The Gaming Computer
Hey guys, Icarus here!
Today, we’re going to move on and talk another category of PCs: the gaming computer.
Have you ever seen those crazy cases that you have to mod(customizing your case, on your own) with slick black, green, and blue LEDs with tubes running through inside the case? With two or three huge graphics cards?
Well, not that every gaming computer has to be that way, but that’s just one example of a gaming computer. As the name suggests, it’s a computer dedicated solely to maximize your ultimate gaming experiences.
So, what’re some key components that have to be emphasized? Well, let me go in the order of importance, from most important to least important:
1. CPU: you need a good CPU. If you have a great graphics card hooked up with a slow CPU, your CPU will bottleneck your graphics power. Also, remember that the CPU is the one sending commands to the graphics cards and all other components in your PC.
2. Motherboard: you also need a great motherboard to hook up all of your components to. Cheap out on the motherboard, and you never know what may happen: your motherboard might overheat and damage the CPU, might burst into flames(unlikely, but it has happened before), or you might just lose everything you had in your hard drive.
3. GPU: Finally, the graphics card. Weird right? You’d think that the graphics card should be the most important. But it’s not actually; it’s actually backwards.
Now, you’d want to pick your GPUs carefully depending on your gaming needs:
- What monitor size do you have?
- What resolution are you going to play your games at?
- How graphics-heavy are your games?
- Do I need more than one graphics card??
- Am I going to play on multiple monitors?
Those are just some of the questions you need to ask yourself before choosing your GPU. If any of you need help with this, just leave it in a comment!
4. Cooling and Case: Oh, this is extremely important. It can save you hundreds of money from damaged components, and it’ll give you much, much more time to enjoy your games.
Many of the components above(especially the graphics card and the CPU) give off A TON of heat. If the airflow in your case isn’t adequate, your components can quickly heat up, and may cause your computer to automatically shut down once it reaches a critical temperature.
And make sure you pick a good case. You can add as many fans as you want to a case, but if the structure of the case isn’t good, then the fans won’t do much for you.
Now, depending on your budget, you can go with two options:
- air cooling: plain and simple: you add fans to your case so that the air comes in and goes out. You MUST make sure that your fans are facing the right direction, or else you might keep the hot air inside your case.
- liquid cooling: much more complicated than air-cooling. You need to plan your tubing, what you’re going to cool(CPU, GPU, sometimes motherboard chipsets), and you also need to plan out where you’re going to put the pump and reservoir. You also need to drain, clean, and put in coolant every month or so to avoid gunk build up. If you don’t do this, your liquid tubing may burst from clogging. And that’s just horrible.
5. Everything else: now, everything else is up to you:
- power supply: just know how much you need, and then pick a power supply that supplies a bit more than what you need. Just as a precaution.
- Hard Drive: up to you on the amount of storage, and the difference between 7200RPM HDD and 10000RPM HDD is negligible compared to the price. I’d go with a 7200RPM HDD with a lot of storage. You may do Raid 0 if you wish, or any other configuration.
- CD/DVD drive: this is completely up to you. If you want multiple so you can play multiple games at a time(that’d be hard though), then you can. It’s totally up to you.
And that’s a typical gaming computer for ya! Sorry this post is so long! I just wanted to make sure I got everything covered.
Well, that’s all for this post! Hope you enjoyed it.
Happy gaming! Happy computer building!
~| Icarus
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