Initial Alpha access restricted to 64 bit OS

True, though I want to say that Apple started their Intel line with the Core2.

Crap. Now I might have to look it up...

Edit: I've looked it up. Early Intel Mac computers sported Core Duo chips which are dual core 32bit only. However, they are mobile processors designed for low power, and have clock speeds of only 1-2 Ghz. So, somehow I don't think that PA would run well. Still, if you have a chip capable of running PA well, you have the capability for 64bit.

+1 <3

So some people using early dual core Macs might be boned but anyone in the Windows/Linux world with a dual core CPU can go to 64 bit with some more RAM and a new OS.

Given the premium nature of Macs I doubt there are that many Mac users who cannot afford to upgrade.

Even worse. They came with crappy graphics, so don't even think about running the PA client. And only 2GB of RAM, so forget about the server either, leave alone running both at once.

The system I built in 2008 included an E8400 Core 2 Duo, which supports 64bit. The reason I didn't go with 64bit OS at the time is that I didn't trust 64bit driver support back then and all of the games ran find on 32bit anyway.

I may be OK for kludging together a quick 64 bit conversion on my current system in time for the Alpha. Trouble is, putting together a decent system that will hold its own for another 5+ years like my last one did, will be a lot more difficult financially than it was in 2008. Back then I was single and living alone. Now, I am married and have 4 step-children and 3 step-grandchildren that all live 4 hours away (who my wife insists on us visiting more often than just holidays). I went through a period of unemployment in 2009 like a lot of people did and have some increased financial burdens now as a result. I also, after that period, decided to up my employment potential and started pursuing a masters degree in 2010. This was a good decision long term, but it has further impacted my overall financial situation.

No one will care about the particulars of why it isn't that easy to build a 'decent' new system out of the blue for me. My point is that just because someone doesn't have several hundred dollars to plop down at the drop of a hat, doesn't mean that they are not part of the "Target Audience" or is a "Casual Gamer". And throwing something together for $300 - $500 is irresponsible just to play this game because when you build a new system, you should put something together that will last for a while. Case in point, given the performance and capacity balance needed for a good gaming hard drive, I have decided to plan on using the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD in my new system (when I am able to build it). Now this drive is currently selling for around $230. Do I have a HDD I could use out of my current system? Yes. Is it something I would trust for the next 5 years as my primary gaming and work/school storage solution? Absolutely not!

TL;DR - If you are in a position financially to throw together a $1,000+ gaming rig(this is low-mid range) at the drop of a hat, good for you, but not all of us are in that financial situation and we don't care for your "advice" on how "easy" it is to do so.

While you certainly can blow a grand on a gaming rig it is totally unnecessary to do so as my pricing information has proved. A low to mid range box is well under $500. Less than $300 if you can reuse enough parts.

I understand that people's lives change over time. When I was building a box for SupCom I was a single college student living alone. Now I am married, work a full time job, and look after nieces and nephews constantly.

If money is tight then you just might have to accept the fact that you can't build a top end system that will last for 5+ years. Also if money is that tight why are you looking at an SSD? Heck why did you buy one 5 years ago if it wasn't going to last into your next PC? I stopped building top end systems when my wife decided that her PC needed to be as fast as mine.

Hardware lasts a lot longer than it used to anyway. Mid range stuff from 2-3 years ago still runs everything great on pretty high settings. Games stopped getting significantly more graphically intense a while back due to development costs and consoles acting as a bottleneck. "Low end" stopped meaning "barely runs games" a long time ago.

Building a low to mid range system that does what you need it to do (or upgrading an older system) within your budget is the polar opposite of irresponsible. Its what adults like us do when we have to make decisions about money and priorities. Thinking that your only option is to go out and build a $1000+ high end machine is what I would call irresponsible. Kind of like how some people think that the *only* kind of car they can own is a massive SUV with a V8 no matter what their financial situation might be.

Besides it sounds like all you need an OS license and possibly some more RAM. So $135 or $152. Not too bad really to keep a 5 year old box going for another year or two.

Well, my post was meant to be generalized response, not necessarily just from my personal situational perspective.

However, given the difficulties I have already been experiencing with games with my current setup, I don't know that the quick fix will be a 1-2 year solution. It will probably hold me until the Haswell processor and MB landscape has settled enough to allow an informed purchase.

Btw, a "High-End" system is nowhere near as cheap as $1,000. Most "High-End" systems aren't even single GPU and you should know what those can run on their own. Not to mention using a processor like the SandyBridge E series cost more than $1,000 on its own at release.

If someone is looking to build a system that performs well at the 5 year mark, they will need to invest in smart purchases now. $400-$500 is not enough to build a mid-level gaming machine that will perform well 5 years from now. Therefore, I will have to spend some time saving up and doing research to get the best bang for the buck on building my next gaming system. I am not destitute, but I can't afford to throw money out the window on impulsive, uninformed purchases.

"High End" is anything that can run the latest games at 1080p on high detail settings at 60 fps. An upper tier Core i5 and a single video card is all that is needed to do this. You get nothing by going with an i7 and dual cards. High end starts at about $1000 and goes up. That's why I had a "+" next to the number. But past the $1000 point you very quickly suffer from diminishing returns. There is absolutely no reason to spend a grand on a CPU for a gaming PC or buy more than one video card. Buying a SandyBridge E series it like buying a Mercedes, you buy it to show people that you have money, not because you need it.

I'd say it would be smarter to wait a month and buy a Haswell chip or a discounted Ivy Bridge chip. $400-$500 is plenty enough to build a mid range gaming machine that will last 2-3 years. 5 years is an awfully ambitious life expectation for a PC but I think an upper tier mid range box in the $600-$700 range might be able to do it given that PC game graphics have hit a budgetary wall at pretty much every major studio.

You are correct that research is the key though. I find that the CPU and GPU charts on Toms Hardware are very useful when looking to maximize my PC construction budget.

You can't be serious, right?
Multi-GPU is not an indicator for an High-End gaming system. It just causes a lot of trouble for a mere 50-80% performance increase, however you are long capped out by software which could make use of that. Either the software is well written, then a dual GPU setup can give you up to 100% increase or it isn't, then a dual GPU setup will get you nothing. Issue? In the first case, you are often enough already capped by the refresh rate of your monitor, so there is usually no point in going dual GPU.

A single, cheap GPU from the high end class (e.g. AMD 78x0 / 7950, Nvidia 660+) is all what it takes for a high end gaming machine. You could get another 50% extra performance if you bought the current top model for twice the price, but thats just not worth it. They will all become outdated at almost the same time, that 50% extra equal only about 6 months more.

And a Sandy Bridge E for a non-workstation gaming computer? That has nothing to do with "High End", it's just wasted money in a gaming PC. High clocked quadcore is all you need to be up to date for another 2-3 years, even a i7 (quadcore + hyperthreading) is already wasted in a gaming system as it won't give you better performance. A Ivy Bridge i5 with k suffix is all you need, they do 4-4.5 Ghz with ease and are enough for EVERY modern game.

SSD is the only thing where an investment could actually be worth it, although the same issue again: You would need to pay way to much for the last 50% extra performance, and you won't even notice the difference since you are capped by other limits again.

Building a gaming machine which would perform well 5 years(!) from now, would require a setup which has about 5-6 times the performance of a recent gaming rig. It's just not reasonable to buy such a thing, it would cost several thousand dollars, but in 5 years the value would have dropped to no more than $400. You can't even use the full potential in the meantime and it's also draining a lot of energy.

In case still haven't gotten it: For the same budget, you could upgrade your PC every 6 months with the current high end, desktop components and play EVERY game in the next 5 years on maximum details. Building a future proof gaming PC is a futile attempt while Moore's law stays valid. Upgrade what needs to be upgraded, but keep it reasonable.
High end is currently about 700-800€ for the basic, futureproof (=upgradeable) system.

It's actually more like buying a tractor unit. Big, heavy, costs a lot and has a lot of power, but it doesn't meet your needs at all if you just want a family car.

You've got it all wrong, it's a waste of money buying a top end PC for over $1000 to last just 5 years when you can get a great PC that will last 3 years for ~$500. Sure you need to update more often but it's cheaper in the long run and is also less vulnerable to major architecture changes (like if you bought a $500 DirectX 9 GPU for a $1000+ PC right before the DirectX 10 GPUs came out, leaving you a pretty major step behind for 5 years instead of just 3).

Dual GPUs is often better bang for the buck when chasing peak performance, however a single GPU is always going to be more consistent performance, which is far more important for enjoyable gaming than dealing with the esoteric nature of dual GPU drivers.

It used to be to support dual GPUs you had to explicitly support them. These days the video drivers handle all of the load splitting voodoo behind the DirectX or OpenGL layer, so it's often on NVidia or AMD to fix issues or work with developers to make sure their game isn't doing something to break assumptions made.

We're doing some particularly novel stuff with our planet rendering that a dual GPU may actually be more efficient at handling than a single GPU if we were able to do the optimizations ourselves. But that would be a significant amount of engineering time to spend on something that would only benefit a smaller percentage of users than those who still have a 32 bit OS. It's also not really possible to do anymore as it is all abstracted behind the driver layer.

In my experience, one gpu is really all you need. Though my board has dual support, I've had a single GTS 250 for years now that I got on sale, and it still supports games on ultra settings: I can actually run Bioshock Infinite on ultra settings. You need the RAM and Processing power to support it, but RAM right now is pretty cheap (8 can run most everything, more is just cherry on top), and dual and quad processors aren't that bad. Don't expect to have to do a full upgrade for PA either, from the looks of things. $1000 is definitely an exaggeration, it takes less than half of that for a good 'modern' gaming rig.

You guys keep mentioning sub $1000 levels for mid-level, which don't make sense. A case, MB, PSU, GPU, CPU, HDD/SSD, DVD, Fans, Thermal Paste etc. all add up quickly. That doesn't include shipping if ordering some parts online, and doesn't include the OS, cost of the game you are upgrading for, etc.

Like I said, I gave examples given my current situation, but I was also trying to keep the discussion more generalized. Personally I can limp along with my setup by simply moving to 64bit OS and using my current 4GB memory. Someone that can't do this, or doesn't want to live at that limited level of performance will probably want/need to build a new rig.

When discussing full 1080p level settings on modern games (and I mean more than just PA), I don't personally think $400-$500 is a reasonable expectation. Hell, you could end up spending more than $50 on shipping alone in some cases, although if you are getting most of your components from one place, they may cut you a deal as a result.

It does make sense, because buying a brand new computer isn't the idea There's lots of components on a computer that can easily be used from one to another. Motherboard, power supply, case, usually don't need to be upgraded very often to be able to do good gaming. The idea is to use parts you already have, and only upgrade systems important to gaming, like GPU, RAM, and CPU. 4GB of RAM will run ~50 to 60 dollars (8 is all you really need, and since you already have 4...), a quad cpu will run around $120 but you can easily get under 100, a good GPU can be gotten for 120 dollars like mine, an OS could run for ~150, which brings us to <500 bucks for all you really need to run a game. Disc space shouldn't be an issue (even if you're out, just uninstall a game or two), and I've found that standard hard drives don't really impact performance much, so you should be fine with what you have. You likely wouldn't have to upgrade your motherboard (unless you only have two ram spots 2 2GB RAM sticks...but then, you still don't need to upgrade the motherboard, the ram would just be a bit more expensive), you wouldn't need a new case (just because it's annoying to work with some older ones doesn't mean that it's nescessary to upgrade), new power supply depends on what you run, but you can upgrade without needing more...you just have to think smart when upgrading. Buying a new comp is for those who don't know too much about what they're doing.

Now, I'm hardly one to get on the elitist train and say that if you're outdated, you need to upgrade or you're bat out of luck, but as antille said, if you can't you can't. There's no shame in that, gaming is just an entertainment afterall. And besides, It's looking like PA is getting 32bit support, just not xp support. I seriously doubt that PA is going to be as intensive as supcom...which would mean that you can still have a nice game without amazing specs. In the end, it's not that big of a deal My guess is that there really isn't much you'll have to worry about. Wait for the alpha or whatever to see how it will work. No sense getting a brand new computer if you don't need one anyway.

Just to make sure PC people aren't misquoting, I went on newegg and made a quick AMDFX quad-core 7770GHZ 8gig ddr3 dvd case mouse keyboard 1TBHDD 500+watt PS system, made out of 4egg or better rated parts, and I was at $470. A decent monitor can be 100, then with the mass shipping another 50. So, 600 for a decent damn computer. Completely new parts.

7770 is slightly below my 6870, and my 6870 can handle most things at highest 1080 bar anti-aliasing (with a few of the hardest, like crysis, not being happy at highest). If you have a computer already or even a decent HD tv, no need for the 100 monitor. A license for windows can be tricky and another $100+, but in PA's specific case unnecessary. I've heard WINE is pretty good and getting better too.

So, it definitely can be done, and for probably even cheaper than I did it since I was quickly throwing things together. So yes, I believe sub 1000 is easily mid- to high-range, even sub 800.

I would like to point out this.

If you already have a screen, keyboard, mouse, optical drive, and hard drive then you can do a total rebuild for under $500. If you are ok with running Linux you can knock another $100 off. If you can reuse more parts than that (case, PSU, some RAM) then it gets even cheaper.

DVD/Blu-Ray drive?

Meant to say if you also already had an optical drive as well. But honestly you don't really need one much these days unless you want to watch movies.

Yeah, but what about to install Windows

Install from a USB thumb drive. Its been supported since Vista.