I wiant to put together a new gaming machine, everyone offers advice so I thought I would see what u lot think.

Advice on processor; Intel, AMD? and video cards please.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

I guess the question is: what kinds of games do you play? FPS types need to go much closer to the very leading edge than, say, RPGers or RTSs do. It's pretty expensive up there. Knowing what you like will likely alter our advice somewhat.

As a general rule of thumb, AMDs tend to be less expensive than Intel processors, but just as capable (if not more so, some months.)

You're fine with either NVidia or ATI. Go as big as you're comfortable affording. This is the centerpiece of your gaming rig. All other considerations (except the RAM) can be safely dialed back, sometimes surprisingly far, to keep the machine affordable. The video card, however, will generally make or break a gaming rig.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

What is your budget?
Is noise an argument? Is energy consumption?

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916

For graphics cards, I'd recommend nothing less than a 256MB card. Its pretty much the mainstay at the moment. If you've got a little extra scratch, the 512MB will keep you at the state of the industry for another five years or so. Graphics at this point are crawling through generational improvements because even if you were to cram a gigabyte of VRAM on a card, the rest of the system, even the card's interface with the motherboard, is too much of a chokepoint to make the most of it. Even games intended for 512MB cards aren't making too many great strides in improving on the 256's. Games that try too hard to be eye candy tend to fall REAL short on gameplay because of the graphics engine choking the system. So while a 512MB might be more muscle than the game demands, it definitely takes a game designed for 256MBs and smooths things out nicely.

If you're playing a game with any kind of serious AI opponent (Galactic Civilizations 2 has an AI that can impress Deep Blue, if you open up the settings on it to full throttle) or any game with heavy animation requirements, I'd go with nothing less than 2GB of RAM. While the graphics card handles the bulk of rendering duties, motherboard RAM seems to hold sway over animation graphic fluidity. This is key in FPS games or MMOs. Plus additional RAM helps the system balance between maintaining the server link and running the client and running any other background programs (like music players, or messaging softwares) without leaning too hard on the harddrive pagefile.

Other than that, the rest is pretty much negotiable. Harddrive space is pretty irrelevent, so long as you have enough for what you need. Most these days are Ultra ATA 100 or whatever, and that's been more than fast enough for anyone other than the most ridiculous powergamers. CPU requirements for most games that I've seen still have yet to break the 1.5GHz mark. It seems after breaking the GHz barrier, the CPU designers left the software eggheads in the proverbial dust. For the most part, anything better than 2GHz is sufficient overkill to keep you ahead of the game. Something to look into if you're getting a custom system done is bus speeds. If you can push them up over 500MHz, you can eliminate a real nasty hidden chokepoint in most systems, but this isn't overly critical unless you feel like picking nits.

I am putting it together myself, at the moment I have a Dell with a 2.7 ghz P4 and 512meg of Ram, 2 big SATA drives and an Nvidia FX GeForce 5600 XT.

Budget and assembly aren't a problem, I am a dell engineer. I am just outtof touch with the latest hardware for gaming. I mainly play FPS, faves being Far Cry, Call of Duty and the Thief games (thief 3 struggles on the highest settings, esp with some of the more amitious user maps that are bigger than the 'xbox friendly' 64meg max size that was forced on the original game.)

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Quadruple that and you're good to go. If you can get the hardware cheap, go with 4GB. The first rule of gaming rigs, you can never have too much RAM.

I would suggest the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB of RAM and the latest graphic card. As an alternative the Athlon64 X2 5000+

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916

Would a game make use of the Dual Core ?

how aboutthis as a vid card? ATI Radeon X1600 512MB PCI-E

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

As near as I've been told, yes, most games take advantage of dual core.

I'll vouch for that one. Its almost the exact beastie sitting my box at home, except that mine's an x1600 Pro. The only thing I'd recommend for Radeons is to head to their website and grab the Catalyst management software, if the card doesn't come with it bundled.

In the grand scheme of things, I've seen that more and more games tend to have some kind of partnership with nVidia, resulting in more ideal performance with nVidia cards, and fewer potential compatability issues.

I just bought a new machine (well, parts of a new machine). I have a very limited budget, but I hate the idea of buying hardware that won't last me at least five years. I didn't want to upgrade my video card (an nVidia 6600GT), but of course you'll want a newer one.

Anyway, the Intel Core 2 Duo e6300 is pretty cheap, and while good at stock speed, it apparently overclocks to some ridiculous performance levels. I've always been an AMD guy, but this was not even an option.

2 GB of RAM is standard in most pre-built systems, but I cheaped out with 1 GB, planning on buying another stick in a few months when I have more money. The thing to note about RAM these days is that you can get dual channel stuff, which improves performance a bit. The downside is that in order to use dual channel mode, you need two sticks which are exactly the same. So that's a decision you really have to make beforehand. I really wanted registered/ECC, but they don't make motherboards that support that any more, except for servers. Very sad.

I ended up with a motherboard from ASRock (a division of ASUS), because it supports the Core 2 Duo and AGP... it's dirt cheap, and it does what I want. Mobos are all pretty much the same except for features -- the performance differences are usually minor.

The worst thing is that my 1.4 GHz Athlon, now a good five years old, was good enough for pretty much anything I wanted to do. It lagged a bit on Splinter Cell: PT, but Guild Wars ran great. Too bad it can't add properly any more. (While people can sometimes get away with that, it is a bad thing for a computer.)

Anyway, about $550 Canadian gets me something pretty close to top of the line. Shell out another $250 or so for a good video card, and another $100 for RAM....

Oh, and someone mentioned above that UATA 100 was the standard interface for hard disks. SATA is more common now (and even my relatively ancient machine is UATA 133, albeit the parallel version).

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"It's turtles all the way down."

I'd advise you to take a bit of time to read through the cpu, motherboard and chipset reviews on a site such as Anandtech to familiarize yourself with the long-term impact of choices made now.

Games are about to become a lot more demanding, and some of those available now (eg Oblivion, Star Trek Legacy) can stress even the best of today's hardware.

For future-proofing, and if you can wait just a quarter or two, the PCI Express 2.0 standard was just completed, and chipsets will be released in Q2 2007 that comply with it's higher bus bandwidth, which will enhance gaming. The other issue is DX10 (Vista), which will take until 2008 to become commonly supported in games. The only cards that are DX10-compliant today are also the fastest, the 88xx series from NVidia. But they do run for quite a lot of $$$, so a good performing DX9 card from either ATI or NVidia is a good choice that will be viable for 18 months or so.

My own investment decision is to wait until Q2 and go for one of the low-cost yet highly overclockable Intel Core 2 Duo E6300's with the coming update to a 4MB L2 cache, a motherboard with an Intel or NVidia chipset that supports PCIe 2.0, 2-4GB memory, and all SATA drives only (including the optical drive(s)). Onboard audio is good enough for primetime, and so I will not add a sound card, which could also limit overclocking potential. If lucky I will find a motherboard that has both wi-fi and LAN connections. The video card choice will be made at system purchase time, with the best DX9 or DX10 card in published benchmarks that then retails for $300 or less.

The PSU is chosen last, and must support all the connections and power requirements of the other components, with extra connections and power for possible system additions. Cases and other elements are a question of taste, but if you decide on a cube or small form factor ( a sort of XBox-like PC), then the motherboard may need to be m-ATX, which can seriously limit the range of component choices and the gaming power of your system if you are not careful.