Finally ordered my upgrade

[Kev367th]

Was a toss up between a Conroe and X2 as expected.

With the current AMD price drop and the option to upgrade to a Barcelona later this year ended up going with an AMD X2 6000 -

AMD X2 6000
2 x 1Gb DDR2 memory
BFG nVidia 8800
ASUS mobo
Zalman cooler

all for a shade under $1000.

Will let you know how it turns out.

[Krusty]

Wow, the 8800! Let us know how well it works

[Laurie]

Originally posted by Kev367th
Was a toss up between a Conroe and X2 as expected.

With the current AMD price drop and the option to upgrade to a Barcelona later this year ended up going with an AMD X2 6000 -

AMD X2 6000
2 x 1Gb DDR2 memory
BFG nVidia 8800
ASUS mobo
Zalman cooler

all for a shade under $1000.

Will let you know how it turns out.

under 1000$?
thats only about 600 quid here,  my system from 4 months ago cost 640£ and i just got 1GB of DDR2 and a 160G HDD With intel pentium D 820.....
and the 22inch LCD monitor was a freebie !
you building it yourself kev?

let me know how ya get on with it

[Kev367th]

Yup ,self build.

Krusty - As everyone else who has 7800's, 7900's and 8800's I'm going to be limited by the CPU.
Processors would have to be running around 6 GHz to push the latest cards to the limit.

Was tempted that for an extra $600 I could have gone 2 x dual core Opterons.
With the option of a Barcelona upgrade to 2 x 4 core later this year.

[Kev367th]

Well -

Installing Win 2000 needed some 'tweaking'.
You have to make a new CD with SP4 slipstreamed into it to get the early install to recognise the SATA drive as a boot disk.
So while I was at it I slipstreamed all the hotfixes, DX 9, IE 6, and a few other things into it.

So the very first proper fire up into Windows 2000 includes everything up to date .

Tried XP on it also, installs normally, didn't get any problems with the spinning clipboard (remember to install the two AMD fixes in the sticky).

Had to go back to Win 2000 as I need access to a Dynamic Disk, or buy XP Pro.

Whats it look like -

Settings -
1680 x 1250 x 32
4xAA
Multisampling
Image setting - High quality
Trilinear mipmaps
Trilinear optimisation
Triple buffering
Threaded optimisation

Ingame -
1024 textures
Hi res pack
All eye candy to the full

Never moved below 50fps, stayed pretty well pegged at 59fps (60fps = monitor refresh rate)

Should add -
Takes less than 5 mins to install XP or 2000.
XP booted to desktop in around 20 secs, Win 2k a little longer.

Pic is resized by 50%, original was 5mb even as a jpg.

[Kermit de frog]

Why did you set your AA to 4X?

[Kev367th]

Can use AA in-game, just if I remember correctly AH doesn't use AF.

[Kermit de frog]

8800 can go higher than 4x right?  If so, then why 4x?

[Jag34]

I have a question for you. With your new system and that Nice video card, why are your frame rates at 59? Shouldn't they be higher or is this because you have your settings set high? I'm looking on building me a new system around Aug and I'm reading up on what to get as far as video cards go, for the best frame rate and picture.

Thanks
Jag34T

[Kev367th]

Because i am running my resolution at 1680x1250

The highest refresh rate at that setting is 60hz (60fps).

So even with all the eye candy on and the high settings it still basically pegs the game out at the monitors max display rate.

RE 4xAA : Just a setting I prefer, anything higher seem to blur the skins, especially the codes.

[Kermit de frog]

Ah, thanks for the info.  I'll do some testing on that to see if/how much, I'm affected by it as well.  That good to know.


Excellent PC btw.

[Bruv119]

Nice system kev.

I run the 640mb 8800gts  I run AH with 1024 hi res, 1680x1050, 16x AA.

AH doesnt do the card justice if you turn V-sync off it starts using some of that video memory but has obvious negatives.

I just go with the 60hz refresh it sits nicely at 59 FPS pretty much all the time unless you get near a dense forest may drop down to 50 lol.

[Bruv119]

Oh and kermit the visible difference between 4x and 16x  you cant really tell that much.

[Kev367th]

Originally posted by Bruv119
Nice system kev.

I run the 640mb 8800gts  I run AH with 1024 hi res, 1680x1050, 16x AA.

AH doesnt do the card justice if you turn V-sync off it starts using some of that video memory but has obvious negatives.

I just go with the 60hz refresh it sits nicely at 59 FPS pretty much all the time unless you get near a dense forest may drop down to 50 lol.

Ditto.

I upped the AA to 8, seems to look OK, not sure I was totally convinced by 16 x AA.