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Help me and my sister build a computer!
Se7en:
Heat damage isnt a problem anymore. EVERYTHING has proper clock throttling now, nothing is physically capable of overheating.
However, the sort of system spec we are talking about, standard cooling is perfectly adequate for standard clock speeds. I think there isnt much point getting into overclocking, thats a bit too scary for most people.
Rounded cables only help in very cramped cases, or in situations where you have no choise but to run a cable right across the front of a fan. In the vast majority of situations, the difference they make is unmeasurable.
Everyone has been recomending AMD processors, for good reason. These just dont put out much heat, and have sophisticated fan control and dynamic clock speeds, like a laptop processor. They also offer better value for money, and are even easier to install, so theres no contest.
Your after something from the Athlon 64 range, iether socket 754, or socket 939 (more expensive, faster, but less value for money)
I would still strongly recomend the shuttle. It removes a lot of guessing from the equation, and simplifies things nicely.
Maybe it would be best if you got your sis to join the forum? Id imagine shes going to be asking on some gaming forums, and they spout an awful lot of bollocks on those places.
jhocking:
On a gaming forum, I was once told that I shouldn't even think about playing any games on a rig that cost less than $10,000 to put together. Then a bunch of other people agreed, and barely anyone disagreed.
I don't listen much anymore to what other people tell me about computers.
Se7en:
I understand your problem. I encountered a LOT of that sort of stuff when i was first trying to learn about computers. Now im the one dishing out the advice via the magazine articles i do, i get my info straight out of the horses mouth. Tech info comes direct from the company that built it, and all performance and value judgements come from actual testing.
Of course, thats beyond the reach of most people to arrange, which is why responsible IT journalism is so important. Theres still an awful lot of misinformation and general bollocks going round, especially on game forums i have to say.
Hell, my own gaming rig would probably have cost about...£2000 if that, (its cobbled together from test sample kit) and thats almost as fast as single core single GPU systems get, whilst remaining quiet.
est:
i've got an Athlon XP 2100+ with 1ghz ram & an old 9800 pro. depending on the part you're looking at there it's somewhere between two and three years old (i think) and was only a middling-power system at the time i started putting it together. i can still play pretty much anything that's been released with it.
i have another system that is a p3 600, 256mb ram and an onboard intel gfx card that can play most non-3d games, so it really depends on the type of games that your sister is gonna be playing. here we are giving you all these suggestions, and your sister might be really into card games or something.
in any case, i'd say that basically any recent cpu (i'd go Athlon 64 for price vs performance) + 1ghz ram + a gf6600+ graphics card would play basically anything released for the next few years.
my advice would be to buy what you can afford based around that, because pretty much the all of the rest of it is a taste thing.
as an aside, almost every time someone asks for opinions on a new system people seem to get into a fight to show how much they know about bits and pieces, and we get into arguments over which graphics card to use, how much power you'll need, etc.
the better way to handle these would probably be to take those arguments outside and link back to that thread in a post. that way if anyone else wants to talk about the power you need to have for a modern system etc they can join in, and we'll have something we can easily refer back to if people start talking about the same thing later.
also, Se7en, this isn't a personal dig because i've never read any of your published stuff & the things that you say in here mostly seem really good, but most PC Mags i've read in the past have been out of date (which i guess is kinda understandable with the release schedule of most magazines), grossly inaccurate, or notably biased towards certain manufacturers.
this is in Australia, so maybe we're behind the 8ball down here (which is very possible), but it's gotten to a point where i just don't trust any published PC mags and tend to try to get my information from multiple sources online, then read between the lines to avoid hyperbole and bias toward manufacturers.
jhocking:
--- Quote from: est ---1ghz ram... 1ghz ram...
--- End quote ---
*cough GB cough*
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