New Computer Help

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Maverickk
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New Computer Help

Post by Maverickk »

Yeah, so I'm shopping around for a new computer. I built my last one ground up. But I'm too lazy this time. I don't need anything super fantastic. Just something that will play Warhammer Online smoothly. I'm not sure of the minimum requirements. But from what I've been kinda reading, it will be an upgraded version of the Catacombs client. But when I played Catacombs, it would run okay. Not top notch.

My Configuration.
Processor - AMD Athlon XP 2800 (2.08 Ghz)
Memory - 1 Gig (Not sure what type of PC)
Video Card - ATI Radeon 9200 128mb
Hard Drive - Western Digital 40GB @ 5400rpm

I need advice on Processors, and Video Cards. I know pretty much about everything.
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Maverickk »

lol the edit button isn't working for me so here's my edit.

The video card is running on an 8x AGP I believe. They have some PCI-E now? That's where I need help. And all these Dual core processors confuse me.
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Maverickk »

This is a computer I saw at BestBuy.com

Check it out and see if maybe a simple upgrade to the video card would make it work for me. Thanks!

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 9877252949

I already got speakers, keyboards, all the essentials. Just need the tower.
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Sicyn
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Sicyn »

Alienware ftw! It's really expensive though. :) I bought a Dell XPS and it was nice too (again expensive).

I'm sure the Pavillion is a good computer, I agree you'll probably want a new video card. Do you know what the Front Side Bus (FSB) speed is on those machines?
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Cleon »

There's only one Pavillion I recommend.

Get the dv9260nr Notebook PC.

You can run any game you want, and use any media feature, etc, and do so from a portable laptop with an excellenet video card.

Get bluetooth keyboard and mouse to give it the full feel size of a desktop when at home on the desk.
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Maverickk »

So after doing a little bit of research this is the computer I'm going to buy within a couple months.

HP Pavillion AMD Althon 64 X2 5600+
Processor Speed - 2.8 Ghz
Front Side Bus - 2000 Mhz
Cache Memory - 1Mb + 1Mb on die Level 2
Power Supply - 300w Standard
Memory - 3 Gb (PC2 - 5300 DDR2 SDRAM) (Expandable to 8Gb)
Hard Drive - 400Gb SATA @ 7200rpm
Video Card - NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE @ 128 mb (Dedicated)
DVD Drive - 8x DVD-R DL; 16x8x16 DVD+RW; 16x6x16 DVD-RW; 12x DVD-RAM; 40x32x40 CD-RW
Operating System - Windows Vista Home Premium

This is the best deal I have found for the money. Only $685 at Best Buy. With this I'll see how Warhammer Online plays, and if I need to upgrade the video card and power supply I will. There are a couple questions I do have about this though. What is the cache memory mean? Also how strong is PC2 - 5300 DDR2 SDRAM compared to the old ram I was using? Last question, what kind of budget wise video card would be a great buy but getting the performance I need? I know pretty much nothing about video cards and what determines what is better than another besides the memory. One more question, this X2 processor I'm assuming is the dual processor thing. How does that work? Does it mean that it acts like a 5.6 Ghz computer? Fill me in please. :)

Sicyn - I think that the Alienware is the best stuff out there, as well as the Dell XPS. But way out of my price range. The only real gaming I have ever done is RPGs and MMORPGs. Which didn't really require top of the line stuff. What does the FSB help out with on computers?

Cleon - I would get a laptop. But I purchased one already (HP Pavillion DV6308) that I wasn't plan on using for gaming and I dont think it will play games very well, and probably too costly to upgrade. Plus I like playing my games on a desktop anyways. :P
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Sicyn »

Lets, see..well first, the Front Side Bus is the thing that transfer's items from the memory controller to the CPU. It's a "faster is better" kind of thing. :) Most gaming systems this day seem to have a FSB speed of 1GHz or higher, however, this isn't to say that lower speeds wouldn't be sufficient for <insert your game here>. Graphic intensive applications benefit from higher speeds, because to get the information to the graphics card it has to traverse the FSB.

Dual processors doesn't mean that you get "twice" the speed, although given the right application it can definitely give a performance boost. So imagine if you had a bag of potato's to peel. 1 Maverick has a top speed at which that can happen (that's Maverick's CPU speed). Now if there were two Mavericks, you would still peel a single potato at the same speed, but now you'd be able to peel 2 potatoes at once, essentially completing the task in half the time. Now it's not completely linear, because there are some other factors like whether or not CPUs share memory busses, etc. So the real question is will WAR take advantage of multiple CPUs...I certainly hope so, but DAoC only uses 1 CPU (that's called single-threaded), so it does not benefit from dual-core. However, you can do other things in the background, or run 2 instances of DAoC at one time, and it should run quite nicely because of the other CPU core.

Whew, okay, caches. :) There are different kinds of caches, but in this context we're talking about CPU caches, and I won't go into details, but it's memory on or close to the CPU (I don't think there is any traversal of the FSB). It's a way for the CPU to access it's potatoes faster. :D Again, it's a "more is better" approach. Just to give comparison, Alienware's highest end computer has an 8mb cache, and the lower end has a 4mb cache (both Intel).

On video cards...it's been a while since I've upgraded one, but the last card I bought was about $600...but that was a big card with a lot of memory. I bet you could spend around $200 and get a really decent video card. Really, you want to ask someone with less expensive tastes. :D Look around on Newegg.com (the best place, IMHO, to buy computer stuff! No, I don't get kick-backs. ;) )
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Leonthor »

I complement Sicyn on some good info and advice, but would like to offer a bit of my own as well.

A few pointers you should take into account about the configuration of the Best Buy system you are looking at. First, the system you described is a slightly nicer more powerful system than the Emachine my Mom just bought me as an early Christmas gift last week. Second, I strongly recommend you try to stick with an AMD processor based system cause the Intel Duocore's still aren't true 64 bit processors and I do believe one of the upgrades they made to the engine used in Catacombs was to take advantage of 64 bit processing. Third, from what I saw almost all the systems available at Best Buy are designed with the video & sound as part of the main board. That 128Mb of ram "dedicated" to the video is part of the 3Gb on the main board. If you like you can confirm that by going to the store, find a display of the model you had selected go into the control panel\ System performance and click the middle link that says something about advance system detail information. If the window that comes up doesn't say 3.0 Gb of Ram or 3072 Mb of Ram, then the video is sharing main Ram which should show as 2944 Mb of Ram. That difference may seem trivial, but a video processor sharing main Ram in the past was never as smooth as a separate video card with its own Ram on the card due to memory access time. I have been so busy all week that as of this posting I still haven't had time to take my new comp out of the box to set it up or test its performance with WOW. I will try to get back to you in a day or so after I tryout the new machine.

On a side note, the system I used when Catacombs launched (and ran it very smoothly might I add) was as follows:

Asus Mainboard with AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor & N-force 2 FSB chipset.
266 Mhz FSB.
1 Gb of DDR Ram (2 512 Mb sticks in a dual-channel memory access setup).
Ge-Force FX-5600 video card with 256Mb of DDR Ram.
80 Gb EIDE Hard Drive.
Windows XP Home Edition.
Sound Blaster Live 24-bit Audio with 5.1 surround sound. (Actually I added this about 2 months after Catacombs launched and was rewarded with much smoother sound & a slight but noticable system performance boost.)
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Maverickk »

Thanks for all the advice and info! Hey you wanna know whats kinda funny? That computer I just pointed out just went down $20 from yesterday! Huzzah!

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 6008217632

This is the comp.
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by Ach »

Custom build via NewEgg 4tehwin!!! Even if you don't buy it's a good place to get some feedback.
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Re: New Computer Help

Post by dangsos »

just built a computer last week from the ground up for like 675$ USD - shipping included
that includes everything but the speakers.....heres my speccs
19' 3ms response widescreen LCD
full sized tower with tooless installation came with 500w PSU with 2 12v rails so it's a pretty decent psu...i wana say it only ran at like 12v@18a though, but it's good enough if you aren't gona buy a high end videocard
2g ram (2x1gig) DDR2 800
2.8g dualcore athlon 64 X2
saphire 2400pro (256mb memory) pci-e card
40g hard drive @ 7200 rpm's
dvd/cd reader burner at good speed (dont feel like typing)
and I bought some tight peripherals...the mouse and keyboard cost me 60$

im guessing since i responded so late youve already purchased a comp....but if not I can give you some links to really good deals since i just got through researching my computer

ohh yeah my motherboard is a gigabyte m57 sli-s4 which has some really great upgradeability
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