Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello everyone, welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Pellette and I'm an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as always a senior writer, Jonathan Strickland Jack Flack always escapes all Betty does. So what does that mean? Well, it means that we're gonna go into a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from James from Carmel, Indiana, and James says, Hello. First of all, I'd like to thank you for making my irritating chores a little better. Secondly, I have a lot of free time now that my football season is over, and was thinking about building a low powered gaming computer. Right now, I have a Mac Mini, which is great unless you want to play games. I was wondering if you could do a podcast over how to build your own computer, or lead me to a site that does a good job explaining it. How stuff Works only has an article over converting your computer to a media computer. Thank you so much for the podcast, James. Well, James, we thought we'd talked a little bit about what makes a gaming computer good and uh, unfortunately part of that is is money. Um. It turns out that low powered gaming computers may not really meet your needs if you want to play the latest and greatest games that are on the market right now, that's true, Um, a lot of cases you've got to worry about. It's really a gaming computer is not significantly different from a regular computer in that it has the same kinds of components. But what a gaming computer has that's different from your standard desktop or laptop computer is generally high, very high end components, such as the motherboard with a very high end processor, or the graphics cards sometimes more than one graphics card, um, and and things like that cause still a lot of money. But it really it really depends on the games that you're trying to play. If you're going to be, you know, working on Beguiled for hours on end, you're probably not going to need the same kind of processor that somebody who plays World of Warcraft might. Yeah, and if you play World of Warcraft, you may not need the same sort of processor that someone who's playing a really advanced first person shooter would need. These these different games have different different requirements. So things like real time strategy games and massively multiplayer online role playing games for the most part, don't need the like cutting edge of technical specs to be able to to run well on your machine. But if you are someone who wants to play games like well, you know the upcoming Duke Nukem, which will be out any day now again just like over the last twelve years. But no, seriously, Duke Nukem is supposed to come out again. Well, if that's gonna be a typical first person shooter, it's gonna try and take advantage of the latest and greatest tech that's out there that it necessarily requires that to run, but that if you have the it'll if you have something that's really advanced machine, it will take advantage of that and you'll have a better experience overall as a result. So yeah, you need um. The three biggest components are your CPU, your video card, and RAM. Now on top of that, you're also gonna need to worry about storage because some of these games are huge, and unless you are playing some sort of streaming service where the game is stored in the cloud somewhere, you're gonna need to have that storage on hand. So, um, yeah, if you look at the specs on on really advanced gaming PCs that are out there being sold as gaming pecs, you're gonna notice that that they have some wicked specs on them. I mean, the CPU is gonna be really fast. And sometimes you can even choose to have your CPU overclocked, which means it's going to run more cycles in the same amount of time and normally, like it would normally run a certain number of cycles, over means use cram more cycles into that same time period, which requires some adjustment on the part of the computer owner. Actually, of course, you can't go in and you know just a setting a software setting in your operating system to over clock it. You actually have to make a modification to your computer to make that happen. Yeah, and uh, and overclocking can lead to some problems. Um, the biggest usually is overheating. Actually, that's a That's another component about PC gaming rigs that we need to address and in this podcast, is that you have to have a good cooling system. That's true, some people use a liquid cooling system rather than just the standard fans that come with the box. Right. Yeah. The three main methods that you'll probably see in most gaming PCs are fans. And then heat sinks, yes, a heat sink and thinking of that, but yeah, and and water cooling systems or liquid cooling systems. So yeah, all all of these are very basic ways of move heat away from the processor because of course, as processors heat up, just like any electronic element, if it gets too hot, it's going to stop working. And that's kind of frustrating when you're in the middle of a game. That's true, and I think it would be worthwhile to mention the reason that gaming computers are so sophisticated. It's uh, and in a lot of cases, especially with these more advanced games and games in which there is a lot of rapid action stuff like um, I would say, racing simulators, uh, first person shooters, things like that, there's a lot of movement on the screen. And of course, uh, at the point we are now, these games are very very sophisticated. But the thing is the computer in order to make this action look so uh so real and so dynamic or unreal depending on how you look at it. Uh, not the game unreal, but yeah in that case too back in the day, yea, but yeah, I mean in order to do that, the computer is having to make a lot of calculations to render that on the screen, and it requires the CPU and the graphics processor to do a lot of computation, which is why they get so hot as they're doing a lot, a lot, a whole lot of work. Um. And that's that's what makes so much of the difference. And it requires the memory, which is what Jonathan was talking about about the RAM, right, yeah, because what the memory is letting you do is it's s laying. It's slaying. The computer access information in an almost instantaneous, uh fashion. I mean, it's so fast it might as well be instantaneous to us. Now, if if you didn't have a lot of RAM, that would mean the computer would have to start to search for that information on your hard drive. It wouldn't be stored in that tipporary storage system for the computer, so it would mean that it would have to slow things down in order to search for that information. And that could even uh cause your game to have one of those annoying loading screens that all gamers absolutely hate. Um. That's something you want to avoid, which is why you want to have a lot of RAM. In fact, I was reading one specification or one one article that was talking about creating a a gaming PC, and they were their demands for RAM. We're pretty darn high said that an absolute minimum would be two gigabytes of RAM, and that to be on the safe side, you should have no fewer than four gigabytes. But if you have four gigabytes RAM, you have to remember that using a Windows machine. And we're really talking about Windows machines here because that's what the majority of games, that's the platform that they use. You can have really good games on other systems, including you know, the Mac, which for a long time the joke about max where that, yeah, it's a great computer unless you want to play a game on it. But that's changed significantly, but it's still true that most games, most of the advanced games come out on PC first and sometimes exclusively. Well, if you want to have more than around three gigabytes of RAM on a Windows based machine, you're gonna need a sixty four bit version of the Windows operating system. So we're talking, we're talking basically Vista or Windows seven. Right, you can't you can't use you know, the operating systems simply cannot support more the older operating systems versions of Windows cannot support that much RAM, so it wouldn't do you any good to add more RAM to it. Um. Before we get too far, you mentioned also the fact that the reason why you need this powerful computers because of the the fact that you've got all these you know this, these dynamic graphics, and that's the computer has to paint the picture over and over and over again. Yes, um, and we're talking about resolutions of around that's lots and lots of pixels. Yes, it is. And so when you think about the computer has to be able to paint each of those pixels or display each of those pixels. And if stuff is changing really quickly, it has to be able to respond to that and repaint those pixels. And the way that where the motion is nice and smooth and it doesn't look choppy, or there aren't trails everywhere unless it's part of the you know, the game's design, and uh and so yeah, that requires that's what where all that processing power needs to go to. So I remember back when I first had a computer that you didn't have to worry about this so much. Like the computers were increasing in power over time, Moore's laws More's law, so we would after every couple of years, you'd want to upgrade because you wouldn't be able to run some of the latest programs. But your basic computer graphics card and basic computer sound card was enough to handle pretty much anything out there. It wasn't until the first person shooters started to take off, really, the Quake generation, uh, Doom and and Wolfenstein three D, that kind of stuff. The the games that came before it still ran pretty well on your basic three eight six machine. It wasn't until you started getting a little further in where you started need specific kinds of graphics cards in order to render graphics that were in a game. That's about the time I stopped playing PC games, Yeah, because it got to a point where it was clear that in order to play the latest and grades PC games, I was going to have to be on a fairly regular upgrade cycle for my machine, possibly as as frequently as every six months, in order to be able to run the the latest games. And eventually you would have to upgrade your entire machine, not just components, because your computer would no longer be able to support the latest cards that were on the market. That's true, and I think that's why so many gamers prefer the desktop computer to a laptop. UM. Not that you can't make some of these modifications to a laptop, for example adding more ram UM, but in a desktop computer. And this really does go for for MAX and PCs both. UM. If you have a tower uh desktop computer, especially although you know some of the other configurations also work. It depends on the MANU factor really more than anything else. But um. For example, if you took a one of the all in one pieces where the monitor has the computer built into it, um, those are generally sealed up a little more in a in a configuration in which it's very difficult to get in and say change out your CPU. Well yeah, especially since especially since most of those machines are designed in such a way where the components all fit very snugly together and there's very little room. So unless you're using a new component that's exactly the same size as the old one, you may be stuck. You may not be able to put it back together properly. Right. But in some of the other, the tower configurations especially, you can open up the box, pull out the card in question, and replace it with another one. If you know what you're doing. It's good to be very very careful when you're doing those kinds of things, but it's a lot easier to install a new card, replace your hard drive, add ram um, you know, in those in those types of boxes, simply because of the way that they're built. That um. That's why if I were going to build a gaming computer for myself, either build one or buy one, I would prefer to get a desktop computer with a very large monitor, you know, so you could see lots and lots of action and um. You know, I would probably prefer a Mac, but I would want to get a Mac Pro where I could you know, upgrade it in the future, because you know, the specs, the specs shift over time, as you pointed out. As a matter of fact, I think a good rule of thumb is to look at the system requirements on the box of the game you're playing. If you're just hitting the system requirements, you're not going to have a particularly good experience in my uh, in my you know, personal experience, in my history with it. It'll run the game, but a lot of times it will be jittery and laggyuch fun. You have to turn the detail level down so that you don't have as many polygons rendering on the screen, so you can you can play the game at a smooth clip without it looking really jagged. Basically, basically what he's saying is the graphic you have to kind of turn down the level of the graph fix processing so that it doesn't fill in all the depth, the depths of the shadows and highest highlights and textures, so that you can still see and you can play the game. You know, if if the game play is more important to you what it is to me than the graphics. I love good graphics, but you know, if the game doesn't play well kind of bugs me. You might as well deal with that. We'll go watch a movie. If if the games aren't play well, it looks pretty. It's all. It's all cinematics. But well, uh, and you mentioned the possibility of using more than one graphics card. That's that's a fairly recent development with you know, back in the day, it was one of those things where you would get one graphics card and you had to choose carefully because some games supported a certain family of graphics cards and other games we're using a totally different, uh graphics model, and you might not be able to play a game based upon the kind of graphics card you have in your computer. Um, now you can use that. Well. In Video and A t I have have really dominate the market quite a bit. And of course am D purchased A T I and from what I understand, they're phasing out the A t I name, So am D then yeah, and they each allow you to use more than one video card if you have the right motherboard. That's something else we should point out is that a lot of the the components that you have in a gaming PC will depend entirely upon which motherboard you have. Not all motherboards will support all formats. In fact, your CPU will really what you should do, and we'll get into this more when you're talking about building a gaming computer is pick the CPU you want first, then find the motherboard that supports that CPU. Because you can't just you can't just go into a computer store and buy components willy nilly and expect them all to work when you hook it up together. Some of them may not hook up together at all. Best, do a little research before you get started, or consult with an expert in the store. Right. So, in Video and and a m D have this Uh, this where you can hook up more than one video card at a time to your machine, which means that the two together can process graphics much faster than a single card could. It's kind of similar to how CPUs now come. In multi coore formats, you can get dual core or quad core or even more um for CPU and each core can do some calculations. Now, in order to take advantage of that, games have to be designed in order to to use that. That's true. That that's true of any software for doing video editing or graphics editing of some kind. A lot of those programs are designed to handle the especially the newer versions. I should say older versions weren't necessarily but yeah, I mean, if you're if you're operating system isn't designed to do it, and you're the game itself isn't designed to handle running across multiple cores, it won't be able to take advantage of that. Yeah. So right now, it's not unusual to find games that are good for dual core processors. You can find quite a few, and there's some they're coming out that are designed for quad core processors or two at least two. They're optimized for that. So you know, it's always a good idea to go ahead and look at what's what's sort of the leading edge on the market there, because that's where everything's gonna go. It may not be able to you know, you may not have games that take advantage of it right away, but that's where they're heading. So there there's no way to future proof a gaming PC. No, no, you can't do it. So that's one of the other things you have to resign yourself too, is that when you build a gaming PC, it may be state of the art right now and in a year it may be average. Yeah, And that's one of the big barriers to gaming PCs in my opinion, is because one they're expensive and too they have a very limited shelf life as far as being the best of the best goes. Yeah, yeah, that's true. You can you can look online and find a number of manufacturers of of gaming PCs and they'll have just watch the websites and the specs will change very very quickly. Uh, you know, I don't think except for really the high end graphics and video processors. Maybe music. Yeah, there's some complications. Most most people don't really need cutting edge equipment like no, but so I mean, if you really want the sophisticated machines, the gaming machines are the ones I think. Yeah, and uh, when we come to sound, that's another element you for modern games. You don't want anything that you don't want a sound card that won't support at least five point ones around sound. Yeah, you'd probably want seven point one because there are games out there that take advantage of the seven point one channel sound system. So, um, yeah, we're starting to get it pretty expensive here. And let me give you three different manufacturers of gaming PCs that that are kind of typical in the in the marketplace. So there's there's the CyberPower PC line. Yeah, there's the Velocity Raptor line, and then there's alien where, yes, um, these are manufact was known for producing high end, super fast, super sophisticated gaming PCs. Yes, I went on alien Ware. Just chose alien Ware because I'm really familiar with the brand and I thought it might be interesting to just see what happens if I were too heavily load down a gaming pc kind of give it all the bells and whistles. Okay, and we should point out to I'm I feel compelled to point out that that that's of the recording today, because we just finished talking about how quickly they go out of dates. By the time this podcast publishes, it may very well be that the state of the art is not what I have listed. And I'm not going to give all those specs because that would just be ridiculous. It would take we need another podcast. I'll just say that I loaded it up with the fastest CPU that was available, the largest hard drive, the fastest optical drive which included Blu ray reading and writing UM, the best video cards that I could get in the system. I added a monitor, added a card that would allow you to hook up to I think three additional displays, so you could have four displays running off of this one machine, which is kind of absolutely insane. I can imagine having UM one display in front of you, with two other displays flanking it, kind of in a slightly tilted towards you slightly to give you kind of that surround feeling, and then have a fourth display that just has your regular like instant message and stuff on it just in the background, you know, just if you want to check UM or hey, put it behind you and put a rear view mirror up. Anyway, so once I added all of these things together, the price tag came to a total of ten thousand, three hundred twenty two dollars and ninety three cents. And that's in US dollars. That's an expensive computer. Yes, it is um actually expensive computer system because it did have lots and lots of extra stuff. But yeah, we're it was by the way, just so you know what the model was, it was the Alien where area fifty one a l X then with all the options, and that included a custom made water cooling system and all that good stuff. So yeah, that's expensive. Now, if you want to build your own, you're gonna save lots of money, but it is going to require research and uh and some careful shopping. Yes, and you'll be able to find some fairly cheap parts online as well as in various stores. Uh. I know Tiger Direct is a good resource for things like like motherboards and CPUs and that sort of stuff, but don't think and places like that. So, like I said before, the first thing you need to do is consider what CPU you're going to use, because that's going to that's gonna drive further decisions down the line. So you figure out what kind of CPU. You want you know whether that's going to be the fastest one on the market or if it's just going to be an a nice competitive one. Uh. Then you have to find the motherboard that will or the kinds of motherboards, because it's going to be more than one, but the motherboards that will support that CPU. You also want to be able to see what kind of connections you can make to that motherboard because when it comes to graphics, there are two different kinds of of of graphic hookups that you can go into. There's pc I Express and there's a g P. Yes, so pc I express is ah, well, you may remember back in the day, pc I was the way to hook up graphics to your computer. Remember that. Yeah, pc I uh was very limited, didn't have a whole lot of throughput for for information, and a g P kind of replace that. So a g P is sort of the current standard, I would say for graphics cards. And uh it's an a g P slot that's on the motherboard and most motherboards will support one or the other. They don't support both. Um. Now there's pc I Express, which is faster than a g P. In fact, I think I read somewhere that it's up to four times faster than a GP, so it puts through more information and less time. So it's if Since it's faster, it will probably end up eventually becoming the new standard for graphics. So if you want something again, there's no way to future proof. But if you want to try and ride that wave, pc I Express might be the right way to go. But again, that's going to your motherboard will will determine which kind of video card you can use, so make sure that the motherboard supports it before you go and buy your video cards, and also make sure that your motherboard can support more than one video card if you plan on buying multiples. Um, go ahead. I was just gonna say, uh, one thing too. I didn't want to sound like I'm down necessarily on gaming laptops, but in general a laptop isn't going to because there are some very very sophisticated ones. Dell's Alien Wear line, uh, since they've been acquired by Dell earlier this year. Um uh, you know has some really nice laptops, and I've seen some others. To the downside being that it's not as flexible as far as being able to make upgrades to the machine, and in general, laptops aren't it doesn't you know that laptops have slightly slower processors at least as of right now than most desktops, especially the high high end desktops that you would use for graphics and video and gaming. Yeah, and you can't you have a lot you're you're you're very much limited on how to cool your laptop compared to a desktop. Um, you're not gonna find a whole lot of really sophisticated cooling mechanisms zero essentially looking at heat sinks and fans, and they run hot anyway. It seems like a lot of people have commented on that. And you know, I actually was going to talk about peripherals a little bit, but we're starting to run short on time, and you know, maybe we could actually do revisit that at a later date, because they have some really sophisticated stuff. Yeah. And and even if you're again going back to building your own if you're building your own desktop, I mean, there are other considerations you'll have to make beyond the CPU and motherboard and RAM and your video card. You we will have to figure out what kind of case you want. You're gonna need a You're probably gonna want a case that's gonna be easy for you to access those those periper not peripherals, but those cards, so that you can swap them out if you, you know, either burn through a card or if you want to upgrade. You want something that's gonna be easy to access. Um, you're gonna want something that's gonna be easy to cool. So you're gonna need a cooling system of some sort of at least a fan, probably more than that, if you're really pushing the edge of the envelope here, and uh, and a power supply. You're gonna have to make sure that whatever power supply you get is going to be able to supply enough power to your machine to make it run. As it may turn out that you've got all these really awesome components in your computer, but your power supply can't support that much power, and then and then you've got to go out and get another one. I did think of one other thing that we haven't touched on. What's that Internet? If you're playing something that requires an online component, such as a massively multiplayer online role playing game, UH, you're going to want a nice fast Internet connection which is partly inside your computer and partly outside your computer, because if your internet service provider can't deliver reasonably fast, reliable connection, you're going to end up getting killed very frequently if you're playing something like a first person shooter online or UM or you get dropped from the game, dropped from the game, UM, and UH, part of that is inside your computer. You do need to make sure that if you're playing wirelessly. Now you know, wireless connections are not always as reliable as a UH an Ethernet connection would be. UM. You know, I think that's certainly a lot better than it than it used to be years ago. But still, I mean, you might you might have some latent between yourself and the wireless especially if you have other things in your home that are interfering with your connection and the distance between you and the wireless router. UM. But also you know, if you if you have a a connection that supports for example eight O two down eleven N, which is the most recent UH proposal for the standard, it gives you you know, the fastest UH most UH you know, the longest distance. They look at the range here, the widest range for the connection. UM. That's also something to take into consideration. Um, you know, wireless connections are going to be more reliable for people who are not necessarily needing to uh stay on top of a very fast action game. Um, you know, it's it's not as much of an issue for them. So you might might find people using wired connections, you know, for people who really need to stay online constantly for a for a nice reliable connection to the internet. Right. And and if you're one of those people who still likes to do land parties, yeah, then you're going to want to take the end to consideration too, because clearly, if you if you're doing land parties, maybe a gaming laptop is the right way to go, or maybe you know, you might want to consider a desktop that's you know, easily portable and doesn't have a big water cooling system attached to it. Yeah. I actually saw when I was doing research for the podcast some that had handles built into the case for the desktop, which is an improvement. I had some friends at a former job that used to play games over land parties, and uh, they had slings set up for a desktop tower computer, an actual and if you haven't seen these before, it's an actual sling fabric sling that they would use to carry over their shoulder with their stuff so they could bring it in to the to the land party. And it just seems like it would be very, very unwieldy to try to manage that, but you know, they wanted their best machine for the job. So and if you believe that land party are dead, then you haven't been reading the StarCraft two complaints because from what I understand, they've they've pulled the ability to do land parties from the game, which is one of the things that StarCraft players really enjoyed doing. They're just playing over battle that there's nothing quite like playing playing a networked game in the same general physical space as other people. Because yeah, you can smack talk over various protocols that that will carry your voice and everyone will be able to hear it. It's not the same as being able to make eye contact with the person while you're making smack talk. That's true that you're not like you're looking away from the screen anyway, but momentary glance I do, but that's because I'm so darn good, um nice, please don't kill me on Xbox Live. So anyway, the that that kind of wraps up the discussion. Now, now James did ask about sites that would let you kind of tell you about building your own computer. One one resource I found that was very helpful was build game Computers dot com. And that was build dash Gaming dash Computers dot com. That actually has a pretty good um round up on all the components that you might need or want in a gaming computer and sort of the stuff you need to look for and the things to keep in mind. I drew a lot of resources from that particular website, so that one comes recommended from me. And uh, I guess that wraps up this discussion about gaming PCs. I don't think I'll be but building one anytime soon, just because despite what I said earlier, I'm really not that great of a gamer, and uh and I'm kind of lame. I've gone to the console gaming world and I don't see myself turning away from that anytime soon, except for maybe Civilization five. I've got to get on the CEV five train, because I'm looking forward to that. It's I've got friends who have been playing it for a few days now and they love it, and I want to. I want to play against them, you know, Tom Maritan, Ronica Belmont for one. Really Yeah, they're both big bands and they're both playing, So I want to conquer tom Merritt's little village and and then and then mock him mercilessly, although he'll probably wipe me out anyway. If you guys have any comments or questions, let us know on Facebook and Twitter, remember where tech stuff HSW on both of those, or if you want to send as an email. Our address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chrisma ill taught to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter text stuff hs wsr handle and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech stuff h s W For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello everyone, welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Pellette and I'm an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as always a senior writer, Jonathan Strickland Jack Flack always escapes all Betty does. So what does that mean? Well, it means that we're gonna go into a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from James from Carmel, Indiana, and James says, Hello. First of all, I'd like to thank you for making my irritating chores a little better. Secondly, I have a lot of free time now that my football season is over, and was thinking about building a low powered gaming computer. Right now, I have a Mac Mini, which is great unless you want to play games. I was wondering if you could do a podcast over how to build your own computer, or lead me to a site that does a good job explaining it. How stuff Works only has an article over converting your computer to a media computer. Thank you so much for the podcast, James. Well, James, we thought we'd talked a little bit about what makes a gaming computer good and uh, unfortunately part of that is is money. Um. It turns out that low powered gaming computers may not really meet your needs if you want to play the latest and greatest games that are on the market right now, that's true, Um, a lot of cases you've got to worry about. It's really a gaming computer is not significantly different from a regular computer in that it has the same kinds of components. But what a gaming computer has that's different from your standard desktop or laptop computer is generally high, very high end components, such as the motherboard with a very high end processor, or the graphics cards sometimes more than one graphics card, um, and and things like that cause still a lot of money. But it really it really depends on the games that you're trying to play. If you're going to be, you know, working on Beguiled for hours on end, you're probably not going to need the same kind of processor that somebody who plays World of Warcraft might. Yeah, and if you play World of Warcraft, you may not need the same sort of processor that someone who's playing a really advanced first person shooter would need. These these different games have different different requirements. So things like real time strategy games and massively multiplayer online role playing games for the most part, don't need the like cutting edge of technical specs to be able to to run well on your machine. But if you are someone who wants to play games like well, you know the upcoming Duke Nukem, which will be out any day now again just like over the last twelve years. But no, seriously, Duke Nukem is supposed to come out again. Well, if that's gonna be a typical first person shooter, it's gonna try and take advantage of the latest and greatest tech that's out there that it necessarily requires that to run, but that if you have the it'll if you have something that's really advanced machine, it will take advantage of that and you'll have a better experience overall as a result. So yeah, you need um. The three biggest components are your CPU, your video card, and RAM. Now on top of that, you're also gonna need to worry about storage because some of these games are huge, and unless you are playing some sort of streaming service where the game is stored in the cloud somewhere, you're gonna need to have that storage on hand. So, um, yeah, if you look at the specs on on really advanced gaming PCs that are out there being sold as gaming pecs, you're gonna notice that that they have some wicked specs on them. I mean, the CPU is gonna be really fast. And sometimes you can even choose to have your CPU overclocked, which means it's going to run more cycles in the same amount of time and normally, like it would normally run a certain number of cycles, over means use cram more cycles into that same time period, which requires some adjustment on the part of the computer owner. Actually, of course, you can't go in and you know just a setting a software setting in your operating system to over clock it. You actually have to make a modification to your computer to make that happen. Yeah, and uh, and overclocking can lead to some problems. Um, the biggest usually is overheating. Actually, that's a That's another component about PC gaming rigs that we need to address and in this podcast, is that you have to have a good cooling system. That's true, some people use a liquid cooling system rather than just the standard fans that come with the box. Right. Yeah. The three main methods that you'll probably see in most gaming PCs are fans. And then heat sinks, yes, a heat sink and thinking of that, but yeah, and and water cooling systems or liquid cooling systems. So yeah, all all of these are very basic ways of move heat away from the processor because of course, as processors heat up, just like any electronic element, if it gets too hot, it's going to stop working. And that's kind of frustrating when you're in the middle of a game. That's true, and I think it would be worthwhile to mention the reason that gaming computers are so sophisticated. It's uh, and in a lot of cases, especially with these more advanced games and games in which there is a lot of rapid action stuff like um, I would say, racing simulators, uh, first person shooters, things like that, there's a lot of movement on the screen. And of course, uh, at the point we are now, these games are very very sophisticated. But the thing is the computer in order to make this action look so uh so real and so dynamic or unreal depending on how you look at it. Uh, not the game unreal, but yeah in that case too back in the day, yea, but yeah, I mean in order to do that, the computer is having to make a lot of calculations to render that on the screen, and it requires the CPU and the graphics processor to do a lot of computation, which is why they get so hot as they're doing a lot, a lot, a whole lot of work. Um. And that's that's what makes so much of the difference. And it requires the memory, which is what Jonathan was talking about about the RAM, right, yeah, because what the memory is letting you do is it's s laying. It's slaying. The computer access information in an almost instantaneous, uh fashion. I mean, it's so fast it might as well be instantaneous to us. Now, if if you didn't have a lot of RAM, that would mean the computer would have to start to search for that information on your hard drive. It wouldn't be stored in that tipporary storage system for the computer, so it would mean that it would have to slow things down in order to search for that information. And that could even uh cause your game to have one of those annoying loading screens that all gamers absolutely hate. Um. That's something you want to avoid, which is why you want to have a lot of RAM. In fact, I was reading one specification or one one article that was talking about creating a a gaming PC, and they were their demands for RAM. We're pretty darn high said that an absolute minimum would be two gigabytes of RAM, and that to be on the safe side, you should have no fewer than four gigabytes. But if you have four gigabytes RAM, you have to remember that using a Windows machine. And we're really talking about Windows machines here because that's what the majority of games, that's the platform that they use. You can have really good games on other systems, including you know, the Mac, which for a long time the joke about max where that, yeah, it's a great computer unless you want to play a game on it. But that's changed significantly, but it's still true that most games, most of the advanced games come out on PC first and sometimes exclusively. Well, if you want to have more than around three gigabytes of RAM on a Windows based machine, you're gonna need a sixty four bit version of the Windows operating system. So we're talking, we're talking basically Vista or Windows seven. Right, you can't you can't use you know, the operating systems simply cannot support more the older operating systems versions of Windows cannot support that much RAM, so it wouldn't do you any good to add more RAM to it. Um. Before we get too far, you mentioned also the fact that the reason why you need this powerful computers because of the the fact that you've got all these you know this, these dynamic graphics, and that's the computer has to paint the picture over and over and over again. Yes, um, and we're talking about resolutions of around that's lots and lots of pixels. Yes, it is. And so when you think about the computer has to be able to paint each of those pixels or display each of those pixels. And if stuff is changing really quickly, it has to be able to respond to that and repaint those pixels. And the way that where the motion is nice and smooth and it doesn't look choppy, or there aren't trails everywhere unless it's part of the you know, the game's design, and uh and so yeah, that requires that's what where all that processing power needs to go to. So I remember back when I first had a computer that you didn't have to worry about this so much. Like the computers were increasing in power over time, Moore's laws More's law, so we would after every couple of years, you'd want to upgrade because you wouldn't be able to run some of the latest programs. But your basic computer graphics card and basic computer sound card was enough to handle pretty much anything out there. It wasn't until the first person shooters started to take off, really, the Quake generation, uh, Doom and and Wolfenstein three D, that kind of stuff. The the games that came before it still ran pretty well on your basic three eight six machine. It wasn't until you started getting a little further in where you started need specific kinds of graphics cards in order to render graphics that were in a game. That's about the time I stopped playing PC games, Yeah, because it got to a point where it was clear that in order to play the latest and grades PC games, I was going to have to be on a fairly regular upgrade cycle for my machine, possibly as as frequently as every six months, in order to be able to run the the latest games. And eventually you would have to upgrade your entire machine, not just components, because your computer would no longer be able to support the latest cards that were on the market. That's true, and I think that's why so many gamers prefer the desktop computer to a laptop. UM. Not that you can't make some of these modifications to a laptop, for example adding more ram UM, but in a desktop computer. And this really does go for for MAX and PCs both. UM. If you have a tower uh desktop computer, especially although you know some of the other configurations also work. It depends on the MANU factor really more than anything else. But um. For example, if you took a one of the all in one pieces where the monitor has the computer built into it, um, those are generally sealed up a little more in a in a configuration in which it's very difficult to get in and say change out your CPU. Well yeah, especially since especially since most of those machines are designed in such a way where the components all fit very snugly together and there's very little room. So unless you're using a new component that's exactly the same size as the old one, you may be stuck. You may not be able to put it back together properly. Right. But in some of the other, the tower configurations especially, you can open up the box, pull out the card in question, and replace it with another one. If you know what you're doing. It's good to be very very careful when you're doing those kinds of things, but it's a lot easier to install a new card, replace your hard drive, add ram um, you know, in those in those types of boxes, simply because of the way that they're built. That um. That's why if I were going to build a gaming computer for myself, either build one or buy one, I would prefer to get a desktop computer with a very large monitor, you know, so you could see lots and lots of action and um. You know, I would probably prefer a Mac, but I would want to get a Mac Pro where I could you know, upgrade it in the future, because you know, the specs, the specs shift over time, as you pointed out. As a matter of fact, I think a good rule of thumb is to look at the system requirements on the box of the game you're playing. If you're just hitting the system requirements, you're not going to have a particularly good experience in my uh, in my you know, personal experience, in my history with it. It'll run the game, but a lot of times it will be jittery and laggyuch fun. You have to turn the detail level down so that you don't have as many polygons rendering on the screen, so you can you can play the game at a smooth clip without it looking really jagged. Basically, basically what he's saying is the graphic you have to kind of turn down the level of the graph fix processing so that it doesn't fill in all the depth, the depths of the shadows and highest highlights and textures, so that you can still see and you can play the game. You know, if if the game play is more important to you what it is to me than the graphics. I love good graphics, but you know, if the game doesn't play well kind of bugs me. You might as well deal with that. We'll go watch a movie. If if the games aren't play well, it looks pretty. It's all. It's all cinematics. But well, uh, and you mentioned the possibility of using more than one graphics card. That's that's a fairly recent development with you know, back in the day, it was one of those things where you would get one graphics card and you had to choose carefully because some games supported a certain family of graphics cards and other games we're using a totally different, uh graphics model, and you might not be able to play a game based upon the kind of graphics card you have in your computer. Um, now you can use that. Well. In Video and A t I have have really dominate the market quite a bit. And of course am D purchased A T I and from what I understand, they're phasing out the A t I name, So am D then yeah, and they each allow you to use more than one video card if you have the right motherboard. That's something else we should point out is that a lot of the the components that you have in a gaming PC will depend entirely upon which motherboard you have. Not all motherboards will support all formats. In fact, your CPU will really what you should do, and we'll get into this more when you're talking about building a gaming computer is pick the CPU you want first, then find the motherboard that supports that CPU. Because you can't just you can't just go into a computer store and buy components willy nilly and expect them all to work when you hook it up together. Some of them may not hook up together at all. Best, do a little research before you get started, or consult with an expert in the store. Right. So, in Video and and a m D have this Uh, this where you can hook up more than one video card at a time to your machine, which means that the two together can process graphics much faster than a single card could. It's kind of similar to how CPUs now come. In multi coore formats, you can get dual core or quad core or even more um for CPU and each core can do some calculations. Now, in order to take advantage of that, games have to be designed in order to to use that. That's true. That that's true of any software for doing video editing or graphics editing of some kind. A lot of those programs are designed to handle the especially the newer versions. I should say older versions weren't necessarily but yeah, I mean, if you're if you're operating system isn't designed to do it, and you're the game itself isn't designed to handle running across multiple cores, it won't be able to take advantage of that. Yeah. So right now, it's not unusual to find games that are good for dual core processors. You can find quite a few, and there's some they're coming out that are designed for quad core processors or two at least two. They're optimized for that. So you know, it's always a good idea to go ahead and look at what's what's sort of the leading edge on the market there, because that's where everything's gonna go. It may not be able to you know, you may not have games that take advantage of it right away, but that's where they're heading. So there there's no way to future proof a gaming PC. No, no, you can't do it. So that's one of the other things you have to resign yourself too, is that when you build a gaming PC, it may be state of the art right now and in a year it may be average. Yeah, And that's one of the big barriers to gaming PCs in my opinion, is because one they're expensive and too they have a very limited shelf life as far as being the best of the best goes. Yeah, yeah, that's true. You can you can look online and find a number of manufacturers of of gaming PCs and they'll have just watch the websites and the specs will change very very quickly. Uh, you know, I don't think except for really the high end graphics and video processors. Maybe music. Yeah, there's some complications. Most most people don't really need cutting edge equipment like no, but so I mean, if you really want the sophisticated machines, the gaming machines are the ones I think. Yeah, and uh, when we come to sound, that's another element you for modern games. You don't want anything that you don't want a sound card that won't support at least five point ones around sound. Yeah, you'd probably want seven point one because there are games out there that take advantage of the seven point one channel sound system. So, um, yeah, we're starting to get it pretty expensive here. And let me give you three different manufacturers of gaming PCs that that are kind of typical in the in the marketplace. So there's there's the CyberPower PC line. Yeah, there's the Velocity Raptor line, and then there's alien where, yes, um, these are manufact was known for producing high end, super fast, super sophisticated gaming PCs. Yes, I went on alien Ware. Just chose alien Ware because I'm really familiar with the brand and I thought it might be interesting to just see what happens if I were too heavily load down a gaming pc kind of give it all the bells and whistles. Okay, and we should point out to I'm I feel compelled to point out that that that's of the recording today, because we just finished talking about how quickly they go out of dates. By the time this podcast publishes, it may very well be that the state of the art is not what I have listed. And I'm not going to give all those specs because that would just be ridiculous. It would take we need another podcast. I'll just say that I loaded it up with the fastest CPU that was available, the largest hard drive, the fastest optical drive which included Blu ray reading and writing UM, the best video cards that I could get in the system. I added a monitor, added a card that would allow you to hook up to I think three additional displays, so you could have four displays running off of this one machine, which is kind of absolutely insane. I can imagine having UM one display in front of you, with two other displays flanking it, kind of in a slightly tilted towards you slightly to give you kind of that surround feeling, and then have a fourth display that just has your regular like instant message and stuff on it just in the background, you know, just if you want to check UM or hey, put it behind you and put a rear view mirror up. Anyway, so once I added all of these things together, the price tag came to a total of ten thousand, three hundred twenty two dollars and ninety three cents. And that's in US dollars. That's an expensive computer. Yes, it is um actually expensive computer system because it did have lots and lots of extra stuff. But yeah, we're it was by the way, just so you know what the model was, it was the Alien where area fifty one a l X then with all the options, and that included a custom made water cooling system and all that good stuff. So yeah, that's expensive. Now, if you want to build your own, you're gonna save lots of money, but it is going to require research and uh and some careful shopping. Yes, and you'll be able to find some fairly cheap parts online as well as in various stores. Uh. I know Tiger Direct is a good resource for things like like motherboards and CPUs and that sort of stuff, but don't think and places like that. So, like I said before, the first thing you need to do is consider what CPU you're going to use, because that's going to that's gonna drive further decisions down the line. So you figure out what kind of CPU. You want you know whether that's going to be the fastest one on the market or if it's just going to be an a nice competitive one. Uh. Then you have to find the motherboard that will or the kinds of motherboards, because it's going to be more than one, but the motherboards that will support that CPU. You also want to be able to see what kind of connections you can make to that motherboard because when it comes to graphics, there are two different kinds of of of graphic hookups that you can go into. There's pc I Express and there's a g P. Yes, so pc I express is ah, well, you may remember back in the day, pc I was the way to hook up graphics to your computer. Remember that. Yeah, pc I uh was very limited, didn't have a whole lot of throughput for for information, and a g P kind of replace that. So a g P is sort of the current standard, I would say for graphics cards. And uh it's an a g P slot that's on the motherboard and most motherboards will support one or the other. They don't support both. Um. Now there's pc I Express, which is faster than a g P. In fact, I think I read somewhere that it's up to four times faster than a GP, so it puts through more information and less time. So it's if Since it's faster, it will probably end up eventually becoming the new standard for graphics. So if you want something again, there's no way to future proof. But if you want to try and ride that wave, pc I Express might be the right way to go. But again, that's going to your motherboard will will determine which kind of video card you can use, so make sure that the motherboard supports it before you go and buy your video cards, and also make sure that your motherboard can support more than one video card if you plan on buying multiples. Um, go ahead. I was just gonna say, uh, one thing too. I didn't want to sound like I'm down necessarily on gaming laptops, but in general a laptop isn't going to because there are some very very sophisticated ones. Dell's Alien Wear line, uh, since they've been acquired by Dell earlier this year. Um uh, you know has some really nice laptops, and I've seen some others. To the downside being that it's not as flexible as far as being able to make upgrades to the machine, and in general, laptops aren't it doesn't you know that laptops have slightly slower processors at least as of right now than most desktops, especially the high high end desktops that you would use for graphics and video and gaming. Yeah, and you can't you have a lot you're you're you're very much limited on how to cool your laptop compared to a desktop. Um, you're not gonna find a whole lot of really sophisticated cooling mechanisms zero essentially looking at heat sinks and fans, and they run hot anyway. It seems like a lot of people have commented on that. And you know, I actually was going to talk about peripherals a little bit, but we're starting to run short on time, and you know, maybe we could actually do revisit that at a later date, because they have some really sophisticated stuff. Yeah. And and even if you're again going back to building your own if you're building your own desktop, I mean, there are other considerations you'll have to make beyond the CPU and motherboard and RAM and your video card. You we will have to figure out what kind of case you want. You're gonna need a You're probably gonna want a case that's gonna be easy for you to access those those periper not peripherals, but those cards, so that you can swap them out if you, you know, either burn through a card or if you want to upgrade. You want something that's gonna be easy to access. Um, you're gonna want something that's gonna be easy to cool. So you're gonna need a cooling system of some sort of at least a fan, probably more than that, if you're really pushing the edge of the envelope here, and uh, and a power supply. You're gonna have to make sure that whatever power supply you get is going to be able to supply enough power to your machine to make it run. As it may turn out that you've got all these really awesome components in your computer, but your power supply can't support that much power, and then and then you've got to go out and get another one. I did think of one other thing that we haven't touched on. What's that Internet? If you're playing something that requires an online component, such as a massively multiplayer online role playing game, UH, you're going to want a nice fast Internet connection which is partly inside your computer and partly outside your computer, because if your internet service provider can't deliver reasonably fast, reliable connection, you're going to end up getting killed very frequently if you're playing something like a first person shooter online or UM or you get dropped from the game, dropped from the game, UM, and UH, part of that is inside your computer. You do need to make sure that if you're playing wirelessly. Now you know, wireless connections are not always as reliable as a UH an Ethernet connection would be. UM. You know, I think that's certainly a lot better than it than it used to be years ago. But still, I mean, you might you might have some latent between yourself and the wireless especially if you have other things in your home that are interfering with your connection and the distance between you and the wireless router. UM. But also you know, if you if you have a a connection that supports for example eight O two down eleven N, which is the most recent UH proposal for the standard, it gives you you know, the fastest UH most UH you know, the longest distance. They look at the range here, the widest range for the connection. UM. That's also something to take into consideration. Um, you know, wireless connections are going to be more reliable for people who are not necessarily needing to uh stay on top of a very fast action game. Um, you know, it's it's not as much of an issue for them. So you might might find people using wired connections, you know, for people who really need to stay online constantly for a for a nice reliable connection to the internet. Right. And and if you're one of those people who still likes to do land parties, yeah, then you're going to want to take the end to consideration too, because clearly, if you if you're doing land parties, maybe a gaming laptop is the right way to go, or maybe you know, you might want to consider a desktop that's you know, easily portable and doesn't have a big water cooling system attached to it. Yeah. I actually saw when I was doing research for the podcast some that had handles built into the case for the desktop, which is an improvement. I had some friends at a former job that used to play games over land parties, and uh, they had slings set up for a desktop tower computer, an actual and if you haven't seen these before, it's an actual sling fabric sling that they would use to carry over their shoulder with their stuff so they could bring it in to the to the land party. And it just seems like it would be very, very unwieldy to try to manage that, but you know, they wanted their best machine for the job. So and if you believe that land party are dead, then you haven't been reading the StarCraft two complaints because from what I understand, they've they've pulled the ability to do land parties from the game, which is one of the things that StarCraft players really enjoyed doing. They're just playing over battle that there's nothing quite like playing playing a networked game in the same general physical space as other people. Because yeah, you can smack talk over various protocols that that will carry your voice and everyone will be able to hear it. It's not the same as being able to make eye contact with the person while you're making smack talk. That's true that you're not like you're looking away from the screen anyway, but momentary glance I do, but that's because I'm so darn good, um nice, please don't kill me on Xbox Live. So anyway, the that that kind of wraps up the discussion. Now, now James did ask about sites that would let you kind of tell you about building your own computer. One one resource I found that was very helpful was build game Computers dot com. And that was build dash Gaming dash Computers dot com. That actually has a pretty good um round up on all the components that you might need or want in a gaming computer and sort of the stuff you need to look for and the things to keep in mind. I drew a lot of resources from that particular website, so that one comes recommended from me. And uh, I guess that wraps up this discussion about gaming PCs. I don't think I'll be but building one anytime soon, just because despite what I said earlier, I'm really not that great of a gamer, and uh and I'm kind of lame. I've gone to the console gaming world and I don't see myself turning away from that anytime soon, except for maybe Civilization five. I've got to get on the CEV five train, because I'm looking forward to that. It's I've got friends who have been playing it for a few days now and they love it, and I want to. I want to play against them, you know, Tom Maritan, Ronica Belmont for one. Really Yeah, they're both big bands and they're both playing, So I want to conquer tom Merritt's little village and and then and then mock him mercilessly, although he'll probably wipe me out anyway. If you guys have any comments or questions, let us know on Facebook and Twitter, remember where tech stuff HSW on both of those, or if you want to send as an email. Our address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chrisma ill taught to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter text stuff hs wsr handle and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech stuff h s W For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you