Quote:
Originally Posted by JivinJeffJones
Thanks for the tips so far guys! Keep em coming. My eyes are opening.
As for sound (re harddrives etc), it's really not an issue for me. If I can hear my hardware then my music/game volume clearly isn't high enough.
And $5000 isn't a totally iron-clad cap. Alas, I have no sense of perspective when it comes to Fallout 3. Tips for saving money are still appreciated, though, and will get due consideration.
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I'll just say that there's a good chance you could get all the stuff I suggested, and the stuff they're suggesting (like hi-resolution monitors), and have a
really good system. If you do, it might go a little over (although it might stay in range since you've still got about $1000 unspent on the system I suggested). but I'd rather send something myself than have you save money and get lesser equipment.
I looked into it, and I think you could easily get a monitor and sound card like they describe for about $700 more than I described earlier. That would leave you with about $300 (out of the $5000) for your mouse, keyboard, case, cooling system, OS, and speakers. If you go even a little over (which you may not have to), then you can get the whole thing done right. You should know that one reason I'm suggesting such high requirements is because it's hard to get XP these days, and if you get stuck with Vista, you need a lot more hardware to do the same thing at the same speed. Trust me, I've got Vista on the new computer my father purchased for me, and even though it's got pretty high-end stuff (including 4GB ram, although it's fairly slow ram), everything runs rather sluggishly if I put a mildly demanding task on it. In fact, I'll probably end up not playing games on it at all, and just running SETI@Home on it while surfing the Internet and running several Office 2007 applications. That kind of multitasking is about all it seems to be good at (possibly due to the fact that he got a Q6600 quad-core). Not only that, it sucks three times as much power as my old computer, and I had to move it upstairs because it kept tripping the circuit breaker when it was on the same circuit as my refrigerator or TV set.
One tip... you can cut the memory cost in half by only buying one (rather than two) of the packages I mentioned. This would give you 4GB rather than 8GB, but you probably don't really need 8GB right now, and you could always upgrade later. Please don't skimp on RAM speed, though. You'll regret it.