OT: Worst PC Decision

[Wardad]

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Yes, but you can still play Far Cry just fine, right? So that just goes to prove the point... you do not need the bells and whistles provided by the cards that cost 2x to 3x as much money...

Yes I can play Far Cry ok, but still I would love to take advantage of all the extra features.

[Zagan]

Just read over this.

You really should buy the highest GFX card for the money you can get.

To buy something less is really wasting your money and is totally pointless.

A guy here is saying buy a mid range card sure that'll Last a year and half but if you buy a top of the range card it'll Last for 3 or more years before you really have to upgrade.

So this guy will have spent double the amount that a top of the range card will have cost him beacuse you'll have bought basicly 3 GFX cards compared to 1 for the same amount of time.

The reasons why to buy a top of the range card:
Able to handle DX9 in hardware.
ABle to do ALL the new lighting shading and anti-aliasing etc.
the fastest ram you can get.
The highest Resolutions you can get at the different Mhz for any monitor you may have.
The highest amounts of ram.
More features in the OS and on the card, such as TV in/out features you wouldn't ever get on a mid range card.
The fastest and most amounts of bandwidth for ram and for the different rendering pipes.

To play Far Cry properly and any of the newest games coming out now, That's Half-life 2, Stalker, UT2004/UT2005, and others.

You will need to have a DX9 or DX10 capable GFX card, anything less and you are basicly wasting your time even buying and installing the card these days.

Lower cards, will have lower resolutions and Mhz ranges.
Les ram, slower ram, less ram bandwidth and rendering pipes.
Few Features if any at all.
A top of the line mid-range card feature would be TV out and maybe dual head for having 2 monitors going at the same time.

Mid range cards are also spped limited and rendering features locked, so you could buy a mid range card that can't render light maps.

The low end GeForce 3 GFX cards were locked in this way execpt the GeForce 3 top end cards, even the GeForce 4 cards are in the same boat.

[dogscoff]

So this guy will have spent double the amount that a top of the range card will have cost him beacuse you'll have bought basicly 3 GFX cards compared to 1 for the same amount of time.

Well no. The point he made is that even though he bought 2 or 3 GFX cards instead of one, it still cost him less because one top of the range card costs more than 3 older ones, because that's just the way graphics cards are priced these days.
As a bonus he gets to sell on/ re-home the old ones as he upgrades...

[David E. Gervais]

Wierd, I have a simple gForce2 MX and it runs Farcry fine with high details. My CPU is an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1.46 ghz. Memory is 512meg DDR2400 (where farcry gives me problems is I occasionally loose the sound. In spite of upgrading to a SB Audigy Gamer from my old SBLive Value.)

One thing that will make most any game lag is if you let windows manage your virtual memory. It is perpetually changing the size of the HD Cache (min of 0mb and max as needed.) Set your Virtual memory to double your actual RAM. And be sure to set the min and max to the same value. It will create one big swap file. Also, it helps enormously if you defrag before setting the virtual memory. (remember to turn off VM before defragging) The final result of this will make your system seem like it is a good 50-70% faster.

That's it for my tip of the day.

Cheers!

P.S. About Graphics cards,.. depending on your motherboard getting top of the line might not show any improvement at all. If you have a max 2-4x AGP then the new cards won't work, and it will cost you a MB upgrade to use it. It's just common sense. My next Upgrade will be a gForce 4 Ti or gForce FX. (depending on what I can get for approx 150$cdn. Last time I looked the FX was creeping into this price range.) Since my MB has a max of 4x AGP, I'll buy a card that will run at this speed. So even if I get the FX at 4-8x AGP I'll be running at less than peak performance, but that's ok, it means less heat issues.

My upgrade after that will be to change my CPU to a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (since that is tha max my MB will allow.)

Nuf said, Cheers!

[ June 01, 2004, 15:29: Message edited by: David E. Gervais ]

[Renegade 13]

Where should I go to manually set the amount of virtual memory??

[Cirvol]

Renegade Right click 'my computer', hit properties, then the advanced tab then the performance button.

BTW, I used to work for M$ and IBM, and now do my own consulting business, database programming, hardware systems for large companies, etc etc

Trust me when I say, Ideally you want 2 gig's of total virtual ram - ie, if you have 512 meg ram, make your swap file 1.5 gig... Windows addresses up to 4 gig of ram, (32 bits), so some argue it should add to 4 gig... if you have the HD space, then go for it. (and yes, defrag before you do this - with swap disabled)

Also, on the VGA CARD issue... don't fall for the general directives of 'buy highest' or 'buy middle'... the companies rely on this, and you WILL get ripped off for the very top of the line, all the time.

Get at least an ATI 9500 PRO or better
Or get at least a GF 4200 ti or better
ati if you want direct x 9 pure support... but the TI series of GF 4's are nice... DO NOT buy MX variants of geforces

These cards are now fairly cheap, but use essentially the same architecture as the highest end cards... they just usually are clocked slower, and have slower memory. In many cases you can overclock to gain half the difference. My own 4200ti card easy runs at 4400 speeds

For those of you who insist on putting your own systems together, use GOOD quality stuff, ie, asus motherBoards, (msi and gigabyte are decent too), use 865 or 875 intel chipsets for the p4's and use nvidia chipsets for the amd's... (some other new sis and via amd chipsets are coming along nicely now as well, for a real low down, refer to tomshardware.com or anandtech.com)

Atrocities --- OMG, I feel so horrible after reading your experience... I wish I was around to help. Or you should have asked here...

Dell's with home warranties really are nice, the prices are reasonable but they do use decent components these days on their higher end stuff. You won't go wrong, you'll pay a bit more than homebuilt, but some say its worth it for the piece of mind.

If you connect to the internet, and use windows, ALWAYS update your computer from microsoft before you do anything else... too many hackers out there these days... if you're running XP, i'd suggest going to service pack 2 beta right away. If you run linux, then you don't need my advice really