Fun Stuff > CLIKC
help me buy a computer, you nerds
Scandanavian War Machine:
--- Quote from: bicostp on 02 Mar 2011, 17:16 ---e: I like this combo. It's got everything you need except the OS and video card for $520. 2.8 ghz quad core i5, 1 TB hard drive, 4 gigs of RAM (which will leave 2 free slots for later expansion)...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.606598
--- End quote ---
well, i still like the look of this combo.
This video card caught my eye though, so i'd like to get some feedback on it, as video cards are the thing i prolly know the least about.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102874
Alex C:
I'd pass on that videocard-- at that price point you can do better than paying for a full gig of RAM and Directx11 support. With video cards it really pays to check out things like the Tom's Hardware charts. Oftentimes you can do better buying a discounted "mainstream" card from the last generation rather than buying the newest budget card-- and that goes double if you can score a good rebate.
Speaking of rebates and discounts, I wholeheartedly back KvP's suggestion of Newegg since they have a topnotch design that's often imitated, but don't forget about Tigerdirect or Directron when comparison shopping. Personally, what I like to do is use Newegg to narrow my candidates down and then I check other sites to see if they have the same product but with different discounts or shipping deals. Directron in particular has a pretty spartan website but as far as the actual products go I've never had a bad experience with them. Tigerdirect is probably my least favorite of the three-- they're alright, but the customer service was kinda shitty when I had to return something.
Scandanavian War Machine:
--- Quote from: Alex C on 03 Mar 2011, 13:14 ---I'd pass on that videocard-- at that price point you can do better than paying for a full gig of RAM and Directx11 support.
--- End quote ---
Care to elaborate? I kinda figured I didn't need DX11 (I don't even know what that means, just that it's new) but beyond that I'm just looking for something decent and relatively cheap that will allow me to ouput to my 37" hd tv (hence why i was looking at cards wit HDMI outputs)
I really am completely clueless about this stuff and those charts and benchmarks meant very little to me. $74.99 seemed like a good deal for 1gb RAM (don't even know what that does relative to video cards) and an hdmi output. alot of the other ones I saw with HDMI had less RAM and were usually more expensive, which seemed like a bad deal to me.
thanks again for the help y'all
Alex C:
The thing with RAM is that either you have enough and you get no benefit from tacking on more or you don't have quite enough and you take a bit of a performance hit. However, just how much video RAM you need is fairly negotiable given that you can often lower AA or texture settings to get back under the bar pretty easily-- and if you're playing at 1680x1050, having a full gig is often just overkill on many older titles. With that said, having a full gig actually isn't that bad of an idea given that you plan on HD resolutions. Plus, another big reason for my earlier post is that I didn't notice that there was a $10 rebate. At $75 I would have recommended spending a bit more and looking into an old HD4850 512 if you could find one for well under a hundo but they've rather dried up it appears and at $65 and knowing you want HD res the newer card starts looking a bit more appealing. Plus, it's bound to be a less noisy and power hungry beast.
Scandanavian War Machine:
Yeah, all the reviews I read on Newegg were pretty dang positive and many of them mentioned how quiet and cool it runs.
question though, just to make sure I'm not fucking myself here: is that card (this one) compatible with the parts in this combo?
it says PCI express 2.1 which I THINK refers to the type port it uses or something...the number of prongs maybe? I don't know. One review on Newegg mentioned that it wasn't compatible with what they thought it was, so i wanna be sure I'm not buying a bunch of stuff that won't fit together.
what does a video card even plug into anyway? the motherboard? the motherboard in that combo is a "GIGABYTE LGA 1156 Intel P55 USB 3.0 ATX Motherboard" if that's helpful or relevent
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