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Socoder -> Off Topic -> About Hardware

Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 04:24
HoboBen

Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 04:49
Toaster
I would have 2 gb's of ram at least. On my computer I got 1.5 and it seems to do the job. I think the rest of the stuff is good except DVD drives cant run at 48X you might want to check to see what the DVD drive speed is. Opterons are built for low power I think they might not make such good gaming CPU's. Other then that it looks good just make sure the motherboard has a PCI-E slot to put that GFX card. My computer is a $200 dollar Emachines piece of crap and I put a better GFX card in and changed the power supply and all was good. Thats something else you'll want to check make sure the PSU has enough power to power your GFX card plus the rest of the computer.

-Toaster
Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 05:29
HoboBen

Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 06:21
Jayenkai
Unless your playing decent modern* games on it, you really won't need 2Gb ram. Heck, I haven't, so far! WinXP runs fine with only 1Gb.
If it were me, and I'm a cheap-git, too. If the 1Gb is a lot cheaper, I'd go for that. Otherwise, if it's not really too much then you might as well get the 2.

£400 for a system. Not bad.

Why'd it shoot up from £113 to £388 though? Heck, if the £113's running Blitz I'd be happy!

*modern = Post Half-Life 2, 'cos HL2 can happily run on a 512Mb system.

-=-=-
''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 07:02
JL235
Should be fine for normal use, but for gaming I don't know how good an Opteron would be. You'd be best asking at somewhere like Tom's Hardware Guide.

But on the surface it does look like a bargain.
Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 07:12
HoboBen
It shot up cause I looked away from the server and instead at proper desktops, cause I was really gambling on the server having the slot for the graphics card and stuff. The desktop comes with the card already in it, and I won't have to put parts together myself (seriously, no clue!)

The processor is pretty decent too. Any better and you pay £100 per 0.07 GHz, which is insane! (Though I had a laugh at the Mac Book Pro on the apple website, where it's £800 per extra 0.2 GHz if I remember right!)

I might go for 1GB of RAM in the end though, but the price difference wasn't too bad from 1GB to 2GB. (Brings it down to £351.33, which doesn't feel like much of a difference)

I don't care much for many modern games, so I may decide to pay an extra £10 for a floppy drive instead

-=-=-
blog | work | code | more code
Fri, 01 Feb 2008, 11:45
power mousey
my brother has one of the latest,greatest Dell laptops.
He loves it and also has WiFi for it.

I'm not in the ballpark much for a lot of these
rigs and other computes too. Pretty much sticking
what I have right now: my Compaq Presario and my HP computer.
Yet, my brother is going to give me his old computer.
Whole lotta better than mine, anyway. I think it has
a 2.5ghz CPU, 1 gig of memory, 200gig of hard drive,
and Nvidia GeForce FX 5500(or better) integrated video memory.

Sat, 02 Feb 2008, 09:37
Nolan
Even very modern games don't always require 2GB, as long as you have a decent graphics card. I have an 8600GTS (not even top of the line), 1GB of RAM, and I can run COD4 at 1440x900 with shadows on and no slowdown.

-=-=-
nolandc.com
Sat, 02 Feb 2008, 11:21
JL235
From the looks of it, the deal is over now. That's a shame, my brother was thinking of buying one. One thing about memory, it's cheap. So upgrading won't cost much and it'll cost less in the future.
Sat, 02 Feb 2008, 11:38
power mousey

@Nolan,

that is true. but for gosh sakes, who has all that
cash to buy mucho memory and the latest,greatest graphics
cards? Or the minimum system configurations which seem to go up and up all the time. Not only to mention the price range as well. You wanna more bits and bytes to munch on or more actual food and groceries to munch on?? I prefer the latter.
True, I still want and like to play Heroes of Might and Magic V and even Titan Quest sometime and eventually.Yet, I'll stick with a few games that come out and now then with minimum system requirements that my HP computer can run. And also are in the bagain and discount bin. But mostly, I'll play the existing games that I have, open source ones that I can play, freeware and shareware games, and even abandonware games too.

I'm still looking at, looking for and even predicting
a coming video and computer game crash of some kind. Probably more harsh and threatening than the "Rise and Fall of Atari".
one of the articles...among many....expresses some of my sentiments:

www.cracked.com/article_15732_life-after-video-game-crash.html


Sun, 03 Feb 2008, 13:11
HoboBen
Well, I just ordered it today.

I went for the 2GB of RAM, because when installing things, or using virtual machines, a big cache really does make a lot of difference.

128MB Gfx card isn't the best in the world, but it's infinitely better than any graphics I've had before. The 256MB NVIDA was an extra £100.

And course, being a PC and not a laptop, I can always upgrade it in future if I win the lottery!

I think what I'll most appreciate is not having laptop fans going off every few seconds and burning my fingers when I've got something intensive going.

-=-=-
blog | work | code | more code
Mon, 04 Feb 2008, 13:47
power mousey

winning the lottery! LOL

And if I do, I'll give ya...and a few others here...a portion of my winnings. Even make a donation to SETI and also to some charities.

True!, I promise.