Gaming Computer - Recommendations?

[Charlie Wilkes]

Mine was an HP and at the time I couldn't buy the parts (including the 24" LCD) for the price that we were selling it for at work. My problems are that I can't run the CreationKit for Skyrim very well and I'm bottlenecked at both the RAM and SATA. I added a Samsung 470 SDD and migrated my OS there, but because it's an older SATA connection it has hardly decreased my boot time. I could add more RAM, but it wouldn't be higher speed than what I'm already running. I've switched the case and replaced the power supply.

AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core 2.2 GHz
5 GB of RAM 640 GB in two HDD and 120GB on SDD
My roommate's old ATI Radeon HD 5700

EDIT: Mine will not run Skyrim at full settings, but I do have a ton of mods. I want to be able to run the Creation Kit well, and the new X game when it comes out at full settings on my two screens. I won't be able to because I don't see myself having any money in the next few months...*sigh*

If you can come up with $50, you might be able to scrape off a little rust with this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-Phenom-...sor-/130991235207?pt=CPUs&hash=item1e7fafa087

 

[Grizzly Bear]

Operating System
Windows 8 Pro with Media Center 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 3820 @ 3.60GHz
Sandy Bridge-E 32nm Technology
Quadcore
RAM
16.0GB DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASRock X79 Extreme4 (CPUSocket)

Graphics
SAMSUNG (1920x1080@60Hz)
Cintiq 22HD (1920x1080@60Hz)
1280MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (EVGA) 130 °F

Hard Drives
1863GB Seagate ST2000DM001-9YN164 (SATA) 90 °F

Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW UH12LS29
ELBY CLONEDRIVE SCSI CdRom Device

Audio
NVIDIA High Definition Audio

^^^(Original OS was windows 7) Was the setup I bought last year. The processor is mid-grade for the core-i7 types but this setup's done pretty well with BattleField 3, Diablo III, Crysis, and the 3D software I use for work, and of course photoshop. It was $1800 though, above the OP's budget but I saw some better prices and more processor cores back then if there was a willingness on trading off on RAM that came out of the box.

The office I work in recently bought a beast machine with 64GB of RAM and 12 cores... which... was astounding, and imaginably expensive but... anyway...

 

[Damien Evans]

Well, you can never get too much RAM.

- Funny, it wasn't that long ago when 16G was a whopping big harddisk.

- Actually, I remember when 40MB was a big HD, but then, I'm ancient.

Hans

My first hard drive on a windows 95 laptop was, from memory, about 400 megabytes.

My current laptop is 450 gigabytes, with another 1.5 terabytes of external drive sapce.

 

[malicus]

Hard drive? Whazzat??

My dad, in a effort to cut a little cost, was convinced by a bloke in a pub that a real gaming computer needed as much memory as possible, and he should buy the meaty 48k version of the Spectrum.

Happy days.