Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: starbug on February 08, 2007, 02:18:04 pm
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i am not sure if this should be posted here but it does have something to do with gaming, so the other day i was thinking of upgrading my processor from a athlon 3200 64, to a AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Socket 939 512KB Inc Fan at £54, for the purpose of getting a semi-smooth game of Supreme Commander and for when i event get Vista, now i hear on the radio and various sources stating that Vista wont run on anything below a core-duo system with certian speed SATA HD can't rem the speed, is that true? Is all the upgrading i've done, well getting a extra 2 gig mem(at the price of £45 for both!), to get Oblivion, fear and X3 to run smoothly been well a waste of money and time? because i don't earn enough to afford a complete new base unit with Core-duo, and my motherboard wont take them, i think, So what i am asking is am i gonna have to spend this year saving for a complete new gaming unit for when games go vista or go for my processor upgrade?
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Waste of time unless you meant a 3800+ X2. You want a dual-core for Supreme Commander since it's built to support that.
The things you've "heard" about Vista is utterly false though.
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Vista is a step up from XP no matter all the utter pish you hear from people who have yet to try it. Ive been running it since October. I *own* Vista Ultimate x64. I can attest to it being 40% atleast better than XP was.
And no, that's not just its appearance.
Vista will run on your system just fine. And especially with that 2 gb of ram, you'll eliminate the hard drive swap file completely, so performance will be just fine.
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Thank god, i was dreading the fact i was goning to have to spend another 1000-2000 on a base unit, seeing as my machine is only just over a year old. i think my motherboard A8N-E nvidia Nforce4 ultra can support X2, has the AMD 64 athlon X2 sticker on the box, never new what x2 meant. is that AMDs version of the core-duo
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Yeah, they're AMD's dual core line. I've been eyeing a 3800 X2 for a while now as well and I've got the exact same mobo as you. :D
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They fit socket 939? How much do they run?
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Yeppers. There's a bunch of 939 X2s, and well as some dual core 939 opterons. Cheapest X2 at newegg is the 4400+ for $180. Can get an Opty 165 dual core for $153. The opteron is only 1.8 Ghz, but it's just begging to be OCed.
Got an opty 165 dual core in my current rig, OCed to 2.5Ghz. Wasn't considered an especially stellar OC back when I got it, but wasn't bad. Not sure how the optys are doing for OCing any more.
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They've gotten better over time. I can get 2.85-2.9 on mine, which was near the best you could get back then, but it's considered only slightly above average these days. Although they aren't popular anymore, ever since the emergence of C2D.
However, he said he mainly wants improved game performance, in which case a new video card will give a far bigger improvement than any processor upgrade 99% of the time.
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Yeah, but assuming he has a mid-ranged video card (7600 class), Supreme Commander is actually heavier on the CPU and particularly likes multiple cores. I guess it's all the physics calculations it has to do for 500 artillery shells =X
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I'd step off Vista for at least 6 months, myself; the drivers are still immature, so DX9 games are suffering a small degree of slowdown (granted, not to unplayable levels because all the benchmarks I've seen are for high-spec systems; say 100FPS in HL2 instead of 120, etc) and there's a wee risk of conflict. Me, I'm waiting for affordable DX10 cards before even considering upgrading (see no pressing reason to do so, admittedly, I'm not really a gamer nowadays).
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I think I'm with aldo on this one. Vista may be shiny, new and even better but since the OS is so important, I'm not happy with moving over to it untill it's established and all the holes that inevitably seem to get found at release are ironed out. If there aren't any holes - so much the better.
Also, yes, I can't afford to upgrade to a DX10 card just yet and the only immediate reason I can see to do so would be Crysis which does take advantage of DX10 trickery. Since it's not out yet - I don't much care for changing my perfectly capable system.
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I think I'm with aldo on this one. Vista may be shiny, new and even better but since the OS is so important, I'm not happy with moving over to it untill it's established and all the holes that inevitably seem to get found at release are ironed out. If there aren't any holes - so much the better.
Also, yes, I can't afford to upgrade to a DX10 card just yet and the only immediate reason I can see to do so would be Crysis which does take advantage of DX10 trickery. Since it's not out yet - I don't much care for changing my perfectly capable system.
Plus, Crysis does support DX9 on 2-3 year old machines, so you don't even need to upgrade to play it (it's probably still look pretty damn gorgeous sans DX-10, after all).
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Vista wont run on anything below a core-duo system with certian speed SATA HD can't rem the speed, is that true?
No.
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We'll i wasn't planning to get Vista until something like november/december, wait for them to sort the bugs, and like aldo i was wanting to wait for the DX10 cards to some down in price, at the mo i have an ATI X800 which seems to be doing ok, but i wanted to get my processor up abit for that main reason of supreme commander's like of the dual core, but i was unsure at the time if my A8N-E nvidia Nforce4 ultra motherboard could support the Dual core which i found out it can.
One thing i don't get is why all these PC experts in mags/tv/radio and even in an article PCgamer did, say the that you need a £3000 pound high-tech rig to get Vista to work, when my work mate told me the day he has it running on a 1.8 athlon.
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One thing i don't get is why all these PC experts in mags/tv/radio and even in an article PCgamer did, say the that you need a £3000 pound high-tech rig to get Vista to work, when my work mate told me the day he has it running on a 1.8 athlon.
Depends on whether the experts are pro-consumer or pro-manufacturer.
If it's the second option, they'll say it because they want to rinse (the consumer) out of as much money as possible by telling them they "need" high spec rigs to even get Vista running.
I'm guessing this is their motive. It'd be interesting to see the statistics in hardware sales during a six month period before/after Vistas sale. I'm guessing you'd see a rising trend in DX10 compliant graphics cards and other high-spec hardware as Joe Public falls for the myth that you need top-notch electronics to get Vista working.
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We'll i wasn't planning to get Vista until something like november/december, wait for them to sort the bugs, and like aldo i was wanting to wait for the DX10 cards to some down in price, at the mo i have an ATI X800 which seems to be doing ok, but i wanted to get my processor up abit for that main reason of supreme commander's like of the dual core, but i was unsure at the time if my A8N-E nvidia Nforce4 ultra motherboard could support the Dual core which i found out it can.
One thing i don't get is why all these PC experts in mags/tv/radio and even in an article PCgamer did, say the that you need a £3000 pound high-tech rig to get Vista to work, when my work mate told me the day he has it running on a 1.8 athlon.
I think it depends largely what you're using it for and what sort of bells and whistles you want with it. MS offering about 7(?) different flavours adds a lot to the FUD over whether it'll run and, indeed, what it'll run. I think some of the basic requirements - 15GB HD in particular - are kind of bonkers for an OS. I'm sort of at the stage where I think they should have 2 things; the actual thing that allows access to the PC (low requirements, very tightly controlled) and then some ancillery application that provides all the fancy user bodgins like a UI or securtiy features. So splitting it into a small, tight kernel facilitating access, and then something that controls that access. Of course, that'd never happen, because there's not a single OS manufacturer who'd want to give up control and actually say 'hey, this is just an Operating System - it lets you control the computer, but it leaves you free to determine the controls' :)
As an aside, Vista min specs - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx - bearing in mind min specs are usually complete bollocks, of course.
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We'll i wasn't planning to get Vista until something like november/december, wait for them to sort the bugs, and like aldo i was wanting to wait for the DX10 cards to some down in price, at the mo i have an ATI X800 which seems to be doing ok, but i wanted to get my processor up abit for that main reason of supreme commander's like of the dual core, but i was unsure at the time if my A8N-E nvidia Nforce4 ultra motherboard could support the Dual core which i found out it can.
One thing i don't get is why all these PC experts in mags/tv/radio and even in an article PCgamer did, say the that you need a £3000 pound high-tech rig to get Vista to work, when my work mate told me the day he has it running on a 1.8 athlon.
I think it depends largely what you're using it for and what sort of bells and whistles you want with it. MS offering about 7(?) different flavours adds a lot to the FUD over whether it'll run and, indeed, what it'll run. I think some of the basic requirements - 15GB HD in particular - are kind of bonkers for an OS. I'm sort of at the stage where I think they should have 2 things; the actual thing that allows access to the PC (low requirements, very tightly controlled) and then some ancillery application that provides all the fancy user bodgins like a UI or securtiy features. So splitting it into a small, tight kernel facilitating access, and then something that controls that access. Of course, that'd never happen, because there's not a single OS manufacturer who'd want to give up control and actually say 'hey, this is just an Operating System - it lets you control the computer, but it leaves you free to determine the controls' :)
As an aside, Vista min specs - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx - bearing in mind min specs are usually complete bollocks, of course.
15GB specs - the reason for this is because vista installs images of all versions of vista at once - this is because now you can use vista anytime upgrade to upgrade at any time to any version of vista. So if you buy home basic, you can upgrade it to ultimate without having to go out and buy a new disc. That's why so much space is required.
My opinion about vista is 1.) the drivers for graphics cards are immature and will probably be that way for another 6 months. 2.)Explorer.exe is alot less buggy than it is in xp, even if it is a tad slower 3.)Security is far beyond XP 4.)The Networking, Graphics, and Sound are much nicer
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It's still ludicrous to need 15GB; that's hideous bloatware IMO (not least because it'd take up over 50% of my master HD)
As an aside, the Vista adverts on the TV are just weird; it's amusing how they don't actually advertise anything about the product (not that that tactic is unusual, of course) whilst promising it to be the best thing since toast.
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We'll i wasn't planning to get Vista until something like november/december, wait for them to sort the bugs, and like aldo i was wanting to wait for the DX10 cards to some down in price, at the mo i have an ATI X800 which seems to be doing ok, but i wanted to get my processor up abit for that main reason of supreme commander's like of the dual core, but i was unsure at the time if my A8N-E nvidia Nforce4 ultra motherboard could support the Dual core which i found out it can.
One thing i don't get is why all these PC experts in mags/tv/radio and even in an article PCgamer did, say the that you need a £3000 pound high-tech rig to get Vista to work, when my work mate told me the day he has it running on a 1.8 athlon.
I think it depends largely what you're using it for and what sort of bells and whistles you want with it. MS offering about 7(?) different flavours adds a lot to the FUD over whether it'll run and, indeed, what it'll run. I think some of the basic requirements - 15GB HD in particular - are kind of bonkers for an OS. I'm sort of at the stage where I think they should have 2 things; the actual thing that allows access to the PC (low requirements, very tightly controlled) and then some ancillery application that provides all the fancy user bodgins like a UI or securtiy features. So splitting it into a small, tight kernel facilitating access, and then something that controls that access. Of course, that'd never happen, because there's not a single OS manufacturer who'd want to give up control and actually say 'hey, this is just an Operating System - it lets you control the computer, but it leaves you free to determine the controls' :)
As an aside, Vista min specs - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx - bearing in mind min specs are usually complete bollocks, of course.
I have a core 2 duo 6800, 2 gb ram, a 380w psu, on a p5b-vm, with a x1950xt. Cost of system, with case, speakers, keyboard, monitor = $~1500.00
I am running Vista Ultimate x64. (It ran fine with 1gb, but 2 eliminates the hard drive swap completely).
It's not uber by any measure. The cheapest C2D. A moderate mobo. 2gb of the cheapest value ram. But it runs like a champ.
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Yeah, but assuming he has a mid-ranged video card (7600 class), Supreme Commander is actually heavier on the CPU and particularly likes multiple cores. I guess it's all the physics calculations it has to do for 500 artillery shells =X
I think the video card will still dominate though, from what I've seen of the demo. The big drop in performance when you increase the resolution points to just that.
As for Vista, I will switch to it once there is a program I want to run that requires it. I don't care about an OS's features except for how well it runs programs, which XP already does fine (slightly better at the moment, actually).
core 2 duo 6800
cheapest C2D
:confused:
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Well i agree with aldo, 15 - 20 gb and according to the box of it HMV for the home premium it recommends 40gb!! is complete bonkers and yeah i don't get the TV ads as well. doesn't tell you anything.
As said i wont upgrade to Vista till prob the end of the year. but as i say i was just mainly wanting to know about getting a smooth ride for SC, so i have decided to go for a X2 CPU at the end of the month.
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Well i agree with aldo, 15 - 20 gb and according to the box of it HMV for the home premium it recommends 40gb!! is complete bonkers and yeah i don't get the TV ads as well. doesn't tell you anything.
Has anyone actually looked at what content gets installed when you do this? I'm sure there's a way to slim it down and get rid of all the un-needed stuff?
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I have no reason to spend the money on Vista until I upgrade to DX10 anyway. A shame I'll be paying more for this piece of software than for many of the pieces of hardware I'll need to buy.
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As said i wont upgrade to Vista till prob the end of the year. but as i say i was just mainly wanting to know about getting a smooth ride for SC, so i have decided to go for a X2 CPU at the end of the month.
I'd check what the price-performance difference is between the AMD X2 and, say, and Intel C2D E6300 & an interm ASRock 775Dual-VSTA (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813157092) motherboard.
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On the subject; http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011078&pageNumber=1
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don't buy an X2 at this point in time. It's not as good of a chip as a Core 2 Duo.
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don't buy an X2 at this point in time. It's not as good of a chip as a Core 2 Duo.
cheaper, though....
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i would love to be able to buy one but my funding at the moment is low, with moving house etc, so i can only afford either a processor or motherboard not both. so until i have got more money ie a better paid job(which could be difficult in dumfries, jobs are only parttime here) i will just have to go for the cheaper option and get the X2, then i will save for a new base unit for Xmas cos with all the recent complaints of vista crashing games left, right and center it will be something like next year before i go for it. They might have the bugs sorted by them :nervous:
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You mean Nvidia and ATi might have decent drivers by then. (Its more an issue of drivers than vista itself, but vista's new setup is what requires the new kind of drivers that the companies havent gotten good at making yet)
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ATi's 7.1 drivers for Vista are actually quite good. In a strange reversal, Nvidia's drivers for Vista are pretty much crap while ATi has functional and quick drivers.
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The 7.1's aren't actually all that good. I mean, for windowed DX they're great, but OGl crashes, and fulls creen DX is hit or miss on my HIS 1950XT.
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it really sucks when people have shelled out so much for such expensive hardware too.
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The last review I read of Vista indicated it was effectively a beta piece of software. apparently, aside from bad drivers, you can't do things like turn off the security centre or set Firefox as default browser.
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The last review I read of Vista indicated it was effectively a beta piece of software. apparently, aside from bad drivers, you can't do things like turn off the security centre or set Firefox as default browser.
Well, that's just completely wrong on both counts, lol.
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Wow, where did you read that? I can't believe the amount of misinformation about Vista that's out there >_>
The 7.1's aren't actually all that good. I mean, for windowed DX they're great, but OGl crashes, and fulls creen DX is hit or miss on my HIS 1950XT.
Hmm, well, I don't have an x1950 but only a 9600 so I can't exactly say I'm straining the drivers. They do run great though Windowed or not. OGL performance... is bad and I've heard reports of graphics corruption (although I haven't encountered that). You're referring to Vista right? 7.1 for Vista are pretty much a different set of drivers from what I've heard (unconfirmed).
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/14/pricey_beta_bugger/
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I'll just put a few choice tidbits.
Indeed, Aero looks nearly as good as KDE, although it demands about three times the system resources
It runs on GMA950. That's heavy hardware there. No, the only "unreasonable" demand is DX9 class. I think it has something to do with the Games for Windows initiative that they're trying to get everyone up to a minimum level (DX10 doesn't so much add features but that the internals are much more efficient).
The new Vista start menu is not my cup of tea. Instead of an expanding menu, it has a scrolling menu, which makes it more difficult to find the programs you want to launch. It also requires two steps; first you must click on a button to show more programs than IE, and then you have to scroll through the list, which is too long to be taken in at a glance.
Eh? Didn't you have to click Start, then Programs in the Win95-win2k Start menu? BS.
Scrolling is also nice when you have a bajillion items in the start menu like some people do because you can use the scroll wheel. It'll also hold your place until you close the Start Menu.
Finally if he's so pro-Mac and all then why isn't he using the instant search instead? You want to start Remote Desktop Client? Windows => "remote" => [enter]
Far too much space is wasted on links to documents, music, movies, games, etc. I always keep an icon for Windows Explorer on my desktop, and have no trouble finding these things whenever I please. I use the start menu to launch programs that I don't launch often enough to be worth linking on my desktop. I want the start menu to be quick; I don't want to waste time with it, being invited to do things that I can do more easily via other means.
Right, it's there and off to the left. That's somehow getting in the way? Grasping for straws.
(Mercifully, Microsoft has dropped its condescending "My" obsession, and directories are now given grownup names like Computer, Documents, Pictures, and so on. And not a moment too soon.)
Agreed.
Next, there's the Flip-3D feature, which gives you a moving Rolodex view of your open windows. When the one you want comes into view, you stop flipping at that point and it opens for you. Unfortunately, there seems not to be a reverse feature on this little merry-go-round, so if you miss your stop, round you go again. I wonder when I might ever find it useful, as I rarely have enough windows open to make a challenge out of finding whatever I want in the taskbar. I rather think it's there merely because it's "cool". And I'll confess; I've played with it a few times. I've never used it, mind, but I have fiddled. And it is rather cool, actually. And pretty useless.
I find Flip3D absolutely useless; I wish MS copied Expose.
But it's as if he's never used Windows before. Hold Shift to reverse the direction when you press tab. You can also use the mouse wheel.
Here's how mine went. First, my computer is intolerably noisy all of a sudden. The fan on my graphics card (nVidia GeForce 7900) now runs continuously. It's supposed to come on to cool things as needed, but now it never shuts off. Probably, it's a device driver problem. Or possibly, the Aqua Aero desktop uses so much of the card's resources that the fan simply has to run continuously. In any event, I'm not listening to this bloody thing for much longer. When my Vista reviews are finished, I'm going back to a dual-boot Linux/XP system.
Or maybe it's the drivers. Too bad Nvidia has severely dropped the ball.
Likewise with the Creative problem. Creative makes horrid drivers since forever.
Now for another little irritant: immortal craplets. There are two. One is the Vista Security Centre. I have disabled it. I have shut it off in Services. I have tried to shut it off in Msconfig. It won't die. Every time I boot, the craplet pops up and demands to be enabled. But if it really is disabled, then why am I seeing the bloody thing? And there's another immortal craplet: one that tells you that you've "disabled important startup programs", like the Security Centre, for example. I've tried to kill this ridiculous thing too, with no joy.
You can turn it off in the obvious place:Security Center itself. On the left column, "Change the way Security Center Alerts Me". Same way you do it in XP. I guess he's not as much a power user as he thought.
And how about a few decent utilities? Yes, thank you for the DVD burner and thank you for the screenshot tool, and for the very basic photo and movie editing kit. But how about a decent text editor, for God's sake? Would it be so difficult to give it a little of the magic that Kwrite has got? A spell checker perhaps? The ability to clean spaces? A little colour-coded action for us HTML homebrewers, so we can see simple typos, like forgetting to close a tag? Is that too much to ask?
Trap. If MS had included a mini-Word, let the litigations begin.
And how about a little encryption software? For email, and for individual files. Oh, Bitlocker is fine, but there are files one doesn't want decrypted whenever the volume they're on is mounted. Is that too much to ask?
Does this guy really work with Windows? Has he not heard of NTFS encryption? Which works per file? Which was present for a LONG time.
And there's more. Little things, really. Firefox is unable to make itself the default browser
Try upgrading to 2.0. It was a known bug in Firefox and they've fixed it.