10 replies to this topic

[Lord Rust]

Heyo! I know I'm going to get chewed up for this but oh well... Basically I abandoned PC gaming for consoles so long ago that I'm completely out of the loop and without a clue when it comes to building a new rig from cheaply sourced parts. If the machine ran photoshop then that was all I needed!

So! Does anyone know of a good, reasonably priced retailer (preferably UK/EU based) that sells pre-constructed gaming platforms? I knows there's Dell and Alienware etc but I figure if you're going for the biggest brands you're going to have to cough up brand price.

So, if you find it in your heart for forgive a techno dunce like my self... Please advise!

[Shepard]

From my search on google, I found these sites recommended in some forums.

http://www.ebuyer.com/

http://www.scan.co.uk/

http://www.cclonline.com/

Not sure about their after-sales service though. The inability to customise a dell properly really puts me off the dell UK website.

Perhaps you can tell us your budget so that we can advise a build configuration for you.

[Lord Rust]

Ta for helping out! I'm aiming to stay in the £400-£600 range (800-ish USD) but I can forgo eating if something amazing comes up.

The best looking deal I've found myself is thus: http://www.ukgamingc...g-pc-p-100.html

I'll probably spend a bit more to upgrade the ram to 8gig but otherwise everything seems to match MWO's specifications. Or so I think....

Harddrive space I'm not worried about as I have externals for miles. Nor do I need any peripherals or software, thankfully.

So yeah, thoughts?

[Shepard]

Your selection will most likely be ok for the game. You can also consider this http://www.ukgamingc...p-pc-p-130.html at a slightly higher price. The graphics card is better, and depending on the coding of the game, the quad core may be useful. £150 more though...

Do remember that to fully utilise the 8GB of RAM, you need your OS to be 64-bit.

[VxSaAgE]

You could also assemble your own PC, as that tends to be much cheaper. Getting Windows OEM is a vastly reduced price (but you need someone from Microsoft to verify it for you) and if you buy graphics and CPU from AMD instead of nVidia/Intel, your cost will drop by a magnitude of at least 5.

Putting everything together is the hard part though, but I know there are also shops that will assemble it for you!

[SakuranoSenshi]

Shepard, on 27 July 2012 - 12:03 PM, said:

Do remember that to fully utilise the 8GB of RAM, you need your OS to be 64-bit.

Not true, as I pointed out in detail, elsewhere. It might as well be, though, because we're talking Windows really and licencing means you won't get to use more unless you shell out for an OS licence you probably don't want. More to the point, very little gain by having 8 GiB, even 4 GiB is well into diminishing returns but is pretty much base configuration for the kind of machine you want to buy (if you expect to run MWO).

The critical feature is a graphics setup that will run MWO well on launch (as you can expect it to eventually get overhauled and can certainly find other games that will tax it, particularly as the years roll by). The next most important is having a modern quad-core CPU, the speed is almost irrelevant, since anything you purchase new will be perfectly fine and despite FUD abounding, just about no games are actually CPU-bound; the graphics bottleneck long before that.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

http://www.pcspecial.../amd-computers/

use these.

Or better build your own

Edited by DV McKenna, 27 July 2012 - 11:34 PM.

[Shepard]

SakuranoSenshi, on 27 July 2012 - 12:39 PM, said:

Not true, as I pointed out in detail, elsewhere. It might as well be, though, because we're talking Windows really and licencing means you won't get to use more unless you shell out for an OS licence you probably don't want. More to the point, very little gain by having 8 GiB, even 4 GiB is well into diminishing returns but is pretty much base configuration for the kind of machine you want to buy (if you expect to run MWO). The critical feature is a graphics setup that will run MWO well on launch (as you can expect it to eventually get overhauled and can certainly find other games that will tax it, particularly as the years roll by). The next most important is having a modern quad-core CPU, the speed is almost irrelevant, since anything you purchase new will be perfectly fine and despite FUD abounding, just about no games are actually CPU-bound; the graphics bottleneck long before that.

Yes, we know that even with a 32-bit OS, we can find ways to use up those extra "wasted" RAM like loading them in a RAMDrive, etc. Still, how many times have you seen questions like "I have 16GB of RAM but my OS only shows 3.2GB." and similar questions on tech forums. Easier to recommend a 64-bit OS.

Lord Rust's selection from the website is sufficient to run MWO since it is somewhat above minimum specs. Since the recommended Intel CPU is an i3, the game probably won't benefit much from a quad-core CPU, which like you said " just about no games are actually CPU-bound." He could probably just spend a little bit more to upgrade the 550Ti to a 560 and above since a pentium G620 won't lose out to the recommended i3 by much. All depends on Lord Rust's budget really.

[Vulpesveritas]

Shepard, on 28 July 2012 - 05:32 AM, said:

Yes, we know that even with a 32-bit OS, we can find ways to use up those extra "wasted" RAM like loading them in a RAMDrive, etc. Still, how many times have you seen questions like "I have 16GB of RAM but my OS only shows 3.2GB." and similar questions on tech forums. Easier to recommend a 64-bit OS.

Lord Rust's selection from the website is sufficient to run MWO since it is somewhat above minimum specs. Since the recommended Intel CPU is an i3, the game probably won't benefit much from a quad-core CPU, which like you said " just about no games are actually CPU-bound." He could probably just spend a little bit more to upgrade the 550Ti to a 560 and above since a pentium G620 won't lose out to the recommended i3 by much. All depends on Lord Rust's budget really.

Actually, given MWO is a well threaded title, that i3 will do quite a bit better vs the G620 for MWO. an i3 is a hyperthreaded dual core, so it can grab whatever tasks are thrown at it.

CryENGINE 3 will run on dual cores, but there is a significant performance boost going from a dual core to a quad core, but there isn't much of a difference between a low end quad core and a high end one... it just seems like the engine has a thing for quads.

In any case, building your own is the best option. You'll get a far better PC that way.

Outside of that, £600?
Case: http://www.amazon.co...43487472&sr=1-1 35
Power Supply: http://www.amazon.co...43487001&sr=1-1 75
Motherboard: http://www.amazon.co...3487064&sr=1-12 120
CPU: http://www.amazon.co...43486945&sr=1-8 80
GPU: http://www.amazon.co...3487584&sr=1-13 150
RAM: http://www.amazon.co...43487314&sr=1-1 40
HDD: http://www.amazon.co...43487530&sr=1-2 50
ODD: http://www.amazon.co...43487410&sr=1-8 15
OS: http://www.amazon.co...43486366&sr=1-1 70

Comes up to £630, slightly over budget, but was the best I could pull off near it.

And if you need to reduce the price more you can swap the motherboard for this and still be alright;
http://www.amazon.co...43488037&sr=1-4
(-50)
And if necessary, you can lower the GPU some.
http://www.amazon.co...3487915&sr=1-50
(-30)

This is my recommendation at least for getting the highest performance for your money.
Otherwise, a couple of prebuilt options that are decent on Amazon;
http://www.amazon.co...43488276&sr=1-4
http://www.amazon.co...3488386&sr=1-30
http://www.amazon.co...3488386&sr=1-45

[Shepard]

Hmm... If MWO is well threaded, the AMD FX-4100 route would be better than the Intel pentiums or the i3s. I hope Lord Rust will update us on his purchase decision.

[SakuranoSenshi]

Shepard, on 28 July 2012 - 05:32 AM, said:

Yes, we know that even with a 32-bit OS, we can find ways to use up those extra "wasted" RAM like loading them in a RAMDrive, etc. Still, how many times have you seen questions like "I have 16GB of RAM but my OS only shows 3.2GB." and similar questions on tech forums. Easier to recommend a 64-bit OS.

Nope, nothing to do with RAMdrives and no wasted RAM. There is no limit on 32 bit OS memory access, beyond what the hardware imposes or the OS designers choose. 32 bit versions of Windows can and do use much, much more than 4 GiB.

Easier than actually correcting the misconception, sure? Lie to them if that's your style but it's still not true. The 3.2 GiB thing is a combination of confusion and MS stupidity - it's actually reporting available total contiguous virtual address space as visible to any process that is started on that machine. You can have 256 GiB of RAM sat behind it but because of the limitations of the virtual addressing system, each process will never get more 4 GiB of address space, of which 2 GiB is kernel mapping and the same across all processes, unless the /3GB switch is used. This has nothing at all to do with your physical RAM total. You get the same size of address space even when you have 256 MiB of RAM, that's why there is a 'pagefile'.

Edited by SakuranoSenshi, 28 July 2012 - 09:58 PM.