Originally Posted by
zencat 
Yea Alera I'm in need of a bigger and faster CPU so I can play Sims 2 or 3 and get Spore to play. I'll have my car payed off in February
, then it time to build a gnarly gamer
, well as close to a gnarly gamer as my limited budget
can handle, but by building it myself I'll save mucho green backs.
I was in the same situation last year. I was able to save up for a new laptop only to have it crap out on me. So I replaced it (under warranty) with a new one that is also a gaming machine. It plays everything from Oblivion:Elder Scrolls IV Game of the Year version to S.T.AL.K.E.R. and the brand new Alone in the Dark. It has a NVIDIA card, TV Tuner Card, 4 Gig RAM and a decent (350 GB) hard drive. It even has a number keypad. It is marketed as a Gamer/Multi-Media computer and I am even able to record and then burn on DVDs of TV programs. The model with a larger screen was featured in ComputerWorld this year on their Christmas list, but I was able to get mine at 2/3 the price by shopping around for a discounted price.
Before I bought my laptop I built the last two desktops I owned and did everything but build the case and motherboard on our third computer.
I would have done the same with my new computer but I needed a laptop for school. Its amazing that in this day and age our house is able to run a bunch of laptops without a single desktop via wireless...and still print, scan and (of course) play the most recent games.
So far the only games that don't run are all having VISTA/VISTA 64 problems(such as a bunch of the ID games), not problems with the computer hardware. I was amazed that a laptop can "imitate" a desktop so well.
When you start building it, I hope you will share the specs and let us know how it comes along.