I plan to buy a windows desktop computer for the only purpose to play:

LSPDFR- 30+

LCPDFR- 25+ mods

Farming Simulator- 20+ mods

Construction simulator- 5 mods top

minecraft/w forge - 10+ mods

Surf Internet with chrome

 

What is the best windows version? 7,8,10?

What are the best processor & ram?

Memory?

 

Thank You for your help, i have found one

Edited January 21, 201610 yr by 72will

Depends on your budget. 

Always go with the most up to date version of windows, so in this case, Windows 10

For a processor, I'd go with an intel i5 or an AMD FX-8350 (the amd is going to perform a lot better and is less expensive than intel)

For RAM, you really don't need anything more than 8GB, but if you want, you could get up to 12GB or 16GB depending on your budget.

Hard drive space, get at least 1TB. 

For a graphics card, I would go with a GTX 960, but depending on your budget, I'd honestly rather see you get a GTX 970 4GB because it will perform a lot better and will last you a lot longer compared to the 960. 

If you got any budget details you could throw at me, I'd be glad to help you. 

Edited December 31, 201510 yr by skillsforilz

On 12/31/2015 at 2:11 PM, skillsforilz said:

Depends on your budget. 

Always go with the most up to date version of windows, so in this case, Windows 10

For a processor, I'd go with an intel i5 or an AMD FX-8350 (the amd is going to perform a lot better and is less expensive than intel)

For RAM, you really don't need anything more than 8GB, but if you want, you could get up to 12GB or 16GB depending on your budget.

Hard drive space, get at least 1TB. 

For a graphics card, I would go with a GTX 960, but depending on your budget, I'd honestly rather see you get a GTX 970 4GB because it will perform a lot better and will last you a lot longer compared to the 960. 

If you got any budget details you could throw at me, I'd be glad to help you. 

I'd have to refute a lot of that. Intel CPUs model for model are going to do a better job than AMD's. AMD processors are often 8 cores, but each individual core is smaller and is capable of doing less work. Many games are also unable to use upwards of 4 physical cores, and others are able to use hyper-threading, which no AMD processor supports, to my knowledge, as it's an Intel technology. The GTX960 as I described in a different thread is comparable to a GTX670 which is what I'm currently running; a card that was cutting edge in 2013. It's 2016 now (happy new year). A GTX970 yields a performance jump of about 44%, a GTX980 yields a jump of about 80%. I also disagree with your assessment of RAM. 8GB is sufficient for today's games, however:

The problem with the hardware you're picking is it's not taking into account the next three to four years to come. That's how long these PCs should be dated for before the components become grossly obsolete.

Two things I'd like to mention to the OP:

-Flat minimum of $800 budget for a decent experience, $1200-1500 for a great experience unless you have pre-existing components to help you reduce spending on things like monitors, hard drives, mouse & keyboard, etc. Cutting corners on your spending only ends up with you cheating yourself.

-GTA IV will not run stable with a ton of mods, it does not matter what kind of PC  you have. You're adding a ridiculous amount of them on. Just keep it to a few modded cars and an ENB with LCPDFR. Having a million car mods and running 20 scripts in the background is essentially asking for repeated game crashes. I would also advise not making this mistake with other video games. GTA V seems to be a more stable game, but we don't know as much about it as we do about GTA IV, because the game's been out for less than a year on PC.

I would advise a 6 core Intel, 980 and 12-16GB of RAM if you can spend the money. If you can't, 4 core Intel, 970 and the same amount of RAM, but you're going to have to upgrade or replace your computer sooner.

Ideally if you can wait for the next generation of graphics cards and not buy anything right now, I'd do that. nVidia is overdue for a new GPU architecture that's going to reset the '900' numbering system by changing it to something else and possibly even de-throne TITAN as top of the graphics card food chain. But if you need something right now, that's what I'd do.

Edited January 1, 201610 yr by unr3al

21 hours ago, skillsforilz said:

Depends on your budget. 

Always go with the most up to date version of windows, so in this case, Windows 10

For a processor, I'd go with an intel i5 or an AMD FX-8350 (the amd is going to perform a lot better and is less expensive than intel)

For RAM, you really don't need anything more than 8GB, but if you want, you could get up to 12GB or 16GB depending on your budget.

Hard drive space, get at least 1TB. 

For a graphics card, I would go with a GTX 960, but depending on your budget, I'd honestly rather see you get a GTX 970 4GB because it will perform a lot better and will last you a lot longer compared to the 960. 

If you got any budget details you could throw at me, I'd be glad to help you. 

I have a macbook pro that i love but it just does not game so i wanted to buy a fairly cheap desktop (under 300) just for gaming

 

9 hours ago, unr3al said:

I'd have to refute a lot of that. Intel CPUs model for model are going to do a better job than AMD's. AMD processors are often 8 cores, but each individual core is smaller and is capable of doing less work. Many games are also unable to use upwards of 4 physical cores, and others are able to use hyper-threading, which no AMD processor supports, to my knowledge, as it's an Intel technology. The GTX960 as I described in a different thread is comparable to a GTX670 which is what I'm currently running; a card that was cutting edge in 2013. It's 2016 now (happy new year). A GTX970 yields a performance jump of about 35%, a GTX980 yields a jump of about 55%. I also disagree with your assessment of RAM. 8GB is sufficient for today's games, however:

The problem with the hardware you're picking is it's not taking into account the next three to four years to come. That's how long these PCs should be dated for before the components become grossly obsolete.

Two things I'd like to mention to the OP:

-Flat minimum of $800 budget for a decent experience, $1200-1500 for a great experience unless you have pre-existing components to help you reduce spending on things like monitors, hard drives, mouse & keyboard, etc. Cutting corners on your spending only ends up with you cheating yourself.

-GTA IV will not run stable with a ton of mods, it does not matter what kind of PC  you have. You're adding a ridiculous amount of them on. Just keep it to a few modded cars and an ENB with LCPDFR. Having a million car mods and running 20 scripts in the background is essentially asking for repeated game crashes. I would also advise not making this mistake with other video games. GTA V seems to be a more stable game, but we don't know as much about it as we do about GTA IV, because the game's been out for less than a year on PC.

I would advise a 6 core Intel, 980 and 12-16GB of RAM if you can spend the money. If you can't, 4 core Intel, 970 and the same amount of RAM, but you're going to have to upgrade or replace your computer sooner.

Ideally if you can wait for the next generation of graphics cards and not buy anything right now, I'd do that. nVidia is overdue for a new GPU architecture that's going to reset the '900' numbering system by changing it to something else and possibly even de-throne TITAN as top of the graphics card food chain. But if you need something right now, that's what I'd do.

You both have very contradicting statements,

 

If you guys have time would you go on ebay and pick a few computers you think would work very well for fairly cheap? Thanks

4 hours ago, 72will said:

If you guys have time would you go on ebay and pick a few computers you think would work very well for fairly cheap? Thanks

Sub-$300 for gaming is non-existent, as I said up above, sorry. Save up. To give you a point of contact, either a CPU chip or graphics card for a decent caliber machine would be $300 by itself. I edited my original post for better accuracy of the performance figures. It's a 44% increase in performance from a 960 to a 970, and an 80% increase from a 960 to a 980. You can always go Google some CPU and GPU benchmarks if you want performance comparisons.

Edited January 1, 201610 yr by unr3al

On 1/1/2016 at 4:31 PM, unr3al said:

Sub-$300 for gaming is non-existent, as I said up above, sorry. Save up. To give you a point of contact, either a CPU chip or graphics card for a decent caliber machine would be $300 by itself. I edited my original post for better accuracy of the performance figures. It's a 44% increase in performance from a 960 to a 970, and an 80% increase from a 960 to a 980. You can always go Google some CPU and GPU benchmarks if you want performance comparisons.

Could you just look on ebay and find something that would work well ($600 max) I just really want to play my games no a big gaming desktop.

Edited January 6, 201610 yr by 72will

1 hour ago, 72will said:

Could you just look on ebay and find something that would work well ($600 max) I just really want to play my games no a big gaming desktop.

No, I'm not going to do the searching for you. But these games require "a big gaming desktop" if you want to run them well with higher detail settings, that's the point of all of this. $400 computers are meant for word processing and updating Facebook, not 3D gaming.

I would go for an i5 and a GTX 960 or R9 380. I have i5-4460 + R9 380 Nitro 4GB and I play on high-very high settings at 50 FPS (because of my 50 Hz refresh rate). However, it's 600+ €, but I'm sure that in USA it's not more expensive although euros are higher than dollars.

Edited January 13, 201610 yr by Canelo

You are far better off building a pc yourself. I'm not a player of any of the games you listed other than Gta V, so i do not know how well they scale performance wise. As for Gta V performance, Gta  V is one of the best pc ports as far as scalability on cheap hardware up to high end builds. There are builds as cheap as ~$350: 

The catch is they are built, not bought from a store. There are massive savings to be had building it yourself. If your budget is higher get a quad core intel cpu. I would try to go with intel i5 series. The intel i7 are overkill for gaming, unless you plan to do video editing. I would recommend to get a minimum of 8 gb of ram. There are several benchmarks ran that show most games aren't utilizing more anyway. As for graphics cards, I would try to stay with Nvidia Gtx Series. The Gtx 970 is the best value accounting performance vs cost. The Operating system has little effect on gaming, so go with what your comfortable with. Some great reading for seeing what Grand Theft Auto calls for CPU performance wise are: http://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/1911-gta-v-cpu-benchmark-4790k-3570k-9590-more . As for Video Cards, take a look at: http://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/1905-gta-v-pc-fps-benchmark-graphics-cards . Overall performance and seeing what Gta V takes to run at certain settings is: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/grand-theft-auto-v-pc-graphics-and-performance-guide#grand-theft-auto-v-tessellation . Reading the above articles will give a very good base on what you will need to achieve your settings goal. 

I wouldn't even trust a $350 pc to play solitaire on. When it comes to pc, especially building one, the phrase, "You get what you pay for." is legitimately true.