02-25-2005, 12:06 AM
jahcs,Feb 24 2005, 06:03 PM Wrote:My system is not experiencing ANY problems right now. It's the owner. I have that "I need something new itch" and I want to scratch it. For an example, I played the Doom3 demo with everything set on low and only got stutter when the shuttle was flying around. My system is perfectly competent. I want more. I believe I will be my own worst enemy for years to come :P . All my programs play great on low detail, low effects, low resolution. Now, to convince the wife I need to move the detail settings to high and increase the resolution. :shuriken:
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I have a 1.6GHz CPU, but with my video card, I can play Doom 3 on the highest settings, with ALL the driver-enabled bells and whistles (8xS AA, 16x AF), and still play very manageably. Far Cry is likewise quite playable, although both at times experience some choppy play. Battlefield Vietnam, on the other hand, can only be played on the LOWEST settings with all driver-enabled bells and whistles turned OFF, and even THEN I get regularly choppy play. :P
To put it into perspective: despite my video card being limited by my CPU by as much as 50% or more (in other words, my video card is getting only about half the workload it was designed to handle; the rest is getting tied up in the CPU, unable to pass through to the video card for processing - my CPU is bottlenecking my video card), I can run most new-age games (including World of Warcraft) at the highest detail settings with maximum Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering at reasonably playable framerates.
The video card makes all the difference, although for me, it's forced me into a CPU / motherboard upgrade. But, I was due for one anyway. :D Next on the list, after I order my motherboard and case (already got the CPU, but motherboard sold out a couple days ago), are (in no particular order): monitor, hard drive(s), power supply. May or may not save up for a water-cooling rig, depending on how well this new setup cools and how little noise it produces. I figure my next major "upgrade" will be for a whole new system, and likely from scratch (i.e. not utilizing any old components, even if the new ones are ordered one part at a time), but I'm not expecting that until mid-to-late next year, for when the latest processors come out to market and PCI-Experess will have had a chance to start settling in. My current upgrades are gonna be geared towards low-noise, high-power computing, with hopefully plenty of overclocking. :D I'd like to squeak as much performance out of this ~$400 upgrade as I possibly can.
Roland *The Gunslinger*