What’s the deal these days with PC gaming anyway? GameStop barely carries any PC titles anymore. That’s probably because if you’ve been like most gamers, you have evolved to make do with a decent laptop or mini-tower for your computing needs and used a true gaming system console like PS3 or X360 for your gaming. So what about when a big hit title comes up like the recent Star Wars Old Republic or the highly anticipated Diablo III which at the time of this writing have no intention of being ported onto a console? What kind of system and how much investment is really needed to get a PC machine up to par for some decent gaming?
A Gaming Laptop
The answer is a double edged sword as any retail chain (Best Buy comes to mind), will no doubly give you a load of bull about how the ram configuration has changed and you need an entirely new system with the latest $400 video card to get even close to having something that will run one of those titles. Not true! Is what we say. A decent $5-600 laptop with an onboard video card that has at least some kind of useable independent RAM will probably hold up to the challenge. When shopping we recommend checking how much RAM the video card has dedicated to itself and how much is shared.
It’s this little difference that OEM Laptop manufacturer’s use to try to fool you into thinking you have a 1.5GB memory card, when in all reality (right click on your desktop and go to display settings advanced) you’ll find you have 16mb dedicated and 1632 shared or something like that. With a standard requirement of 256mb of “on board” ram, it’s ‘iffy’ and probably not likely at all it will run on your 16mb ‘on board’ and 1600 shared memory laptop video card. So what do you do? Buy a cheap $200 tower from say Walmart with a decent amount of RAM (2gb or better), and get yourself a decent 512mb video card. Sound comes next, and that’s another investment entirely, but if you are animate enough to start building a game machine, you are going to bit the bullet somewhere. Let’s see what GameAspect has to say on the subject.
But still owning a Windows PC is not without a high degree of maintenance. Its not like you need to wash and wax it or anything, but it does tend to completely destroy itself over time. With the old Dos operating system I was used to, PCs were fairly robust with their one major problem being the conventional memory limitation. But once Windows 95 came around everything changed. Nowadays Windows PCs seem to simply self destruct every once in a while whether by their own DLL nature, or by the will of an ominous email sender.
Read more at: GameAspect
