Here's my current home pc (not the latest and greatest) but it gets the job done for my casual gaming.

CPU: AMD XP 2500+
Vid: Nvidia Geforce 4ti
Mem: 1GB
HD: 80GB

While traveling I do some gaming on a laptop:
HP Pavillion zd7020
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.8GHz, 533MHz
Vid: Nvidia GeForce FX Go5600
Mem: 2GB

This is a decent laptop for gaming.

What kind of gaming rig are you folks running ? Got any far out custom case mods or extreme gaming PC's ?

Here is what I'm running:

CPU: AMD XP 2600+
Vid: Radeon 9500 pro
Mem: 512MB
HD: 2x 180GB

The only customizing I've done is to replace the stock heatsink/fan for my cpu and vid card with Zalman coolers (cnps7000B-AlCu and VF700-ALCU).

I had to bend the power lead on the vid card to get one of the ram heatsinks on (which wasn't exactly easy), but everything stays nice and cool now

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Nvidia 6600GT 128 MB
Ram 1g
HD 1: 40 g
HD 2: 120g

I think im going to retire with this one... unless a really really good game requires otherwise

I'm trying to hold out on upgrading as well. I still might upgrade a bit in the next year or so

Me too. Well, the CPU is a 3000, but it's overclocked to slightly over 3200 speed

Cool reyalP! How fast do you think I could run mine at? Its at 2g now. Im think thats probably a bit slow for what I have.

It depends on the chip and motherboard. The only way to really find out is to turn it up until it starts getting unstable or too hot. As long as you are cautious, this is fairly safe, althought there is always some risk that a crash will hose you data. If you go so far your computer won't boot, you may have to open your keyboard to reset the CMOS.

Mine was 1.8ghz, and now seems to run stable at 2.133ghz, using the stock cooler (although I did add some fans to the case). It took a fair bit of tinkering to work out the optimal combination of settings.

What about shortening the life of your PC componets by overclocking ? Doesn't that happen ? I mean parts are rated to be run at a certain level. I know they have a percentage of room they can handle above the rating but that can shorten the life of a componet if it exceeds that percentage. I forget what the exact percentage was for most electronic parts. (I remembered that from school). It might be 15%.
I thought I had seen some horror stories before of people that tried to overclock systems, vid cards and caused damage on some overclocking websites.

I've never had a CPU or vid card die before it was obsolete, despite overclocking most of them. Your mileage may vary, of course

I don't go for 'extreme' overclocking with lots of fancy stuff. My view is that I can get the next speed grade or two of performance for free, with minimal risk. If I spent $100 on coolers, I might as well have just bought the faster chip in the first place.

In general, solid state electronics last a really long time. Even if you shorten their nominal life by 50%, chances are they are still going to be obsolete before they die. My old celeron 300 (which has run at 450 since just about the day I bought it ~7 years ago) is still running as Greys second computer. The PC I use as a router is similar vintage, and was overclocked for much of it's life. My TNT card from that era (which I also overclocked) did start to get flaky eventually, but only after it was pretty well obsolete.

As long as you are cautious (don't increase the voltage by insane amounts, increase the speed in small increments, keep an eye on temperatures) you are very unlikely to destroy a component outright. Especially now that almost every CPU and GPU has a thermal protection circuit.

This http://www.collectivecomputing.com/~ree ... onboot.jpg OTOH, is a result of defective components, not overclocking

I game on 2 machines both with almost the same specs.

System 1. (laptop)
2.0Ghz Intel CoreDuo
2.0GB Ram
120GB Hard Drive
256MB ATI 1600 Vid card
15" 1440 X 900 screen

System 2. (Desktop)
2.2Ghz Intel Core Duo
2.0GB Ram
250GB Hard Drive
256MB ATI 1600 Vid card
20" 1920 X 1080 Monitor


Oh, and They are Both Macs.

I dont have any trouble with overheating. I think if I had all the fans pointing in the same direction , the tower wouldnt stay on the desk I guess I will bump it up a bit...

What's a CPU Is it like a TK

I remember in the help desk days some people would say "I'm gonna bring the CPU to your office" I was like uh.. and they brought the whole PC case (main unit) which they called the CPU.

Back in the dark ages.... I took Intro to computers in college. If Im not mistaken the book showed a diagram of a monitor, a keyboard and a square box labeled CPU Im sure they have updated there stuff by now

Windows XP Pro SP2
Intel Core2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz
2046MB RAM ddr2
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GTKo ddr3 pci-e 512 MB
Dual sataII 16mb 320gb 7200rpm
G11 keyboard - I like
G5 Mouse - prefer my mx500