"Wifeack" PC goes thru its paces....

[humble]

Following up on the earlier thread I thought I'd recap things so that anyone struggling with a budget level build out has a better feel for some of the lesser known options. As per the earlier thread I decided I'd rather rebuild/replace my wifes PC (circa Feb 2002 or so) on my terms rather then due to its impending demise (might be 6 months or a year IMO). In then end it was easier to just retire the box and build new, in the end I even got a new case...

AMD 550 black               $102
MA790GP-UD4H              $109
4G 1066DDR2                 $55
Seagate 1T 32M/7200     $99
Thermaltake RS201 case  $49
HP dvd 1170i                 $39
OCZ ModXstream 500W   $39

$492 after rebates and before taxes

This is not a "gaming" rig by any means, it's intended to give my wife (and there for me) another 7+ years of glitch free general use for whatever she might feel like doing on a PC. It's 100% quality parts (I did switch the memory out to ocz gold pc8500 I already had in another box. If I was going to build this for AH I'd pay ~$18 more for a 720 3 core CPU and use a DDR3 board and memory....


So how did this puppy do.....



Under minimum strain on the CPU it does very well....



On deck on a burning CV the load on the CPU takes a toll...



It generally maintained a 30+ FPS under load
 


and picked back up in "clear air"...


Overall I think it flew quite nicely with framerates in the 30's or better 95% of the time. Dropping down to rocket town or drop bombs on GV's and/or fight in enemy ack with high plane counts occasionally pushed the frame rate down to 24-26 but the system stayed very smooth with no lag or stutter of any kind.

I loaded all of these as JPEGs for bandwidth....here is the 1st shot in bitmap for comparison...








   

[Denholm]

Thanks for sharing the results, Humble. It certainly does give lower-end users a few more options.

[gyrene81]

 Under minimum strain on the CPU it does very well....

Sorry Humble, but are you talking the processor or the graphics processor? If you're processor is taking a huge hit with the game running (and I hate very much to disagree with any of the HTC folks) but it means your graphics card can't handle the "hardware acceleration" needed to run the game so DirectX takes over with software acceleration which pushes your system processor to 100% usage. That's the information I've had on DirectX for several years...9c could be different but I've never seen an api still in production change what it's supposed to do, even though it will change how effectively it does things like any other program.

Having the video card maxed out on resolution so that it's forced to the lowest possible refresh rate it can have an effect on the ability of your graphics card to handle hardware acceleration of 3D rendering as well...since AH uses v-sync have you tried lowering the video resolution of your GPU to the point where you can use 72 or 75Hz refresh rate and see what happens?

You're screen shots show nearly 1.8GB of video memory available (onboard video chip memory + shared system memory)...but only 5MB is being used...the amount of used memory will probably go up with the object detail all the way to the right for faster rendering.

You're build is pretty darn good. I can tell a lot of thought went into it to get the performance you want. 

[humble]

The motherboard has an ATI3300 onboard "Video Card" with 128M of dedicated DDR3 memory. You also have the option in the bios to dedicate another 512M of ram. Comparatively the AMD 550 is a robust CPU even at stock speeds so the systems graphics performance will be the bottle neck. Under a high graphics load the GPU is deprived of resources since it is not discreet. As noted above this system is not optimized for game play in any way. A 3 core processor and DDR3 gaming memory would offer a significant boost in performance IMO.

I'm simply showing that you can build a basic system capable of playing AH reasonably well at fairly high settings. To me this is potentially a better option for someone who is trying to fit a budget then getting a lesser Motherboard, PS and CPU to make the numbers fit. This type of build offers a lot of head room for expandability simply by adding a midrange video card when possible but still allows for an enjoyable experience "out of the box".... 

This is a Win7 build and I'm using the reference drivers that auto loaded with no catalyst control panel, total actual memory is 128M+512M so I have no idea what the system is reporting. Max refresh rate on my LCD is 60Hz....as a side note I configured as a dual boot with Linux Mint (6.2) and it runs AH (under wine) with no problems at all. Wine does not fully support AH in its vanilla install so it has some anomolies but easy to take it up and fly off line.

As a side note I'd highly recommend Mint as the "best" (meaning easiest) of the Linux shells for anyone interested in exploring the possibilities but with no experience/comfort at the command line.

[gyrene81]

If all the whiners took the time to consider things the way you have with this system build...they wouldn't have anything to whine about.

Hats off to you sir...(beat my economy system build by nearly $200 and I cheated ) 





If you're new to Linux, absolutely don't do Fedora, Red Hat, Cent or Suse... 

[guncrasher]

hey that system would give me enought fps to allow me unlimited vulches and ho's  .  that it's fast enough to allow me to dogfite too its even better.  good job 

semp

[Fender16]

Anyone else notice the Goon/shark hybrid in the first picture?

[Fulmar]

Anyone else notice the Goon/shark hybrid in the first picture?

Gonna need a bigger boat.

[guncrasher]

Anyone else notice the Goon/shark hybrid in the first picture?

this is what came out of it.

semp

[AirFlyer]

Anyone else notice the Goon/shark hybrid in the first picture?

Oh..., and here I thought it was the loch-ness monster and already submitted my findings.