Having limited room on a hard drive can cause any Mac/PC to run at a slow pace. Luckily, in this short tutorial you will be able to see how much space is left on your drive as well as its full capacity.

1. Open up Finder and right click on Macintosh HD. Select Get Info.

2.  A new window should open (as shown below). Here you can see lots of information ranging from your Capacity, Available space and Used space on your Hard Drive. You can also change the name of your hard drive to whatever you want!

In many ways it really does sit just below the X58 platform which is why I thought it was very disappointing, however these new chips running on 32nm wafers do run extremely cool and have overclocking capabilities almost similar to the old Celeron processors that would clock through the roof!

5.0Ghz has been a very common trend on all the overclocking forums with a lower end of 4.6GHz on air and even higher on water cooling. The new chips, since they’re on a smaller wafer than X58, can’t handle as much voltage as the previous generation of Nehalem CPU’s, but at the same it really looks like they may not be necessary.

Either way, I’m seriously looking forward to seeing some of the liquid nitrogen numbers once those people start getting the supplies to do it!

Most people are reporting that, with a decent cooler, you should be able to reach an overclock of 4.0Ghz with the cores unlocked which sets us up for an amazing budget system!

The processor and motherboard are in a combo deal on Newegg and the motherboard I picked out was the Gigabyte MA770T-UD3. It’s an AM3 based board with core unlocking and overclocking features in the BIOS and since it’s made by Gigabyte, despite being a budget motherboard, the quality will be excellent.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.581279

Follow us on Twitter to listen out for next weeks update of the Budget PC Build series where we will be looking at Coolers!

In these difficult economic times, budget is a word that everyone’s familiar with and budget PC gaming has never been better! The market today consists of essentially three main performance levels: budget, mid-level, and enthusiast. If you take a moment to think about all the new hardware that’s been released over just the past year, you’ll notice that a very large majority of it is targeted at budget and mid-level PC builders. This is an excellent thing for you because it lets you get good performance out of less money. Will building a budget gaming PC give you the best visuals? Maybe not, but it will allow you to play all the new games mostly at medium settings with a decent frame rate.

The main computer components that I will be including in this guide are motherboard, processor (CPU), RAM, hard drive, case, power supply, disk drive, and graphics card (GPU). Our total budget for this build is going to be set at $400 including shipping and after mail-in rebates. I will be referring to Newegg for the pricing of components and will also include links to the product pages.

Stay tuned for tomorrow (Thursday) morning when our first section will be online for you to read where we will be starting with our CPU and Motherboard!

The Intel Core i5 750 quad core is an excellent choice. Pair it with a nice H55 motherboard and a 2x4GB kit of DDR3 1600MHz RAM and you should be sitting at about $350, leaving you with about $150 for a graphics card which is very respectable.

The above point is very important when building your own system. There is no point what so ever in blowing all your mid-range budget on an amazing processor if you are only going to under-spend on your graphics card. This will only result in a poorer performance than if you spent half as much on both your processor and graphics card put together.

When it comes to PC gaming, most people only think of graphics cards when a game is running slow, but the graphics card can only run a game as fast as the processor powering it. When a computer has a fast graphics card but a slow processor, the graphics card is bottlenecked by it essentially making it pointless to have a fast graphics card. So, what are some good CPU options for the different levels of gamers out there today?

We will be addressing three different budget levels of processing power for PC gamers in this series. At the same time, it’s vitally important to keep in mind the platform costs as well. This means you must be thinking about the cost of motherboards, RAM, and even graphics cards. Graphics cards only need to be kept in mind if you are looking for a multi-GPU solution because some platforms don’t natively support having more than one graphics card of a certain brand. AMD and Nvidia are the two brands in the graphics world at the moment. AMD platforms don’t support SLI, more than one Nvidia card on one motherboard, unless the motherboard has an Nvidia chipset. Recently, however, people have found a work around that allows you to enable SLI on motherboards with AMD chipsets. Intel’s newer offerings support both SLI and CrossfireX, AMD’s version of having two AMD cards on one motherboard.

The three levels being addressed today are going to be budget, mid-level, and enthusiast. Prices are based off of Newegg.com in Jan 2011 and are subject to change at any time.

Budget Gaming Solution:

The budget gamer is someone who has a limited amount of money to spend but doesn’t want to lack in performance. We’re going to say the budget gamer has a limit of $250 to spend on upgrading the main components; the motherboard, processor, RAM, and graphics card. The best choice for this person is going to be an AMD Athlon x2 240. The chip can be found for around $50 and will have the possibility of being unlocked to a full quad core. A decent motherboard and a 4GB kit of DDR2 RAM can be bought for right around $100 leaving the budget gamer with right around $100 for a pretty decent graphics card.

AMD Athlon x2 240:

This question is something that should be asked before you even start the planning process of a build because it determines the other main components you should choose to build with such as the motherboard, RAM, graphics card(s), and even cooling.

AMD and Intel both have many, many options for you to choose from that are excellent choices for different situations. AMD, at the moment, is most likely going to give you the best bang for your buck and provide a nice a price to performance ratio while still giving the budget gamer plenty of power and up to six cores.

Intel on the other hand, in the high end area, will give you the most performance and provide you with a higher chance of being able to overclock higher. In the mid range area, AMD is a clear winner due to the low prices and almost all of the dual and triple core chips on the market have the capability of being unlocked to quad cores with the full amount of cache being unlocked too. Intel does have offerings in this area, but they do perform fairly close to the high-end offerings they have and come with a similar price tag. The bottom line is if you are an enthusiast you should go with Intel for the overclocking side of things and budget gaming builders should choose to build off either an AMD x4 or x6 CPU because they perform very well at a much lower price.

These new drives use transistors to transfer electrical currents to store data via binary code, a series of 0’s and 1’s. Another benefit of this is that if a solid state drive is in a laptop that gets dropped, there won’t be any damage compared to a disk drive that would have a much higher risk of breaking.

The second advantage is the amazing speed capabilities of solid state drives. The drives offer read and write speeds sometimes up to 2x faster than disk drives allowing your programs to open and run faster and SSD’s do not have to spin-up from a cold boot. Along with the speed comes convenience. The drives don’t need to be defragmented like the traditional drives due to built-in tools.

Advantage number three is reliability. Solid states can’t die due to a mechanical hardware failure because they have no moving parts.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “What graphics card should I get in order to play this game?” There are multiple answers to this question. In order to pick the right graphics card for you, you need to first take a look at a few things. The first thing you need to look at is your monitor’s native resolution, which can be found in Windows if you don’t know it. The second is, how high would you like the quality settings turned up? And finally, how much money are you willing to spend, or what is your budget.

For those of you that are on a tight budget or lower resolution, read #1. If you want something budget friendly and capable of handling itself at all resolutions in a decent fashion, read #2. And finally, if you are a person that has no budget and is simply wanting the best of the best to run everything maxed out at high resolutions, continue to #3.

First, here are the system requirements as published by the developer:

• 12GB Hard Drive Space
• Windows Operating System(XP or newer)
• Socket 775 Dual core or newer CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 256MB 8600GT/X1950Pro or better graphics card

1. Those of us on a tight budget probably still have the urge to play the game with the settings jacked up, so I’m going to recommend that you get a GTS250. These cards can be found in the sub $100 price margin, new in box. This means that you could probably find a used card for somewhere around $75 if you know where you’re looking. This card, paired with a dual core processor, is perfectly capable of running most games even in the 1920×1200 resolution, but you do have to sacrifice some eye candy to achieve an even remotely desirable result.

2. Now, there are a lot of cards better than the above-mentioned GTS250, but which one is that I recommend? It is the AMD HD5770. The HD5770 is a very popular card because of its sub $150 price mark. These cards use up a little less power on idle and load than the GTS250, outperform it by a lot, boasts DX11 support, and it’s reference designed coolers even run quieter.

3. The final card recommendation I have for you is the enthusiast level. Now, I could just tell you to get the most expensive card on the market, but that won’t be necessary for this game to run at 60+ frames per second even at a 2560×1600 resolution. The card I’m going to suggest for this category is the AMD HD6870. These cards can be found for around $240 online. This card pumps out enough performance to run with all the settings on high without showing so much as a hiccup. Another nice thing about this card is that it was designed with a low power bill in mind. It does use more power than the two cards mentioned above, but it doesn’t use as much power as cards in the same performance class as it is.

Well, there you have it! Now you can be prepared, graphics-wise that is, to play countless rounds of zombies through the night when this long-anticipated title is finally put out on shelves next Tuesday at 12AM!

For those that struggle installing a new graphics card, be sure to check out our article on Installing a Graphics Card

Newly released games are requiring more and more powerful graphics cards every day and installing a new card can make your gameplay much smoother and faster. Finding the cheapest and best performing card might be a problem, but physically installing them definatly shouldn’t.

Today we’re going to be installing a nvidia 8500GT PCI-E, this is a relatively old card that I had lying around but still handles games such as Call Of Duty Modern Warfare quite well on medium settings. Please excuse the dust gathered in the heatsink, for a quick guide on unclogging heatsinks I highly recommend our guide on How To Clean Your PC.

After removing the side panel of my PC, you can now see my Foxconn motherboard. The PCI-E slot where the new graphics card will be housed is the longest yellow slot. PCI-E slots are typically yellow or white and will almost always look the same shape as the one pictured below. The black and yellow cable running over the slot is a 4 pin connector supplying power to my CPU, it gets in the way a bit, but until I purchase a new power supply it is going to have to stay put.

You can roughly see 4 screws on the left hand side of the picture, these keep the card slot covers in place which purely act as a barrier between the innards of your PC and the outside world. You may have noticed that I have already removed the top slot opposite the PCI-E connector in order to make room for the new graphics card, you should do the same.

Now you will need to physically insert the new graphics card into the yellow PCI-E slot. All that’s needed is common sense to figure out which way it fits. When inserting the card, keep an eye out for the metal slot on the left hand side (where the ports are) to make sure it is correctly aligned, the same applies for the connecting pins which fit into the yellow slot on the motherboard. Also, try not to be too forceful if it doesn’t slot in straight away as you might damage the connecting pins. When it is properly inserted you should hear a click, letting you know that is secured. However, the card will still wobble about, and this is where you need to screw the card to the case.

On the top left of the picture below you can see that I have screwed the graphics card to the case using a thumbscrew. I highly recommend these for almost every part of your PC which requires a screw as they are so quick and easy to use. Now your card is firmly secured, make sure there are no wires in contact, or close to the heatsink on the card, as this can cause the wire to melt or for the heatsinks to stop functioning properly (thus causing dangerous overheating problems).

Your new graphics card is now successfully installed! All that is needed now is to refit your cases side panel and to connect the graphics card to your monitor. Here’s what my graphics card looks like from the rear of the case:

As you can see, this card has HDMI (pink), VGA (blue) and TV-Out (black) ports. Make sure you connect the PC to your monitor using one of these ports, NOT your onboard adaptors that you have used previously as this will not work. This is because the new graphics card automatically overrides onboard ports.

Now, boot up your PC and enjoy your newly enhanced graphics!