Then his father needs to have a word. Step away from the Monitor, there's life outside.

 

Quick spend £2000 on a Mac!

 

lol which you cant play recent games on! yea!

 

 

To get anything half decent your going to be splashing out around 700 quid for an i5 2500k chip with a z68 mobo.
ATI will do a cheaper graphics card than nvidia, memory... stick to the 1600mhz ddr 3 stuff, you dont really need much more than that, 1tb hdd but those will be expensive due to the shortage at the moment, but look at places like overclockers, scan, dabs etc, some do pre built machines.

Tony

 

 

FWIW when i made the switch and started getting back into PC gaming properly, i think i remember Steam having around 3mil users on the stats page, then noticing it when it got to 3.3, then 3.6 seamed high, i remember checking at 3.8. i missed 4.0 all together and checking just now the peak today was 4.6million users.

That is crazy!

 

Steam saved PC gaming.

 

Top games today.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/?snr=1_4_4__10

 

I can't see how pc gaming will overtake console gaming, especially when the world is in a recession.
I used to love playing GP4 on my old mid-spec pc. Now I have an xbox 360 so I really don't see the point in spending close to £1k on a pc just for playing racing games.

 

Maybe because the games are cheaper ?

I spent around £600 on my machine IIRC, it has served me well, i have 271 games on steam now, and i only ever paid full RRP for one game (Dirt 3) and the RRP of a PC game is just about always cheaper than a console title anyway.

Usually a PC title is around £10 cheaper at RRP than the console counterpart, if i paid full RRP for all my titles, i would still be about 2.5k better off!

The more i buy, the more i save, not to mention that a lot of the time the PC version gets free DLC (although this is sadly dwindling) that is even more money saved.

I could stop paying for Xbox live to save a bit more, but i still play the odd round of Gears 3 on the xbox.

I would like a new GFX card at some point, i have been meaning to buy one for about 2 years now but i have just bought a load more games in a steam sale (all at least 50% off) and my current card is still rocking them fine

Batman AC with all DLC = £26, better graphics, runs spot on, just came out this year?

Cheapest console version i have found online was £25 without the DLC.

Yes you can trade console games in, but i dont think its worth it anymore, you dont seam to get **** all for them now they are all coming with codes in the box for a multiplayer pass (i`m allready paying XBL for ****ing multiplayer)

 

^^^^LOL - everytime I log into Steam I see you playing some new game

Companies making graphics cards for PCs must be annoyed with this love of consoles. Whilst PC gamers are having to put up with console ported games there really is no need to upgrade the GPU. I have a GTX460 and I've not had one game slow down on me. I upgraded from an I3 system to I5 purely because the I3 mobo conked out and the our company was doing some IT buying so I slipped a part or two into the list.

The mad rush to buy the lastest PC component to make the new game run has died out.

 

These days you should just future proof fork out a bit more so you don't have to upgrade for a considerable amount of time. At that point it would probably be worth buying a new one.

 

Two schools of thought there.

I'd rather spend 1/2 the price and have two fairly good gfx cards over a 3 year period rather than blowing it all in year one only to suffer towards the end of the year two as technology breezes your card into oblivion.

 

Really, thats basically the Motherboard and CPU.

RAM is cheap. SSDs will get cheaper/bigger. And graphics cards are on a constant cycle..buy whats current, maybe SLi/crossfireX it when prices drop for the same card.