I recently put together an AOpen EZ 482 Cube barebones machine. I am using an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core (Manchester) 3800+ processor. I chose for the time being a XFX GeoForce 6600GT 128 MB PCI Express x16 video card. This machine also utilizes 2 gigs of Corsair XMS Dual Channel memory and a Western Digital 10,000 rpm Raptor drive. I have loaded and have been playing Half Life 2 with their latest versions, online and off, Lock On Gold (similar flight sim) but all offline, and Delta Force Xtreme all offline. I was told that for the time being AMD Dual Core users must have one of their cores disabled. I have called and spoken to BOTH AMD and Microsoft's Knowledge base. As a matter of fact even called Microsoft and PAID $35 just for this event! Needless to say, Microsoft DID NOT HAVE A CLUE! They were totally worthless and refunded my money............SAD.
However, AMD has a great support team and it was actually the AMD crew that told me exactly what to do. It was exactly what has been recommended here in this very forum. Unfortunately, for me, this did not solve the problem.
When you attempt to sign into the game things get very erratic and extremely unstable. If you ARE lucky enought to get into the Task Manager and disable one of the cores then everything just locks up. I do actually play this game on a 2.4 gHz Celeron with an ATI Radeon card that works to an acceptable level. Originally, I had tried to use another nVidia card, the XFX GeoForce 5200 card and the results were marginal at best. Both of these cards are comparable.
I do realize for all of the "hard core" gamers that all of these video cards are very entry level. However, you have to start somewhere and I had no idea how much fun and rewarding Aces High could be as well as the other PC games. It just seems that for this particular game that Intel processors and ATI video cards is the much preferred route.
If anyone could be so kind as to make some suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.
