It's been my experience that PC manufacturers will sell you a PC that contains already out-dated hardware . It's best just to build your own . A good video card is the Geforce 7800GT 256 , not quite top-of-the-line , but an excellent card . It sells for about $300 , a good sound card $75 , a good AMD 939 motherboard $125 , PSU (power supply unit)$75 , good AMD Dual Core Processor $370 , fan and heatsink $40 , Seagate Barracuda 300GB Hard drive $140 , 2 of your favorite optical drives $60 . Decent ATX mid-tower case $125 , keyboard and mouse $50 , monitor well....the sky is the limit , OS $150 . For $1500 or so (less the monitor ) , you can have a stronger PC than Dell or HP or any other can build for you . Oh , I almost forgot RAM , 1GB add another $100

This machine would be capable of running the best FPS system hogs at very high res. , and maximum settings.

Take a lookie here ,

System Build

GB has something for everyone! I want to thank Billie Bob for the link re dual booting, which helped to answer my question and to thank Robert for the System Build link, which was very educational, and I'd have to commend Corsair (and the writer) for doing a great job. (But it was a painfully slow d/l with dial-up;-)

Hi Merle ,

Your welcome . I thought that system build article was quite fascinating myself .

Robert, I want to build my own someday. Excellent link - I bookmarked it. I'm still a little intimidated by the over-clocking though! My step-son and I are talking about building one for the grand-son. Yeah, I know. Grandmas aren't supposed to be into this stuff.

Jersey doc, a hearty welcome to Gameboomers! I have what I consider to be the ideal setup for me. I kept my old 98SE computer (reformatted and reinstalled the 98SE OS for a brand new start with that one). My new(er) computer is an hp that I simply love. It has a P4 processor with hyper-threading at 3.0 GHtz; I upgraded to 1 G of RAM; a decent 128 MB Raedon Sapphire video card; 160 G hard drive etc. It's already outdated, but I can do everything I want with it. What I did to make this system work for me was to put in a wireless network and then use a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch which allows me to double tap my Scroll Lock key and switch between the two computers using the same monitor, keyboard and mouse. I'm playin Grim Fandango right now on the old computer (which wouldn't even load on my XP computer). If I need to touch base with a walkthrough, I just switch to my XP or vice versa if I'm playing on my XP. I love the set-up.

As far as a new one goes, do a lot of research. There have been a couple of great threads lately on GB addressing the same question. You've already gotten the best advice - get something you can upgrade. Avoid the ones with integrated graphics etc. I'm not a huge fan of Dells, but many people love them. The issues I have with Dells or hps like I have is they put a huge amount of things on them that I don't want. Then I have to go in and uninstall, delete, edit the registry etc. But stick around. I'm sure you'll get plenty of good advice here!

Hi Draclvr ,

From what I read near the end of the article , over-clocking the processor is pretty straight forward . They over-clocked their processor and got another 200MHZ out of it , essentially changing it from a 2.2 GB to a 2.4 GB .

They didn't get into over-clocking the video cards , however , most Nvidia cards that you buy come slightly over-clocked out of the box ( some more than others ) . I think the EVGA brand is the best to get .

I would suggest (having built several PCs for myself & others) that overclocking is an entirely separate issue and you need not concern yourself with it until you're completely confident fiddling with hardware and bios settings.

And anyway, in my experience, the gains available through overclocking are insignificant in the real world, rather than the megahertz obsessed world of the weenie overclockers

Gremlin

I don't know how one would get " confident " over-clocking their processor or video card until they've done it .

Some of the new First-Person-Shooter games are very demanding on hardware , that is " real world " .

There's nothing wrong with someone wanting to get the best performance possible out of their hardware . To call them " weenies " I think is a bit arrogant of you .

Hello Robert -- I'm sure gremlin was having a bit of a laugh at himself as a self-confessed hardware geek.

I always thought "weenies" were college students who studied very hard. The best way to shake the label was to do jumping jacks on the library table if you were caught studying there on a Saturday night.

I myself am within a day or two of ordering a new Dell. I have one last decision -- how much money should I plug into purchasing the video card?

I'm trying to decide between a 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX --

or a Dual 256MB PCI Express

Hi Becky ,

You could get the one with the single 256MB 7800GTX , and tell them you want the SLI motherboard , and a 500W PSU . That way , you could add another video card later if you think you need it . There aren't very many games out there at the moment that will really benefit from the SLI setup all that much , but I'm sure they're coming .

I admit it. I'm a total weenie. My step-daughter told me about a year ago I'd even passed her up in computer geekdom.

I am also a weenie then. I overclock anything and everything that is overclockable. The performance gains can be quite substantial.

Rusty

I think we should start a "Proud to be a Weenie" club.

Robert -- thanks for the extremely helpful input!

I think it may be time to move this thread into the Glitches forum, where we may get additional feedback from the experts, overclockers, and other kinds of hardware geeks that hang out there. So I'm copying the thread over there to Glitches.

I think you should mention that when you start over-clocking you should also think about cooling and adding extra fans.

That's a good point Geo . A good case with (2)120mm fans ( 1 intake , 1 exhaust ) is recommendable . Plus a good quality CPU fan and heatsink would be a must .

Another alternative to building your own system is to have it built by a local computer shop. You would be likely to get support from the person who built it. The only drawback to building your own system is the fact that each component has its own warranty not the whole system. Also, MS is releasing a new OS this year. You may want to keep thqat fact in mind when picking out components. Kay