What computers make good gaming computers?

Answer 1

It all depends. If you want brand name systems, go with something like Alienware. If you build your own or are considering a custom system, here are some pointers:

• Use benchmarks to help you shop for components.
• The latest of the Intel processors are great, but remember that in gaming, clock speed helps you more than the number of cores you have.
• Go with a high end video card. Those using the Nvidia Fermi are at the top. The latest Nvidia cards provide CUDA support, and that can even be used for non-GPU tasks.
• The more video RAM the better. That allows the cards to store all the textures and video data used in the game so the processor, hard drive, and bus won't have to keep loading that data.
• Multi-GPU cards are probably better than using SLI or Crossfire, but you could combine multi-GPU video cards in a multi-card arrangement.
• Get a lot of system memory and use all the channels to take advantage of channel banking.
• If you do online or networked gaming, then make sure you have decent network support. The 1 gig LAN controllers are good.
• Hard drives are another bottleneck. If price is no object, than get a SSD drive that comes on a PCIe card. If you want to use cheaper SSDs, then you should use two in RAID 0. If you use a performance array of cheaper SSD drives and you do stuff besides games, then you might want to boot from a regular hard drive (or 2 in RAID 1) and use the solid state stuff for the games in case of failure. It might do good to avoid Sandforce driven SSDs.

Answer 2

There is no one specific answer to this question.

Computers do not have specific names that you can list as good or bad; what most people toss around are brand names and the trouble with brand names is those companies typically make dozens if not hundreds of different kinds of computers all at different price points.

I can't tell you that 'a dell' or 'a mac' is good for something at a particular price point when those are company names and they both make a huge selection of models, all of which change prices on a regular basis.

Also, it depends on how you define 'good' and for what type of games. If you want something good for facebook games than virtually any cheap computer on the planet that is capable of running a web browser is going to be good enough.

If you want something good for a high end game you are not likely to find a pre-built model for under 800, but if you built one yourself than you could potentially build something fairly decent

I suggest you study a magazine like PC gamer and get a better understanding of what you are asking.

What you need to understand is the specifications of the games you are trying to play. Once you have decided on the games you want to play than you will be able to select the pieces of hardware that you need. Than you need to find a computer with that kind of hardware, or put it together yourself.

Just for example: If you select a game that REQUIRES a $900 video card; you aren't going to find a 'good' computer, or any computer that includes that card for less than $800, it just won't exist.

On the other hand if you are trying to play games that require 10 year old computer parts, you may not even need to spend $400, let alone $800 and it will be 'good' enough for those games.

So in summary this question cannot be answered without knowing what games you are trying to play; and the answer is going to be a list of computer parts needed to play that game. That list of parts then needs to get compared to whatever selection of computer models happens to be available on any given day, or build it yourself.