darxus | (no subject)

[Poll #639434]

Current plans for the $1400 machine: http://www.chaosreigns.com/dancer/ ($1467 with an x2 3800+)

My home computer, dancer, cooked itself to death over the summer. I built dancer in 2001, and upgraded its video card to the latest and greatest in 2002. So perhaps I was due for an upgrade anyway.

I have been terribly indecisive. While being too frustrated to deal with the problem for months, I have beem using

nchanter's old busted laptop which requires me to sit in terribly uncomfortable positions in order to keep the (nolonger attached) display upright.

Finally I've started to seriously research the possibility of building a new machine (my third, the first was oblivion). I remain indecisive. Honestly the only thing I've missed lately is a comfortable sitting position and an entirely functional keyboard. But I can totally afford an up to date gaming machine. I've enjoyed these games some in the past. Would my life be better having them back? The latest FPS, F.E.A.R., looks amusing.

And again, I can afford it. Hell, computers are my living, should I not have nice hardware at home? But do I need it? Is it worth $1400 to me?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Speaking as another person who works with computers and likes computer games, $1400 sounds excessive. My home machine is a 2.7ghz P4, 1gb ram, and a geforce4 ti 4200 and I'm still mostly happy with it, despite it being of older vintage than the machine you mentioned. It's not cpu bound on anything I play (C&C Generals, B1942, and WoW being the newest), and maybe $200 on a new graphics card would extend it's life a couple more years. The key phrase there being "anything I play"; my two cents worth is to take a close look at what you think you'll be playing and work backward from there. For example, you don't need a Geforce 7800 GT Dual to play F.E.A.R., or Far Cry, or Half-Life2, unless you're trying to win tournaments with all the graphics options turned all the way up. So, while a $200 prebuilt is probably not what you want as it helps to have some control over the design where FSB, video bus, and memory speed are concerned, but if you recycle a case, power supply, and basic peripherals, $400 for the system and maybe as high as another $400 for the video card would certainly give you a pc that would deal gracefully with everything out for the next few years.

Take this as a data point from something of an old fogey where pc games are concerned; heck, I was just talking this evening with

frotz and

starheptagon about maybe hosting a retro lan party, where the games focused on would be xpilot, bzflag, bolo, usw.

Wow, I was wondering if you could sli 2 dual GPU 7800GTs when I read that (the post voodoo2 incarnation of) sli could be more than 2 GPUs, but figured you couldn't when I noticed they didn't have the sli bridge connectors. Interesting that sli doesn't actually require the bridge, I wonder what the performance difference is.

I would really like to hear how your current machine runs the fear and maybe battlefield 2 demos. Both what you think of them at whatever settings work best, but more at maxed out eye candy. I had a geforce 4 ti 4600 in dancer.

I may have played xpilot a couple times, I believe bzflag and bolo looked interesting, but I can't even expand usw.

*grin* Those cards are a pretty good example of overkill, aren't they?

I'll give those demos a try and let you know, but I suspect single-digit frame rates with everything cranked up, possibly not even working at all; I vaguely recall B2 requiring a minimum of a Geforce FX series. On the HalfLife2 demo I had about 20fps with the settings turned all the way down, 10fps midrange, and unplayably slow with the settings cranked up.

Um, my bad; 'usw' expands to 'und so weiter'; it's just another way of saying etc or et cetera.

(no subject)

Hm, I'd say about two thirds of that would be plenty

Re: Hm, I'd say about two thirds of that would be plenty

Re: Hm, I'd say about two thirds of that would be plenty