First of all does any1 know what resolution gears of war is rendered at on 360. Im guessing its around 1280x720
 
Im thinking that the following specs may be enough to match or exceed the 360 version graphically and be able to play at 60fps;
 
cpu;                e2180 2GHz                                                    44gbp
gpu:               Gecube HD 3850 512MB GDDR3                      82gbp                                
ram;               OCZ 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz                28gbp
harddisk;       Hitachi 160GB  7200rpm 8MB Cache                27gbp
mobo;            Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L                                    42gbp
dvddrive;       Optiarc AD-7201S 20X DVD±RW                      17gbp
psu;               Gold 400W 12cm Fan Silent PSU                     15gbp
case;              Casecom black atx                                          11gbp
gamepad:       xbox 360 control pad wired                            22gbp
kb n mouse;                                                                            5gbp
 
total;                                                                                     293gbp
 
will this pc run aswell as a 360 or a ps3 or are games that are ported to pc end up running much slower.

I'm not sure how that graphics card stacks up, but the rest of it should be sufficient.

 
It'll probably blow up like the 360 if you use that PSU as well...
Get a cheap (but good) branded one and save yourself a lot of grief...
E.g.
[link]http://www.ebuyer.com/product/124922[/link]
 
Bob

Sorry 'bout the link but the THG forums are ******* yet again... Keeps saying this thread doesn't exist when I try to post a full reply...
 
Bob

 
the hd3850 is almost as powerful as a 7900gtx and a x1950xtx and remember that a 360 has something similar to a x1800xt and the ps3 only has a weakened version of the 7800gtx

 
 
I think the power supply I've chosen should be fine, its got 20amps on the 12v rail which is plenty, 20A x 12v = 240watts. I've got a cheap 300watt power supply on my current pc and its been over clocked to 3ghz for 2 years and i haven't had a problem.  
 
EXtreme Power Supply Calculator says this system is gonna only use 254watts after I've over clocked to 3ghz.

So that should be fine then, but yeah, cheap PSUs can cause a lot of grief.  A good measure in my book is if it is high efficiency rated then it is probably a good unit.  Cheap PSUs have a hard time getting 80 certified.

you should take into consideration that games are a lot more well optimised for consoles and consoles use HDTVs

The 360's GPU is nothing like the X1800XT as it sports 48 unified shaders and integrated eDRAM. The PS3 GPU is a G71 at 550MHz with only 8 ROPs enabled.

Gears for PC also runs Dx10, which means it will run slower than on an equivelant setup as the 360. I would get a better graphics card or go crossfire.

 
No the R500 (Xenos) is closer to the R600 than the x1800 series. It shares the same unified sharder arch and ring bus memory controler arch as the R600. It was a powerful card when one company decided to make a PC version but never hit us retail.
 
The HD 3850 should be more then decent to play at 1280x720 without a problem. But higher res might fare better with a HD3870.

i already use a 32" hdtv with my pc, it has a resolution of 1366x768, which i know isn't full hd but on a 32" the quality difference isn't that noticeable.

how badly optimized are Pcs compared to consoles, would i need a 8800gtx just to get xbox 360 graphics?

Also i don't want to get crossfire or sli because scaling efficiency seems to be very poor so i thinks its better to get 1 powerful graphics card.

the videocard in the xbox 360 is similar to the radeon x850XL or a geforce 6800 GT
 
everything is good except the CPU  
 
while it is faster than that of the xbox 360,  keep in mind that the xbox is not running a bloated resource hogging OS like vista
 
I use windows xp  with the startup stripped down to 11 running processes at startup,  windows uses around 70MB memory at startup  and starts up in about 17 seconds after a good disk defrag  
 
 
 
the xbox 360 doesnt give you memory usage info but it starts up in around 5 seconds which means it is loading much less crap  
 
you could overclock your CPU to get better performance.
 
xbox 360 games are designed to use multi core  
 
many pc games will not make good use of multicore and for some reason   many games that are ported from the 360, to the PC fail to make proper use of multi cores  
 
also most pc games have better graphics and are able to have more detailed structures  and better physics  so they will always be harder to run  
 
PS don't get the pc version of gears of war, it was a horrid port for the pc.
 
it was unstable, and was generally laggy compared to other games  (my friend got it for the PC , he has a quad core system with SLI 7900GTX videocards
 
it runs crysis pretty well, and runs cod4 with 100% no problem  but it lags on  the pc version  (lucky i did not buy the game, i was thinking about it because it was so popular for the 360 but i didnt wanted to get a 360 (cost too much and theres a monthly fee to xbox live)
 
 
(the lag was not like the kind of lag you get when trying to run crysis on a 25MHz PC,  
 
it was more lie just general all around slow/sluggishness   signs of a bad port or poor inefficient programming  either that or they purposely made it inefficient  to push users to consoles

Wow I'm actually surprised to hear you say the PC version is laggy, razor...when I played it I thought just the opposite - it's not a port at all, as they fixed the engine to run specifically on PC. Also, they are never releasing the extra PC content for 360 users, and I read somewhere it was because the 360 couldn't handle it. I would definitely go with playing it on DX9 though, as it runs considerably better and there is literally NO difference in graphical quality; go look up screenshots if you'd like to see for yourself. I have an 8800gtx, and I know that's a card that's going to blow the 360 out of the water, but I played through the whole game on about 95% max settings or so and probably averaged about 60-70 fps. It was silky smooth the whole time, and that was at a resolution of 1680x1050 too. I guess I can't speak for everyone, but I was surprised at how WELL the game ran, considering it came to consoles first...the Unreal 3 engine rocks as far as optimization too, in my opinion.
 
Just my 2 cents!