Hmm... Which to go for?

[the_leander]

PMC wrote:
Well, £62 is taken care of with an upgrade to an ATI 9600 thingy as playing Battlefield Vietnam on my PC is a bit like playing Amiga Quake on an '030...  Despite my Athlon 2500 CPU.

However, those pretty blue hubs are swaying me more and more...  When my bike's finished I'll post some images of it on here I think hehe.

What the hell kind of settings are you using? With an Athlon 2000 and a radeon 9200 I could get seriously good frame rates with BF1942 with full detail settings at 1024x768 32bit screenmode... Seriously, if you're having big problems with that game I would really recommend looking at your drivers and game settings. There is no way in hell that BF-Vietnam should be making your system struggle that much.

[the_leander]

PMC wrote:
Erm, pass... Am very non-clued up with PCs.  Always know where I am with an Amiga.

My system is an Althon 2500 512Mb RAM.  BF1942 runs great, but BF Vietnam runs like an absolute snail.  Turning off DirectCD makes a big difference, but I've got the graphics prefs set to a bare min.

I got HL2 for Xmas so I really ought to upgrade...

Hrm, plenty of ram, a decent cpu reasonable gfx card... I would suggest before going AMD64 on us, that you get the lastest drivers for the radeon, or if you're feeling brave, the Omega drivers for the radeon series (these gfx drivers are modified for maximum performance). Perhaps O'Cing your cpu... (2.0Ghz should be well within the 2500's capabilities provided you have a reasonable cooling setup)

I would also see if their are any upgrades to the BFV engine...

Beyond that, unless I was there to look for myself I can't really help you.

[the_leander]

PMC wrote:
Yeah but their real purty blue hubs...  They make this cool "ticka ticka ticka" sound when freewheeling that confuses courting grasshoppers when you cycle past them...  

But an Athlon 64 would no doubt make for a nice gaming experience...

Also helps reduce heating bills too

The socket 754 stuff also has the advantage of the multiplier on the chip being unlocked, (bus speed X multiplier = cpu speed) which makes for a supreme overclocking system :-D

But outragiously overpowered for anything except serious gaming, ray tracying or distributed computing clients...

Which is why just as soon as I can I'll be shifting over BeOS to its own low power system - beyond gaming I just don't need anything this powerful for day to day use.

[the_leander]

No, not really, a decent pro sound card, a couple of gigs of ram a raid array and a low end AthlonXP would suffice for the making of music. You shouldn't need a hugely powerful cpu provided you have plenty of storage space (in terms of ram and hd space) and a good pro sound card, the rest is irrelivant.

Just look at macs...

[the_leander]

Karlos wrote:
Depends how much you are into realtime massively polyphonic softsynth stuff I guess ;-)

heh, the DSP in the the sort of soundcard I'm looking at would be doing that provided the software was up to scratch ;-)

But by pro sound card, I'm not talking Audigy's here, am talking about the sort of kit you pay £600 for :-D