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• Blow the bucks and have a sweet setup
• Deal with slow games and poor graphics

Following this path is not easy. It wil involve knowing quite a bit about PC technology and being able to build your own system. Some nights you will be awake at 1:00am wondering why the HELL you chose this path. But those days your whooping up on some poor slobs ass with a Voodoo 1 card, you will laugh and enjoy yourself. You have been warned.

The system board is the KEY to any computer. If you get a crappy motherboard, you're going to end up paying for it with your hard earned cash. The three things you need to consider when picking up a new motherboard are ...

• Processor support
  A Celeron 333MHz processor is a powerful and adequate processor today. If you purchase a good system board, you will be able to keep your motherboard until you upgrade past a PIII-450MHz processor. That's a good range to grow into.
• Cache
  The more the better. Don't skimp here. Cache produces real performance so don't opt out for a cheaper board with less cache.
• PCI/ISA/AGP and Memory sockets
  Once again, more is more. Chances are that everything will be AGP and PCI soon, but if you are like me, you have two ISA cards. 3 ISA, 5 PCI, and 1 AGP would be ideal today. The more slots of each kind is better. The more memory the board supports, the more you can add down the road.

Buy what you can afford. Compare the price to MHz ratio on chips and weigh out the best buy for you. If you are choosing between a 300MHz chip for $50 and a 333MHz chip for $60, do the math. The 300MHz chip is about 6MHz on the dollar, while the 333MHz chip is $5.55 per dollar. Go for the 333MHz chip and save a few bucks for your performance dollar. If processor speed isn't as important as other aspects of your system, go for the 300MHz or the cheapest. DO NOT count on overclocking working. The moment you plan on overclocking your processor to give you more power, it won't work.

Most people just hit the online catalogs and look for the cheapest stuff they can find. I don't. I have a place that I trust where I purchase memory. They are very competative price-wise and they are willing to replace bad memory and test it for me. The best advice for buying memory is to treat it like the stock market. Buy low, sell high. Memory is a commodity and the price will rise and fall based on industry trends. Sometimes you need memory when the price is high, this sucks. If you can wait for prices to drop, wait. It's that simple.

A very important strategy involved in buying a system board, video card, or network card is playing the standards/leading edge game. At any given time there are four levels of technology...

• Obsolete
  You have these parts cause you can't throw them away. Build a Linux server or keep the parts for emergencies. 486 parts, 14.4 modems, and VGA video cards are in this group. They don't provide the performance you need to even play most of todays games.
• Old
  You will have some of this. It will still work and do a good job for you. You might even BUY some of this stuff for a new computer. Don't think that because John Carmack's system doesn't use a Sound Blaster-16 that those counds cards are useless. Good examples of this are SB-16s, 10Mb Network cards and maybe even Voodoo 1 video cards.
• Current
  You want to buy system boards and other things when they have JUST moved from New to Current. You're getting equipment that will be established and supported, but that isn't about to become totally outdated. This would include Celeron-PIII supporting system boards or 10/100 PCI Network cards right now.
• New
  If you buy anything from this category, you might be blowing good money on technolgy that never gets fully used (ie Pentium Pro) or might not be supported for long or very well (ie SMP). This is a high risk area that I would not recommend buying out of. But by watching the new technology, you can see what you want to buy when the next wave of new technology hits the market and the old new stuff moves to current technolgy. Got that? Good! Some examples at this time would be Voodoo3's, SMP PIII System Boards, and 1Gb Ethernet Network cards.

I see quite a few people who do not participate in the communities surrounding the applications they are itching to run. By activly asking questions and reading about the software you desire, you contribute and learn about the hardware required to meet your needs. A few examples...

• I had a Pentium 233MHz MMX system with a Voodoo I. I wanted to know wether I should invest in a faster system, or a new video card. No one at the time had a similar system that was so old. This was odd since I was still playing Q2 and Q3A Test with no problems. It was hard to find information. Turns out that the best thing to do was to upgrade my system to a Celeron 333MHz system because it would give the most boost in FPS for Quake II or Q3A. And it worked, I got an additional 5 or 10 FPS. Research and patience payed off.
• I was wondering why Homeworld ran so slow when I had several ships on the screen. I asked some good questions on the Sierra Homeworld forums and got good answeres back that confirmed my theory that my Voodoo I was laboring with the number of polygons on the screen. Turning to the community probably helped a few others with similar systems and answered my question of what to upgrade to get better performance.

• Shop around a lot
• Read about new technology
• Find a local PC Hardware shop
• Ask people about their experiences with certain products
• Stay in touch with the communities around your games/applications

since june 7 1999