Ars technica system guide 2014 gaming

Think of aiming for the 3D performance of the Hot Rod, without the price. The hard drive may not be as big, the case might not be as nice, and the system may not provoke as much geek envy among friends, but the performance is close enough. The Performance Gaming Box comes in at around double the cost of the Hot Rod and is what the same enthusiast might build if he had the budget for a gaming machine that had one sole purpose in life: playing the most demanding games on hardware that that enables a gaming experience with all the bells and whistles turned on.

The Performance Gaming Box may share core components with the Budget Gaming Box and other systems from the Ars System Guide, but it is taken to a higher level of performance. For the serious gamer who has is looking at high-resolutions with the latest games, the Performance Gaming Box may be perfect. For those who demand Hot Rod performance but without the budget to live on the bleeding edge, the Budget Gaming Box is the place to start. The Budget Gaming Box and Performance Gaming Box are different takes on a gaming box, outlined by differences in budget and practicality.

The Budget Gaming Box focuses its resources on money for the best gaming experience, knowing that when price is an issue, some components give much better performance gains for the money than others. The Performance Gaming Box has higher demands for performance as it is expected to run at the highest resolutions that a gamer might run today, but enough room in the budget to help meet those demands and more.

The Performance Gaming Box can justify an even faster video card setup as it needs to work at even higher resolutions than the Budget Gaming users, but its increased budget means it can still afford to justify some of the nicer little things for the gaming experience, such as a faster hard drive and nicer sound card.

The gamer who wants top-of-the-line performance will be very pleased what the Performance Gaming Box can do without breaking the bank like the God Box. The differences between the specialty Gaming Boxes and others may be smaller than some think, though. Many gamers have large collections of downloaded games, which means Gaming Boxes actually need fairly large amounts of storage.

The shrinking cost of LCD monitors, affordable SSDs, fast video cards, and other components all mean that the adjustments in a build from a focused gaming box to a more well-rounded box aren't all that bad on the wallet. The Gaming Boxes give a greater emphasis on gaming performance than the boxes in the main System Guide. For those who desire something more than the Hot Rod but don't need all the storage or processing power of the God Box and with a stronger bent on value , the Gaming Boxes can provide that, too.

With gaming as the primary focus, things like low noise might take a hit. However, modern components today tend to have energy efficiency designed in, so the power and noise penalties aren't too bad. The base components making up the Hot Rod today actually look quite solid, so bumping up some areas such as CPU or memory end up being a relatively poor value. Keeping those in the same class as the Hot Rod and focusing on the parts that matter for more gaming panache—the video cards and monitor in particular—seems to find the best balance between performance and money.

This forces some difficult choices. Bumping up both frame rates and resolutions can cause a serious strain on the video subsystem as well as significantly increasing the cost of the monitors necessary to support higher frame rates, higher resolutions, or both. Needless to say, things can quickly get out of hand as we found in our time searching for reasonable configurations. These are especially kind to gamers whose console ports of choice don't translate well to mouse and keyboard.

Finding a way to securely bolt the wheel to your desk usually isn't too hard, but the real challenge is doing the same for your couch. The number of games that use them has simply declined.

Those of us in the Ars Orbiting HQ with flashbacks to the glory days of LucasArt's TIE Fighter are probably not representative of the general population these days—and that makes us a little sad. On the more widely used end, there are plenty of options for in-game communication headsets.

Major upgrades are often driven by software, not hardware. And one of the biggest software categories driving upgrades is games. Excitement over dual-channel memory or the NVIDIA GeForce series video cards is great, but without a compelling need to upgrade, excitement does not always generate sales. Far Cry brought many older systems to their knees a few months ago. Today, Doom 3 does the same to many almost-new systems.

Some find this unacceptable. They can afford upgrades, they do not want to settle for running Doom 3 at x; to them, they want to run Doom 3 at x And they can justify this kind of upgrade. Some scrape pennies from their tuition checks to buy the latest video card and most capable system because it is what they want to do, others can easily afford upgrades but wait until the latest-and-greatest game is released before they spec their next system.

As you can guess by the name, gaming is the focus of this guide.