A friend wants a new desktop gaming machine, and has a total budget of $1400. He's already found a new monitor which eats up $170 of that, leaving him with $1230 for the rest of the machine. Does anyone feel up to the task of making hardware recommendations for him?
Ebay. I built my own computer and bought the parts off of ebay like a year or two ago, and my rig is still highly competitive. The hardest peices to get are gonna be the graphics card and processor. RAM and hard drive space is common and cheap. If he stalks ebay and pounces on a good deal for his graphics card and a nice quad-core processor, from a reliable seller, he'll be laughing. The market for Nvidia graphics cards has actually got a little worse now they're phasing out the old GT's in favour of 9000's and pretending they're better cards because the numbers are larger.
An NVidia 8800 GT graphics card,
if he can find the 1024mb version, will compete with most of the other high-end expensive crap that Nvidia is trotting out these days, and they're cheap, too. Don't get a "dual core" 512 mb card. 2x 512mb does not equal a 1 gig card, in the same way that a dual-engine car does not have double the top speed of a single engine car. Likewise with a quad core processor, if you see a "4 ghz processor" quad core processor being marketed on the cheap, it's 4x1 ghz core. I have an Q9300 intel processor, but AMD are competitive nowadays and the price on Intel processors may've shrunk, so I dunno.
Been a while since I've done this, and I wasn't particularly tech savvy even at the time, but if he's got any questions, stick him onto me.
