i don't have anything newer than those kona, save for portal 2 (which is basically HL2 from a technical point of view) ..yeah i'm a little behind the times ;)

temperature app seems a good idea, i shall obtain. gave the fans a bit of a dust too :D

right now i'm testing it from a different system HD. hopefully that will help determine whether it's a software or hardware thing... 

Released today.

Fuck me, it's a fast graphics card. 

not sure where to post, so i'm posting here . i'm looking for a decent player for win7. winamp 5something sounds like shit or i can't properly configure it. So maybe i should move to another player. Any advice?
2.95 was great for XP 

The GUI looks like shit (underdone, looks like 'generic windows XP' kinda), but I would highly recommend it. It has a lot of features and plays almost anything. And the sound quality is superior to Windows Media Player, I can guarantee that. Winamp never seemed too bad to me, but VLC sounds better for sure. I'm using some cheap 40watt desktop studio monitors, and I can really tell the difference between VLC and Media Player for sure. 

www.videolan.org/vlc/ 

don't listen to Ricky. get foobar. 

It's good, been using it for years.

No bullshit media player. 

but to be honest, if a media player sounds bad to you then there probably is something terribly wrong with your system or player config. 

gonna check that.

but to be honest, if a media player sounds bad to you then there probably is something terribly wrong with your system or player config.

i have two OS on my PC , win7 and XP. and on XP the sound from winamp 2.95 much better and richer. in seven i'm using winamp5 as i cant launch 2.95 for seven 

okay, so portal 2 worked absolutely fine when i tried it on a different HD containing a fresh windows install (albeit a service pack & numerous updates behind) and i got a good day or two playtime out of it before i had to go away for christmas. however on returning and loading it back up i find the problem has resurfaced, only worse this time since it doesn't snap out of the slowdown unless i close the game and restart (and it kicks in after less than 5 minutes now)

drivers have been updated, temperature monitor has been installed (cpu is running a good 10 degrees below apparent average) and task manager shows nothing untoward. but it was actually working! then it wasn't! i can only assume an xp automatic update broke it? :(

something is obviously fucked. tempted just to thwack a load out on a new machine but that means no summer holiday next year!! 

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/21/origin-pc-launches-new-3d-gaming-laptop-two-graphics-cards-for/

I am just wondering what would be the result with Quake :> 

i should put everything into perspective first, though:

graphics cards:

i don't mind fps going below 50. obviously anything below 10-15 is unplayable.
the current graphics card in my mac is an nvidia geforce 6600.

a friend said the below specs are a good start for me:

'intel core 2 duo' is better than processors marked as 'intel dual core' or 'intel core duo' (although they do exactly the same thing 'intel core 2 duo' is the most recent and generally better). aim for one that is at least 2.2 ghz (games like stalker need processors of this speed or above to run smoothly)

windows xp is generally better for gaming although there are games appearing that will only run on vista/windows 7

2 gb of ram is perfectly sufficient for almost all games.

i'm all ears! 

But that mostly sounds like advice from about 4 years ago. Current intel tech is sandybridge which I think gets sold under names like "second generation core i7" and is at least two generations on from the core 2 duo. The intel GPU that can accompany sandybridge chips actually has decent performance for an integrated gpu, but you'd want something gruntier for games I'm sure.

I don't understand any reason for limiting yourself to 2 gigs of RAM. I have 8 gigs in my laptop which would cost me all of US$45 currently.

Can't comment on vista vs xp vs windows 7, but have heard that windows 7 is actually reasonably nice... 

first of all, fps below 50 in what game? quake? sure, you can get away with almost anything. crysis 2? different story.

core 2 duos are great cpus, i had one for 4 years iirc, before i got an i5. you do notice the higher clockspeed though, so i agree that you'd want to stick to at least 2.2, 2.4 or 2.6 would be even better of course. my core 2 duo was one of the really early ones and it ran at 1.8ghz and that definitely hurts performance. if you're getting a dual core intel, than price is going to be low across the board, so you may as well get the highest clockspeed cpu you can.

2gb of ram is tiny. on top of that, ram is super cheap. i picked up 8gb of pc3 10666/ddr3 1333 ram for 45$ (CAD).
you should get at least 4gb, 6gb would be better.

in general, i'd stay away from getting winxp this late in the game. especially if you plan to get more than 3.5gb of ram. if you can nab the winxp 64 version that's fine, but i don't know how fiddly that version is compared to 64bit win7. 

cheers guys,

didn't know about intel i5 or above, i'll watch for that in my perusing.

so, a core 2 duo with 2.2ghz is not too bad?
it sounds like a good starting point.

i will probably look to have at least 4gig of ram, like you mentioned.

going back to graphics cards:

compared to my nvidia geforce 6600 in my mac, what would be a good step up from that?
i'm looking to spend �50 max, so i'm quite happy to hunt for a good deal if i can find one. 

In a nutshell:

socket 1155 - Z68 chipset

Intel Core i5 2500K or 2550K, or if u have loads of money a 2600K or 2700K

min 4GB RAM (pref 8GB - not expensive, 64bit OS)

GTX 560 is good value for money. GTX 560Ti is faster.

New Radeons came out, and are really fast, but too expensive. But NVidia will surely release their '6' series cards soon.

If you have the money, get a 120GB SATA3 Solid State Drive. Look for 85K IOPS+ and 500MB/s+ read AND write speeds. To install your OS. 

just wanted to chime in and say that the difference of having the OS installed on an SSD is really amazing.
just make sure you find and follow a guide for installing windows 7 on an SSD.
you usually need to enable ahci on your ssd otherwise the installation will not install drivers needed to maximize performance, and fixing that AFTER windows is installed is a pain (i had to do that). 

and find a guide that talks about changing the default windows directories for things like program files and my documents so you can put that on your normal hard drives. 

Did you try running Windows games using Boot Camp? Because usually the games are much faster in Windows than they are in Mac OS X due to driver optimizations. 

i can't. i have a ppc.
one of the reasons i'm looking at getting a pc gaming set-up for games only, nothing else. the mac will be for everything non-game related. 

what is your budget and games do you want to play? 

upgrading to a more recent iMac, which can run many games just fine. Probably more expensive though. 

"i'm looking to spend �50 max"

For the graphics card, for the processor, or in total?

If you are not going 64 bit OS then stick to 4Gig of RAM because 32 bit cannot access higher than that. Vista 32 bit is apparently marginally better at handling memory than XP. The restriction is on total addressable memory, so it is not RAM alone that affects things and as necros says, you will not actuall have all 4gig at your disposal anyway.

But �50...? 

i was thinking about �50 on ebay for the graphics card.
a friend has sent me some ebay links for pc's for about �150, but in need of a better graphics card.

i always run a few years behind the times, even with consoles. i'm not impatient with the need to have to see the 'top' games straightaway.
i'll be happy playing stuff that was new up to about 3-4 years ago. fps, adventure/sneak stuff.

Crysis is always mentioned when talk goes back to having a modern set-up.
i will probably leave titles like that until the hardware i need to run it dirt cheap (a year or two down the line!). 

�250 = ~500$CAD (i'll just work with CAD for now)

cpu: intel i5 2500 (NON k)
- 190$
mboard: asus p8h61
- 90$
memory: anything, it's so cheap... ex: patriot 2x4gb pc3 10666
- 45$
video: not too sure... but any of the older nvidia gt/gts 200-400 cards are probably around 100$ - 130$?

this will come to about 455$.
Now you just need some HDD (SSD is nice but it's not strictly necessary)
50-100$ can probably get you 250-500gb

this is all brand new stuff. i'm sure others will have better suggestions, but you can get quite good stuff for your �250.

you can probably run even crysis 2 fairly well with that. not maxed out at 1600x1200 of course, but better than 800x600 with everything on low too.