Posts Tagged ‘games’

Want to Upgrade Your PC or Build a New One

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Am sure many will be or already at a phase of either upgrading some parts of their PC or buying a new one completely. Thing is, you only (if you ever do so) go on searching and reading up about new PC components reviews, comparisons and prices when you are about to do such an upgrade or purchase. So the issue is, you tend to lose track of what new products that came after you did the upgrade and it gets boring to do the research again. The time frame from your last upgrade and your new one is usually enough to see one to many generations of new products to show up in the market with new features that you know nothing of because you simply already got your upgrade that does what you expected from it.

Now for casual PC users who surf the net and use MS office, they don’t need to worry much as long as their PC can do the usual stuff. Though for gamers, it is a different story. New games always raise the bar a notch or two higher that require existing hardware to play catch up. Ending up at some point to the need of an upgrade or a totally new PC. I usually do my upgrades yearly, which is sufficient for both my gaming needs and budget. Within that 1 year, graphics card makers (AMD and nVidia) release two generations of cards (usually six month time frame). Now apply that to the processor, memory, storage and other computer components and you will end up with doing a lot of reading. Or simply you can visit Sharky Extreme. The site has three sets of PC building guides tailored for gamers depending on their budget. They got the value range (1000$), the high range (2500$) and the extreme range (4000$). They release updated guides every few months depending on the market. The guide doesn’t tell you how to build the PC though. It just points out the PC components that you need to get to meet your budget and end up with a gaming PC. They sometimes provide more than one option on a certain component to get. For example the processor, they tell you to go for a certain Intel version or the equivalent AMD version.

Of course no guide can be followed 100% but these can be used as good starting points and help minimize the headache to look up on each component. There are many sites on the web that provide such guides but through my experience, Sharky Extreme does it very well. Have a look yourself and see what you think.

You can visit the site here. Navigate to the guides tab and look up the latest guides they have.