Understanding gaming PC Operating System

Given Microsoft’s Windows vast market penetration, driver availability, games availability and software compatibility there’s not much of a choice here, specially if you already have an Operating System like Windows XP. Older Operating Systems usually cease production so we should choose Windows 7 as our Operating System for our new gaming PC or if we plan to upgrade. Some reports state that Windows 7 is more stable than Vista, the previous Microsoft’s Operating System. Remember that we should have at least 4GB of RAM in our gaming PC, so we should choose a 64 Bit Operating System. We will analyze three Microsoft’s Operating Systems in terms of 3D performance. Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. You can feel free to make your choices based in our analysis.

1) Windows XP – provides great stability and driver availability as well as 3D performance and is very popular because of that. This one is the best of the three in terms of RAM usage. There are thousands of games and applications available for this Operating System and lots of them are still being developed. The 64 Bit version of this Operating System added support for more than 4GB of RAM at the cost of stability. As this Operating System became older, better drivers were produced and stability improved a little. Windows XP 32 Bit version is the best one of the three for gaming. . If you have the 32 Bit version of this Operating System you can save some money by keeping it instead of getting a new one.

2) Windows Vista – this operating system started with the wrong foot in the stability department and didn’t comply with Microsoft’s expectations about its popularity because of that. The 64 bit version of this Operating System was also a failure because of stability issues and driver availability. 3D performance reports mentioned a decrease of about ten frames per second making it bad for gaming. Ten frames per second are crucial when the games you’re running in your system are barely getting a desirable FPS. Also it uses too many RAM like 2GB just to boot the Operating System and about the same amount to run 3D games. That reason and the decrease in frames per second makes it the worst of all three for gaming. For those reasons Microsoft decided to stop development of this Operating System so people who wants to get a new Operating System should get Windows 7 instead. People who not so happy with this Operating System should think about upgrading it to Windows 7.

3) Windows 7 – you can consider it as an enhanced version of Windows Vista. Stability improved and driver availability is good and improving. It uses less RAM than Vista but more than XP so it is in the middle in that department. The 64 Bit version of this Operating System is the most stable of the three making it the best choice for people who want to experience the benefits of a 64 bit Operating System. As this Operating System becomes older its stability should improve as well as its driver availability. This Operating System is better than Vista for gaming but is not at the level of XP yet. This is the Operating System of the present so it should be the choice for our new gaming PC. People who’s thinking about getting a new Operating System or upgrading their older ones should choose Windows 7.

Conclusion about Operating Systems

Windows XP – this Operating System doesn’t require much RAM and today’s games use about 2GB of RAM so if you have the 32 bit version of this Operating System you should keep it. If you plan to upgrade you should get Windows 7.

Windows Vista – if you're not happy with this Operating System you should upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 7 – stability and driver availability is good and improving. The 64 bit version of this Operating System is the most stable of the three. It requires less RAM than Vista. We should pick Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit as the Operating System for our new gaming PC.

We finally made it. We managed to analyze and explain every important feature for every basic component of a gaming PC. Newbie users who have read the entire tutorial should now be able to make smart hardware picks for their gaming PC based on their budget. However if you still have any questions about what hardware you should pick we encourage you to contact us. Refer to the installation tutorials for instructions about how to put together your recently acquired high performance hardware. Once your gaming PC is assembled, we encourage you to visit our PC games reviews section for tips about which games you should get. There’s also a lot of great PC games that you can download totally free. You can get them from any of the following sites. Contact us with any comments you have about this site, the sites we mentioned before or any game you got from them. You can also write some comments in our blogs if a review is available for the game you want to comment on. We really hope that you enjoyed reading this tutorial as we enjoyed writing it and we encourage you to keep reading our other cool sections as we update them.

Understanding gaming PC speaker system

Graphics are important when playing a game but audio also helps to make everything more believable. Just imagine that you just have finally beaten the last enemy boss (a robot 50 feet tall) of your game and a big explosion is about to take place. Also imagine that you have just a pair of 3” full range speakers hooked to your gaming PC. A 50 feet tall robot explosion trough a pair of 3” full range speakers? That explosion is not going to sound too cool or realistic isn’t it? A 5.1 speaker system will deal with that efficiently and even a 2.1 speaker system will deal with that efficiently providing that they both have quality woofers and satellites. Common brands are: Logitech, Creative Labs, Genius, Cyber Acoustics and Altec Lansing. We will tell you which features to look at when choosing a speaker system so you can pick a quality and affordable one for your gaming PC.

Features to look for when choosing a speaker system for your a gaming PC

1) frequency response – the frequency response is the range of frequencies that the speaker system is able to reproduce. The frequency response should be equal to that of the human ear so it can reproduce every sound efficiently. Humans are able to hear frequencies between 20 HZ and 20MHZ so the speaker system should be able to reproduce them.

2) configuration – the available configurations are 2.0, 2.1 and 5.1. A 2.0 speaker system equals two full range speakers. The 2.1 speaker system adds a woofer for the lowest frequencies and two satellites for everything else for a total of three speakers. A 5.1 speaker system resemble the one of a home theater and add a center speaker and two surround speakers to the 2.1 speaker system configuration for a total of six speakers. The 5.1 speaker system is a cool addition for any gaming PC but the quality ones are expensive and require a 5.1 sound card. A quality 2.1 speaker system will cover all the frequencies that the human ear can hear and is affordable enough for our gaming PC so we should pick one. Now we can hear the explosion from our robot boss as we are supposed to.

3) RMS power – the RMS power is the continuous power that the integrated amplifier can supply to the speaker system. The higher the RMS power, the better and less distorted the sound will be reproduced. We should pick a speaker system with high RMS power.

4) magnetically shielded – the speaker magnet will distort and eventually damage our monitor’s screen. We typically place a pair of speakers near our monitor so that’s a big problem. That problem  can be solved by getting a magnetically shielded speaker system so we should get one for our gaming PC.

That’s pretty much the most important features concerning our speaker system so now we can choose a monitor for our gaming PC.

Understanding gaming PC RAM or system memory

We already know how to choose our CPU and motherboard so it’s time to choose the next piece of hardware which is our RAM or system memory for our gaming computer. RAM stands for random access memory and is responsible for storing data temporarily. Every time the CPU runs an instruction the RAM or system memory stores the input and output (results) temporarily and then send it to the other hardware. Think of it as a intermediary between the CPU and the other hardware, temporary because data stored in the system memory is lost once the computer is shot down. Our gaming computer performance depends on the size and speed of the system memory. Too few will result in bad performance, but we never have too much system memory. System memory is one of the key pieces of hardware in terms of 3D performance along with the CPU, motherboard and video card. Since it’s role in it is less significant than hardware like the CPU and video card we are allowed to choose affordable and slower system memory over expensive and faster system memory without much of an impact in 3D performance. Some common brands are G. Skill, Crucial, Kingston, GeIL, Corsair, Viking and OCZ. Below we will explain the most important features to look for in our gaming computer system memory.

Features to look for when choosing the RAM for your a gaming computer

1) socket type – the RAM socket type is very important because a module with the wrong socket type will not fit in our motherboard’s memory slots. There are different types of RAM like SDRAM, DDR, DDR2 and DDR3. DDR stands for Double Data Rate and is capable to deliver two instructions per cycle over one for the SDRAM. We should choose our modules according to the sockets available in our motherboard.

2) size – it is measured in MB (megabytes) and GB (gigabytes). There are different sizes like 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB. Since we want at least 4 GB of RAM in our gaming computer we should choose at least two 2 GB memory modules.

3) speed – speed is measured in MHZ. Speeds cover from 66 to 133 MHZ for SDRAM, 266 to 400 MHZ for DDR, 533 to 1200 MHZ for DDR2 and up to 2200 MHZ for DDR3. The faster the RAM the better the 3D performance, but faster modules are considerably more expensive than slower modules at present time so we should stick to affordable ones.

Those are the most important features when choosing our RAM/system memory. Since the improvement in performance from this hardware is not so significant when installing the faster modules we should stick to affordable but yet fast modules. Memory modules between 800 and 1200 MHZ should be okay. Now is time to choose our video card which is the most crucial piece of hardware in a gaming computer in terms of 3D performance.