Expert: Dennis Fastenow - 12/12/2001

Question
For a school project, I am designing the computer and networking for a large game review company.  Could you suggest a good high-end gaming system and a lower cost one?  What kinds of parts should I look for.

There would be about 250 computers in use, so I need some good ones for testing more demanding games, and lower ones for other games.  If you can give me some ideas it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Grant Emsley

Answer
These days the perfomance diff between the low cost and and the high cost units are very slim but here are my recomendations for the high end (ultra high end)

AMD XP 1800+ processor      beats the Intel by a slim margin

asus A7V266 mainboard  DDR ram goodness!

GeForce 3 video card Ti 500

Adaptec 39160 SCSI controller card

36 gb Seagate cheetah drive (ultra 160 SCSI @ 160meb/sec transfer rate 10,000 rpm)

Plextor ultra SCSI CD reader and burner

256 meg DDR ram      Get the good stuff  (corsair,micron)

Creative Live Platinum sound card

Lian Li aluminum case           (better cooling)
sparkle 400 watt power supply
Klipsh pro media speakers

Viewsonic ps790 monitor  (very clean 19" screen, I still think the tube looks better than an LCD )


this will set you back about 4000 if you do it yourself and for the "lower end the same processor and mainboard (cost is not that far off from the lesser models)

Geforce 2 video card or the new radeon 8500 are getting good reviews and both are VERY fast and notall that expensive.

the other thing that changes is the cd/HD setup
here you can use the Raid zero setup on the main board with two 7200 rpm IDE hard drives (raid delivers near SCSI performance ! at an affordable price now) then you could get IDE cd rom and burner drives Plextor makes the burner but not a cd reader (cd writers tend to have a longer access time than a plain reader)

to cut cost more you can delete the burner and 1 HD and just run it at the ATA-100 spec still no slug action here!

feel free to ask more if you need I will try and get back to you sooner   Dennis      AKA jetmutant@earthlink.net