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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Redrobes" data-source="post: 2990987" data-attributes="member: 40793">I think that your first decision should be whether it needs to be portable or not. If it does then just how portable. And next on the list is cost.If you want to play in LAN parties or say you DM for a group but play at a friends house and want to use the computer then portability might be useful.For a gaming rig the most important feature of your machine is graphics speed. CPU speed is important but not as important as GPU speed.If picking a laptop, dont get one with a video chip that shares memory with the main memory. Most top end laptops come with NVidia or ATI chips with larger amounts of graphics ram than they used to.For the graphics system ensure it has at least 64 Meg of RAM. Your better off getting 128 and if it is possible get 256 or even more. It makes a big difference especially if your gonna play Doom III or Far Cry type games. On the graphics processor it will have a total lit pixels per second rating. This is also a very important number of the moment second to memory. I think that toms hardware has the best comparison charts which they perform each quarter. You need to be picky about your graphics card.I would probably buy a Dell if I had to get a pre built system as I believe their systems are well designed, use reasonable parts and are quiet, tho I have heard a lot about their poor after sales service - I havent used them as I build mine but I guess you wont hear a lot about all the good after sales service.And... dont forget the cooling of it. Nowadays we burn so much power that the systems have a lot of fans or water cooling. You will probably only get water cooling on a custom built machine or a specialist like Alienware. Note how loud the machine is before you get a shock later !Another thing to consider too is what sound card is in it. If you want the 7.1 Dolby stuff then it takes a lot of CPU to generate it. There are some better sound cards out now with fairly hefty sound processor chips on them to offload the CPU.A dual core and its just great ! If there is a choice then opt for a multi core CPU every time ! Six months ago AMD wiped intel but its turning around again. Again, toms hardware has good CPU charts...In terms of RAM thats pretty easy. 1Gb is probably not enough these days and Win XP (32 bit) cant handle 4Gb properly so you need 2Gb.If your going down the Windows route then you have XP, XP x64, or Vista (soon). I love XP x64 tho its specialist and I would not recommend it for a straight games machine. Vista is a bit unknown as yet and I reckon XP is the only sensible choice.<a href="http://tomshardware.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://tomshardware.co.uk/</a>esp...<a href="http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/graphics/charts.html" target="_blank">http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/graphics/charts.html</a></blockquote>

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