Advice on gaming desktop under $1200 ?

It's high time for me to get a new desktop and I was looking for advice. I've been looking at dell/alienware and others. Is 4GB memory adequate or do I need 6 or 8. Also is the ATI Radeon HD3650 256MB good or should I be looking more at Nvidia cards? And will duo core suffice or should I get a quad core processor?

As you can tell Im not entirely clueless but pretty close. After all is said and done Im not looking for something hardcore, but something that wont be obsolete in 1 year and can run smoothly for a pretty fair amount of gaming. Thanks for any help.

 

This belongs in desktop review.

 

BUILD YOUR OWN!

That's actually the best way for a few reasons:
1. You can buy the parts cheaper by themselves usually
2. no building fee premium
3. it's actually not difficult (I built my own for the first time just last year around this time, and quite frankly, I thought it was pretty easy.)

First of all... you're making a gaming desktop, but if you plan to photoshop or anything, you'll need 4GB of RAM or more. If you're strictly just gaming/websurfing/stuff like that, even 2GB is more than enough.

If you get 4GB of RAM or more, you'll need a 64-bit Vista.

Most games do not care about how many cores you have, and are programming for single, or maybe dual-core use. I don't think there are many if any games out there using 4 cores, so a dual-core is plenty good enough. (Unless you buy Intel's Core i7, which is quad core only at the moment?)

With regards to video card, the 3650 is about... a year old now? It's still a decent card, though you may want to splurge more here to make it worthwhile. One of the best cards out right now should be the Radeon 4870 IIRC, but you should confirm with other people on that.


...and yea, what the guy above me said.

 

Now's the time to make a desktop since nehalem just came out, and the economy is helping keep prices low. You could build a core i7 920, X58 MB, 6GB DDR3, Decent GPU (9800 GT if you're cheap, 260 GTX for little over 200), HDD is like 60 bucks. DVDRW drive these days is 20 bucks. Case, cables, GOOD psu, and you're coming close to 1200, but it's well worth it.

 

Okay I said I wasn't going to contribute to this topic since it doesn't belong here, but what can I say. I do love desktops almost as much as I love laptops. I agree with the above posters, and I agree that the i7 is an awesome direction to go. The only suggestion I have is that you wait until January or February, the prices on the i7 and X58 platform are expected to drop tremendously. That's when I will be buying.

 

That's almost exactly what I spent on my desktop. (in sig) About $1350.

I recycled the 8800GT, monitors, etc, off one of my old systems, but the big HDs brought the price back up.

It's quite a jump from an Athlon 4400+

 

go to dell's outlet on there website you can get a quad with dual 9800gt's or more likely xfire 3870's for under $1200...
Oh yeah... and this thread doesn't belong here

 

Vcard is the main component. What do you guys think of the HD4850. It seems the best ratio performance/price?

 

If I was buying today, I'd go with the Nvidia 260GTX for $199

 

Or get a ATI Radeon 4870 with a heck of a lot more stream processors, for the same price, with an additional discount on RAM.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102810

 

Good find, although it's $199 price depends on actually getting your rebate from Newegg (I'm 0 for 4 with them.)

However, even without the rebate, I'd rather get that 4870.

 

The 4870 and the GTX260 are pretty neck and neck, one edging out the other on different games. But form my understanding the OC ability of the GTX260 is considered very good, and the new 55 nm die will allow it to OC even better. Some push it close to GTX280 territory.

 

Well... if we're going on specs...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3415&p=1

The 1GB model... however much that happens to cost, pretty much outperforms the GTX280 and GTX260Core216. However, performance is pretty much totally based on what games you'll be playing. If you're playing Valve games or a few others, ATI is a better option. If you're a Crysis fanatic, NVIDIA is the way to go.

 

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