Okay, this isn't a post for the shit days thread yet, but my computer (which is pretty damned old and has been creaky for some time) may have packed up for good.
Need suggestion on cheap parts for a super-budget rig. The only technical requirement is that it can comfortably play TF2 (not according to the stock specs, but according to the somewhat unknown post-patch requirements*) and that everything stay as cheap as possible.
I'll need everything. My hard drives are ancient, my RAM is probably incompatible with new motherboards, I didn't even HAVE a graphics card, the case prrrrrrobably won't take newer parts, and the power supply has been in such bad shape for so long that I had to keep it outside the case (monitor, etc. works fine).
In general, I'm not so obsessed with penny-pinching that I want to buy a clearly inferior product if a significant performance increase can be had by spending 10% or 15% more, but cost is the dominant concern after meeting the minimum requirements.
*Even if you can't suggest parts, suggesting a set of projected minimum requirements would be appreciated, because as any player can tell you, the official requirements - which are the only ones I can find anywhere - are no longer accurate. Here's the "official" on-paper requirements:
* Minimum: 1.7 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM,
DirectX 8 level graphics card,
* Recommended: Pentium 4 processor (3.0GHz, or better),
1 GB RAM, DirectX 9 level graphics card,
No idea what the real minimum and recommended settings are, but they're higher than this. I met the recommended settings with my old rig (barely), and could hardly play sometimes due to appalling FPS. I almost never had a smooth framerate, I can tell you that much.