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Roxy,

The best bet would be to go with a P55 EGO system. If you are new to gaming and you are just trying to cut your teeth but you don't want to worry about hardware holding you back, you cant miss with the EGO.

The main things to worry about in a gaming system are the following...

1.) Sustainability.
2.) Performance
3.) Display type/size

The EGO p55 is a very sustainable platform. It utilizes Intel's 1156 series of processors which are the latest generation of technology that Intel has produced. This is important because you can tell based on Intel's road-map that they will be producing processors on this platform for the next few years. That means motherboards, upgrades, ram etc for this platform will all be available from manufacturers during that time as well. That is a great insurance policy to have especially once your machine ages past the hardware warranty. It gives me warm and fuzzies to know that if my motherboard eventually fails, rather than having to build a whole new gaming machine, I can just swap motherboard's and be good to go for just the cost of the part.

Secondly, performance. The main thing to keep in mind when building any gaming computer is to select a good video card. Either EGO platform you select would provide you with an NVIDIA GTX470. To be quite honest, as an avid gamer myself, there really aren't too many games out right now that would even make that card sweat. I would leave that card alone and if I were to do any upgrades at all, I would select a more robust power supply as well as possibly throw in a solid state disk for your main HDD.

While solid state drives have very little effect on gaming performance (aside from load times) - the performance difference in literally EVERYTHING else is totally undeniable. You can't really tell the difference between 4 or 6 gigs of ram in windows, but let me tell you, with solid state drives - it is a totally different story. You simply cannot compare a machine that runs an SSD to anything else. Bang for the buck, this is one of the best things you can do to future-proof your machine at this point.

As for the Power supply, the reason why I say bump it up to something more robust is also to future-proof your machine. Having a high-watt psu already in place allows the low cost addition of another video card to boost performance down the road. You also want to make sure you have enough rails coming off the PSU to power whatever other devices you may want to add later =).

Playing off my last point about the PSU and second video card leads into display type/size. Are you playing games on a high resolution TV or monitor? (High resolution defined by higher than 1920x1080). In the event you are, you might want to think about configuring the machine with a secondary video card right off the bat so you can run your system in SLI. (This is a method of video cards working together to share the workload to increase speed, especially at high resolutions.) I would call in to either location and ask to speak to a sales representative and any of us would be more than happy to help you answer all of your questions and get a system configured based around your needs.

Cheers,

Nick

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