Building a Gaming Setup

[Cmelt]

So i'm planning on trying to organize a nice setup for when TOR comes out since right now i'm only using a laptop. I have Dell desktop computer but I want to go all out and create a nerdgasmic center of high tech gaming equipment. However I have never done this before and have no clue where to begin. I would appreciate some help in figuring out what I need to do to get this all together and what brands of equipment I should be looking at.

[Atrayu Yung]

I just build a custom pc in late september so give me your budget options and that will help narrow some stuff down, but basically you need to decide if you want to go amd vs intel. Amd just came out with its new bulldozer processor, but I'm not sure how it stacks up to the sandybridge, I haven't done much research on them. Your GPU is one of the most important parts and you can either go with a single really powerful card, or run a two card crossfire or sli setup. But your budget will really determine that.

[Gryffon Etheras]

Really hard to give you much help without three things-ish:

1) General budget - how much are you looking to spend? we can hook you up with a monster of a machine, or a best-for-your-buck budget build that'll run things nicely. To give you an idea, I build rather top-notch machines and save up around $800 for each upgrade - I've been upgrading every five years or so on average, which is a pretty good time-to-obsolete in my opinion.

2) What hardware do you already have? Do we need to get a monitor in this budget? Hard drive? Case? CD-Rom drive? Can we salvage any of these things from the old one?

3) What're you looking to do with it, just a gaming rig? Or do you want to be able to do video editing, etc...

Thanks! We'll help as best we can

(Some resources for you in your search, btw... newegg.com has several DIY tools and tomshardware.com is my #1 resource when determining what to buy.)

[Cmelt]

1) General budget - how much are you looking to spend? If it's not too low i'm thinking around 5k



2) What hardware do you already have? Do we need to get a monitor in this budget? Hard drive? Case? CD-Rom drive? Can we salvage any of these things from the old one?
I have all of the basics but i'm no expert at customization when it comes to computers

3) What're you looking to do with it, just a gaming rig? Or do you want to be able to do video editing, etc...
Just a powerful gaming rig.

EDIT: When I say basics I mean the standard parts that come with a Dell desktop but not necessarily very high quality and I do want to do a new monitor.

[Gryffon Etheras]

With 5k you can get a tricked out, custom-built nightmare of a machine that will make small children cry at the sight of its glory.

I might suggest you check out...
http://www.alienware.com/ (They've been a little less awesome since Dell bought them, but still a fine machine)
http://www.velocitymicro.com/
http://www.falcon-nw.com/ (This would be my personal pick)

The level of budget you are talking about can get you a boutique-quality built-with-white-gloves-on machine. If you wanna build it personally, we can do that too. Just let us know

If none of the above tickle your fancy, we can look at others too - those are just the ones I'm failiar with. Once you pick one that looks to your liking, we can talk speccing it out for awesome, but to be honest any button you push on the sites above will probably lead to glory.

[Atrayu Yung]

5k will get you anything you want. I would stay away from alienware though, they are way overpriced and from what I have heard their quality is going down since Dell bought them. I would recommend you do a custom built. It gives you the flexibility to put exactly the components in you want, where as a pre-built from something like alienware you might pay full price for them including cheaper brands. Although with custom build it yourself you do run the risk of screwing something up and frying your motherboard.

[PlusMinus<]

You could build your own rig and save a little money rather than buying one already built. Plus, I had a lot of fun learning how and actually building my computer over the summer. Like others have said, with $5,000, you can pretty much buy whatever you want. Just keep in mind that you could probably spend a third of that and get the same quality rig.

[Cmelt]

I just have no clue where to start creating my own custom rig...

[Gryffon Etheras]

All of the above is very true, don't feel like you need to get a pre-built from the above. It's just easier if you have the money and don't want to risk something not working and deal with any issues - building a PC was fun for me, I build all of mine, but there is definitely frustration in each build .

[Gryffon Etheras]

CmeltTheBoss wrote:

I just have no clue where to start creating my own custom rig...

The best question might be: Do you want to learn, or just have it appear on you doorstep? We can point you to resource to learn if you want to learn. Happy to help

[ATownArmy]

The biggest thing that will affect SWTOR is your graphics card. With that kind of budget, go all out. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M SLI or the AMD Radeon HD 6990M Crossfire (Depending on if you go NVIDIA or AMD) are two awesome choices. They require a LOT of power, and a big case, but they'll run SWTOR on a ginormous monitor with no problem.

Next up in importance would probably be your monitor selection. Get something big and sexy. 47" LED LCD? Sure, why not? If you really want the top of the line, do it. Another option would be to run multiple monitors. 2-32" monitors would possibly be even cooler. Of course, all of this may be overkill and you can just get a good 25" flat screen computer monitor and save some money by not needing such a super graphics card.

Next I'd suggest looking at hard drives. SSD (Solid State Drives) are the new big thing because they're lightning fast, but still very expensive compared to a HDD (Your standard spinning hard drive) for the same amount of memory. Your best bet would be to get a top of the line 150-250GB SSD to run your operating system and select games, and then a huge HDD (1-2TB) to store all your media and non essential programs.

Something that I think that get's looked over is your mouse and keyboard. I would put them next in the list o' stuff to look at. If you have a mouse with a lot of macros available, combat in SWTOR becomes super easy, just program in what you want each button to do, and now you never have to take your left hand off of WASD to fight and command your companion.

And now, we finally get to CPU, memory, motherboard, sound card, power supply, case, and any cooling that you'll need. Rather than go on about all of these, I'll let you google it. Just trying to show you what I think is most important to a SWTOR gaming setup and give you some ideas of where to go with that.

[mrmarko]

Even though you are willing to spent 5k do you really want to spend 5k?.

Also, if your willing to learn how to build one (it's definitely a skill worth having) you can get it even cheap + get a superior machine.

If I was building a new rig now, I'd get the following (costs about $4,000)

X2 Gigabyte GTX 580 3072MB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics

Intel Core i7 2700K 3.50GHz Socket 1155 8MB L3 Cache Processor

Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z Z68 Socket 1155 8 Channel HD Audio EATX Motherboard

X2 G-Skill 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 2133MHz RipjawsX Memory Kit CL11 (11-11-11-30) 1.5V

Coolermaster HAF X Case

X2 WD 1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s Caviar Black Hard Drive - 7200rpm 64MB Cache

Crucial 256GB 2.5" M4 SSD SATA-III 6Gb/s - Read 415MB/s Write 260MB/s

Samsung SH-B123L 12x BD-ROM DVD±RW DL & RAM Lightscribe SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black

Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro 7.1 Soundcard - PCI-Express

Be quiet DARK ROCK PRO C1 cooler

Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 1000W Modular PSU

For graphics cards be very wary of purchasing stock models - for that reason alone I would not recommend purchasing a ATI 6990 or the gtx 590.

The fans on a single one sound like an jet plane is taking off, it's incredibly distraction (so bad on my machine that I took apart my graphics card & rebuilt it with a custom fan/VRM heatsinks.) - but if you have not built a PC before - I'd suggest stay away from modding GFX's cards.

For that reason, go for a ATI 6970 (x2) or GTX 580 (x2) - but one of the newer overclocked (higher bin) revisions.

[ATownArmy]

mrmarko wrote:

If I was building a new rig now, I'd get the following (costs about $4,000) X2 Gigabyte GTX 580 3072MB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics Intel Core i7 2700K 3.50GHz Socket 1155 8MB L3 Cache Processor ..... Be quiet DARK ROCK PRO C1 cooler Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 1000W Modular PSU

I wish I had room for a desktop like that...

[mrmarko]

ATownArmy wrote:

mrmarko wrote: If I was building a new rig now, I'd get the following (costs about $4,000) X2 Gigabyte GTX 580 3072MB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics Intel Core i7 2700K 3.50GHz Socket 1155 8MB L3 Cache Processor ..... Be quiet DARK ROCK PRO C1 cooler Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 1000W Modular PSU I wish I had room for a desktop like that...

Hehe, yeah - the tower unit alone is massive, but it's required if your running more than 1 GFX card - even a single 6950 is almost 14 inches long, small cases are useless for the new hardware.

Edit - An Alienware machine will perform worse & cost twice as much.

You do get websites that will build the PC to your exact specifications - but you will be getting a 3.5k PC for around 5k.

Do it yourself for the same money & it will be better.

[Gryffon Etheras]

Yeppers. I built a beastly $5,000 Falcon Northwest dream machine last night - specs below. It comes to right below $5,000 but a rough glance at newegg says your paying right at $1,000 for the cost of them putting it together, etc. That's including a water-cooling system which might be a bit much for virgin hands to assemble without issue, but still - $1,000 :P. Could buy new officer furniture to put this beast on for that money! Or build a rockin' Proton Pack.

http://build.falcon-nw.com/staging/configurator/?q=82396&s=1&pt=None&pc=ffffff,0&h=69364CDAF2BFA8A4C0744A3C7F07DB2C95CFB86B

As for where to start in configuring your own... For a new guy, read tomshardware.com - They've got several guides on how to pick certain pieces of hardware. Start with a beefy i7 processor and the niftiest graphics card of the week and go from there .