After reading Loyd Case's original PC guide, 'Building the Ultimate Gaming PC' and learning about this sequel, I knew I had to have it. I ordered my copy used through Amazon Merchants; it's worth every penny I paid for it, and much more.
As noted in the prologue, a colleague of Case's mentions that the author has the gift of being able to take the highly technical nature of PC hardware and software tech, and boiling it down to its logical base, so the reader can truly understand it. His first book did a great job of this, as does the second.
All topics related to personal computers relevant to gamers are covered in this book, including many paged devoted to the games that PC gamers love and how to get every last drop of performance from them. Even if the reader has an older system all hope isn't lost as Case illustrates with useful upgrading tables and priority upgrade components. He gets into the Windows family of operating systems and even covers those from obscure types such as Linux and Mac OS X. Make no mistake, though, this book has been desgined for the performance-oriented PC gamer. Later, he delves into the intricacies of how 3D accelerated video cards work. This topic alone could use an entire book to adequately describe. However, I am able to understand the technical jargon used by the techies and the manufacturers of the cards with the help of both this book and the previous one. He obviously doesn't stop at video cards. The author is an admitted audiophile and devotes a good section of the book to outlining the best audio cards at the time (Fall, 2002), and which ones to avoid, while mentioning the many shortcomings of owning a mainboard with integrated hardware chips for video and audio. Closing out the book, he covers a lot of very useful hardware and software tweaking that will allow the user to squeeze a lot of extra performance from their systems before needing to upgrade or replacing entirely.
I enthusiastically recommend PC gamers and techies to read Loyd Case's books. These two are obviously dated now, but the knowledege you gain from reading them will take you far into understanding the modern computer hardward used in PCs today. If Case authors another book, I'll be waiting in line to buy it.
