Were not talking here about the occasional game of solitaire or a secret late
night Zuma obsession. Were talking about cutting edge 3D gaming first-person
shooters or real-time strategy games with thousands of troops on the screen
at the same time, with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing and mip-mapped
specular reflections and a lot of other confusing terminology that describes visual
effects designed to make your system fall down on its knees and cry like a little
girl.
So you’re going to need the fastest processor you can afford and plenty of
RAM, as well as a motherboard to match, since the speed of the motherboard
buses can limit high-end components. But even that won’t be enough, so you’ll
need to offload as much of the work from the processor as you can. The first way
you can do this is by adding a video card (or cards) with cutting edge GPU’s
(Graphic Processing Units). ATI and NVIDIA have been competing for “king
of the graphics card” honours for years and the competition is so keen that new
cards running on new GPU’s are released, it seems, twice a month. So do your
research and buy the best current cards you can afford.
The other component which can offload some of the burden from your CPU
is a good audio card. The DSP’s (Digital Signal Processors) on the audio card
can take over a lot of the sound processing and free up the CPU for other
tasks. Currently Creative Labs pretty much owns this space, but again do your
research (partly by reading on) and get the best audio card you can afford.
Finally all of these components are going to require a pretty hefty power
supply, particularly if you decide to run two graphics cards in Crossfire (ATI)
or SLI (NVIDIA) mode, in which case make sure the power supply is rated
for the dual-graphics card mode you choose. Generally a serious gaming rig
will require at least a 500 watt supply; units are available up to 1000 watts (1
Kilowatt) and two Kilowatt supplies have been announced. Keep in mind that
having a higher-rated power supply will not actually increase the power your
computer draws. The rating is the maximum that the power supply is designed
to provide. Get the best you can afford.
As you may have noticed, pretty much every component inside the computer
needs to be top of the line; the same is true outside the case. Youll want a big
monitor, and a high resolution mouse. There are even gaming keyboards with
the keys specially arranged, not to mention joysticks, throttle controllers, driving
wheels, etc.
So, given that your budget is not bottomless, how do you prioritize? Well,
the processor and video card are the components that will have the most effect
on your gaming performance. Next comes the motherboard and RAM. If you
use one instead of two video cards, you can also use a less expensive power
supply. One of the advantages to building your own computer is that you can
get the components you can afford now and plan to upgrade them later.
A note on cases for gaming rigs it is not necessary to get a case with a
side window that reveals glowing blue fans and revolving animated heatsinks.
A well-built plain case will do just as well and let you spend more money on the
components that matter. But if you have the cash, and thats your taste, there
is lots of bling available these days, so go crazy.