Gaming PC?

[EcHoFiiVe]

Basically I want to undertake a project to build my own gaming PC. Now I know absolutely zero about the inner workings of computers beyond like the display and hard drive. What I want to use it for is Call of Duty 4 Promod if anyone is familiar with it, and probably Counter-Strike:Source. Those will most likely be the most intensive games I would be playing seeing as they are fast paced FPSs. I may also start playing WoW again on occasion, but my MacBook can run that fine on high settings so I don't think that would be a big deal. I would like to have the option to record high quality videos with Fraps or something else of the sort, so when giving advice about this please keep that in mind. Finally I may decide to edit videos and do digital art stuff on this thing, so I would like it to be able to comfortably run After Effects, Vegas, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Any advice regarding what components are needed or how I would actually go about building this thing would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

 

[Wolfram23]

You need a budget, first.

Secondly, go here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum-31.html

Third, when you think you've picked some parts you want, google comparisons and benchmarks and see what the cost is to step up to better parts. There's a lot you can do.

FYI by the sounds of it, you could get a PC to do that with less than $1000 easy. Probably $700-800 would do the trick if your funds are limited. You could put one together for even less if necessary but anyway... budget is important...

 

[purf]

you could get a PC to do that with less than $1000 easy.

Very much seconded. I paid ?600 for mine (not built) and that was more than 2 years ago and it still runs everything reasonably fine. Granted, I have a ridiculous old screen here so I'm operating at the lower ends of resolutions but then again, I also use it for realtime digital art stuff and have yet to hit its limits.

 

[Thaliur]

I bought a 1100?-PC in 2004. It still handles pretty much everything, although I have to be careful with the graphics settings in very new games. ME2 runs quite fine though.

I might have been lucky, but apparently paying a little more than planned for a new PC can really pay off in the long run. Seven years is pretty good I think. THe only thing I remember upgrading so far is the harddrive.

 

[number2301]

You're not asking for much of a PC there. You haven't said what your budget is but the spec I'd go for today is an Intel I5 2500k and a Geforce GTX 460. Completely overkill for what you want but would be fairly future proof.

 

[thethingthatlurks]

1) Get a few screwdrivers. Trust me, you'll need 'em.
2) Name a budget. You can get a PC for just about any price north of $300, but its capabilities will increase drastically with a larger budget.
3) Any preferences vis-a-vis AMD/ATI vs Intel/Nvidia? Personally I like all AMD systems, but that's just me and a decade of fanboyism and experience talking.
4) Don't forget, OS is not included. Set some money aside for that

 

[MaxP779]

GTX 560 was released today as well so that should push prices on the 460 down.

 

[oplinger]

Basically I would like to have the option to record high quality videos with Fraps or something else of the sort, so when giving advice about this please keep that in mind. Finally I may decide to edit videos and do digital art stuff on this thing, so I would like it to be able to comfortably run After Effects, Vegas, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Any advice regarding what components are needed or how I would actually go about building this thing would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

For the bold part, the big limiter on that is your hard drive. Not space, but write speed. It's a huge bottleneck if you're thinking "oh I want 60 frames at 1080"

for the rest, just about anything would be able to run those, as far as the editing goes, rendering the movie would be what takes the longest, and that depends on what you're doing to the movie too.

As for components, rather than tell you what to get...I'd rather just explain what you're looking for. But that'd make for a huge post that probably won't interest you at all <.< so I'll let everyone else tell you what components you MUST HAVE and stuff.