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[18Weapons]

so i put off buying a new pc last year and now i'm so out of touch with hardware that i don't know what is good?  what is a good mid range gaming pc set up for this year?

[MonkeyKungFu]

got me...  I'll have to go and look this stuff up again.  It's been a while since I've checked out hardware pricing.

[18Weapons]

i guess i don't care as much as i should since I don't want to play any games that my current rig can't handle.  but i am thinking about getting a passable new machine so that i can increase some of my other system features like HD space and being able to burn dvds on more than one system.  after all is said and done i just want to know which cpu, ram, MB, and gfx cards are the good buys right now... time to go to Tom's hardware...

[18Weapons]

it looks like core 2 quad cpus are priced reasonably and have good benchmarks.  specifically: Core 2 Quad Q6600 kentsfield for $200

i'm not sure what I'm looking at for gfx cards, but i am guessing that the 9800 GTX is a decent card for $200.  But the reviews say the Radeon HD 4850 is a better value especially if you might do crossfire at some point...

[MonkeyKungFu]

Yeah, I've heard good things about the Q6600.  As for the GPU, I'm still a huge Nvidia fan.

[18Weapons]

yeah i like nVidia also... didn't always...  read this article though... i think the 9800 GTX's price has been adjusted though so it may not be such a big gap

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-cards,1965-4.html

[18Weapons]

from the prices i see there is only about a $10-$20 difference between those two cards.  i guess at this point the only thing i have an immediate need for is extra HDD space... anybody have any experience with USB Hard Drives?  can you install programs to them or are they just for files that you don't execute?

[MonkeyKungFu]

USB 2.0 HDDs aren't too bad, you should be able to run things from them without noticing too much difference from an internal HD.  I think USB 2.0 has something like 400MB/s transfer speed.