New Here, first of hopefully many posts, need new pc help.

Hi,

I am new here and have been learning much. I am in the market for a new pc and have been reading here a lot. I want this to be a very fast gaming pc.

I have had my eye on the Dell XPS system, but reading here makes me think I should build my own. I have been reading up on oc'ing, but don't completely understand it.

If you were to buy a prebuilt gaming system, which would you buy, or should I build my own? I have never built one before. I really have no idea what mb to get, or what cpu for that matter.

So, with this first post, I hope to get a dialog rolling. I would like as much advice/help as possible.

I am not sure if I want to oc the system, or if I should even build my own.

Well, I hope to hear from you.

Thanks

Viper

 

with the speed of stuff these days you can build it fast enough not to need ocing.My rig screams through anything and I run all stock. Specs in sig If I were to buy a prebuilt I would go with Dell and upgrade the video and power supply.

 

I'm currently undergoing my second build. My first was simply, fairly cheap, and ran all the games I needed on best graphics for three years. Forget prebuilt. Build your own. It's fun and its faster for the money.

Building a computer is all about research and decision making. Those two should alternate in about a 10:1 ratio. The number one decision that will guide all of your choices when building a computer is how much money you have to spend. Both of my builds have cost 700-800$ and they would be not considered high end, perhaps not even "mid range" but that's subjective. The first thing you want to understand and decide on is whether you want an AMD or a Intel based system. AMD and Intel are the two major manufacturers of processors. A processor (Central Processing Unit or CPU) is a small, square chip that does all, or most, of the computations in your computer. I am an AMD man myself since their processors have way faster communication speeds, and as far as I'm concerned a CPU can be as fast as it wants in theory but if it can't talk to the rest of the system its useless to me.

I used newegg.com almost exclusively for my surface-level research (looking up specs) and purchasing. I highly recommend them for their unbeatable prices and famous customer service. Also, they have a good page with links to various other sites where you can do your entry level, hard core research (such as what is a CPU, what does clock speed mean etc.). That's under the help and support tab when you first go to their site. Wikipedia, of course, is always good. The primary way I learned was by noodling around looking at components on Newegg and then looking up what all the terminology I saw meant on other websites like wikipedia. One of these I found useful was webopedia.com. That isn't nearly as comprehensive, but it provides a lot of good, basic information.