PC recommendation

[Blue Hero]

Howdy folks. I wanna get into PC gaming, but I know absolutely nothing about PCs and the parts and graphics cards and monitoring chips with the CPU and the GPU and the hawk-eyed walking mathematicians. What graphics card, GPU, CPU, all the important parts, would you recommend for someone that wants to play Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Audiosurf, STALKER, Penumbra, and Call of Cthulhu on? It doesn't need to be the best of the best, just able to play all (or most) of these games on at least medium settings.

I'm not swimming in money here, so something that'd add up to less than $700 AUD would be ideal.

 

[Blue Hero]

The games you mentioned have such low system requirements that I am pretty sure 3 hamsters in a cardboard box could run it.

My old PC could barely run Team Fortress 2 on the lowest settings, and my currently laptop can't play any of them without exploding and turning into dirt.

 

[IamBadAtMakingNames]

Hmm first of all I recommend BUILDING your own computer PARTS because you will save A LOT of money.

 

[80Maxwell08]

Well I don't know how much that converts to in U.S. but I would say get 4gb of ram since that will run about everything and it's pretty cheap. For graphics cards ATI has a better price to performance ratio than Nvidia but I hear of AMD having way more problems with games so that might be a problem. For CPUs I would recommend intel but if you don't have the money the new AMD processors are still very good and much cheaper. I think someone here could recommend a good graphics card for that range but totaled out I still don't know the conversion rates between AUD and U.S. so I can't honestly stay within that. Maybe a GTX 560 for GPU since it looks like they are cheap right now.

 

[octafish]

That is a lowish budget for Australian parts, so I'd reccommend sticking to AMD CPUs and GPUs, but get at least a quad core even though those games don't require more than a dual core. Check out "The Menagerie" in PC PowerPlay at your local newsagents, hell buy a copy. You'll be looking at "the Budgie" which usually has a budget of $1000 or less, but if you can recycle your old monitor, speakers, HDD, case, optical drive, and maybe even your PSU you should be able to get it close to your budget. If you are building completely from scratch that budget is going to be extremely tight.