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I put my current gaming computer together about 4 years ago, and I'm thinking of upgrading. So, CPU? Motherboard? Graphics card(s) and configuration? If you were building your dream machine from scratch, what would be your specs?
What I have now works reasonably well, but I want to upgrade it to 64-bit and add more memory. It has two 500MB drives in a RAID-0 array, which makes it a bit problematic to swap drives and copy the old data back over. So, I'm curious about what a new machine would look like.
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Gawd, I hate RAID0!
Double the chance of a HDD failure ruining everything...
Other than that, I have no idea - sorry!
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Yeah, I know  The idea was to maximize disk access speeds. Probably not necessary nowadays.
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One word: SSD.
Gregory.Gadow wrote: what would be your (dream) specs?
Costly. 4000€ give or take 
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Given how cheap solid state drives have become, I will probably go that route this time.
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See that's a terrible question for me to answer, because I would design something entirely ridiculous (i.e. all sorts of stuff you don't need, but as long as you're dreaming you might as well...).
I can tell you my current specs though, it can run every game I've come across at max settings @ 2560x1440 fine:
AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition (3.4 GHz quadcore)
16 GB 1333 DDR3 RAM
ASUS ROG 5870 Platinum (900 Mhz, 2 GB GDDR5)
I don't remember the motherboard off the top of my head, it's ASUS though. Overall, not too expensive either (the card was, but it was complete overkill at the time). Also I've noticed the newer AMD X870's (6870 and 7870) don't really compare to mine though, my room mate has 2 6870's in his (I think) and it's only a little better than my single 5870 in some benchmarks we ran (his system is pretty similar to mine, same CPU, same RAM speed). So if you only want to run one you might want to go for a higher one. (Or get a Nvidia card - I can't help you there though, no experience.)
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Depends if you have an interest in overclocking things? Have a look a www.reddit.com/r/buildapc[^] and http://pcpartpicker.com/[^]
I built a new PC last month but I'm not really interested in playing games. It's an i7, 16gb ram, 250gb ssd and 1tb hdd. With case, monitor, keyboard etc it was about $1400 AUD and it does things very, very quickly.
You can easily spend the same again on two graphics cards if that's your thing.
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What kind of gaming?
For gaming, disk speed is not that important. (YMMV) and in the last 20+ years, I've never had the use for RAID at home
The latest generation i5 (haswell?) are very good and very good quality for the price and good enough for most games.
Get the best motherboard you can get; if it also supports i7 the better, so you can upgrade CPU later on; the MB also needs to support SLI (or crossfire) to be able to get 2 graphic cards if you want to.
Graphic card : Most high end cards will play most games at high or better resolution, I have an old Radeon 6800 HD (something) that still runs skyrim and starcraft2 at ultra settings.
Memory:for games, no need more than 8gig.
Power supply : get a big enough PS to allow expansion, and if you build your own PC, get one that is modular (to reduce cable clutter) ( there are online power calculator).
This should get you started.
Good luck
I'd rather be phishing!
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Gregory.Gadow wrote: 500MB
MB? Did you mean GB?
Keep Clam And Proofread
--
√(-1) 23 ∑ π...
And it was delicious.
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I just bought myself (as a 40th birthday present) an old-style cocktail gaming machine... it's spectacular!! Moon Patrol, Raiden, Rygar, Space Invaders, Galaga, Gyrus, Galaxian... the list goes on (and on and on and on and you get the idea)...
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Happy Birthday!
I've got an arcade machine too - upright cabinet running an XP machine with MAME
Galaga 88 FTW
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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_Maxxx_ wrote: Happy Birthday!
Thanks!! It was back in April, but it took me a while to find the one I wanted...
I got a Jamma based one, which is the new MAME...
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I can't let that go without contradiction!
JAMMA is the connection specification for the original arcade machines - if a machine was a JAMMA machine, then any JAMMA game board could pretty much be slotted in and played - so they could mass produce the bare machines and stick streetfighter in one and Raiden in antother.
My cabinet is a JAMMA cabinet. So my PC interfaces directly to the Jamma card - so is effectively emulating a jamma card.
The PC runs MAME which emulates the game, and the JAMMA interface handles the communication betwixt cabinet and computer.
The recent JAMMA multi-game boards (like what I suspect you have) are essentially exactly what I have - except it's built into a nice looking board (instead of a clunky old PC) & I suspect runs a flavour of Linux rather than XP. I don't know if they use MAME or some other emulation - I suspect a hacked MAME.
I would have gone for a jamma multi-game board, but I wanted to faff around for hours and hours tweaking the graphics settings, refresh rates and H&V sync to get a stable picture, only to repeat ad nauseum when I played a different game 
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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Interesting... I was paraphrasing of course - my point was that where you used to find MAME machines, people/manufacturers etc seem to have switched to JAMMA multigame boards...
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Yep - they've taken off in the last few years - I'm guessing because they aren't worried about prosecution (they breach copyright on the game ROMS) for some reason. AFAIK they're not paying any money to NAMCO, Nintendo etc. for the use of the ROMS.
Mame machines always used to be sold (officially, anyway) with no ROMS on board - but often a CD would be passed over (or a URL given) where the roms could be downloaded.
There's now a growing sub-culture of folk hacking the multi-game boards so they can put new Rom images on there.
Quite why anyone would want to run all 50 versions of Galaga is beyond me - although I am a bit addicted to Galaga 88 right now 
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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The machine I bought has controls on 3 sides... on the short sides for old school games where players took turns (and sat opposite each other), and on the long side, two sets of controls for two player games where both players play at once (and some of the old games like Moon Patrol that are in landscape mode, not portrait).
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:envy:
My biggest gripe (other than the hours spent tinkering, which is fun really, is that being an upright portrait configuration, it doesn't really play horizontal games that well.
And I really like Moon Patrol !
The original machine was a vertical scroller - I still have the original Jamma board somewhere. I'd love to buy another with a horizontal monitor (the cabinet itself will take either in principal)
sounds like yours gives you not only the best of both worlds, but also the ability to sit down, and somewhere to put your beer !
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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That's why it took me so long to find the machine I wanted... I love Moon Patrol, but I also love Galaga and Gyrus and some of the other portrait games...
I did see a stand up machine in my travels that came with a rotatable screen - undo four screws and relocate the screen landscape/portrait and switch to that mode of games... you wouldn't want to do it every day, but once a month or so that would work... maybe something like that would work for you also?
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I did look at one time at rotating my screen; the cabinet supports either orientation but those monitors are HEAVY! (and my DIY skills non existent)
ONe day(!) I might buy another and build it landscape - jsut so I can have two identical machines with my own selection of games - but I'm more likely to sellmine and buy one like you have - sacrifice the range of games for usability so I can spend more time playing and less tinkering!
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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Hi, currently i am using SSD hard 120 GB for my windows (i wonder why ) and 2TB normal sata 3 hard. I am thinking of adding more 3 TBs just for fun. My Downloads partition has only 61GB free left :/. I think that the perfect game pc has to have atleast on of These. The more the merrier  . The rest doesn't matter (oh you can add some RAM for lets say 8 GB or 16 GB)
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
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Big fast Multi-Cpu, Muilti-core, Multi Threaded
Multi Titan GPU SLI
Max out on RAM
RAM Cache
Multi-SSD Mirrored Striped sets Raid Configuration
Mortgage required to buy....
Failing that, I'll stick with what I've got (built myself) for the time being -> Major Component Upgrades with a twist, benchmarks and all![^]
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Mine's about as old and I'm planning to build a new box to correspond with Win 8.1's release.
I7-4770k (If you're not overclocking, get the non-K version for better virtualization support)
$200ish ASUS or other premium brand mobo
4x8GB DDR3-2133 or 2400
GTX 770 GPU - don't want to go for the 780 when TSMC is doing a process shrink next year that should ~double performance.
1 TB SSD - Debating Crucial M500 or Samsung 840 EVO. The latter is faster but has only just hit the market; the former has been out since this spring.
Ridiculously huge and expensive water cooling friendly case[^] - I want a 3x140 radiator since I suspect in a year or two when I get a 4k monitor I'll need dual GPUs to game on it; and my inability to break the all-flat-horizontal-surfaces-are-tables habit means I can't use a model from elsewhere at half the cost because they all have top venting radiators I'd end up blocking.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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How to Spot Comet ISON in the Early Morning Sky[^]
Apparently only those 10-inch and up need apply at the moment, but hopefully that will improve (and hopefully it will be naked eye visible later this year as well).
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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8 inch reflector with 1000 mm focal length.
Bung on a 9mm lens and a barlow and you can image ISON.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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