Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Capt. Harlock

Assuming you're not buying a laptop, I'd go half-and-half with hard drives: a 120 or 240 GB SSD for the C: drive for fast boot-up and Windows tasks, and a big regular hard drive for the data and large apps. My own homebuilt is set up this way, and seems to work pretty well.

Cheap working alternative. However costs of SSD drives have came down hard and may still be falling. At the moment terabyte SSDs are available around 200 € around here (Finland)

I bought a new gaming PC a couple of years ago--500GB solid state system drive and a 6TB drive to install games on. Default settings for Windows 10 are for a single hard drive, so if you have Windows 10 as your operating system, you might want to adjust your settings for an additional hard drive to account for your D:\ drive. Otherwise all your installations, downloads, etc. will be directed to your C:\ (system) drive.

ORIGINAL: Kuokkanen

ORIGINAL: KurtC

Gilmer's/KurtC's computer

Some old tech there. I recommend i7-8700 in place of 6700K. And appropriate mother board for it.

Yeah, i know it's a little older, but I only said it is for ideas.

I'm off to buy a laptop for the wife. She does not need a gaming level computer but I found that the one I'm looking at has intel Optane Memory. Which increases speed on conventional drive (almost to the level of SSD drives, at least reviews say so). I'm still undecided on a gaming laptop for myself though I am tending towards the Costco laptop suggested by Wesy.

ORIGINAL: DonCzirr

Looks like the time is coming for me to retire "old reliable" - my 8 GB Win 8.1 Laptop - and is time to pick up a new rig.


Looking at "Gaming PCs" available from various vendors, I see that they are oriented towards 3d shooters and things like Fortnite".


Being primarily a Wargamer, I have little need of 3D graphics but do have the need to process substantial maps and number crunching - examples : AGEOD Pride of Nations / Alea Jacta Est,

War in the East, Strategic Command WIE and WaW.


Any recommendations then for folks that may have gone through a recent exercise?

I'm thinking with Windows 10, 16 GB RAM is a good start ... and perhaps a SSD Drive .... any other Wargamer friendly tips ?

I have custom built two rigs form my kids who enjoy their graphics intensive FPS games, while also built one for myself, with emphasis towards memory intensive hex-and-counters wargames.

I'd actually pretty much go what you said there. SSD for one, I'd not consider a system anymore without a primary SSD drive. Fast, quiet, quite inexpensive nowadays. So I'd definitively have that.

Then, I'd actually future proof my PC with 16GB RAM as well. While RAM is something that can be added later, the newer chips are not necessarily compatible with old, and as our PCs are a few years old and had DDR3 RAM, instead of the latest DDR4 standard, it was a bit difficult to find a decently priced upgrade to 16GB from the original 8GB. Thing with RAM is that your motherboard, in a years to come, will not likely support the what ever is the next spec, so it might be if not difficult then at least more expensive to upgrade later.

Graphics cards are easy to upgrade, so I'd not worry about that for now, and if I'd want to save money somewhere, and given you said your gaming preference is not GPU intensive, well there you go. So what ever left I'd invest in a CPU.

To recap, my priorities would be:

[*] SSD from the word go, with a less expensive large secondary HDD possibly later.
[*] 16GB RAM
[*] CPU
[*] GPU

A word about RAM and SSD: money is best used for quantity rather than quality. Still it doesn't hurt to read up on it from computer magazines. I recall reading about a cheap SSD that performs significantly slower than only 30 € more expensive ones. Still even that one is likely better than any easily found HDD.

ORIGINAL: Kuokkanen

A word about RAM and SSD: money is best used for quantity rather than quality. Still it doesn't hurt to read up on it from computer magazines. I recall reading about a cheap SSD that performs significantly slower than only 30 € more expensive ones. Still even that one is likely better than any easily found HDD.

I always go for the quality. It makes things so much better.

Perfect example. I had an HP or a Dell and it had a cheap wireless card. Could not stream ANYTHING on it without getting the buffering icon. I built my new computer and "splurged" for a good wireless card and streaming is so smooth now.

ORIGINAL: KurtC

ORIGINAL: Kuokkanen

A word about RAM and SSD: money is best used for quantity rather than quality. Still it doesn't hurt to read up on it from computer magazines. I recall reading about a cheap SSD that performs significantly slower than only 30 € more expensive ones. Still even that one is likely better than any easily found HDD.

I always go for the quality. It makes things so much better.

Perfect example. I had an HP or a Dell and it had a cheap wireless card. Could not stream ANYTHING on it without getting the buffering icon. I built my new computer and "splurged" for a good wireless card and streaming is so smooth now.

Agreed, there's items where one should shop for quality, and areas where it matters less in itself. Power unit is probably at the one end where the cheap alternative is not a good choice, then, as Kuokkanen mentioned, those RAM chips available seem to be in general all good (enough) quality, and there's little gain for shopping for the fastest possible RAM chips, for instance. Especially when on budget.

Of course, when building without budget, or with a large budget, it is a different matter. Just like with cycling, shaving out those last grams from your bike frame is what really costs you [:'(]

ORIGINAL: KurtC

I always go for the quality. It makes things so much better.

DonCzirr doesn't want to pay more than $800 for entire computer. Quality motherboard cost more than that.

ORIGINAL: Kuokkanen

ORIGINAL: KurtC

I always go for the quality. It makes things so much better.

DonCzirr doesn't want to pay more than $800 for entire computer. Quality motherboard cost more than that.

Whoa now, there's quality and then there's quality. I'm going for the quality.... the cheaper quality. More like $300.

ORIGINAL: Hoeist6634

ORIGINAL: JReb

ORIGINAL: Hoeist6634

I wouldn't go to high on spec's because pc gaming is going to change dramatically over the next coming years with major players launching their game streaming services which will require less high end hardware from the consumerside.

Now there is an idea. A $10 monthly subscription to a Slith / Matrix streaming channel to have access to their entire catalog of games. Oh yeah baby! [:D] [8D]

Couldn't agree with you more![:D]

And now Google Stadia is coming.... Who needs a high end pc or laptop?

As always, there are tradeoffs between streaming/local gaming; and it remains to be seen what those truly are as we get a fuller appreciation of them with time. For me, I'll stick to having games installed on my local PC. What with PC tech plateauing, it is becoming increasingly cheap and easy to build a powerful gaming PC.

ORIGINAL: wesy

I just picked up a Lenovo Legion Y7000 laptop at Costco (online) for $999. I know it's a bit above budget, but specs are good (not a ton of battery life, but it's not an ultrabook). Build quality is good and I like the matte screen.

Intel® Core™ i7-8750H Processor 2.2GHz
16GB DDR4 RAM
1.0TB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive + 256GB PCle Solid State Drive
No Optical Drive

Graphics & Video:
15.6" Anti-glare IPS LED Backlit FHD (1920 x 1080) Display
6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Graphics

As per your tip, I just picked it up before the sale ended. Should be good gaming for a long time

Hope you enjoy. Plus Costco warranty and return policy rocks