I recently upgraded from a Athlon XP 2600+ (thoroughbred) to an Athlon 64 3400+ (newcastle). The difference is simply amazing, easily twice as fast, at least when comparing compile times, which is a big bonus for me doing java development. Everything else is just all around snappier. The new SATA 10k rpm WD Raptor drive doesn't hurt anything either. Oh ya, and my system plays doom3 better now as well.:)
That and you'd easily spend $100 on a more expensive 939 board, and the 939 cpu. With the $100 you save now, you can spend that on a new mobo down the road, and you'll still have your left over 754 board and cpu to put in a new "play" box, build a new machine for your dad, or whatever.
I just recently bought a socket 754 mobo and Athlon 64 3400+ (newcastle) cpu. I couldn't be happier, the thing screams, easily twice as fast as my Athlon XP 2600+ (throroughbred) setup, at least when compiling java applications and a few other random "real" things.
Yeah I had a lot of fun playing B&W, but it tended to crash a fair amount on my machine and the saves took forever, that's what killed it for me.
Plus my creature developed an uncanny taste for villagers, no matter how much I slaped him around for doing it, he still liked to munch on them. The baby sitting aspect of it killed me.
The funny part was that there was a round about way of winning the game. Save the rancid food from the 2nd level by dropping it through the portal after each level. Then you can simply poison your enemies food supply making for an easy takeover.
Every once in awhile I think about busting the game out again give it another shot on my faster computer, but I just don't have time for epic games like that anymore. I want to hop in and get my half hour fix.
Well I was specing out a "budget system", for power users and myself I would get the full gig of ram.
Actually I bought new ram awhile back, 1 gig of corsair pc3200, so hopefully that should work in an amd64 board just fine. I already have an NV 6800GT, which is really what sparked this whole upgrading mess for myself.:) The video card is incredibly fast, so that I get the same framerate no matter what resolution I run in Doom3. I have a 4x agp Athlon XP 2600+ system now. (I have a feeling the 4x agp is what's really hurting me). Plus the faster cpu would really help with java deveopment.
Thanks for the advice on the HD, I was kind of fretting over that, how much faster the 10k rpm drives are. They are quite a bit more, and it looks like a 74 gig is the max you can get at $175 which is rather pricey. But looking back on it, doing SATA RAID level 1 mirroring with two 7200 rpm drives for increased speed might be better, since I can get two 7200 rpm drives for the price of a 10k rpm drive, plus I'd have some kind of redundancy in case a drive died. I know RAID isn't a backup solution, but it should hopefully keep my system up and running in case a drive dies.
There are already budget AMD64 machines as long as your build your own. I don't know if any big name vendors build such a machine yet as I'm not into prebuilt machines, but I wouldn't doubt if there are some available.
You can get a Chaintech K8T800 socket754 mobo for $64, an Athlon 64 3200+ (newcastle) cpu for $218, a WD SATA hd for $68, maybe a 512 meg stick of DDR400 ram for $78, a case for $60. What else do you need? Most people probably have everything else they can canibalize from their old machine. All that comes up to $488. These prices are all from newegg.
I'm looking at a new setup myself, but using a nicer, probably nforce3 mobo with better sound (hopefully it won't pick up USB/HD noise as I hear some people are complaining about) either from MSI or Asus.
Or smart users will get the oem version of xp pro from newegg for $141, or $90 for the home version. Don't forget to add a floppy power cable to your cart.
Probably one of the many reasons why best buy is getting sued. I'll gladly pay $10 more for something as long as I don't have to deal with any stupid rebate that I may or may not receive.
Great, now I can't delete it because it "may be in use". Good lord I hate XP's bullshit sometimes. Is there anyway I can delete this thing without rebooting?
I had to use reiserfsck about 2 years ago to repair a somehow corrupted reiserfs3 partition. The hardest part was finding a bootdisk with reiserfs and reiserfsck so I could fix my main partition. After that, it was an easy fix, no important files missing.
With all my machines and servers running reiserfs, that was the only time it has failed me.
6.9 gram infared controlled rc helicopter. It's lighter and smaller. I downloaded a video of it awhile back of the guy flying it around his living room that someone posted on a message board. Cool stuff.
Well if 3/5ths of all computers were infected with a virus, then I believe that would MAKE it Microsoft's problem for not having a more secure operating system in the first place.
I'd suggest cutting a deal with spybot or something, and force users to clean their system of spyware before installing SP2. I'm sure Microsoft would rather buy out spybot before that happened, so they could fix the program so that their spyware installing parterners won't have their software cleaned.
"Shh, we don't want to bother the primitive monkey-people."
Exactly, never forget the prime directive. Don't interfere with pre-warp civilizations.:) All joking aside, the prime directive is a good idea, and I wouldn't doubt if other ETs held similar morals rules.
Just out of curiosity I looked it up. I've never seen this whole version before...
PRIME DIRECTIVE
As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.
Well take a look at doom2, quake, quake2, or quake3.
When Doom2 came out, 486's were only out, I think the pentium machine came out a little later. Sure you could play doom2 on a 386, but it sucked, and anyone playing competative deathmatch will tell you you need at least a P5-60mhz machine or higher to get a smooth framerate. The ultimate hardware to play the game didn't even EXIST yet.
Now take quake3, I only had a pure 3d original voodoo card, I probably only got 15 fps. Voodoo3 and GeForce card's were just coming out at the time, they gave you maybe 35-45fps. I now have a GF3, and get 100+fps@1024x768 in quake3. The gf3 wasn't probably barely a glint in nvidia's eye at the time, that card didn't exist at the time of the game either. I'd really like a faster card so I can maybe run 1280 with anti-aliasing to make it look really fantastic, now that hardware certainly didn't exist.
id software along with many other comapanies put out games so in order to get the full experience, you need hardware that doesn't exist yet, if it did--the engine wouldn't be very worthwhile, now would it? People would move onto more advanced games that will take advantage of their shiny new hardware they bought, instead of playing this outdated game.
Of course counterstrike is an exception to that rule, I just can't explain that one. I've played the game, AWP whoring and all, and there's just other stuff I'd rather play. Of course there will always be niche games that people with old ass hardware like to play. CS relies a lot on gameplay. I don't know if d3 will have gameplay of that level. At least not multiplayer, which is what has kept that game alive.
I'd be willing to wager the 7 million is just an arbirarily large enough number so the feds will investigate their case. If they say they only lost a grand, then there would probably be no investigation.
That's what really annoys me about XP. I have a gig of ram, so I shouldn't NEED a swap file, right? If you turn off swap, windows turns it back on for you. If you specify a fixed swap file size, XP is nice enough to automatically bump it up for you.
When I have my dual head desktop up and running with my development environment, I'm already sitting at 341 some odd megs of swap currently. So when I start up a game or something, everything else gets pushed to swap. So I have NO CHOICE by to sit there and chew on swap. I've tried all sorts of tweaks to no avail.
When I double my RAM awhile back to a gig, I never noticed a single different in performance, and I'm pretty observant about that. Unless you use programs that use tons of ram at once, you'll probably never notice much of a performance increase above 512 meg, so that seems to be the magic ram point right now. Hopefully Long Horn will this program, but I'm not holding my breath.
I remember the first time I saw Doom 2 being played on a Pentium class machine, looked absolutely incredible. You basically needed a Pentium to be competitive in death match, it made my room mate's DX2-66 look slow.
8...The sound engine is entirely CPU dependant. Therefore a crappy soundcard works flawlessly. Not to worry, the enfine only uses a small percentage of cycles, much less than if the engine relied on a soundcard.
I'm glad to hear this one, when battlefield 1942 came out I had tons of problems with my sound card (ymf744) that I've never had with any games before. Sometimes sounds would cut out, sometimes I'd lose sound entirely. I use the same sound card in other machines with no problems at all with any other games so far. Actually there was one other game that had the same problem, Midieval Total Warfare I believe.
I ended up buying a new sound card, and I still had some problems, just less frequentyly. UT2k4 cuts out sounds sometimes, but I'm not convinced that not a bug in the actual game itself.
Searching google about the problems I have I find nothing but other people complaining about the same type of stuff, with no solutions. With mixing in software, you remove all unknowns, plus you get Mac and Linux compatilbity.
I agree with other people tho, I don't see how doing software only mixing would mean less cpu cyles used.
I'm convinced that Valve never intended on releasing Half Life 2 on time. Wasn't it originally a late September 2003 release date? The code theft was just a clever scape goat to delay it indefinetly.
I'm still waiting on Team Fortress 2... heh. Which I've considered dead in the water for all practical purposes, just like Duke Nukem Forever. The respective companies have stopped talking about the project, so I'm guessing they're dead projects, or at least shelved. I'm just hoping I won't have to add half life 2 to this list, but at least Valve is still talking about HL2, so that's at least good news.
Not to be picky, but this has always bugged me. It's "id software", they've never capitalized their name funky like that, ever. Feel free to prove me wrong tho.
As for being released in Germany, not sure, but I'm sure there will be places that will ship it internationally.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently upgraded from a Athlon XP 2600+ (thoroughbred) to an Athlon 64 3400+ (newcastle). The difference is simply amazing, easily twice as fast, at least when comparing compile times, which is a big bonus for me doing java development. Everything else is just all around snappier. The new SATA 10k rpm WD Raptor drive doesn't hurt anything either. Oh ya, and my system plays doom3 better now as well. :)
-- gid
That and you'd easily spend $100 on a more expensive 939 board, and the 939 cpu. With the $100 you save now, you can spend that on a new mobo down the road, and you'll still have your left over 754 board and cpu to put in a new "play" box, build a new machine for your dad, or whatever.
I just recently bought a socket 754 mobo and Athlon 64 3400+ (newcastle) cpu. I couldn't be happier, the thing screams, easily twice as fast as my Athlon XP 2600+ (throroughbred) setup, at least when compiling java applications and a few other random "real" things.
Yeah I had a lot of fun playing B&W, but it tended to crash a fair amount on my machine and the saves took forever, that's what killed it for me.
Plus my creature developed an uncanny taste for villagers, no matter how much I slaped him around for doing it, he still liked to munch on them. The baby sitting aspect of it killed me.
The funny part was that there was a round about way of winning the game. Save the rancid food from the 2nd level by dropping it through the portal after each level. Then you can simply poison your enemies food supply making for an easy takeover.
Every once in awhile I think about busting the game out again give it another shot on my faster computer, but I just don't have time for epic games like that anymore. I want to hop in and get my half hour fix.
It's an older thoroughbred cpu with a 133/266mhz FSB... so ya, that's probably it.
Well I was specing out a "budget system", for power users and myself I would get the full gig of ram.
:) The video card is incredibly fast, so that I get the same framerate no matter what resolution I run in Doom3. I have a 4x agp Athlon XP 2600+ system now. (I have a feeling the 4x agp is what's really hurting me). Plus the faster cpu would really help with java deveopment.
Actually I bought new ram awhile back, 1 gig of corsair pc3200, so hopefully that should work in an amd64 board just fine. I already have an NV 6800GT, which is really what sparked this whole upgrading mess for myself.
Thanks for the advice on the HD, I was kind of fretting over that, how much faster the 10k rpm drives are. They are quite a bit more, and it looks like a 74 gig is the max you can get at $175 which is rather pricey. But looking back on it, doing SATA RAID level 1 mirroring with two 7200 rpm drives for increased speed might be better, since I can get two 7200 rpm drives for the price of a 10k rpm drive, plus I'd have some kind of redundancy in case a drive died. I know RAID isn't a backup solution, but it should hopefully keep my system up and running in case a drive dies.
There are already budget AMD64 machines as long as your build your own. I don't know if any big name vendors build such a machine yet as I'm not into prebuilt machines, but I wouldn't doubt if there are some available.
You can get a Chaintech K8T800 socket754 mobo for $64, an Athlon 64 3200+ (newcastle) cpu for $218, a WD SATA hd for $68, maybe a 512 meg stick of DDR400 ram for $78, a case for $60. What else do you need? Most people probably have everything else they can canibalize from their old machine. All that comes up to $488. These prices are all from newegg.
I'm looking at a new setup myself, but using a nicer, probably nforce3 mobo with better sound (hopefully it won't pick up USB/HD noise as I hear some people are complaining about) either from MSI or Asus.
Or smart users will get the oem version of xp pro from newegg for $141, or $90 for the home version. Don't forget to add a floppy power cable to your cart.
Probably one of the many reasons why best buy is getting sued. I'll gladly pay $10 more for something as long as I don't have to deal with any stupid rebate that I may or may not receive.
You see, it's just like a tape recorder, but because it's on a computer, it's illegal, get it?
Great, now I can't delete it because it "may be in use". Good lord I hate XP's bullshit sometimes. Is there anyway I can delete this thing without rebooting?
I had to use reiserfsck about 2 years ago to repair a somehow corrupted reiserfs3 partition. The hardest part was finding a bootdisk with reiserfs and reiserfsck so I could fix my main partition. After that, it was an easy fix, no important files missing.
With all my machines and servers running reiserfs, that was the only time it has failed me.
Hah, I remember that, I wondered if anyone else did as well.
Also, I miss the old "quickies"... I guess that leaves too much room for site whoring now.
Also, here's the unsplit link
6.9 gram infared controlled rc helicopter. It's lighter and smaller. I downloaded a video of it awhile back of the guy flying it around his living room that someone posted on a message board. Cool stuff.
http://pixelito.reference.be/
infinity * .5 = infinity
Well if 3/5ths of all computers were infected with a virus, then I believe that would MAKE it Microsoft's problem for not having a more secure operating system in the first place.
I'd suggest cutting a deal with spybot or something, and force users to clean their system of spyware before installing SP2. I'm sure Microsoft would rather buy out spybot before that happened, so they could fix the program so that their spyware installing parterners won't have their software cleaned.
"Shh, we don't want to bother the primitive monkey-people."
:) All joking aside, the prime directive is a good idea, and I wouldn't doubt if other ETs held similar morals rules.
Exactly, never forget the prime directive. Don't interfere with pre-warp civilizations.
Just out of curiosity I looked it up. I've never seen this whole version before...
PRIME DIRECTIVE
As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral
obligation.
Half Life actually uses a heavily modified Quake I engine with some Quake2 code thrown in as far as I know. read here
But yeah, using software rendering, you allow pretty much any computer out there to run it.
Well take a look at doom2, quake, quake2, or quake3.
When Doom2 came out, 486's were only out, I think the pentium machine came out a little later. Sure you could play doom2 on a 386, but it sucked, and anyone playing competative deathmatch will tell you you need at least a P5-60mhz machine or higher to get a smooth framerate. The ultimate hardware to play the game didn't even EXIST yet.
Now take quake3, I only had a pure 3d original voodoo card, I probably only got 15 fps. Voodoo3 and GeForce card's were just coming out at the time, they gave you maybe 35-45fps. I now have a GF3, and get 100+fps@1024x768 in quake3. The gf3 wasn't probably barely a glint in nvidia's eye at the time, that card didn't exist at the time of the game either. I'd really like a faster card so I can maybe run 1280 with anti-aliasing to make it look really fantastic, now that hardware certainly didn't exist.
id software along with many other comapanies put out games so in order to get the full experience, you need hardware that doesn't exist yet, if it did--the engine wouldn't be very worthwhile, now would it? People would move onto more advanced games that will take advantage of their shiny new hardware they bought, instead of playing this outdated game.
Of course counterstrike is an exception to that rule, I just can't explain that one. I've played the game, AWP whoring and all, and there's just other stuff I'd rather play. Of course there will always be niche games that people with old ass hardware like to play. CS relies a lot on gameplay. I don't know if d3 will have gameplay of that level. At least not multiplayer, which is what has kept that game alive.
I'd be willing to wager the 7 million is just an arbirarily large enough number so the feds will investigate their case. If they say they only lost a grand, then there would probably be no investigation.
When I have my dual head desktop up and running with my development environment, I'm already sitting at 341 some odd megs of swap currently. So when I start up a game or something, everything else gets pushed to swap. So I have NO CHOICE by to sit there and chew on swap. I've tried all sorts of tweaks to no avail.
When I double my RAM awhile back to a gig, I never noticed a single different in performance, and I'm pretty observant about that. Unless you use programs that use tons of ram at once, you'll probably never notice much of a performance increase above 512 meg, so that seems to be the magic ram point right now. Hopefully Long Horn will this program, but I'm not holding my breath.
old screenshot showing what I mean
Just for comparison, my linux box never even touches the swap file:PS. I love how the useless "ecode" tag eats spaces. Above shows 0 used megs of Swap.
I remember the first time I saw Doom 2 being played on a Pentium class machine, looked absolutely incredible. You basically needed a Pentium to be competitive in death match, it made my room mate's DX2-66 look slow.
There's gonna be a floppy version too, look
8...The sound engine is entirely CPU dependant. Therefore a crappy soundcard works flawlessly. Not to worry, the enfine only uses a small percentage of cycles, much less than if the engine relied on a soundcard.
I'm glad to hear this one, when battlefield 1942 came out I had tons of problems with my sound card (ymf744) that I've never had with any games before. Sometimes sounds would cut out, sometimes I'd lose sound entirely. I use the same sound card in other machines with no problems at all with any other games so far. Actually there was one other game that had the same problem, Midieval Total Warfare I believe.
I ended up buying a new sound card, and I still had some problems, just less frequentyly. UT2k4 cuts out sounds sometimes, but I'm not convinced that not a bug in the actual game itself.
Searching google about the problems I have I find nothing but other people complaining about the same type of stuff, with no solutions. With mixing in software, you remove all unknowns, plus you get Mac and Linux compatilbity.
I agree with other people tho, I don't see how doing software only mixing would mean less cpu cyles used.
I'm convinced that Valve never intended on releasing Half Life 2 on time. Wasn't it originally a late September 2003 release date? The code theft was just a clever scape goat to delay it indefinetly.
I'm still waiting on Team Fortress 2... heh. Which I've considered dead in the water for all practical purposes, just like Duke Nukem Forever. The respective companies have stopped talking about the project, so I'm guessing they're dead projects, or at least shelved. I'm just hoping I won't have to add half life 2 to this list, but at least Valve is still talking about HL2, so that's at least good news.
Not to be picky, but this has always bugged me. It's "id software", they've never capitalized their name funky like that, ever. Feel free to prove me wrong tho.
As for being released in Germany, not sure, but I'm sure there will be places that will ship it internationally.