tippy2k2 said:
Seriously? That's pretty impressive. Now again, I'm not a PC gamer so excuse my ignorance here:
From what I heard from the interweb, Crysis was supposedly the benchmark of PC gaming when it came out (was your computer 7 years old at the time or is it seven now? If it's seven now, that's not as impressive since Crysis is 5 years old).
Haha, it would have been 8 years old in a month from now, so at the time it was two years old. Crysis, however, as you said, was a benchmark of PC gaming. Many modern games don't reach its requirements to run on Maximum settings, and XCOM is unlikely to be an exception.
Anyway, my question is: How much does it cost for you to keep that thing updated enough to run modern games? It just seems like at some point, it would be much cheaper for you to just buy a new rig (which would come with the new Windows) than it would be to sink money into the old system.
To simply run modern games, absolutely nothing. I put an initial investment of about $1000 into it, and it served me faithfully until I decided to upgrade it last year to max out BF3, still running most games anywhere between medium and highest settings. That cost me around $600 for a new CPU, Motherboard, RAM and GPU. Since then I've had a bit of spare money, so I've spent another $500 getting a second Graphics card, a 2560*1440 monitor, an SSD, a new case and a few other bits and pieces.
The price of buying an entire rig is far more than that, however. You could get a pretty poor rig in store for $600, that would struggle to run Deus Ex; HR, or you could pay for something decent and end up spending $1000 to $1500, or even better get an Alienware for between 2 and 4 thousand just because it costs a lot and that makes it sound good, but buying the parts and assembling the computer yourself is often far cheaper.
As an example, $600 at my local computer stores would net me a rig with 4Gb RAM, an i3 CPU [Maybe i5 if I'm lucky], and either inbuilt graphics, or a low end last gen GPU. For that price I managed to get an unlocked i7 CPU @ 3.4Ghz, 12Gb of RAM, a new Motherboard, Liquid Cooling for the CPU and a 560Ti 2Gb. Buying a fully built rig tends to stack on a fairly hefty assembly cost, as well as the price of the case, harddrives, cooling, disk drive, OS, sometimes M&KB - all of which you'll generally have. Its cheaper to scavenge what you already own, and augment it with a few new bits and pieces than it is to grab an entire new setup.
