GamersBeyond Community Blog

Every day more and more computers are bought by, and sold to consumers who are uninformed as to the system they are purchasing. When a consumer goes into the nearest electronics retail outlet the sales employees that said consumer comes in contact with have no intention to teach the consumer anything about their purchase, their only interests lay in making a sale, whether it be for commission or for sales numbers.

This is bad news for the consumer, especially when they intend to play games or experience high-definition content. The fact is that base model computers just don’t have the processing power to handle content outside the realm of office applications; and when they are sold under the false pretenses of expandability or “future proof” claims, then ultimately it is the consumer that suffers.

That is the main purpose of this blog, to inform the game ready consumers on PC parts and peripherals that give them the experience they want for the price they want to pay. Everybody wins, the consumer gets exactly what they want without all the fluff and hardware manufacturers and decent retailers turn a profit and continue to produce and sell top of the line products.

If you haven’t guessed yet, the consumers mentioned previously are you, my readers. My plan with this section is to frequently build you guys systems, or at least spec them, that have all the features that you, the avid gamer, need and none of the crap that you don’t. Each weekly (or so) spec will fall into a predefined outline, either extremist, high-end, midrange, casual, or portable. These outlines will have rules and associations to clarify each of them, but the quality that all systems will have is their ability exceed the recommended system requirements of whichever game is deemed worthy at the time of the post. The reasons for this should be obvious; we don’t want to promote any system that cannot play new games. Do realize though that if you come here looking for a casual system, that said system may not be able to run the newest games at full resolution while maintaining a decent frame-rate.

And lastly as there are so many considerations when purchasing a new system from parts that we cannot be held responsible for any failed attempts at recreating a spec sheet. These lists are merely suggestions of systems we would buy or build, and should thusly be treated as such. If your experiences vary from our intended experiences the variables that could have caused such results are completely out of our hands, though if you have questions or concerns about a certain build we would be more than happy to help you.

For our first Rigg, we are going to shoot for the casual gamer. Don’t be confused into interpreting casual as net only, this system will meet, if not exceed the recommended system requirements of Crysis. The casual gamer is one who maybe doesn’t have all the time or money to keep up with the newest tech; they worry about stability and ability more than graphics. Our concern for these gamers is to provide a system inside their budget that will play every game out today, and have the option for inexpensive upgrades in the future to play games that have yet to be released.

This list is broken into 3 sections: Primary, Secondary, and Other; all of these sections represent the order that you should prioritize updates. for example if you have a keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard drives, cd drives, etc… then you don’t need to worry about buying those things and instead should focus your upgrades with the first 2 rows. The total price for this setup after rebates is $1068 just slightly over the $1000 price range desired for a casual gamer. lets take a look at the pieces and why I chose them.

The Phenom X4 9600 CPU is a damn good processor and when bought with the HDD you get a $60 instant rebate making it cheaper than most other processor/hdd combined prices. On top of the price, it is a black edition which means the multiplier is unlocked leaving it open for over-clocking, a feature you don’t get on Intel for under $1000.

The motherboard is from a reputable manufacturer, ABIT and includes an HDMI-out plug so when used with Media Center your new gaming machine can double as a HD digital media player for your TV.

The Video card was chosen to fit the needs of the recommended Crysis requirements. and it includes the game Witcher, a damn fun experience if you haven’t played it yet. the DDR2 memory is a great value now so there is no reason to not get the best. And the rest of the peripherals were chosen to fit the price point, but are all things that if I were to have this same budget I would be happy with.

Just remember when you build this system it isn’t designed to max out the settings but instead to provide an enjoyable gaming experience to those that regularly use their systems for other purposes.

until next time…

-shegs