Ping Paul

Buffalo

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Oct 30, 2012, 7:02:22 PM10/30/12

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Hi, any good suggestions on building a good gaming PC for around $1000 or
less?
Thanks,
Buffalo
PS: Yes,I realize I will have to upgrade from Win2000ProSP4. :)
If I go to Win7, should I go for 32bit or 64 bit (I still like to
play Q3 Arena online)
PPS: I don't believe I will be able to use any of the components in my old
system, except the monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Paul

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Oct 30, 2012, 7:58:02 PM10/30/12

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i5-3570K 4Core 4Thread 6MB L3, 3.4GHz $230
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504

i7-3770K 4Core 8Thread 8MB L3, 3.5GHz $320
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116501

The difference there, is one has Hyperthreading turned on,
the other has it turned off. Price diff is $90.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Intel Core i5-3570K @ 3.40GHz 7,128
Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz 9,641

Double the execution threads, gives 1.35x in that benchmark. In
the first generation when Hyperthreading came out, it was good
for about 1.05x on average.

*******

There are a ton of LGA1155 motherboards out there. Just get one
with the peripheral chips on it you really want. (Gigabit NIC
for sure, USB3 is good to have for the future, ESATA if you
had a lot of ESATA external drives, Firewire if you had some
kind of camcorder and needed video transfers, and so on.) There
are some features that only seem to be of interest to the
manufacturer, as they never seem to come up in conversation.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157293

*******

Q3 Arena shouldn't need much of a graphics card. Some of the Intel
processors have built-in graphics. You can use ark.intel.com
to check for that.

http://ark.intel.com/products/65520/Intel-Core-i5-3570K-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

"HD4000 graphics".

If the motherboard has the graphics connectors on the back,
and you're not ready to purchase a video card yet, you
can test and bring up the system using the processor
built-in graphics.

*******

The OS choice, depends on your taste in memory. If you're the
kind of person who buys a 4x4GB kit for your new computer,
then a 64 bit OS will make best usage of the 16GB total memory.
If you buy a 2x2GB kit of memory, then a 32 bit OS will be
a good fit for that.

W7 x64 does not support 16-bit stuff, like some older installers.
Whereas, the x32 version, does support x16 installers and more of
your older programs.

I haven't looked lately, but in the past Microsoft had compatibility checkers
or web pages with lists of known-to-work products. You could try that
route. It'll be a bit harder to find some of that stuff, because
Microsoft generally pitches everything when they move to their new OS.
Sometimes, I have to use www.archive.org to find older reference
material.

Some Adobe products now, are 64 bit only. If you have gazillions of dollars
to spend on things like Photoshop or the Adobe movie editor, then you
should give more serious consideration to the 64 bit OS.

A 4GB address space used on the 32 bit OS, will be a bit restrictive for
gaming. Especially if you buy a video card which has a lot of
onboard memory. This might be an issue for something like Microsoft
Flight Simulator, or some other program which is resource intensive
just so it can be resource intensive.

But if Q3 Arena was your only objective, then the 32 bit OS should
handle it.

I have W7 x64 on my laptop, and so far that hasn't provided me
any additional functionality. So in terms of "happy surprises", I
can't say it's done anything for me. But, I don't use older
programs with 16 bit installers on there, and I also don't
have a gazillion dollars for Adobe products. So I hardly qualify
as a "discerning user" :-) YMMV.

Paul

Buffalo

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Oct 31, 2012, 2:32:48 PM10/31/12

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The only reason I mentioned Q3Arena was that I was wondering if it would
work on Win7 64 bit, or would you have to have a second OS?
No, I'm not into Adobe either.
I want to try to build a PC that will still work with most of the newer
games for a few years anyways. My last build was (is) my ECS K7s5a rev 3.1
with a Honey X bios, a 7600gt AGP 256MB DDR3 vid card, single 7200rpm 120GB
HDD, cheap sound card, DVD RW, 1GB Ram, and an Athlon XP mobile 2500 (266MHz
bus) cpu running at 2 GHz.
I have a 27" LED monitor and a wired kb and mouse (MX510) running
Win2000ProSP4 as an OS.
I doubt if I could use any parts off my system except for the monitor and
the mouse.
Yep, I do plan on putting in a video card.
Thanks for your input.
Buffalo
PS: My first build was an Asus P2b and a 300MHz celeron cpu (oc'd to 450)
and a Riva TNT vid card, I believe, and I had Win95c and 128MB of ram.

Paul

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Oct 31, 2012, 7:16:08 PM10/31/12

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Buffalo wrote:

> The only reason I mentioned Q3Arena was that I was wondering if it would
> work on Win7 64 bit, or would you have to have a second OS?
> No, I'm not into Adobe either.
> I want to try to build a PC that will still work with most of the newer
> games for a few years anyways. My last build was (is) my ECS K7s5a rev 3.1
> with a Honey X bios, a 7600gt AGP 256MB DDR3 vid card, single 7200rpm 120GB
> HDD, cheap sound card, DVD RW, 1GB Ram, and an Athlon XP mobile 2500 (266MHz
> bus) cpu running at 2 GHz.
> I have a 27" LED monitor and a wired kb and mouse (MX510) running
> Win2000ProSP4 as an OS.
> I doubt if I could use any parts off my system except for the monitor and
> the mouse.
> Yep, I do plan on putting in a video card.
> Thanks for your input.
> Buffalo
> PS: My first build was an Asus P2b and a 300MHz celeron cpu (oc'd to 450)
> and a Riva TNT vid card, I believe, and I had Win95c and 128MB of ram.

32 bit code does work on 64 bit systems. But sometimes the problem is,
the program itself is 32 bit, while the *installer* program is 16 bit.
So you get stuck while trying to install the program, rather than
the program itself failing to run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions

"All editions support 32-bit IA-32 CPUs and all editions except
Starter support 64-bit x64 CPUs. (64-bit installation media is not
included in Home Basic edition packages, but can be obtained
separately from Microsoft)."

There are very few pictures I could find, of the "box contents"
of a Windows 7 software purchase. A couple show two DVDs, one
perhaps labeled 32 bit, the other labeled 64 bit. But the
pictures were blurred on purpose, and aren't worth the time of
day. And it's pretty hard to verify which version really
does come with two DVDs versus just the one DVD. If you had
both DVDs, you could change the installation on the day that
you needed to.

http://solutions-24.com/media/images/popup/298.jpg

I suspect the OEM versions might include only one of the
DVDs, like just the 64 bit one. But with so little information
to go on, I can't prove that to you.

*******

The motherboard graphics, give you an option to use, before
you get a video card. They might even be fast enough for Q3 Arena,
because that game happens to be very light on resources.

Paul

geoff

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Nov 1, 2012, 10:09:16 AM11/1/12

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> good gaming PC

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/System-Builder-Marathon-August-2012-GTX-670-Kepler,3280.html

Buffalo

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Nov 1, 2012, 1:09:04 PM11/1/12

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geoff wrote:
>> good gaming PC
>
>
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/System-Builder-Marathon-August-2012-GTX-670-Kepler,3280.html

Thanks for that link. I have been searching the web for gaming pc's under
$1000.00 also.
Paul is one sharp person also.
Buffalo