Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Nilsen on April 05, 2004, 07:48:41 AM
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I have been offered this pc for almost nothing... i didnt think i was gonna buy a windows box again, but the offer is to tempting (no..it is not stolen :D )
Intel CELERON 2.8 ghz *sigh*
256mb 333 ddr ram
40gb hdd 7200
dvd/cdrw combo
on board 64mb graphics and soundcard but free agp slot
It is a brand new packard bell PB IMEDIA1815 puter and i can buy it of someone who got it for his bd but wants to sell it to me for 100$ because he is getting an ibook.
question:
how far up the videocard ladder can i go before the rest of the puter becomes the bottleneck (would a 9600xt be fine) and most important...would it run AH2 at 1280*1024 res with ease? oh.. and im getting 256mb extra ram
thx
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My thoughts would be buy the thing, put in a faster processor, another 256 od RAM and a 9800 Pro (which is a bargain right now). Or alternatively do it all except the processor and do that later. It is a crap processor though it should be still be plenty for AH2. I hope my XP2000+ machine is anyway, and it will be slower than your Celery though not by much.
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2.8 ghz is plenty fast IMO.
Buy it, pick up a good 128 mb AGP card to put in it.
256 mb of ram should be plenty unless your doing high end rendering. (thinks most people over ram their computers)
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thx guys. i dont really use windows computers for anything anymore so it would be used only for AH2 and some card games. maybe you are right, and i dont need any more ram.
any idea what the best value for money AGP card atm for AH2 use when im only gonna go as high as 1280*1024? (lcd default is that res so getting card that runs fast at higher res is pointless)
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on board 64mb graphics
This is the culprit for not being able to run AHII on the box... A good ATI AGP card is kinda cheap tough...
And if you buy the ATI card then you can easily connect the PC to the TV and thats neat :)
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Originally posted by FOGOLD
My thoughts would be buy the thing, put in a faster processor, another 256 od RAM and a 9800 Pro (which is a bargain right now). Or alternatively do it all except the processor and do that later. It is a crap processor though it should be still be plenty for AH2. I hope my XP2000+ machine is anyway, and it will be slower than your Celery though not by much.
Newsflash a 2000+ is much faster than any celeron, but you'll shoult be fine with a 9600, The 9800 would require a bigger power suply & processor.
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BTW im really happy with my ATI 9600 Pro.... You should be able to find that card very cheap now...
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9600 Pro or XT should do fine. If you wanna spend less money you can get a 9600 non pro, flash it to pro and OC it, takes a bit more work though.
The bottleneck as I see it (except for being packard bell ) is he CPU.
Sure enough it's 2.8ghz but it's only running 128kbit cach memory, which makes it ALOT slower then P3, P4's, AMD Athlon not to mention AMD 64 bit (1024kbit Cach memory)
It should do all right though, but it's a dangerous thing to "just" look at the CPU core speed. Cach memory is in fact a much more imporant thing.
100 dollars? Buy the damn thing, if it doesn't work with AH2 you can always sell it for 200 or 300.
Ati 9600 should be enough, possibly some more RAM but that RAM is quite cheap.
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lol, i just checked the price on that celeron and its cost more than a boxed amd 2500xp and close to a 2800 :eek:
intels are not cheap i know that but this is insane :D
ill buy the box and borrow a 9600 non pro that another friend of mine has just taken out to put in a 9800xt.
if its no good to the finished AH2 ill skip buying the vid card and use it as a fileserver.
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Nilsen, why do you want the P47N instead of the M? The N is basicly just a P47 with longer range while the M is the real hotrod.
I want the M! :D
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N has better roll, longer range, carry bombs, better armoured etc and was made in real numbers compared to the M.
It also has better climb and speed than the D and only a little worse than the M
:)
http://home.att.net/~Historyzone/Seversky-Republic8.html
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"The additional horsepower allowed the N to retain its energy better than the older Thunderbolt. Perhaps the greatest performance increase was in maximum speed. Though not as fast as the stunning P-47M, the heavier N was fully 40 mph faster than the P-47D-25-RE and could generate speeds 30 mph greater than its principal rival, the Mustang. Scorching along at 467 mph @ 32,000 ft., the N could not be caught by any fighter in regular service with any air force on earth with the single exception of its M model sibling. This combination of wing and engine had pushed the N model up to the top rank of the superlative prop driven fighters then in existence."
"1,816 P-47Ns were completed"
"Much to everyone’s surprise, the XP-47N, with its greater wingspan and higher weight actually proved to have better roll performance than the D model. At 250 mph TAS, the N attained a maximum roll rate just over 100 degrees/second. The P-47D-30-RE could manage but 85 degrees/second at the same speed. At higher speeds, the N widened the gap further. In mock combat with a P-47D-25-RE, the new fighter proved to be notably superior in every category of performance. In short, the XP-47 waxed the venerable D model regardless of who was piloting the older fighter. The new wing was part of this newfound dogfighting ability, however, the more powerful C series engine played a role too"
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while were on the topic what would be the best card for me to go with on a
1.1ghz amd athlon XP
256mb ram
on a epox 8kha+ motherboard (up to 4x agp and 266mhz FSB)
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Vorticon,
In your shoes I'd either get a cheap (used?) Geforce4-4200 or 4600 for under $80 and wait for the next generation of everything (cpu/mem/mobo/vid), or go with an ATI 9600XT and hold out replacing it as long as possible. The GF4 cards still push more triangles than anything slower than an nvidia 5700 or ATI 9600, but at half the cost. You'll lose a little bit of ansio filtering, anti-aliasing, and you'd go without DX9, but none of that really matters all that much with flightsims because framerate is king.
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Originally posted by Orig
Vorticon,
In your shoes I'd either get a cheap (used?) Geforce4-4200 or 4600 for under $80 and wait for the next generation of everything (cpu/mem/mobo/vid), or go with an ATI 9600XT and hold out replacing it as long as possible. The GF4 cards still push more triangles than anything slower than an nvidia 5700 or ATI 9600, but at half the cost. You'll lose a little bit of ansio filtering, anti-aliasing, and you'd go without DX9, but none of that really matters all that much with flightsims because framerate is king.
Do you think the PNY GeForce FX 5200 128MB DDR PCI Graphics Card or eVGA e-GeForce MX 4000 128MB would be ok?
Thanks
YankCH
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YankCH,
If you only have a PCI slot, you're stuck with what you can get. None of the gaming sites I read even review pci video cards because they're not typically aimed at the gaming market. You'd be better off spending your money on a new motherboard that has an AGP slot and getting an AGP video card when you could afford it. Ask around in the general forum, hardware/software forum, or on other BBS sites to see if anyone has any experience using PCI video cards for gaming. My guess is that the results would be disappointing. At some point, you're just throwing money away using old/cheap technology and you need to save up for a while and make a larger leap in technology. Dell sells basic systems that have open AGP slots for under $600. AH is not terribly cpu dependent since it has only minimal artificial intelligence entities, so almost any modern system, pentium 4 or AMD athlon, will be sufficient if paired with a reasonably fast video card. PCI cards don't really fit that description unfortunately.
Nvidia "MX" cards are based on the GeForce2. That's right, "2". Those cards were designed years ago for directx 7. Avoid at all costs if you have any other options at all. The FX5200 cards are not much faster. They support directx9 but it's very slow, and a GF4-4200 will be faster running most directX 8 games, at least according to web reviews and benchmark summaries I've read.
I have a GF4-4200 (overclocked to around GF4-4400 speeds) and I've been watching the vid card market for a while because I want to know what cards are faster than mine when the time comes to upgrade. The thing is, you have to spend at least $150 or so to get one of the current DX9 cards (ATI 9 series, preferrably 9600 or better or Nvidia FX series, FX5700 or better) that will beat the GF4 in basic 3d performance. There are some image quality differences and some of the newer cheap cards are faster in some games, but those are pretty rare cases. Unless HiTech goes full-bore into directX 9 and requires DX9 hardware acceleration, the GF4 cards will remain very good inexpensive gaming cards, more than fast enough for AH2. Just don't get ANY nvidia card that says MX on it, because they are still based on the GeForce 2 and have somewhere less than half the performance of a GF4 card in most games.
For a rough performance guess at how any given card will run most games including AH and AH2, look at the 3dmark2001SE score. A Geforce4-4200 will usually score somewhere between 9500 and 12000 depending on how fast the rest of the system is. On my machine, that equates to between 50 and 85+ fps in AH at 1280x1024 resolution with anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering turned off, using an AMD Athlon 2000+ (1700mhz) processor. AH2 framerates vary a lot depending on the detail sliders and options, vid card driver, and beta release version, so I won't even guess what framerates I'll see in AH2 later on. From the early results though, I think that it'll be more than playable but not quite as nice as AH unless the detail levels are turned way down.
http://www.pricewatch.com lists GF4-4200 cards for under $80 and you should be able to find used ones for even less.
Sorry about the long answer... Too much time on my hands I guess.
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Slap in a p4 2.4
And Overclock the little bugger.
I got mine running at 3.0 with stock intell fan and heatsink been this way for six months no issues at all.