Building/Upgrading a PC for TS2
Hegelian:
Quote from: VyeOlin on 2006 June 19, 07:33:06
My fiance is friends with a guy that is a Senior Design Architect for Intel and his recommendation for upgrading was to buy AMD.
Was that before or after Intel's Core 2 CPUs ship next month? :)
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He said that Intel made a huge mistake but they will rectify that within 5 years as they are planning on using liquid nitro to break the 5ghz limitations. He said that cpu chips will come in an enclosed refrigeration unit. Sounds expensive to me.
The mistake Intel made was assuming it could continue to increase raw clock speeds without excessive power-consumption and heat issues by continuously shrinking the die, which turned out to be wrong. The solution for the foreseeable future for both Intel and AMD is multiple, lower-power cores in each CPU unit.
FWIW, Intel's new "Athlon killer" CPUs were designed by Intel's team in Israel. 8)
Quote from: Orbit on 2006 June 19, 16:48:23
So, I'm just wondering what graphics card you guys think I should get. $450 is the most I'm willing to spend on one.
You don't need a $450 graphics board for TS2, and buying at the top of the price curve is usually a mistake unless money is no object. That said, you can (sort of) future-proof your PC for a couple years by going with something like the Radeon X1900 GT (under US$300) or X1800XT (under $250). OTOH, you can get a PowerColor X800 GTO for US$120, and while it won't match the performance of the other boards, it offers more performance per dollar (I have a Sapphire X800 GTO in one PC and an X800 GT in another, and they work quite well—my game performance is limited by my 2.8 GHz P4).
One thing that makes TS2 quite different from most 3D games is the extent to which it is scalable to your hardware. Most games have fairly "hard" minimum hardware requirements, and if you don't meet them you don't play the game. But TS2 will run on some pretty old and underpowered PCs—at greatly reduced levels of visual detail. For the most part, this compromise doesn't affect gameplay: you don't get cinematics, you can only invite a couple sims to parties, and community lots may look like slide shows. But the improvements in the look and feel of the game with a graphics board that allows all settings to be set to High and the surrounding landscape to be seen when playing a lot really improves the overall game experience, and there are game situations where having more rather than fewer sims at a party or on a community lot can be a real advantage. There is a significant difference between what is needed and what is optimal.
Let's say you went toward the high end with the X1900 GT. That would leave US$150 of that US$450 for a second hard drive (for documents and archives, media files, and the main paging file), and more RAM. IMO that woud be a better buy than spending the entire $450 on a graphics board.
Bear in mind that some high-end PCI-E graphics boards require a dedicated lead from the power supply, so you will want to check the PSU to see if it will support the board you end up buying.
One thing to keep in mind when buying a graphics board now is that Windows Vista ships next year with DirectX 10, and DX10 will be Vista-only; so if TS3 is released as a DX10 game, you will need to upgrade both your OS and your graphics board to play it. Therefore, it's probably a good idea to make the board you buy now the last one you need until you need one with DX10 support in hardware. The X1900 model I mentioned above would probably fit the bill. ;D
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Also, the system comes with 528 [512?] MB RAM, and I'm wondering if that's enough for Sims 2. So, if the RAM doesn't cut it, what RAM should I get?
As others have said, get 1 GB at the minimum. If your new PC has a motherboard that supports dual-channel RAM, you need two modules in order to have dual-channel operation (so that would be 512 x 2). WinXP is happier with 1 GB than with 512 MB, and TS2 will certainly use more than 1 GB if it's available (although you may need to modify/reduce the paging file settings to get Windows to use all your available RAM).
VyeOlin:
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Was that before or after Intel's Core 2 CPUs ship next month?
He said it last week, what he was referring to I'm not exactly sure. Just thought it was strange that he recommended AMD.
J. M. Pescado:
You know, I've been wondering: How does the X64 stuff affect existing programs and the OS? That part has me stumped.
Hegelian:
From everything I've read, the 64-bit extensions in current CPUs only really have an affect when running a 64-bit OS like WinXP Pro x64 or Windows Server 2003 x64. So it's partly marketing and partly future-proofing; in the long run, it is probably more economical to make all your processors 64-bit capable rather than having separate 32-bit and 64-bit products.
Of course, unless you have 64-bit apps, there's not much point in running a 64-bit version of Windows on a desktop. The ony realy advantage with current apps is that the 64-bit OS can address 32 GB of RAM compared to 4 GB for WinXP, and as much as 4 GB is available to 32-bit apps, compared to 2 GB for WinXP.
Tom's Hardware: Windows XP x64, Promise and Reality
J. M. Pescado:
Am I looking at compatibility issues if I just plug Ye Olde Windoze for Ye Olde 32 Bit Machines onto one of these newfangled gewgaws?
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