Building the Ultimate Game PC (Bradygames Take Your Games Further)

Rarely is the raw calculating power of your computer as evident as when you're playing a modern game. If a spreadsheet takes a couple extra seconds to update, no big deal. But if your man takes a couple extra seconds to look around a room in Quake, he'll probably have copious amounts of the most heinous sort of death rained down upon him. In games, hardware matters. Building the Ultimate Game PC will help you understand how games use processors, video cards, disks, and Internet connections. Further, it will help you design and build a fireball game machine that will strike fear into the hearts of your opponents, cybernetic and otherwise. This book gets beyond the hardware holy wars and shows you how to build what you want.

The risk in writing any hardware book is that it'll promptly become obsolete, and author Loyd Case makes his share of specific product recommendations, but he improves the shelf life of this book by also explaining game technologies a step back from the devices that implement them. His explanations of widely used technologies (like three-dimensional sound) and specific implementations (such as DirectX and OpenGL) are excellent. Similarly, Case's advice on assembling a machine, optimizing it for top performance, and performing maintenance (keeping drivers updated, for example) are strong too. If you want an informed opinion on high-level PC hardware that will give you the edge in competition, you'll be very pleased with this book. --David Wall

Topics covered: Processors, memory, motherboards, graphics cards, sound systems, disks, and other physical devices. Graphics chipsets, including the 3dfx Voodoo series, ATI's Rage products, the Matrox G400 series, the Nvidia TNT2 and GeForce 256, and S3's Savage4 and Savage 2000. Programmer's instruction sets (including OpenGL, DirectX, DirectSound, and Direct3D). Building and optimizing a computer, starting from scratch.