I rebuilt my PC yesterday from this:
- Gigabyte mobo
- AMD 2800
- 1 Gig of RAM
- ATI X800 (256MB) AGP video card
- tired, old ATA 100 HDD.
to this:
- Asus P5B mobo
- Intel E6420
- 2 GB of DDR2 800
- Geforce 7800GS (256MB) PCI-e
- Seagate 320GB SATA HDD
I used the same case, PS, CD/DVD-RW and sound card.
Through the years, I've used Intel and AMD, a variety of chipsets, mobos and video cards. I decided to try Nvidia this time just for a change. I don't play other games, so AH is my only gaming reference. I was getting about 40-50 fps and much less with stutters and some heavy disk-paging in heavy traffic with this:
WinXP Home, 1280x1024 @ 75Mhz, 2x AA, 512 textures, skins disabled and using FSAutostart. I was starting to get enough heat to barbeque ribs on my box.
I have to say that this upgrade had the greatest overall improvement I've ever had over the years.
First, the Asus board and BIOS was straightfoward, as was the CPU and fan installation. I only wish the Asus manual had a little larger print for my old eyes. Deciding and copying which stuff I wanted to carry over was the hardest part of this whole upgrade. I saved my AH settings folder and downloaded the latest Nvidia driver. Everything sprang to life first time. The only BIOS changes I made were to disable the Parallel Port to free up an IRQ, since I'm not a printer-kind of guy, changed my boot sequence and disable the onboard sound. Easy peasey.
Fingers crossed, WinXP SP1 home (retail) installed in a flash. It seemed like less than 10 minutes instead of the usual 45+ minutes. That was an indication of how much faster things were going to be for me...
Installed the mobo, video and sound drivers, then disabled Windows Messenger and set security setting on IE before connecting to my router to start the dreaded Windows patching routine. I disabled all ActiveX and scripting and added *.microsoft.com to the trusted sites zone. Installed Firefox and Thunderbird email client, since I set Windows Update as start page in IE and will only use it for updating.
I had to get a new number from MS to activate, but it was painless and easily done over the phone. They even provided a toll-free number here in Japan and it was an automated process that I did on Saturday night at about midnight.
First surprise came when I could not use Windows Update. No matter what your security settings and domains for the trusted zone, you can't use Windows Update to update from SP1 anymore. I turned on Automated updates and went to bed. The next morning, a billion updates were ready to be installed, including SP2. Everything went smoothly after that and a scan confirmed that my router firewall works great. :-)
Turned off Windows Firewall and automated updates, installed AH and downloaded and installed hires textures, FSAutostart and a few other apps I use. Setup FSAutostart and launched AH. 1024 texture size was already set, enabled all graphic goodies and let it load up. Closed it down after finishing and deleted video8 file from my saved settings folder and copied folder over to AHII folder.
The result?
First, the latest Nvidia control panel seems to have a little glitch, you have to set AA to off before you can set it to another value. Also, vert sync seems to be set by default now, which is good. I set up AA to 8x and I'm getting a solid 75 fps (monitor refresh) in all conditions using hires textures and no stuttering, ever. I have graphic sliders set to max using 1280 x 1024 resolution.
To me, Nvidia cards seem to display a little darker than ATI. Easily solved with a small boost in gamma, and ATI seems to have a softer feel to lighting effects. Clouds seem to render differently. Not bad, just different and very nice.
Everything is running very cool. Even trying to stress the system. I can't get the processor to go above 50C and the mobo temperature is <40C. My power supply is 450 watts and it is more than enough to handle this system. I would attribute it to the reduced power demand by the processor. I'm not overclocking anything and can't see any need to.
Aces High looks and performs great. Look at the lighting on the clock, compass and airspeed indicator on the overhead panel in this screenshot.
_____________________________
________
This was a cheap upgrade for so much value.
