What Is The Ultimate Gaming PC?

Why no sold state drive for your gaming machine?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I didn't see that as an option in the config screens. But the drives I selected spin at 10,000 RPM!

I recently visited the CyberPower web site, went through the configuration selector and then emailed the configuration to myself so I could do some comparison shopping. Interestingly, the email I received was from IBuyPower. Since I'd scoured several PC forums and found lots of horrible reviews of IBuyPower's quality of construction and customer service, I was discouraged and decided not to chance a purchase. Of course, your mileage may vary.

@hrutie,

In checking the prices of a 1TB SSD drive, Newegg has only 1listed, an OCZ Colossus LT Series OCZSSD2-1CLSLT1T 3.5" 1TB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) and it is priced "Was: $3,149.99 Now: $2,864.99." Likewise, (2) 2.5" 600GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drives (SSD), which would equal 1.2 TB, together cost around $2,600. I think, that pretty much says it all.

Now, (2) 600GB, SATAII @ 10,000RPM hard drives that equal 1.2 TBs, together cost around $450, from Newegg.

Overall, Bob's Gaming PC still costs around $7818! In my book, that's pretty expensive. I could easily build 7 brand new PCs, with that kind of money. Would they be Gaming PCs, no. However, they would be solid, reliable PCs with lots of 'bells and whistles'. }:O)

I'll add my 2 cents since I've built a few of these over the years:

Modern games, particularly FPS (First Person Shooters) are most reliant on the graphics card. The CPU actually doesn't does less in some modern games than it did in games of 3 or 4 years ago. Few are actually using the multi-core aspects of the new CPUs - the extra CPUs do add benefit in that they let the Operating System, virus protection, etc, run on their own cores though - leaving at least one core for the game to run by itself. Some of the VERY new games also run their physics engine in a separate core, although the majority use a physics engine built into the graphics card if it has one.

The key though is the graphics card. Buy one with at least 1GB of on-board VRAM - the faster the better. VRAM holds all the textures that make things photo-realistic.
Given the memory stipulation, buy the best card you can afford. There are so many ways to measure performance that I really can't give guidance here - but performance pretty much follows price. All the decent chipsets are made by either nVidia or ATI - never consider anything running some other (like intel) video chipset. ATI and nVideo don't sell under their own names, but all the card makers feature the chipset name in their product names anyway.
New graphics cards typically come out twice a year, with the big introductions made starting in Sept/Oct in preparation for Christmas. For bang-for-the-buck, I usually buy one generation back - the latest models are always overpriced and typically experience driver and overheating problems. anything released at least 6 months ago should be more stable.

The operating system can be a bit of a dilemma. If you are ONLY playing the latest games, then use Windows 7 64 bit. But if you are planning to play some older games, you may want to stick with the 32 bit version of Windows for greater compatibility. The drawback is that the 32 bit version only recognizes 4 GB of system RAM, while the 64 bit version will recognize whatever the computer's motherboard will let you install. And more RAM means faster speed overall. So operating system and RAM decisions really depend on what you plan to run on it.

Bob recommended a Solid State Drive (SSD), and I agree. If you put your operating system and game files be on an SSD, you'll see much faster load times and less lag between levels or rooms. SSD's have no need to move a head back and forth so they can access and transfer data to your computer memory much, much faster. The downside is that they have a limited (however very large) number of reliable write cycles, so you don't want to use it for writing all the time. There are different camps about whether a swap drive should be on an SSD - I personally thing it's no problem.
A 128 GB SSD is enough to hold the operating system files and all the files for your primary game program. If you want to have 3 or more games on your SSD, figure on moving up to a 160GB or larger SSD. You will still need a second regular hard drive for all your other files, but I personally think a slower, 7200 RPM drive is fine for that.

When it's all said and done, I agree with Bob that buying a pre-built rig is your best bet - especially if you want to venture into the overclocking arena. You can spend days, weeks, months, trying to tweak an overclocked system to keep it running reliably - a pre-built rig has been tested and comes with guarantees. Unless you're an Uber-Geek who likes tinkering and doesn't mind crashes during the middle of a raid, a pre-built rig is worth the extra $$$.