We've been lucky enough to build machines to specification for one of County Kildare's largest integrated circuit chip maufacturers, and for many other production environments

What we've had to do is isolate and provide redundancy for as many points of failure as possible, this includes

• the replacement of hard drives with solid state flash drives,
• implmenting hot swappable power supplies,
• implementing RAID configuration depending on base requirements such as speed versus data availability
• removal of non essential OS elements
• UPS (uninterruptible power supplies)
• Infrastructural Anaysis
• Installation of additional cooling/air extraction where heat build up may be an issue
• writing watchdog processes to maintain status and report on unstarted services/programs
• writing weekly procedures to produce and email a report on the overall health of the system, including disk space, cpu utilisation etc etc

So what's so special about a gamer's PC?

-Mainly the addition of dedicated hardware specifically designed to make pretty pictures appear faster on your screen.

Games can literally 'take you away' with their immersive visual experience, however the 3d extra capibility needs extra power and extra 'bits' otherwise you can be doing something akin to putting ferarri wheels on a tractor.

Anyone who's tried to play any of the latest games knows that meeting the minimum system requirements, can deliver a disasterous experience. To get the most out of a game you may need the latest and greatest hardware, you may also (this is not an endorsement of vista in any way) benefit from direct x 10. Trying to stay up with the latest games can require extensive knowledge/driver & firmware updates/overclocking, operating system upgrades/hardware upgrades and system reinstalls but the costs needn't be prohibitive. We can help get the best value for money based on the games you're interested in playing and the system you have.

Gamer's are probably the only people who understand that when it comes to computing, looks aren't everthing, it's very much a case of 'what's under the hood' that matters, and while your case looks pretty, if you're only putting in a Socket 478 Celeron and 1GB RAM, and running Vista(for the laugh), then your gaming experience is quite simply going to suck!

Questions to ask yourself?

• Do I want/need a 32 bit or 64 bit operating system?
• How much RAM do I/will I need? - always allow room for expansion where possible
• How much disk space? What speed&capacity?
• FPS, how many screens, dsiplay resolutions?
• Is antialiasing of any interest to me?
• Is going to LAN partys/having a 'pretty awesome looking' rig of any interest to me?
• Silent Operation
• 80% PSU
• How much of my old system can I reuse?
• Is it true that running DirectX10 games in DirectX9 causes my graphics adapter to overrun?
• I've heard Vista sucks for general applications, can it be made to go any faster for games?
• Dual Core versus Quad Core
• CPU Clock speed
• Intel Versus ATI/AMD Versus NVidia, is that a game I need to watch?
• Is Water Cooling an option? Pros and Cons
• Overclocking, is it a good idea or a bad idea?