For gaming fans, PC gaming is anything but trivial -- and certainly not cheap. Every new crop of action-oriented games, it seems, requires new hardware with top-end components.
"You'll really have to invest between US$1,200 and US$1,500 into an optimal gaming PC," says gaming expert Thomas von Treichel from Darkbreed, a club for network games based in Karben, Germany. And remember, he says: that price doesn't include the monitor.
The most important components of a good gaming PC are the motherboard, the processor, and the graphics card, von Treichel says.
Most gamers would also not think about serious gaming without a loudspeaker system capable of making the walls rumble.
Serious gamers will also need the appropriate input device for the game at hand, such as steering wheels for driving games or gamepads for football or ice hockey simulations. Game-ready machines must also have a fast CD-ROM or DVD drive, a large hard drive (at least 80 gigabytes) and 512 megabytes or more of RAM.
And then there is the question of the monitor: fast-paced games are still best depicted on tube monitors, von Treichel feels.
"Even if the manufacturers say otherwise, the response rate of LCD monitors remains too slow," von Treichel says.
As a network gaming fan, a network card is also standard equipment, in order to play on a local network as well as via DSL or cable over the Internet.
Only rarely will a PC from right off the shelf meet the needs of PC gamers. "You really need to get the components to work with each other," explains the gaming pro. Dream PCs can be built to specifications at a dealer or can be put together by more adventurous users. No-name computers found in discount outlets are to be avoided, though. Those computers costs less in part because they put the graphics chip right onto the motherboard, which can result in huge expenses later when it comes time to upgrade.
For Uwe Scheffel, a hardware expert who runs the Tom's Hardware Guide Web site, the perfect gaming PC demands the newest hardware.
"A gaming PC should have an Intel Pentium 4 with 3.2 GHz," he advises. Buying the best carries a steep price tag, however.
The final bill could easily reach US$2,500 or more. A cutting-edge graphics card, decked out with an Ati Radeon 9800 Pro or an Nvidia FX-5800 Ultra chip set, will cost at least US$500. This is why such cards usually end up in the hands of only the hard-core gamers.
Von Treichel's approach is somewhat more pragmatic. He believes that hardware that is six-months old is still sufficient to have fun.
Twice the price for a new computer does not necessarily mean twice the power.
"The performance bump is only in the single percentage points," von Treichel says. This matters only to the geeks who get chills at the idea of squeezing one more image per second from the action games. The more images per second that a graphics card produces, the less stuttering of the image is seen by the viewer.
Gamers' preferences have not gone unnoticed by the hardware industry. Product development for graphics cards and sound cards is strongly driven by gamers, explains Christoph Muellers, a spokesman for the PC component manufacturer Terratec.
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