09-19-2006, 05:43 AM | #31 |
Magniloquent
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: In a van, down by the river
Age: 43
Posts: 3,361
Xbox Live Leaderboard: 16th
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Re: Stang's Upgrade
Until Vista comes out, 1GB of RAM is probably enough for most things. Most performance tests show that's the "sweet spot" for FPS and games because it's the best mix of speed provided by RAM vs. overhead of addressing the memory to use it. If you've got a lot of memory-resident apps you run, then you might want to consider it, but for the "typical user", 1GB is fine until Vista comes out and tests get run on it.
There's a lot of new video cards out there, but not knowing your motherboard it's hard to say what you can and can't take. PCI Express cards are great, but if your board doesn't support them then it doesn't really matter how great they are. To buy another motherboard to support the card...well, again, you're better off waiting for Vista in the February timeframe and just buying a brand new computer from the ground up. If you're looking at AGP cards, they're still reasonable...the ATI X1600 512 MB AGP card lists for $200, which is not bad at all. Granted, you'll want to do some research into what card meets your needs best, but only you can really figure that out. For example when I was buying my current machine there was an nVidia 6800GTO and a Radeon X800 XT on the plate. Looking at individual performance tests at places like Tom's Hardware and [H]ardOCP I found out that wihle the nVidia was better at 1024x768, the X800 blew it away at 1600x1200, which is the resolution my monitor runs at natively. Since that's what I wanted things to be at, the ATI card made more sense. Figure out what you need to do, and THEN find the thing that meets that need, don't go out and buy the biggest number you can find. |
09-19-2006, 06:30 AM | #32 |
Registered User
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Re: Stang's Upgrade
RAM was my main issue with WoW I had 512MB of paired corsair XMS PC3200 which was sufficient until WoW. Once WoW was running certain areas resembled powerpoint slideshows (flying into/out of Ironforge for example) I upped my memory to 2GB of generic PC3200 and the issue went away.Wow is not too graphically challenging. My AIW9700pro ran it nicely. Now with my 7800GT it's still smooth, but games like FEAR, and HL2 run much better. In fact with WoW, my gfx card's fan does not kick up to high rpm - run FEAR for 30 seconds and hoover is in the house.
I'm not sure you'll need more than 1GB for WoW, but 512M is just not good enough. |
09-19-2006, 06:41 AM | #33 |
Re: Stang's Upgrade
I had 1GB in my machine and I constantly had issues running other stuff (like TS) while running WoW. Also, if I needed to alt-tab out for something, it was a horrendous wait while everyloaded unloaded and reloaded. I took that 1 GB out and replaced it with 4....and now, life is really, really good.
Except Vent now gives me trouble when we have to use it with the other guilds....havent quite figured out whats going on there yet... it wasnt a problem before I changed the RAM. |
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