Building/Upgrading a PC for TS2
ZiggyDoodle:
Very, very cool machine, Brat.
I personally would switch an equivalent (or better) ATI card for the nVidia. Hegelian has made some valid comments about the difference above.
Finally, might be a good idea to ask the seller/mfg. if they will give you a Vista premier coupon so you wont' have to fork out any $$$$ should you decide to switch the OS in a few months. That is being done by several computer manufacturers.
[Edited to include Vista Ultimate coupon, as the premier and ultimate versions support the Aero graphics; the home basic version does not]
KatEnigma:
I just thought of something else- does the motherboard support 2 video cards? If you're looking to build a machine that you won't have to replace anytime soon, it's something to consider. I wish I'd made that decision a year ago, honestly (that and I wished I'd known AMD was going to change the darn socket so fast. LOL). Just because the performance difference isn't large enough to justify the price difference NOW IMNSHO, doesn't mean that 1-2 years down the road, games won't rely on it more, and you'll wish you'd thought ahead. Building something you can upgrade to meet future needs whenever possible, rather than needing to replace the entire thing, is always a good idea.
Otherwise, like I hinted at before and Ziggy said, go with an ATI card. It will prevent headaches later on.
brat:
Okay. This is what I have listed so far-
XPS 700 Intel® Core™2 Extreme processor x6800 (2.93GHz)
Operating System Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition with re-installation CD
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 2 DIMMs
Keyboard Saitek 104-Key Eclipse Backlit Gaming Keyboard (Ships Separately)
Monitor No Monitor
Video Card Dual 512MB ATI Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire
Hard Drive 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Floppy Drive and Media Reader 13 in 1 Media Card Reader
Mouse LOGITECH G5 Laser Gaming Mouse (ships separately)
Modem No Modem Requested
Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 7.0
Optical Drive Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write capable
Sound Cards Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeMusic (D) Sound Card
Speakers No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Office Software (not included in Windows XP) No Pre-installed software
Additional Hard Drive 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Future Operating Systems Windows Vista™ Capable
SYSTEM DETAILS 2.5MM aluminum thickness Chassis with front & back customizable LEDs
SYSTEM DETAILS 7-slot, BTX design motherboard
SYSTEM DETAILS 1 kilowatt Power Supply
SYSTEM DETAILS Tower Six-heat pipe, Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fans
SYSTEM DETAILS Two 120mm x 38mm front fans
Photos, music & more! No preinstalled software
As I said before, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to computers. How can I tell if it will support a second card? Thanks, guys, for all your help. I really do appreciate it.
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Cons:
Just a few thoughts. I've been on tech boards for years and for reviews of mainboards and video cards and memory there is no one better than MS at www.lostcircuits.com. There is a forum and he can and will answer all questions. Much better than Tom's Hardware is.
I'm running a Nvidia GF6600 AGP 256 meg on this machine. I've found the drivers for the Nvidia cards with Sims 2 can make or break how it plays. When I upgraded to this Athlon 64 I did a clean install because I put in a 160 GIG HDD with an 8 meg cache on it and had changed the mainboard from an NForce chipset board to a SIS chipset board. XP doesn't like that too well. LOL I have too many Grandkids and the one in college needed two computers (One for at school and one at home) Thus I grabbed this socket 754 board for me and moved my old set up to them (XP2200+). Anyway I had put in the latest Nvidia drivers when I upgraded 8. something(March 2006 issue date) and the game was choppy, video card was running hotter than H , blue screen with the cute little hour glass, blotchy video at times. So I went back to the 7.1.8.9 drivers issued 4/1/2005 (Still on Nvidia's site) and those work like a dream. Game has no video type glitches anymore.
Then after running this game vanilla with nothing in it except Maxis stuff I was going nuts with some of the game annoyances. So I downloaded several hacks to fix those from this site this week and low and behold, this game is running the best I've seen it run since the day it came out. Loads fast, no lags, rotation is fast, moving up and down levels is fast, no application crashes.....so I would assume from this that it's a combo thing to get this game to run right. Plenty of ram,at least a gig, a good video card (ATI or Nvidia) drivers are critical, and perhaps several of these hacks that fix some of Maxis code that just isn't up to par????? I have all expansions in here and the latest OFB patch. I don't have the two little packs though GL and FF.
My son is a WOW player and he runs the X800 ATI card. No problems there. He did have a problem with an ATI 9600 Pro card. It would give errors when playing WOW. We knew they had some cards with bad chipsets so after trying every driver ATI had, we shipped it back, got the replacement and same thing. The old ATI 8500 would play WOW but couldn't display the underwater scenes, my FX5700 would play it without errors so we knew it was something with that 9600 PRO. That's when he bought the X800 and that ended all his problems. He'll keep it until he upgrades his computer again. Which he does about every two years. Odd thing is my oldest grandson has the 9600 PRO, plays WOW and has no problems whatever with it. Kind of tells you all video cards aren't created equal.They were both Saphire cards.
So while your upgrading, if your going to keep these machines for any length of time. Go with the best out there at the time that you can afford and if your a big gamer, don't cut corners on ram and video. Intel has only one core that's worth having and that's the Conroe based processors. I however only run AMD and have only ran AMD for years. When I upgrade again I will probably go with all the bells and whistles, provided I don't have to build 4 of these at once. (Grandkids saying "Mamo I need you to build me a computer".
KatEnigma:
Quote from: brat on 2006 October 15, 13:40:45
Okay. This is what I have listed so far-
XPS 700 Intel® Core™2 Extreme processor x6800 (2.93GHz)
Operating System Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition with re-installation CD
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 2 DIMMs
Keyboard Saitek 104-Key Eclipse Backlit Gaming Keyboard (Ships Separately)
Monitor No Monitor
Video Card Dual 512MB ATI Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire
Hard Drive 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Floppy Drive and Media Reader 13 in 1 Media Card Reader
Mouse LOGITECH G5 Laser Gaming Mouse (ships separately)
Modem No Modem Requested
Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 7.0
Optical Drive Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write capable
Sound Cards Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeMusic (D) Sound Card
Speakers No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Office Software (not included in Windows XP) No Pre-installed software
Additional Hard Drive 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Future Operating Systems Windows Vista™ Capable
SYSTEM DETAILS 2.5MM aluminum thickness Chassis with front & back customizable LEDs
SYSTEM DETAILS 7-slot, BTX design motherboard
SYSTEM DETAILS 1 kilowatt Power Supply
SYSTEM DETAILS Tower Six-heat pipe, Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fans
SYSTEM DETAILS Two 120mm x 38mm front fans
Photos, music & more! No preinstalled software
As I said before, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to computers. How can I tell if it will support a second card? Thanks, guys, for all your help. I really do appreciate it.
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It looks like that one has 2 video cards already. :) Two mighty fine ones at that- I'd be estatic with just one x1950. Goodness, that thing must be costing you an arm and a leg. ;)
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