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Gamers, Upgrade your Systems
jbischof writes "Looking to upgrade your aging PC? Ace's Hardware has a new upgrade guide tailored specifically to gamers. The data shows exactly which upgrades - processor, motherboard, gfx card, or combination of the three - will give the best performance boost on all the latest and most popular games (according to their recent poll)."
I really don't like their guides. I find the best one is the sharky gamers guide to system building (at different budgets.) Check it out @ www.sharkyextreme.com
No they're not. The recommendations are from benchmarks. The base hardware they picked for their tests is what a poll had a large part of their readership running.
Anyway, don't knock polls. I was very relieved when a poll at HardOCP showed that I'm far from the oldest reader they have. (I was expecting something more like when Freeze sent me a reader survey card with questions like "How old are you?: a) 8-12 b) 12-15 c) 16-7 d) 18 and up" and "How much money do your parents make?")
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Shit, man, you may as well ask why they didnt benchmark Mac. It always amuses me how the biggest seller for Mac games is always something so old no PC gamers are even playing it anymore.
Dont get me wrong, this isnt a slam against Linux. But Linux isnt the be-all and end-all of computing that most people make it out to be. Most developers make software for Windows because they have the biggest market share, developers know how to program for it, and- the biggest factor- companies know they can make money selling software for the PC. Hell, if you are too cheap/poor to pay for an OS, how willing will that market be to pay for your software?
id makes so much money they can afford to play around with money-losing propositions like making a linux port of Quake 2 or 3. But except for the dedicated server component, it really isnt cost (or time) effective to make a second-tier OS port. You dont delay a product for two months so you can concurrently release the Linux/Mac client which accounts for 1% of your sales base. Most companies that actually do release an alternate client mainly do so because the programmers are fans of that OS and work on it in their own time.
The developers may get burned by Slashdot for not making a port, but so what? It's only complaints from a very loud and vocal minority: think Simpson's Comic Book Geek here. Worst... Game... Ever...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
For example.
007 Nightfire for GCN: $49.99
007 Nightfire for PC: $19.99
at ebgames
You will find that's similar for a lot of games on both platforms. Ghost Recon? $49.99 GCN, $39.99 PC (GOTY edition even, for the PC).
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
I think you are misusing the term stereo a bit here. If you want a simple solution for 3d with stereo glassess, get a deceantly fast nVidia card, like a GF 3 200 or better and get the stereo glassess for it. You also need a monitor that can pull a deceant refresh rate. The card will the work with the shutters on the glassess to do 3d. Works well for the price.
As for sound I haven't seen a non-stereo Pc in years. In sound terminology stereo means 2-channel, left and right. You are thinking surround sound. Also, THX isn't a surround sound spec, Doubly Pro Logic, Doubly Digital, Digital Theatre System, and Sound Dynamic Digital Sound are. THX is a spec that involves listener experneice and deals with noise and distortion levels, volume calibration, crossovers and a whole bunch of other things. the idea is if you buy a THX system and calibrate it right, you'll get a movie theatre sound experience form DVD.
However, it really won't do much good as Quake doesn't support 3d positional sound. It just does normal stereo sound.
Get an Athlon 1700+ Tbred B (the really new ones)... and overclock it. It runs at about 1466mhz stock, but it's VERY easy to get these things up near 2000mhz and beyond. A 500mhz OC is really incredible, and these chips are cheap, selling for $50 or so.
Currently, I'm running an ancient 1GHz Thunderbird Athlon, with 768MB of PC-133 SDRAM, a GeForce4 TI4200, and 2 HDDs - 27GB Maxtor and 80GB Maxtor, 2MB cache. I've been running this rig for almost 2 years now, and it still runs strong & stable. Only upgrades I did were the 80GB HDD after a 20GB Maxtor that died a horrid, clicking & spinning death during an FDISK (after having it cause countless crashes & ATA failures), and the GeForce4 (which offered me a surprising performance increase in games over the GeForce2 GTS 32MB it replaced).
This rig still runs all my favorites plus some of the newer games (UT2K3 runs fine at my LCD flat panel's native res (1280x1024) with normal options turned on). The upgrade guide on Ace's (which I haven't read) simply wouldn't offer me any compelling reason to upgrade for today's games.
Doom 3, OTOH, would probably provide my system a major challenge (according to reports on its functionality, anyway). When Doom 3 comes out, that'll be my new benchmark & prompt me to upgrade. Not sooner.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
Perhaps you should take your nose out of the strategy aisle and check out some of the action and sim gaming coming out. Today's cutting edge games are designed to be minimally playable on 1-2 year old hardware, and to have legs for the current TOL and next-generation.
This is why we refer to them as "cutting-edge".
Dont be concerned with pagefile size as much as with page faults. Run the performance monitor, select Process (and choose your game process), then select page faults/sec to look at the rate of page faults as you play.
"Page Faults/sec is the rate Page Faults occur in the threads executing in this process. A page fault occurs when a thread refers to a virtual memory page that is not in its working set in main memory. This will not cause the page to be fetched from disk if it is on the standby list and hence already in main memory, or if it is in use by another process with whom the page is shared."... these page faults are costly reads from disk
Where did you pull that 89MB of RAM figure from? That's total BS. IIRC, Win98 uses a tru 32-bit memory model (with one bit wasted, I think, for some reason I can't remember), so SHOULD be able to use a full 2GB of RAM. (And I've even seen Win98 systems upgraded from 128M to 256M with drastic improvement in high-end apps.)
Common people; if you are going to state something as a fact, make sure you know what you are talking about, or at least hedge your statement with an "I think." I'd sure like to see a source for that 89MB remark...
I picked up this tip from the February 03 issues of Computer Power User (CPU) magazine:
Use msconfig to edit your System.ini file. "In the System.ini tab, highlight [386enh] and click New to add a new line beneath this branch. Type
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1
in the empty box that appears, then click Apply and restart your PC. We found that this helped clean up game jerkiness because it reduces the background file swapping that causes video hiccups and pauses."
This tip was for XP, by the way. I tried this on my machine (512MB), and the swapping that started during UT2K3 sessions has stopped. Maybe it will work for you.
Happy Tweaking!
Let's get drunk and delete production data!