First of all, thanks to Perry at RealNets for all your help! He recommended I check out Arstechnica's article on building gaming machines at different cost levels. I saw this article when it came up on digg a while ago and it is a great reference.
These are Perry's recommendations.
Video Cards:
ATI's FireGL
Nvidia's Quadro
- Features to look for:
- Memory - the more the better >=256MB.
- Pixel Pipelines - the more the better >=12
- RAMDAC - the more Mhz the better
- Connectors:
- Dual monitors, either DVI (digital) or Analog. There's almost zero difference (visibly) between the two. Most cards come with adapters to do both DVI-to-analog or vis versa.
- S-Video, if you plan on connecting a "standard definition" (non-HD) TV or Projector, S-Video is a good connector to have.
- HDMI - pretty much all HD capable TVs, Projectors, etc are using this connector now.
Another key factor to look for is that the video card "interface" is "PCI Express" aka "PCIe". That's the new standard. The old standard was "AGP" which you should avoid.
- Other suggestions.
- Avoid Budget processors - Intel Celeron or AMD Sempron processors are cheap, but for a reason.
- Avoid Extreme processors - This is a marketing gimmick. Way too expensive for the 2% speed increase it gives you over normal processors.
- Get at least 2GB of system RAM. Make sure your motherboard can support that much. Some have limitations.
- BUS Speeds - If you've shopped for Motherboards, CPUs, or RAM you'll notice "bus speed" being mentioned. The higher the better. Note that Intel based systems have completely different bus speeds than AMD solutions, so you can't really compare them apples to apples.
- Hard Drives - Make sure you get current technology. "SATA2", "SATA II", "3Gbps" are all names for the same thing. Talk about confusing! Also, you'll see hard drives have RPM ratings (rotations per minute), essentially the faster the drive spins, the faster data moves. You should get 7200 RPM.
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