Hello there, I'm going to build a system for my older sister, the main purpose of this build is to play older games, like roller coaster tycoon 2, need for speed underground, theme hospitals, age of empires, and such. Though I want to make the system capable of playing newer games too.
Here's my build:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/utoa
I am either going with the A-10 but I might go with the a4-5300 if she want the system to be cheaper.
Please say if there's something I should change.
!!! EDIT: Forgot the Motherboard in the link......... Have been added !!!
Thats a decent system that will definitely push those games, some even max out(like AOE and rollercoaster tycoon). For the $300 can we recomend you a system that will give your sister more gaming horsepower for her dollar? She can have a system that runs circles around that A10 onboard GPU for equal price.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/usjK This system will do it.
Vistination around the same amount as the build, I can't say for sure as I live in Denmark and the pricing is so weird (It's a lot more expensive than in the US)
To John c's build:
If you use the same parts in both the APU build is 50$ cheaper but... I cannot get those parts...
Though I did build an Intel build but I had to change the 7770 to a 6570 instead.
It's actually the exact same price as the 5700 in Denmark, but this is not going to be overclocked, and I would like to keep the watts as low as possible. As electricity is expensive aswell. (The 5700 is a 65w part while the 5800k is a 100w part)
7660d vs 6570 theyre about the same on most games, with the 6570 having a small lead according to this review: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/amd-trinity-graphics.html
The L3 cache and the stronger cores of the Pentium would probably be better for older games than the four cores of the A10. Old games and many current games don't take advantage of four cores. Future games will though. Thats when the four cores of the A10 will be useful. The pentium can upgrade to an i5 which is four cores but that will cost you. Although the i5 is the best CPU for gaming.
BTW, if you're sister decides either of those is too expensive, I would go with the A6 rather than the A4. The A6 GPU is a bit better and it supports 1866 RAM whereas the A4 only supports 1600.
I'll be honest, you could pull a 10 year old computer from the trash and it would still max these games out. I remember playing AOE on an AMD Athlon 64 with a NVidia GeForce MX2 with no problem.
One problem you will run into is that the games may not run on windows 7 or 8 unless you're re-purchasing them from that website that remakes them for newer OS's (whatever that blasted site is called)
BTW, if your going to play Theme Hospital I would reccommend going with the corsix-th project, it uses all of the assets from the origional game which means you need to have a copy but it is built to run on newer systems and it even runs on linux.
Zanginator the only computers I know I can get my hands on are horribly slow and not that nice to use. But I will ask her if she's interested in getting something like that.
I'm getting windows 7 for her, as for the games I know that all of the games (except for the Theme Hospital) works as I have tested them on a windows 7 machine. I don't know if there are other games, I will have to ask her. Thanks for expanding the thread to software too!
And thanks Bacondrinker I will look into it! Unfortunatly my copy of Theme Hospital have been scratched to death by my younger siblings (and probably by myself too...)