I am going to buy a new desktop computer.

Background Info

Hi, this may bring tears to some of your eyes, but I am going to buy a new desktop computer with the money I have been saving up from a part time job.
The tear part? What I have been playing Guild Wars on for about a year now. (I've been playing for 2 years, but the other PC for my first year was no better than this on)

Right now I have, on my laptop:

18.6GB Hard Drive.
32mb Integrated Video Card (Mobility Radeon 7500)
768 MB of ram
Intel Pentium 4 Mobile CPU 1.69ghz

How do I play the game? With 1-8 FPS range, and graphics always on lowest, with only Guild Wars installed on my computer as a game. It is quite tight on space.


I am looking to spend $800 or lower (Before Taxes) Canadian for a desktop computer that will be good enough to play Guild Wars AND Guild wars 2 decently.

Looking For:

2 Gb Of Ram.
Atleast 256MB Video Card (ATI or NVIDIA?)
Hard Drive - not too picky, i've lived on 20GB for 2 years...300GB would be enough even.
For the CPU...Dual Core or a powerful Single core?

Im sorry I dont know much about computers, and I want to get the most for my money. Also, I dont think i'm building a computer...

What should I try to buy to get the most for my money? any sites in Canada that I should look at?

Would be great if you could build it yourself with the parts you want and for the lowest price you can find.
I'll see what parts I can dig up for best bang for the buck.


http://www.redflagdeals.com/

I'm from the UK, so I can't give you any advice native to Canada, what I can do is give you some pointers on where you can save money, and where you really shouldn't.

This is IMHO; but for gaming you want a few main things:

An off-board GFX card, I use an Ati 1550x 512Mb PciE (£40 UKS ), and find it copes with most of my needs atm, I play GW with all setting on high except shadows on low with an average FPS of 70.

Memory; you really want 2Gb to aid lag free play.

CPU, there is little point in trying to save cash here, go for the best you can, dual core is defintely better than say a 64bit single on a higher Mhz. A fast 1x CPU can still only calculate the data from a single source at any given time so you will notice lag on a single core system if something ( often windows related ) deiced to kick in while you are playing.

HDD; 300Gb is fine if you aren't planning on installing much on you PC, also it is really easy these days to add upgrades at a later date.

Sound. Personally I find the onboard sound to be fine as it is the visuals that are important to me, but if you are a audiouphile you stand to be disappointed and would want to invest a lot more in an offboard card with 7.1 setup I imagine.

Networking. Keep it wired. Assuming you have a descent broadband connection then most of the time yopu will have hastle free GW'ing. On a wireless connection though you can expect serious packet losses and lag.

I should say that I am by no means an expert, but I have built my own systems and played GW for over 2 years, so I hope this helps

Take from www.ncix.com
Just a basic setup, didn't bother to add mice+keyboard, but I encluded case+power supply+dvd burner.

Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 Dual Core Processor LGA775 Conroe 2.2GHZ 800FSB 2$139.15

ASUS P5B ATX LGA775 Conroe 965P DDR2 PCI-E16 3PCI-E1 3PCI SATA2 Sound GBLAN Motherboard $107.53

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA2 8.5MS 7200RPM 8MB Cache Hard Drive 5YR MFR Warranty $76.42

Patriot Extreme Performance 2GB 2X1GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 CL4-4-4-12 Dual Channel Memory Kit $89.99

EVGA E-GEFORCE 8600GTS 675MHZ 256MB 2.0GHZ GDDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI-I HDTV Out DIRECTX10 Video Card $179.62

LG GSA-H55L DVD+RW 20X8X16 DVD-RW 20X6X16 DL 10X Lightscribe DVD Writer IDE 2MB Black OEM W/ SW $40.64

Coolermaster Extreme Power 500W ATX 12V V2.01 Silent Power Supply 20/24PIN 120MM Fan $47.73

Nmedia HTPC-300BA Media Centre Tower Case ATX Black 1X5.25 4X3.5INT Front Audio USB Firewire No PS $49.29

YOUR TOTAL $730.37

But yeah that's vaguely what you'd want, pretty decent video card, dual core cpu, onboard sound+lan on the mobo.

I've been doing some research for myself to catch up on the latest stuff since I got about 1000 € from my family as a Christmas gift and was thinking of a little upgrade. I'll put it together myself but I suppose you can look for a prebuilt with similar components, or find some site that you can order a custom-built one from.

Here's what I've been thinking:

CPU: Some mid-priced Core 2 Duo will do just fine. There's new Core 2 Duo CPUs (codenamed "Penryn" for the laptop CPUs and "Wolfdale" for desktops) made on Intel's new 45 nm process coming out on the 20th of January, but no info on how many they'll actually have ready for the launch, so availability may be low for a while. On the other hand, the prices for the existing Core 2 Duo models may drop a bit, making them even better deals.

Video: ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB or Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT w/ 512MB. Don't get a 256MB GeForce 8800GT: the card's otherwise so powerful the only thing keeping you from running many new games smoothly at 1600x1200 and above with high settings and 6xAA will be lack of video memory with the huge multisampled framebuffer eating it up.

I think I'll stick with my factory-overclocked GeForce 7900GS until a decent GeForce 9 series card is released, though.

RAM: DDR3 isn't good value for the money at current prices, unless you must have the fastest RAM available, in which case it's usually a better deal than equivalent DDR2. I was thinking of getting 2 gigabytes of DDR2-800 from Kingston, maybe.

Motherboard: Intel's P35 chipset seems pretty good. I've been thinking of buying an Abit IP35, which uses one of those. I've found Abit stuff very reliable (and tweakable) in the past.

HDD: Samsung's latest series looks pretty nice.

A friend of mine recently built a comp with parts similar to the above, using an Antec Sonata III case and the power supply it came with. Thing was insanely fast and made almost no noise when running. Heck, the thing's noise was drowned out by his old laptop running Guild Wars.

Edit: Oh, didn't notice it was $800 _Canadian_. Oh well. Drop the 8800GT from the list.

Just bought a new system a few days ago

Intell core duo quad 2.4 gig
Nvidia 8600 gt 256 meg
2 gig ddr2 ram.

my old system "Amd 1800 nvidia ti4800 128 card and 1 gig ram" ran gw at around 7fps in towns and 14 outside.
Settings were at medium level.


New system with gw on max settings
Kamadan on a busy night with the snow falling 68 fps
Outside its around 160 fps

Price in the uk for the system was £579 don't know canadian prices but if "Medion" sell there might be worth a look.