Buyer's Guide: High-End Gaming - August 2002

Continuing the buyer's guide this week is the highly anticipated high-end gaming system. The second high-end buyer's guide and the fifth buyer's guide over all, our mission remains the same:

What we will keep doing is bringing you up to date system configuration suggestions on the type of system that you are interested in. Although it is impossible to suggest a single configuration for each individual in each situation, what we can and will do is provide you with recommendations towards a system setup; recommendations which can be altered appropriately for each user's specific needs. We will do what we have always done in buyer's guides: spec out a system using reliable components from reputable vendors. Remember, these prices are not necessarily the lowest prices on the web but are meant to be representative of what is out there and representative of what we think is the best solution in one of the six categories.

Changing this time around will be the format of the buyer's guides. We will maintain the six specific categories, value SOHO, value gaming, value professional 3D, high-end SOHO, high-end gaming, and high-end professional 3D, but this time around the recommendations will not be lumped together. Instead, we will be publishing one recommendation from each category weekly. We kicked off the buyer's guide with the value SOHO category and continue this week with the value gaming category. After the value and high-end recommendations are made we will do one article on a dream configuration. At this rate, new recommendations for each system will come every eight weeks so in eight weeks from today you can expect an updated value gaming buyer's guide. Not only does this keep the system recommendations fresher, it also keeps the price estimates more accurate.

Every component in a recommend system, from case to monitor, is covered. The only hidden costs are shipping costs, which can add anywhere from 5% to 10% to the total system cost depending on what you get and from where. The best way to keep shipping costs down is to order as much as possible from a single vendor or pick things up locally. Be sure to take a look at the AnandTech Hot Deals Forum to see if any AnandTech readers have posted a special deal on a piece of hardware in the recommended system. Also be sure to check out our Weekly CPU & Video Card Price Guide and our Weekly Memory & Motherboard Price Guide to see if prices have been updated since the buyer's guide was last posted.

Like before, an OS for each system is recommended but the OS price is not included in the final system price listed.

This Week

Again, configuring a high-end system is not as easy as some may think. If we were simply to choose the highest performing components available regardless of the cost, we could have a machine that would satisfy the needs of almost all users. The problem with such a system is that items necessary on one high-end system may not be necessary on another. In addition, we must be somewhat price conscious when specing out our high-end systems. Our dream system configuration is aimed at building the ultimate system regardless of price, but our high-end system recommendations are set out to build a fast system on a reasonable budget, not a limitless one.

The goal of our high-end gaming system: to configure a system that displays some of the fastest frame rates in 3D games today and has the ability to handle 3D games well into the future. Our high-end gaming system recommendation is to chose a set of fast, reliable components to create one mighty gaming machine.