Help me buy a PC!

[Mechagodzilla]

I'll start this off outright by saying that, despite my love of Half-Life and Half-Life accessories, I have absolutely no computer knowledge whatsoever.

That's why I need your help!
My current PC is hopelessly outdated, so I'm going to buy a new one that will actually run Half-Life 2 at a reasonable speed. All I need to know is what sorts of products you all would recommend for providing the required megapixels or whatever.

So, what's the best cheap HL2 PC/Graphics card/Sound card I can buy/build?
And remember: cheap is better!

 

[blahblahblah]

We need a realistic price range for us to help you. And will you build this yourself or have it pre-built. Building it yourself will be slightly cheaper and you can highly customize the parts you want.

 

[DJ_Cheeba]

Like Blahblahblah said, a budget would be good helpful. But the good news is you can do this fairly cheap these days. If you already have a decent monitor, speakers etc. That will cut the cost a bit

 

[Mechagodzilla]

Hmm. Price range would probably be between 500 and 1000. Closer to 500, the better.

 

[C-O-N-Spiracy]

build a pc.. much cheaper! its easy.. all you gotta do is plug things in.. might wanna have someone help you get all your chipsets right though, or else it'll bark at you and play dead.. dont want that..

 

[Hazar]

I built mine for ~650
Here it is:
Athlon 2700+
512 ddr 2700
geForce4 mx440 128 (hopefully soon to be a 9800 )
40 gig hd
dvd-rom/cd burner
regular cd-rom

that's about it. Most all of the stuff is from newegg which has EXTREAMLY good shipping rates for a lot of stuff. (to give you an idea, the case, monitor, and some other stuff all shipped for about $35. anywhere else you would have had to pay like 50-60.)

 

[CptStern]

Hmm. Price range would probably be between 500 and 1000. Closer to 500, the better.

one purchase leads to another ...best upgrade would be a good graphics card

do you want to get a whole new computer for $500-$1000? that's a little bit tough at the $500 range

this is good place to start to figure out what components you can get for your price range

here's an example ...you could easily shave off a few bucks here and there but this is a pretty good system ...I didnt include an operating system and used some parts that are a bit more expensive ...you could easily get it below $1000 ..oh and if you do buy from NCIX make sure you check out the sale items (every week there's a sale)

* Canadian prices

 

[The Terminator]

I built the stuff in my sig for around $900. Thats amercian money though.

 

[CptStern]

I paid about $1100 canadian for mine:

http://www.ncix.com/pcbuilder/index.php?action=config&id=1593252&platformid=1001

but I searched high and low to get the best prices ...even 5 months later I still saved myself $300 by buying the parts myself from different stores

 

[Drizz]

I just bulit a new system as well. It's not hard at all.

I have X880 pro graphics card (very expensive you may not want to buy that just yet)
AMD 64. Amazing processor
1536 MB Ram( lol)
Creative 7.1 audio
Asus K8v motherboard.(works amazingly if you wanna use an athlon processor)
2 120 gig hard drives with RAID support.

Yes this is an expensive system. If you're not looking to spend much maybe I reccomend getting an ATI graphics card. Amd is a great choice for a gaming machine. 512 mb ram will suffice. And the rest of your hardware. Overall building a computer is a fun project. I remember the first one I built. I stuffed it full of LED lights and it started a motherboard fire due to a power surge! lol not funny.