But seriously, if you only get two things, get the Antec 900 case and one or two nvidia 8800 GTs. They’re cheap and totally amazing. Unless of course you want to wait for nvidia’s new cards (probably the only way crysis will ever run on very high settings with out insane triple sli).

Finally of course, if you have a lot (like seriously a lot) of spare cash that HP Blackbird 2 looks really sexy and it runs quiet as a whisper The best thing about it though is that its motherboard is compatible with nvidia’s sli AND ati’s crossfire so tons of upgrade options down the road.

If you want a cheap gaming pc, you’d be best off building one yourself. Here are some good site: http://www.newegg.com and tigerdirect.com.

Tiger Direct is the best and cheapest, because instead of having to buy a whole bunch of expensive parts you can buy a bare bones kit that comes with a case, power supply and all the other neccessary things including cpu. The only thing is that you have to assemble some of the parts.
Since you said that your not too good with building PCs, I recommend that you buy a static wrist guard (around 5 bucks or so at a crafts shop). It prevents electric damage to parts when your building. As for putting it all together, you should be fine as long as you have manuals.

Talking about Gaming PCs I think that it is better to stay with a vendor-made than a self-made computer.

Someone gave me this link once:
http://www.alienware.com/product_pages/desktop_all_default.aspx

Good luck gaming girl

There are a few Mac-focused game companies out there that are putting out some great titles, and some exclusives just for the Mac as well. Companies like Aspyr, Ambrosia, and *ahem* Freeverse. (yup, I work for Freeverse!)

If you’re looking at building, or even buying… you may want to check out the latest system guide at Ars. They’ve been doing this for years, and while I’ve never built one exactly to their specs, I have used their specs as a good starting point.

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200711.ars

Jason

It’s lot cheaper, and you get what you paid for. Several months back I finally upgraded and I can run most any PC game(except for Crysis that is, but that really is the only exception) and the final price was a little over $600.

Or you can just buy a Gaming PC from Costco or elsewhere: http://tinyurl.com/2jzr2y - My friend just bought this Gaming PC and he says it’s amazing. The price is kind of steep, but what you get is well worth the price tag.

Anyways, give it some thought about what you want to do, because after all I’m sure you’ll be sticking with this Gaming PC for along while.

As for the hardware I am a ‘get the best of 6~12 months ago’ builder so I built a rock solid encoding AMD dual core (£120 in Nov 2006) around a DFI board (RDX200 £30 new) Corsair HX 620 PSU x1650 Radeon 24 pipe (£85) 2GB G.Skill HZ’s (£100) with about a TB of HDD’s all in for about £600 with a supadupa Akasa case that did cost ~£95.

All that rig would need is a faster Gpx card if that is not up to it x1950XTX’s can be had for cheap money. Do yourself a favour an build a second box game PC.

You can always continue to wait “just a little bit longer” trying to get the newest hardware that is going to come out, but no one wants to wait forever. The fact is, Nvidia and Intel are just about to release their latest “uber high-end” products, so if you want to have the “latest and greatest” for at least a few months, then you should wait for Intel’s latest penryns, and Nvidia’s latest 8950gx2 (or whatever the next gen equivalent of the 7950gx2 is).

OK, so now that you have that background, I’ll give you two main scenarios - Balance, and High-Spec.

Balance - 8800 gt ($200) + Q6600 ($300) + 2×2GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM ($200) + basic mobo, case, cd/dvd drives, etc. ($200) + 1tb HD ($300) = $1200

High-Spec - In this case, it would be best to wait because the latest highest-end Nvidia cards are not much better than the mid-range.
QX9770 ($1200) + 8950gx2 ($600) + 2×2GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM ($200) + mobo, case, blu-ray drives drives, etc. ($600) + 1tb HD ($300) = $2900

The CPU is largely just about how much power you think you need (and you should only choose the quad Q6600 over the dual E6850 if the games you plan to be playing will be utilizing multiple cores), but you shouldn’t skimp on the ram and the video card is crucial to the actual gaming performance since 99% of the games you will be playing will be bottlenecked by the graphics card at high resolution.

Hope that helps, free feel to contact for further insights.

If you do decide to get a dedicated gaming PC, I recommend looking into the custom build outfits like CyberPower. Back when I was shopping around, it was definitely worth going to them instead of doing it myself. I didn’t want to be the system warranter on a system I put together!

I didn’t read everyone else’s comments, so this may have already been presented to you.

My advice, don’t bother building a gaming pc. Its a terrible investment all things considered. I built one almost two years ago, and it just sits around. Aside from my growing personal preference to play games on console, the whole experience of “building a gaming pc” is a downward spiral of disappointment.

If you’re like the majority of people who set out to do this, you’ll say you want to build something “not quite top of the line”, in an effort to save money. Then the time sink of researching begins. Slowly you decide to raise the bar of how you want to spec your machine. Eventually you’re spending at least 25% more than you originally set out to… only to find that 4 months later there is a better graphics card or cpu that u start thinking maybe you should upgrade to.

And worst of all, the value of your computer is less than half of what you paid for it in about a year. Hopefully in a year you’re still playing it and getting your moneys worth, but i’d hate to see you end up like me… just walking past your gaming PC all the time on the way to either your Mac or your gaming console.

Especially as an existing Mac user, I think you’d get more satisfaction from getting a Mac Pro to dual boot for games… That way even if you don’t game on it all the time: a) it is still a super powerful & very useful computer that you could enjoy using for something other than games b) as time goes on it will hold its value at least twice as well as a similar PC.

Cheers & keep up the good work.

+if u end up sticking with the mac, you should call on one of your friends at apple… or email me and make a friend at apple