Out of Pod Experience

the 7300gt is barely able to run eve and is the card ive recently replaced with an ( please forgive me) ATI Radion 6670 series, cheap and effective
however it does require a good powersupply unit 500w minimum cheap enough and easy to swap

that said if your having to ask these questions please do have a system built before you end up with a mental hernia like i did

its so much easier and the extra cost over homebuild is marginal,, plus if it goes a pete tong,,, its their problem not yours


to give you an idea the cheap system i have it this

500w psu
500gb hard drive
dvd r/w drive
intel quad core Q8500
3gb ram
ati radion 6670 1gb card with a clock speed of 800mhz

this rig gives a 5.9 microsoft score and runs eve very well with reasonably high settings and it was a pleasure to finally check out the captains quarters without a meltdown, plus the missles look shweeeet

by all mean build your own system but do plenty of research and dont be afraid to email companies and ask their advice
but hand on heart, if your wanting to avoid headaches and not bothered about the aclaim of " i built this",, have one built

For 699, it should be possible to get:
180 GB Intel SSD
Nvidia GTX 560
8 GB Ram
i5 CPU

And this will easily run 2 instances of EVE + another game all at the same time @ max graphics.

Because the rating is based on the lowest factor; in almost all cases it is the speed of the HD (usually 7200).

My I7-3770,16 GB RAM,HD ATI 7970 system still is at a 5.9 due to its HD speed.

hmmm... I picked up an ASUS and dropped in a GeForce card all for about $800, all max performance with good frame rate. Also picked up a budget Toshiba laptop (both this year), not quite max settings, at least a little clunky in captains quarters (I have no need for) otherwise looks as good as my desktop apart from quarters. Figures I wind up playing EVE 80% of the time on the cheap laptop. Oh crummy sound though, but I plug in my line6 guitar port with guitar amps and all is well, and neighbors mad. I vote laptop :)

Thread moved from General Discussion to Out of Pod Experience - ISD Type40.

Your logic is flawed, slightly.

If the [primary] reason for building your own computer is to lower cost - what happens if you have an accident whilst building it? Or, within the first few days or weeks of operation? OR it simply stops working for no perceived reason?

The money you 'saved' is then meaningless, especially if the entire system gets the hard end of a static discharge from your body, completely by accident, resulting in total system failure and zero refunds.

Alienware, I'll agree on your points, but not the 'saving money' aspect of building your own PC - it's a false economy.

The only reason someone should be interested in building their own PC is for personal satisfaction or hobbiest reasons, not cash.

I appreciate the chances are slim, but accidents can and do happen, regardless of the maths involved and there is no way I'd risk $/€/£/¥ on something like a computer, no way.

I recent build I ordered for several K's broke recently after over a month of usage. To this day I do not know what went wrong with it, and I do not care. All I care about is that I got all my money back within 2 days, and they collected the pallet with the rig+stuff with 24 hours of total system failure.

Make an informed choice who builds it, then place the order with them. If it goes wrong, it's on them, not YOU - and your dream will not become a nightmare of lost K's.

AK

I wouldn't use a retailer.

My spec was too high for retail and it would have lost all personalisation even if it was low enough spec to be in a shop.

I told them what I wanted, and did the math - by my calculation they charged me less than $100 dollars to build it.

This included a water cooling system, prime95 burn ins, over clocking (CPU+gpu+mem), sli config, creation of bios profiles specific to my build, fan controller install and config, RAID-0 SSD configs, plus additional SSD scratch drive setup and config for Adobe MC, plus black magic pro install and config.

Fully tested electrically and with more stats and reports than I could care to mention, plus photos emailed to myself whilst being built.

Shame it went wrong really, but my point stands.

AK

AK

I looked at the alienware website at the x51, it looks like midrange consumer system, it is not a gamer system. Don't buy it to play games.

As far as video cards from nVidia, a gaming system should have a GTX 460 (now old, but still good card) or GTX 560/GTX 560 Ti at the minimum. The better systems will have GTX 570, GTX 580 or 6xx series cards. For example, the system you linked has option of two video cards, GT 545 and GTX 555, they are not gaming cards, they are for running browsers, office applications and watching dvd, they will run EVE, but an older GTX 460 will destroy them in gaming.

At this time for nVidia the gamer cards start at GTX 460, 560, 660. If you don't see one of these cards in the build, then you know that it is not a gamer build.

You can pick up refurbished GTX 460 for around 100 dollars. You can still get new GTX 460 for about 120-130 dollars. Also, refurbished GTX 560 are around 150-160 dollars if you want something newer.

Like I said earlier, the none gamer cards will run EVE too if you don't want to buy gamer card. Just make sure it is 4xx series or higher if you buy nVidia. All 4xx and higher series cards do DX 11. The 1xx, 2xx and 3xx series nVidia cards only do DX 10. Not really too important at this time, but if in a year or so you will run in situation where you must have DX 11, then you will not need to buy another video card.

Also check power supply. I run my GTX 460 from cheap 520 Watt power supply, general minimum for GTX 460 is something like 460 Watt power supply. That alienware x51 had 300 Watt power supply if I remember right... like I said, it was not a gamer system.