favorite games, but I can't say I've liked every game they've developed.

Rockstar's good with the sandbox experience. Valve tends to have an incredibly polished engine and good stories. Bioware is good with integrated RPG and FPS elements. id also develops very polished engines, but they're often a little weak on the story side. They're best with the deathmatch experience. Ravensoft has made some of the best oldschool multiplayer games. Neversoft/Treyarch mades my favorite sports/superhero games. Oh.. and of course infinite ward for COD.. and Ubisoft for Splinter Cell games..

Lol. I guess I can't name a single favorite. They're all high-caliber devs in one way or another.

Aim higher than a 560 ti. That's all I can say. I only got the 560 because I'm a cheap bastard. You can max out just about anything at 1080p, but games like Crysis and Metro 2033 will dip below 30fps alot- not being the smoothest experience. If the budget is about a grand, you can definitely go better.

Concerning sleep mode: that's what I always said about Windows 8. People act as if the boot time reflects the overall speed of the OS, when you can achieve the same effect through sleep. Still, SSDs aren't just about boot times.

It certainly makes things snappier. It's like the final piece of the puzzle to a snappy system. Depending on what you do, it could offer slight to astonishing results. If you're doing audio work that involves loading up millions of tiny samples, the non-existant seek time of an SSD does wonders to speed up the process. For games, don't expect a huge framerate boost, but at least your HDD won't be such a bottleneck in games with massive streaming like MMOs or sandbox games.

I love the fact that I can be installing a game and compressing files while playing another game simultaneously and practically unaffected. If hard drives had cores like CPUs, an SSD would be like a quad-core HDD.

USB 2.0 is fine for an optical drive because you'll hardly ever reach the peak of 60MB/s on those. I should have emphasized that it's not so great for an HDD. Honestly, for your needs, you'll be fine with USB 2.0. It's not like you'll be streaming uncompressed 1080p footage or anything, just some nextflix and youtube, etc.

As far as the actual media PC is concerned, just make sure you have all the components in the end and keep in mind what I said about an HDD booting from USB. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.

Sounds like they're riding off of the momentum of DayZ. Nonetheless, I'm in.

A game using an Unreal Engine will undoubtebly look and perform great. Then a "co-op sandbox survival game" sounds awsome. My buddy and I have been playing a ton of coop games lately, but it's often just a side-feature as opposed to a primary focus.

Quake 3 hands down.

Started when I was in elementary. Each version had a different community. I started in .30 for a couple years: it was mainly noobies and pirates, but a good railjumping insta community. Played freeze tag in that version alot. Then I moved to .16, the earliest version, which is where the vets were. Mainly played freeze and insta CTF. Then at last, I migrated to .32, which is was the last patch. You'll find a mix of everything there. Less hackers due to punkbuster implementation.

It didn't stop there though.. then I got into Defrag. Anyone who's gotten serious with it knows that it can easily swipe years from your life lol. Quake 3 was my childhood.

Looks fine, but there's a couple things to note:

It doesn't include RAM. You'll need a stick of DDR3 1333 memory, up to 4gb supported.

As far as the HDD, you say that you have one already with a USB adapter. If you want to install one internally, you'll need a 2.5" drive, which is notebook sized. This is prefered over an external one because you don't know if the motherboard supports booting from USB or not.

As far as the DVD drive, it looks like it may have to be external. There's only one SATA (newer drives) port and no PATA (older ones). With that fact alone, I'd consider looking for another barebone which includes two SATA ports for both the HDD and optical drive. Sure, you could hook those things up externally via USB, but you'd be bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 speeds.

Just my 2 cents.

[QUOTE="thphaca"]

Things are slowly brightening up for PC IMO. As long as the game runs in a smooth clip and looks good up close like Mass Effect 3, I'm happy. Multiplatform games don't look so bad now. I know many gamers hate EA for various reasons, but I find that their dev's ports usually run pretty good and look great after the bugs have been ironed out.

Concerning the pics of hi-res antialiased Gamcube and Wii screenshots, it's fairly easy to make cell-shaded graphics look great at a higher res because the geometry isn't as apparent, but the same outcome doesn't apply to the generic rendering style.

Like some have commented previously: it's not cheap to make good graphics, though with the improvements in game engines, I imagine that itwill be very soon, as engines like CryEngine 3 or the Arma III engine become licensable. While it's easier to implement great lighting and shaders, it will still take time and resources to create them.

Concerning consoles, some people just want to buy a $400 system once and be set for the next couple years. PC gaming has a rep for having a steep enterance fee, but that's slowly changing as todays mid-range budget cards are equivalent to yesterday's high-end. Essentially, an acceptable CPU and GPU can be had for at the most, 150$ each, making it easy to build a budget system capable of decent gaming for the same price as a console. If you really want to squeeze every penny, you can try ebay or craigslist, which will grant you even better savings. I got my GTX 560 ti for $125 there. If I'm not mistaken, I would spend nearly twice that on Newegg or Amazon.

JigglyWiggly_