Building a Gaming PC
The gang at Corsair have posted an article outlining the various details of building a high performance gaming PC. Of particular interest is the section regarding overclocking the system. For those who might have limited experience in overclocking, who better to teach you the black art than one of the leading enthusiast memory vendors. Should you be looking to build a system yourself, be sure to also check our our own Hot Hardware Holiday Buyer's Guide.
The sweet spot for resolution right now seems to be 1280x1024, which is the native resolution of most 17" and 19" LCD monitors. In a newer game like Call of Duty 2 or Battlefield 2, even the top-of-the-line video cards like the 7800GTX and the X1800XT show slowdowns with all options enabled and Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering turned all the way up. They're still playable, but they're faster without those options.
Part of the fun of a system build is the tweaking, changing settings this way and that way and experimenting with performance. It's a task that never really gets finished, as anybody who's built up an engine or done a case mod can attest to. Nothing is ever really finished, there's always a little more performance, one more little thing you can change that will make you more satisfied.
