First let me describe my situation...

I'm 15 years old, currently only working part time jobs for family and have nothing to game on. I've been eager for a month or two to actually purchase a machine to get back into gaming but I've come across a few bumps in the road and troubles in to what I should get.

I CAN build a computer and have a fairly good knowledge on what parts to get and how they function, but I wouldn't say I'm the best. I'm going to be spending from $2000 - $4000 Canadian currency on either a [B]gaming laptop[B] or high end gaming desktop

I've considered completely building it from scratch off of newegg, and I might do that if the prices on websites that I will be mentioning below are overpriced however they've all gotten great feedback.

At first I was looking into the Alienware M18X which is on top of the laptop gaming market and competing against the eon17-x as the most powerful choice featuring high end mobile cpus/desktop processors @ around 4 ghz and 10~ L3 cache (quad core) and up to 3 HDD's/SSD's, dual high end mobile graphic cards (6990m x2, 580m x2) sturdy builds and lots of nice extra features such as backlit keyboards, AlienFX etc.

The thing is, while this may be able to completely max out any of the games currently released @ 1920x1080 with 60FPS, it may not last that long as far as future proofing goes. PLUS, I plan on making lots of youtube videos for my channels that would put on the extra strain.

Now, the second option.

Currently my desk and everything in my room is old and cramped and I'm going to revamp my entire room and get a nice new corner/wall length desk, smaller compact bed/sofa and thus allowing me to go a big desktop rig with maybe up to 3 monitors in eyefinity or the latter.

As I said the budget is about 4000$ maximum and I'd be willing to spend the entire $4000 on a PC alone but I don't think I need to. Basically I want to be able to play all my games maxed out while also being able to record with fraps @1080p, 720p and not suffer a huge performance drop that's noticeable while watching the video itself. I'm a razer fan, so I'd be wanting to get a new razer mouse, keyboard and headset (preferably featuring 5.1 surround sound/7.1) and was looking into the razer naga epic, lycosa and tiamat/megaladon. I also found the RAT mouses to be of high quality and nice, the K90 keyboard to be also very nice with all the extra macros and the logitech G35 headset to be a good choice.

The sites I'd be buying from are..

ibuypower.com
cyberpowerpc.com
originpc.com
http://www.digitalstormonline.com/

If there is no good options on the sites, and I'm not too sure about that when it comes to pre-built, then I wouldn't mind ordering off of newegg.

Main things I'm looking for in my desktop build
A decently sized SSD to install my OS and a few/couple main applications/games
At least 1TB of HDD, doesn't matter if raid performance or not.
8GB+ or ram
Preferably a nvidia GPU as I've heard better things compared to ATI/AMD lately. Looking into SLI.
Preferably an AMD cpu, must be quad core L3 with preferably 3.0ghz +
Obviously a power supply to support whatever you suggest
A very good case that has a lot of ports/good airflow.
Doesn't need a blu ray player if too expensive, most likely NEVER going to use it.
A new keyboard/mouse/headset from Razer/Logitech, looking for top quality as for me the equipment you're using is just as important as the PC itself.
A decently sized 23' - 27' monitor, would definitely consider getting two/three of them.
An extra, but not required at purchase of PC, a good "studio quality" microphone such as the at2020, blue mic or blue snowball.


If anyone could help by posting build specs including price and link to the parts, would be very appreciated! Remember, I'm in canada so if you're putting it together via newegg use newegg.ca

Thanks in advance!

if you're worried about your hardware lasting for the new gen of games, then find out how long its gna be till nvidia and ati/amd release their new gen of hardware and plan accordingly.

from the general view of things your only worry is graphics card, in which case, build a boss pc that can run whatever you want now, just downscaling the graphics somewhat to the point where you can run the curent gen of games no problems and selling it off and upgrading when the new tech is released.
graphics cards depreciate quite reasonably, after a year+ of having my 5770 that still runs new games on medium-full with decent fps, i can still sell it for 2/3's of what i paid for it.

although i dont think its really an issue, strong cards from 2 gens ago like the 4890x2 are still performing excellently. your idea for 580x2/6990x2 will blow everything out the water easilly for atleast 2 years.

as far as new headset/keyboards/mouse goes, im a die hard fan of razer. their new electra headphones look gorgeous, if my orcas are anything to go by, you'll not be left wanting at all. brilliant gear, i wear my orcas all day long at work and my ears dont feel at all like theyv been stuck in a vice. sound quality is brilliant aswell, decently priced, i honestly dont see why anyone would go for anything else.

keyboard and mouse are entirely up to your own preference. personally have the midrange deathadder mouse and lycosa keyboard, which are great, although my lycosa does get a bit buggy.

monitors, for gaming i dont like anything over 23", gets a bit big for multiplayer, although pairing a 27" for browsing and watching movies to a 23" for gaming might be a good idea. changing the primary monitor in properties, quickly gives you a bit of variation for the more cinematic based games like mass effect or skyrim, while the 23" would be great for the faster more bang bang games like CoD or LoL.

also, might be worthwhile waiting befor doing anything on the monitor front, just heard news about new super high res monitors somewhere, although i cant confirm that, might be worthwhile getting some confirmation beforhand though.

in terms of hardrives, SSDs dont generally come in "decent sizes", theyr primarilly for your OS and thats it.

doubt you'll need to worry about amd/intel releasing anything new and amazing to replace their i7's anytime soon, so its not an issue, just browse around for a nice i7 and you should be good.

consider what OS you'll be using, 64bit windows will probably be NB for your RAM, might as well go 16gb, seeing as the rest of your pc looks to be ridiculous.

get a decent power supply, dont be stingy on that, those graphics cards are going to sap the life out of a shitty psu.
there was a site somewhere for calculating how strong a psu you'd need

Mind be that the dual 6990's or 580's are the mobile units and that was referring to getting a laptop. Any comment on that? Apparently a 6990m is still equivalent to a 6850, which is decently good.

oh right
just had a look, amd has released their 7000 series, which i know nothing about, other than the stats look reasonably good, but not overly impressive on paper, buts stats can be decieving i guess, their pricings on their 7850's look pretty great actually, only released very recently aswell
the 6850 is an reliable card, and should meet most requirments, but i wouldnt bet on relying on a single one to do 60fps with fraps running for very long, if at all.

if i was to be getting the 6990m i would be getting it in crossfire, so i'd be pretty much having two 6850's in a laptop. then again a desktop is looking way better right now as i really want to get into my gaming channel along with video editing, music software and 3d art. also the new 600 series from nvidia is coming out soon which, apparently, the 680 will have the equivalent power to that of a 580. i somehow doubt that but that's the rumor that's been going around!

i would suggest this for a gaming computer i did forget to add a dvd or blu ray drive however... that's not to bad though for a dvd burner they're $20 lol

Hello Lume, first let me remind you to read the FAQ in this subforum, even though it looks a bit outdated the info is good and theFalco's guide is auto-update.

Since you considered buying a gaming laptop, let me first say that I would never buy a gaming laptop because of my experiences. Firstly the built in peripherals are poor. The keyboard, touchpad, mic and speakers built in to the laptop are very bad. In addition you will find that even if the monitor is 18" 1080p it won't look as nice as an external monitor, and besides that it won't be at the right height level so you will be looking down instead of straight ahead. Both of these things sound kind of trivial, but if you are going to have to buy a new keyboard, mouse, headphones, and monitor then why are you getting a laptop? Secondly the hardware and size make it very heavy and bulky, it will not really be portable. And even so, barely more portable than a desktop would be. Do you even intend to move it? And if you do, will it be so often that you couldn't take a desktop? For example if you plan to use it for LAN parties you will find that a desktop is easy enough to move. If you plan to take the laptop to school/college/university/work you will find it is too big and bulky to do so anyway. So why bother getting something portable with built in peripherals if you cannot take advantage of it?

Sadly at the moment you are looking at buying hardware in what are uncertain times - we are due for next gen consoles to be announced any time now, which will set the new benchmarks for hardware. So I suggest investing in solid CPU, mobo, PSU and excessive RAM rather than GPU. Of course you do need a strong GPU, but I would consider the GPU market to be the fastest moving, new models are released constantly - and yet an old GTX280 can play everything! Take a leaf out of that book, and look to upgrade every 2 years rather than spend a lot at once. A solid CPU, mobo and PSU will give you a great base to keep upgrading. Of course you can upgrade your CPU often too, and take advantage of the deeper integration, but CPU moves effectively slower than GPU.

So why did I advise you to buy excessive RAM? Well to answer that we need to take a quick look at the overview of a computer system. How fast does a CPU run? Very fast! How fast does a GPU run? Very fast! How fast does a harddrive run? Very Slow! Even in a basic operation you can bet your bottom dollar that the harddrive will be the choke point. What can we do about that? Well a 64gb SSD costs around $80 and will fit your OS and a few programs, so that is good. But 64gb can't fit a Steam library, so we have to manually move games there to get the benefit, plus we all know SSDs can be damaged by intense writes over a long period of time, so do we want to be copying in and out 10gb game folders? I think the 100x speed increase of the SSD over the HDD is great, but there is something far better than that. RAM has read/write speeds well over 5gb/s (some at 15gb/s), so using a basic RAMdisk software will let you use your RAM as a harddrive. Want to play some casual Starcraft but hate waiting for map loads? Not a problem, move your entire Starcraft install in to RAM (or just your map folder and use a symbolic link to trick Starcraft in to thinking it isn't moved) and then you will instantly load even those nasty 800mb maps. If you have 8gb of RAM, then you can use 4gb as a drive comfortably. But if you have 16 or 24 gb then you have way more to play around with. If you have even a bit of scripting knowledge then you can make some scripts to move your game installs in to RAM when you open them, or just keep your favorite games in RAM for when you want to use them! In other words, 2 GTX680s will be fast, but if you have to wait 2 minutes for the game to load up, it sets the tone for the entire game. Besides that what game can utilize that much power? Do you know what the latest breakthrough in gaming graphics was? FXAA, a new antialiasing algorithm that is a few orders of magnitude better than previous techniques - a way to get more for less power. Don't be fooled in to thinking that the only improvements in graphics require better hardware, algorithmic improvements have much more effect on graphics than hardware ever did. How much better is the 680 than the 590? Is it 1000x better? Even if you used the same computer since the turn of the century, graphics will improve every year like clockwork.

And now on to peripherals. I see a lot of people getting sucked in to things like "neon light mouse" or "keyboard with macro functionality". I think maybe you should play in a well lit environment and save yourself some money and some eye fatigue, and also learn to use AutoHotKey, a powerful high level scripting language, and save yourself from learning the gimped kludge language that comes with certain brands - and also pressing alt+q is almost always faster than pressing some extra macro button in whatever weird position they put it. Brands like Razor are all about neons, if you are in to that garish ascetic then good for you, get a glowing mouse. If not, get something quality. Logitech has far superior build quality, wireless technology, and better tracking and lasers than Razor. As for keyboards Logitech may be nice but they aren't mechanical. Razor now has 1 mechanical keyboard, and sure it has a few rave reviews, but guess what, Razor has been making mechanical for a few years. A brand like Filco (general purpose great boards) or Ducky (Asian pro gamers use these) or Das (generally for typists) have been making mechanicals for decades. Do you think a handful of years can compare? If you are buying a keyboard I would personally suggest a Ducky backlit with MX blacks. But Filco makes MX blacks too, I don't think backlit so you would have to be a confident gamer to even consider one of them.

For headphones I have heard good things about Tritons, but of course headphones are a big topic. The general gist is, if you can't tell the difference between good sound and bad then get some cheap headphones. The cheapest noise canceling is earmuffs - take advantage by wearing inner ears and muffs.

Please never spend more than $2000 on a desktop in one hit. Remember $1000 over 10 years buys equivalent hardware to $10000 now (I am being generous with that estimate, it may be closer to $1000000). Incremental upgrades are the king of computing.


By the way if you are only gaming, you should pretty much just halve your hardware that you are thinking about. Games are not as strenuous as people seem to think. If a 5 year old xbox360 can run it then why do you need a $4000 rig... If you just want to enjoy the graphics-porn *cough* crysis *cough* then you need a bit better. But what game is there that 580x2 can max but a 580 can't? What game can burn 4gb of RAM? (Ok, you do need some for your OS, that's true) What game can fully utilize a 4ghz x4 processor? Even if you are going for max, half is fine.


On a personal note, as a long time gamer I can't condone of people who think gaming is all about graphics. Nethack was way more enjoyable than ME3... Graphics is a part of the game, but gameplay experience is not as easy as clicking "very high"... Games don't have sliding scales for gameplay, a good game on low graphics should still be a good game!