Pimp Your PC

BURLINGAME, CALIF. - It’s called the Dominator. And it looks the part: It has fins. Many buy it with a specially designed fan. It’s not cheap–the Dominator will easily add more than $250 to your costs. But if you’re a serious PC gamer, you’re hungry for the most whopping memory modules out there–and willing to pay up to be fast.

Once upon a time, teenagers and other hot-rodders put their muscles and dollars into vamping up roadsters or motorcycles. These days, instead of getting under the hood of cars, they’re prying open their PC cases to transform the once humble office computer into the 21st century equivalent of the hot-rod. Egged on by programs with breathtakingly. complex graphics, gamers are tricking out their computers with high-performance variations on stock PC parts–including memory modules such as Corsair’s Dominator. They’re even decorating the outsides of their machines with showy paint jobs that mimic the candy-colored automotive contraptions of an earlier generation’s youth. And PC makers are cheering them on, every step of the way.

Analysts say it’s impossible to know how many gamers are rolling up their sleeves and messing around with their computers to make them work with the latest generation of videogames. There’s no shortage of games available that gamers are eager to take on.

And between the games and the equipment needed to run them, such super-high-end PCs are generating multibillion dollars’ worth of business. Web sites such as NewEgg.com and computer chains such as Fry’s cater to do-it-yourselfers eager to trick out their computers. Last year Dell (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ) snapped up high-end PC specialist Alienware, and HP bought its rival Voodoo in an effort to increase the margins for their PC businesses.

Corsair Chief Executive Andy Paul says he sells 375,000 pairs of memory modules, from its Value Select to the high-end Dominator, every month, chiefly to do-it-yourselfers. Since the start of the year, the company has begun selling two lines of high-performance main memory, and it’s begun competing with a host of new companies that are trying to juice up the once-prosaic electrical guts of the personal computer.

Much of the credit, or the blame, for the fad rests with software developers who are eagerly pushing the limits of what today’s PCs can handle. Electronic Arts‘ (nasdaq: ERTS - news - people ) latest shoot-em-up, “Crysis,” has already gained a reputation as a game that will push even the priciest machine to the edge of its capabilities. That’s in part because developers are building games that will be able to look good on systems that won’t be built for years.

“We call it scalable content,” says Chas. Boyd, an architect with Microsoft’s (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) DirectX group. “There are options in the control panels that turn on additional levels of visual quality that the developer knew would not exist at the time it shipped, or at least not at playable frame rates. But that really gives legs to the title.”

Hobbyists, however, aren’t content to wait. Crawford Del Prete, a senior vice president with tech tracker IDC, compares hardcore gaming enthusiasts to Harley-Davidson (nyse: HOG - news - people ) owners, who love to show off their latest rides at events such as the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota. Likewise, custom-built, liquid-cooled machines are no more about running spreadsheets than a Harley Fat Boy is about basic transportation. “It has turned into a social thing,” Del Prete says.

The result is you’ll find high-end versions of any PC part that promises to boost gaming performance from the central processors sold by AMD and Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ), to graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD, to memory from the likes of Corsair, to hard drives sold by the likes of Seagate. Kelt Reeves, chief executive of boutique PC maker Falcon Northwest is even sourcing exotic, high-speed solid-state hard drives from Japan in an effort to offer his customers better performance.

And along with showy cooling systems, there are electrical systems that can pump more than a kilowatt of power into a machine that could be running three of Nvidia’s $600 graphics cards at the same time. “These guys aren’t looking at performance per dollar,” says Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight64. “This is for people who have more money than sense.”

article from forbes