St. Louis Gaming – Warfactory LAN

STL Hardware Survey

While we were talking to the gamers, we took it upon ourselves to take a survey of what hardware gamers in St. Louis are using today. We were able to get a pretty random sample of 45 gamers out of the 72 in attendance for our questions.

Before I show the graphs, I’ll hit on a couple of the results which is not worth making a graph. There was one system at the event that was watercooled which was watercooled by a EXOS Koolance Kit. Out of the 45 people we asked, only 5 had store-bought PCs – the rest built their own computer or had someone build it for them.

AMD or Intel Processor?

This is not too big of a surprise to me. The number one reason why was because AMD Athlon XP processors are cheap! So there is no doubt that we have some budget gamers here is St. Louis, MO.

NVIDIA or ATI Graphics?

The budget crowd shows their numbers in this graphics chart as well. 30 of the 45 people we surveyed show as using the typical AGP FX Series for NVIDIA and AGP 9600-9800 Series for ATI. This means that 2/3 of the people we surveyed have purchased a new video card or system in the last year and a half, so in the next 6 months to a year, many will be ready to purchase again to update their system to keep up with more demanding games. And I would also point out that most of the FX series cards were 5700’s or lower and most of the ATI cards were 9600XT’s or lower, so the folks here in Missouri are definitely part of the mainstream market.

Memory Brand?

The memory brand of choice is definitely Kingston. After Kingston, Corsair and Crucial have to compete against the generic crowd for second rank!

Reference or After-Market CPU Cooling?

When one builds their own PC, they ususally get a heat sink with the processor; unless they choose OEM. I must say that I was a bit surprised at how many of the people we surveyed went out and purchased an After-Market CPU cooler. With the budget parts we saw in Processors and Graphics, we now see where the custom PC crowd spends their left-over pennys.