Post
by welwyn » 26 Jul 2012, 04:54
Keyboards, the Logitech G11, or similar is awesome for gaming, I'm sure others can attest to this as well!
Razor mice are awesome, Deathadder or copperhead or both very good, solid mice, I used the copperhead for 4 years before upgrading to the Razor Naga.
Speakers, go as good as you can afford, the difference between a $20 speaker set and a $900 system is HUGE, songs sound so different on them. Same with a headset, get something decent, you will like it, your teamates will love it!.
Now onto the Comp hardware, Your AMD Phenom II X4 955 is a quad core 3.2ghz cpu, however performance wise its nowhere near the iseries, even i3 at 3.2ghz. The i5-2500k at 3.3ghz is a beastly cpu, and not that expensive either. Its an H2 chipset (LGA1155 ) So make sure you get the right motherboard! the P67H2-A2 Is a solid choice of mobo, but it may be above your price range, at roughly $200.
Next up is ram, which on the sandybridge architecture is limited to 1333mhz without overclocking and meddling with the bios, which if your not sure what your doing I don't recommend. You can easily do 2 x 4gb, leaving further expansion of another 2x4gb if you later need it, but 8gb is pretty decent. Get the lowest latency ram you can afford as well, it def makes a difference!
I'm not up to date on gfx cards, but the P67H2-A2 mobo I said about earlier supports 2 x pci-16 slots, and they are far apart enough to fit in the dual socket cards of today! Essentially you can have a powerhouse in that pc! If you provide a price range I'm sure we can look at more specific options for you!
Power supply. Often an overlooked component, it has the greatest possibility to cause high damage. I cannot stress this enough, but get a good quality power supply that can supply a good 20-50% more power than you need. For example, your entire pc uses 750w, get a 950w or a 1100w psu. Don't try and scrimp on them, it can cost you dearly!
I'd also look at things like a custom cpu cooler, standard coolers tend to not cut the mustard when gaming. The extra 5c might not make much difference when playing minecraft, but when you want to play the latest HD games, that 5c can be the difference between awesome FPS, and burning the cpu out!
On the same note, your tower is important as well, good airflow is important. If you have room, fullsize tower cases give you more room for cabling, and air will flow much easier. Other important factors are metal cases are cooler, but heavier / costlier, and will the components fit!
Disk drives are not that important nowadays with everything downloadable. Your current drive will work fine for the odd game that does need a disk.
HDD you want to get the highest rpm you can. Do searches for read and seek times, not all 10k drives are the same speed. A 7200rpm drive for mass storage is also a good addition.
You wanted speakers, so a good quality sound card if you can fit it ( do some research on the gfx card sizes, and the mobo first) can really help!
Hopefully this gives you something to think about, just always research before you buy, if it comes down to it provide links to the items and we can say if it works!
