Shadowex3

Well everyone's already said Seagate/WD so I'll just throw out one last trivia tidbit: Maxtor hdd's make music when they die.

Akaru: seriously man, Tink saying something like that suprises you still?

Which means it's pretty much worth nothing since those listings are utter crap. The best way to tell if a given comp can run a given game and a given set of settings is to find a site like anandtech and start checking their CPU and GPU benchmarks to see what performs at what level.

Then if you're fine when doing the 100tic server test there's something wrong between you and the SG servers. I get 50+ loss/choke on the GG server while other people run it just fine, all it means is a pipe somewhere got bungled.

Choke = Server wants to send you data but can not send you data. Might be because your rates are set too low, might be because the server's incapable of holding the rates/ticrate it's set to, might be because you have a bottleneck somewhere. Wireless doesn't = choke unless you're using a really slow one like B or G. Wireless N should have the bandwidth for gaming so the packets WILL be sent. The problem is that wireless gives you something much worse, wireless = LOSS. You get a little interference here, some weak signal there, and you start recieving incomplete packets or missing them entirely and then REALLY BAD SHIT happens with Source. If you're getting choke but no loss try playing on any TRUE 100tic server, one that "net_graph 3" will show "100/s" on the right right of the "IN:" and "OUT:" lines (second and third line of the net_graph). If you can play on a 100tic server with your rates maxed out and no choke/loss that means it's serverside. Otherwise it's on your side and you need a wire. p.s. Wireless sucks for gaming.

WRONG jimmy, the 9400's a stripped down POS that's going to be LESS impressive than an 8800. Minimum requirements listings are bullshit.

Also note the capitalization is important. MB=megabyte, mb=megaBIT. 8 bits = 1 byte. If you're asking about harddrives it's 1TB=1024GB, if you're asking about the internet you're probably working with 1 terabit = 128 gigabytes instead of 1024.

Since he did a nice long writeup I'll do a TLDR for you: Case holds everything. Everyone spooges for 120mm fans because they are very quiet and move much more air with a lot less noise than smaller fans, plus the noise they do make isn't as high pitched so it's not nearly as annoying. Toolless means that you don't need screws to put in listed as such. It's generally best to pick a case in person if you aren't ordering one of the well known models, that way you get a feel for it and make sure it's not a flimsy POS. Motherboard's where everything plugs into. Just get a nice midrange Asus or Gigabyte board with the right socket for your processor and you're probably fine. Resist the temptation to buy open-box or recertified stuff. You can't plug in the power cords where they don't belong. The plugs are shaped to stop you from doing that wherever possible. Ram. It's there. Just buy the recommended amount (4gb for everything except core i7, 6gb for i7) from the cheapest thing that has both a lifetime warranty and a heat spreader from: Gskill, Geil, Corsair, OCZ, and Mushkin for ram (Corsair and OCZ are likely the cheapest too). Don't worry overmuch about the #-#-#-## speed things, just pick one roughly symmetrical and with a lower final number and that doesn't take overmuch electricity. 7-7-7-12 and 2.1v beats 5-7-5-10 at 2.1v and 5-5-5-10 at 2.8v for example. Videocard... just get whatever benchmarks highest in your price range from: XFX, EVGA or BFG-Tech. Remember that the AMPS are what count, not the volts. 600v is enough for ANY gaming computer that isn't using SLI, and you shouldn't be using SLI it's a waste of money compared to saving it and upgrading more often, but picking a power supply that gives good amps on the 12v rail is important. CPU's need heatsinks too. learn to love anandtech's reviews, otherwise just get what us crazy overclockers tell you to in a given price range. When in doubt Thermalright anything and arctic silver thermalpaste win by default. Pick the best benchmarking CPU in your price range, be it AMD or Intel. Goes in the slot one way usually, pretty hard to mess up. Mounting the heatsink will take more force than you're comfortable using, as long as you aren't bending the motherboard you should be fine. Power supply is important. It can and will kill everything else in the computer, it can and WILL kill YOU if you do not treat it with respect. Always install this in the computer case first, then plug it into the wall. That grounds your entire case and prevents static from frying your shit, the amount of static it takes to kill everything is less than humans can physically feel so don't think "if i dont feel zapped its ok". Only ever buy a power supply from: Corsair, Seasonic, or PC Power and Cooling. If you MUST buy another one, and trust me you will NEVER need to unless you get taken in by "ooh shiny" read the review at jonnyguru.com. I'm not joking, asking any power supply questions of anyone who knows something about anything will just get you linked to his website. Drives: Seagate and Western Digital for hard drives. Get SATA for everything including DVD burners. Don't spend more than about $30 tops on a DVD drive, they're not that big of a deal. And remember, there's a thousand opinions but Anandtech and Jonnyguru will provide hard unarguable facts for why they say what they do. Always trust fact, always listen to but suspect opinion. There is an objective measurable value to every computer part, if you know what you need you can find what is unarguably the best part for you if you know where to look.

Drivers != software.

Everything HP I've worked with tends to have annoying software that makes it a bitch to get things working.

http://www.amazon.com/Technica-ATH-AD700-Audiophile-Headphones-Neodymium/dp/B000CMS0XU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1254518872&sr=1-2 ^^^ These are also excellent quality headphones if you prefer their design to the HD555, Audio Technica's roughly equal to Sennheiser on the quality scale. Think Razr vs Logitech = Audio Technica vs Sennheiser. As for the cable, I've got HD595's which are basically just the bigger brother to the HD555's and aside from being insanely comfortable (nothing even touches your actual ears, it sits on your head AROUND your ears) the cable's made of the same woven cloth exterior and thick beefy insulation that the logitech g5 mice have. I would however strongly recommend getting one of those audio cable extenders to use because the connector for these things is enormous and it's a LOT of weight and leverage to put on a tiny little bitty plug, easy to break with a really small amount of pressure.

Speaker settings in the options menu ingame. It's kinda complicated and for the most part requires an X-fi soundcard. Basically though if windows and CS thing you're using 5.1 surround sound (has to be windows too, Source is wierd like that) you can divorce your X-fi from those two settings by unclicking the "sync with control panel" thing and set the X-fi settings to headphones and CMSS3d and get pretty much perfect headphone audio. But in order for CS to not sound like ass you need to set snd_Digital_surround to 1 and i don't know if it works with any other settings because I haven't tried. It's not a subtle thing, if it does actually work you WILL notice the difference, sound goes from being kinda muddy and dull sounding to a lot crisper and clearer. It's like how things sound kinda faint and blah when you have your headphones not plugged in all the way but enough that they still put out whatever sounds are playing compared to having it plugged in right.

They don't tell you the THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) which throws up an immediate red flag, and in my experience any headphone claiming to either alter the sound or be a "gaming" headphone usually means Very Bad Things. Generally when headphones are built for gaming or designed to alter sound for it what that means is that it's designed like a bose, as in "No Highs, no Lows, it must be a Bose". Big boomy midrange bass may make gunshots and footsteps stick out compared to other sounds, but at the cost of a lot of noise and loss of audio quality as well as being useless for listening to music or really anything else. Your brain is hardwired to interpret sounds, you want a headphone to do as little alteration to the sounds as possible both for clarity and for less ear fatigue. Listening to all that THOOMBOOMBOOM in the mids with the highs and lows clipped off will very quickly wear your ears out, that's why I suggest to everyone using headphones to play with "snd_digital_surround" set to "1" rather than the default of "0" and in 5.1 mode. Especially if they have a CMSS3D compatible soundcard. On top of that for the price of those things you could easily get a nice set of Audio Technica's or Sennheiser HD555's which are absolutely known to be pretty much the most popular gaming headphones among anyone who isn't getting paid to use them. The fact that Steel Series always hides their THD levels while everyone worth anything (Sennheiser, audio technica, etc) brags about how low theirs is should tell you something about the "quality" of Steel's products. P.s. get an audio-jack headphone and not a USB one. Better quality sound AND it'll work with ANY soundcard you get by default.

Would you hurt me if I suggested The Sims?

actually in most of the benches I've seen even my old Q9450 (not even made anymore) outperforms most of the phenom II's.

Wrathek: I posted benchmarks, newegg's got prices. There's no room for opinion or argument in this, the best solution is very simply a matter of mechanically finding the highest performing system configuration that fits in his budget.

I'll give you the specific reasons I'm wary of either one of those: 1. They only list "dynamic" contrast ratio which, for reasons I'll explain when not cooking or you can google, is basically a bullshit number. 2. They both claim response times so low that I wouldn't trust them. 3. They are both TN panels. That means Twisted Nematic, the link I posted to [H]ardforum explains why that's bad. 4. 1920x1080 @60hz is low refresh rates and a low resolution for that size. and lastly for the price of either of those you can get screens that do 1920x1200 or higher. Take This 23" samsung for example. Still a TN panel I think but at that resolution likely a much better quality one. What you need to do is go someplace like OCforums or [H]ardforum and ask them to recommend you a good non-TN panel LCD monitor. I guarantee you for the prices you're looking at you can have something better than those. Hell man just look at newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010190020%201106209153&name=1920%20x%201200 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010190020%201106246724&name=2048%20x%201152 So go ask the flatpanel experts over there. They're both very friendly forums that are quite welcoming to newcomers with legit questions like yours.

Whenever a post is deleted it leaves a note on the forum saying "Deleted by X admin for Y reason", and odds are if it was serious they'd let you know about it in PMs or something. I asked beth the same thing when i got on in class yesterday.

An LCD only has 1 native resolution, all others are just proportional to that so that it either scales properly across the fixed pixels or sits centered evenly across the fixed pixels. Only CRTs can have multiple "native" resolutions in that they are run at a minimum of 85hz.

Do you mean whole computers or just parts? [edit] http://www.resellerratings.com, just check out newegg vs bestbuy's ratings to get an idea of how significant this place is. It's not unsuprising for a well trafficked site to have hundreds of thousands of ratings.

Okay this is kinda freaky, I wrote up and posted a good explanation of all this stuff and the difference between 720P/1080P and why that salesman was basically lying through his teeth (summary: my monitor from 1996 does a higher resolution than 720P, go for 1080P) No idea where it went, it apparently wasn't deleted by an admin because that leaves a notice and I've got no PMs or anything, so here's the link to the different panels: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1039222 Summary of important things: Those #ms response times aren't necessarily tested by any standardized method, they can literally just make that up if they want, computer monitors are much sharper and smaller pixels since they aren't built to be used from across the room but rather right up in front of your face, computer monitors do 1920x1200 (1200P) instead of 1920x1080, and TN panels are pretty nasty man. And to any forum mods: Seriously dudes if you guys did delete that stuff rather than a database funky happening or something let me know why, if I don't even get a PM or something on why I don't know even know if it was just lag preventing it from ever getting posted to the server to begin with.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3492&p=12 http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts/3DMark-Vantage-1.0.2-CPU,1398.html I've said it before, i'll say it again. Phenoms are underpowered. If you want a gaming computer for $800 or less you go with AMD, if you can afford $800 or MORE you go with core i7. This is not complicated, there's not much to debate. The numbers are RIGHT THERE, it's not a matter of opinion, it's an easily and objectively measured fact. AMD for a cheap gaming computer, Core i7 for larger budgets. Honestly I don't get how you people can argue so much about this when the benchmarks and newegg's price listings will decisively prove what's true and not. If the guy wants a sub $900 gaming computer build it with a Phenom2.

Are you deadset on a flatpanel, what size do you want, what resolution do you want. For $150 you're probably getting either a really some MVA/IPS panel or the usual middlesized but mediocre quality TN panels.

Looks like Thermaltake went Lian Li.