You spend hours in front of a screen and your computer is doing it tough trying to push out the best graphics as it can so that you get the best gaming experience. So, are you getting the best bang for your buck from your family friendly machine because it can run the game you mostly play, probably not, because it is using standard graphics and low resolutions. Why purchase a gaming computer?, so you dont waste hours playing your game without being able to see all that is happening as well as your opponent can. Lets look at a few items that make for great gaming with a well designed gaming computer.

Your computer is made up of its case, power supply, mainboard (motherboard), a hard drive for storing data and applications, memory for CPU processing needs, the CPU itself, sound cards, Network cards, and the ultimate Video Card. Each one of these can make a drastic difference to how you play and enjoy your PC game.

Lets look at some of the computer components that can give you great gaming experience as an upgrade to your current computer.

A better video card.

A Gaming Video card will improve the screen refresh rates so that your visual experience is smooth all the time without video lag. Most serious gamers also want to play at higher resolution rates giving more information per inch on your screen. This enhances the eye candy and allows certain things like bullets, gun rays, objects a long way away all to be more easily seen. To really enjoy a game means to run all video controls for colour, resolution, rendering and the like at the top level and thus a high quality video card is imperative. All this great resolution is great but your display must be up to it so make sure you have a decent screen as well.

More and faster RAM.

Memory (RAM) is often miss-understood by most people. Memory works with the CPU and the quicker the information flow between the CPU and memory, the faster and smoother your gaming experience will be especially when your system is under constant intense utilisation of its resources. The two areas to improve your RAM are How Much and How Quick the RAM is. The more memory you have the more of the large game maps you can load in one hit from the hard drive. If the RAM has to keep on replacing current parts of a game map with another part, your gaming experience may become laggy because you have to wait for the hard drive that many more times, especially if your hard drive is a standard mechanical one. The speed of your RAM is crucial and many gamers will purchase memory with Heat Sinks so they can run the RAM faster and dissipate the extra heat quicker. The cooler you can keep your system the faster it will run.One more tip with RAM, purchasing RAM in duel sets will give you duel channelling allowing for the system to work with the RAM quicker.

Quicker Hard Drives.

I mentioned something about mechanical hard drives…

YES – most hard drives currently are mechanical but run extremely fast. Mechanical hard drives are the slowest part of your system. The faster the hard drive can read and write data, the less the system has to wait for the Hard Drive to do its bit and the faster the system can run. Fortunately we have the new SSD (solid state drive) drives with us and although more expensive, they will provide for greater speeds in data read/writing without the worry of mechanical wear and tear. The SSD drives have no moving parts, they are instead made up of memory chips that run electronically.

Gaming Motherboards

Gamers will try and overclock their systems to run faster but what does this mean!!!.

Overclocking is the art of running your processor and/or memory harder and faster and it requires a motherboard that can allow for changes in clock speed. Clock speed is the timing of your CPU and Memory. The faster the clock, the quicker the processor and RAM can go. Overclocking creates heat which causes system instability and crashing. A mixture of a good Case that allows for maximum airflow, fans, minimal wiring and correct processor cooling apparatus such as heat sinks and water cooling devices allow you to run your system at higher clock speeds thus getting more power out of your CPU (processor). The more power your computer has, the faster it can run and thus generate greater sound and graphics than a normal computer would.

HoT CPU’s…

If you are wondering what CPU you should have in your computer,
a good bet is a K version of the i5 CPU. Gamers don’t need the hyper-threading of an i7 chip but will enjoy being able to overclock an i5 such as the i5 4670K.

Conclusion…

There are other components that can enhance your gaming life such as gaming keyboards, mice, power supplies, surround sound headphones, sound cards, and the like which I will talk about at a later time.

Your best upgrade to get into gaming are a graphics card, more memory and a faster hard drive which will improve your eye candy, reduce lag and improve your scores. Enjoy.