The Guide for the Ultimate PC

So you want a game machine?

It seems like just a few months ago that you laid down $5,000 for that state of the art Pentium MMX 233, with 128MB of RAM and an unheard of 12GB of storage. For some reason though, the world has decided to specifically target your for obsolescence, and now everyone and their grandma are sporting Celerons, K6-3s, and Pentium III powerhouses.

Looking for that ultimate upgrade?

Even if you've got a kick-ass gaming rig, the progress of hardware is inevitable. Sooner or later (more likely sooner), you're going to have to trade in some parts to stay on the bleeding edge. However, there are so many competitive products in the marketplace now, all of which boast some performance or feature advantage over the other. Sometimes, all you can do is hold your head and and mumble unintelligibly to yourself.

But all is not lost, and FiringSquad is here to help! Our PC Pricing Guide is designed to aid you not only in picking out the newest and hottest PC components at the lowest prices, but also as a guide to help you mix and match components for your perfect system.

In this guide, we'll be covering a few of the basic components needed to build a system, specifically, the CPU, motherboard, RAM, video, and hard drive. These are the critical components which determine the speed and performance of your system, and they fluctuate in price frequently; what costs $150 here may be $75 elsewhere. Hopefully, this guide will help you determine the price you should be paying for the components you want.