This Christmas I build a PC for playing games as a gift. There are some pictures here showing the "human side" of PC construction. I'm just going to write about the "technical" parts. The end result isn't perfect I'm sure but it's still about three to four times faster than any of the other machines I've got.
The constraints were that we were going to build the thing from scratch, it had to be able to play the latest PC games, and that everything had to be available at Fry's cause this was a last minute idea.
I used the ArsTechnica Buyer's Guide as the basic reference to give me an idea of what to look for. The current CPU recommendation is AMD, which I've used in the past and liked. I picked the motherboard possibilities based on this AnandTech motherboard review.
So off to Fry's we went to return with:
- AMD Athlon XP2000 processor
- Leadtek K7NCR18D motherboard
- 512MB of Mushkin memory
- WesternDigital WD800JB hard drive
- Sony CD-R/RW
- Radeon 9000 128MB DDR video card
- Enermax CS-307 case
- OEM version of Windows XP Home Edition (ick)
I think that's quite a list but at least there was no need for a floppy, keyboard, or mouse as I've got those bits already.
Putting the hardware together was pretty easy, as usual. All of the big bits are never any trouble, it's hooking up all of the leads to the leds on the front, usb ports etc. that's tricky. Installing windows was easy, though took a long time, RedHat's quicker. The only problem, and it took some time as was pretty frustrating, was trying to load the motherboard drivers. Every time we tried it would freeze up, and without the drivers the built in lan wouldn't work. Fortunately we noticed that the freeze was after the lan was enabled so I was able to download a later set of drivers from the web and they installed with no problem. Fortunately we've got a DSL line. Without that downloading 18MB of driver would be very painful. Of course once all that's done it's time to play windows update. Finally, after another 20MB (excluding the .NET Framework), we were ready to go.
So, how does it play? Fantastic. The No One Lives Forever, A Spy in HARMS way demo will run smoothly at maximum resolution. Lots of fun, not that I plan to do this anytime soon. I've sworn off windows at home so my PC gaming is over, well as long as I can resist it is anyway. It just takes up too much time that could otherwise be spent programming.
Posted by Alex at December 24, 2002 04:32 PM