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Video cards... is 512MB "decent"?


By-Tor

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Ok... found my system specs. I found out from the receipt that paid 299 € for this... so it definitely wasn't expensive. It came without OS of course... don't want to pay extra for things that any bozo can get for free. Fake cracked Windows with gen performance and all updates... goes along well with my rep philosophy. :D

I wanted a low end machine for cheap, mainly for photo editing and Internet browsing... and apparently that's what I got. I didn't know I was going to play new games but recently changed my mind. :)

Processor: Amd Athlon X2 5200 AM2 64bit

Mainboard: ASUS M2N68-VM NF630A DVI,HDMI,VGA

HardDrive: 250gb sata 7200rpm

MEMORY: 2048mb DDR2 800Mhz

DVD -RW dual layer 20x

Power: 400w ATX

Video card: Integrated GF7050PV

Sound card: Integrated 8-CH.HD Audio

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By-Tor,

Processor looks good

Power Supply looks good

Add at least 1gb system memory

Add external video card, preferrably w/1gb ram. GeForce cards are good. You may have to change bios settings to disable on-board video but probably not.

Good luck,

w

+1

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More excellent advice.

I'll get that 9600 gt card that Ricardo suggested (if it uses lower power than 8800 gt) and add 1GB of ram.

I actually received another PC game today, MLB 2k9 Baseball and I was shocked how slowly it ran. It was like playing one of those chd "modern" games in MAME emulator. It was terrible... I hope this better card helps.

Thanks again everyone for the great suggestions. This is the place where you can find anwers to all questions.

PS: Oh I still have another one... what's the meaning of life? :D

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More excellent advice.

I'll get that 9600 gt card that Ricardo suggested (if it uses lower power than 8800 gt) and add 1GB of ram.

I actually received another PC game today, MLB 2k9 Baseball and I was shocked how slowly it ran. It was like playing one of those chd "modern" games in MAME emulator. It was terrible... I hope this better card helps.

Thanks again everyone for the great suggestions. This is the place where you can find anwers to all questions.

PS: Oh I still have another one... what's the meaning of life? :D

That will cost you 1 White Explorer II :D

w

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good stuff, but you will need to get the 9600gt that is pci express x16, not the pci express 2.0 x16. Your motherboard does not support the 2.0 so therefor buying it would be useless. Just make sure before you buy!

-Ricardo

And again they are really easy to install, if you have questions, just pm me or email me

iclerek@me.com

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Hmm.. -_- I've built a huge number of gaming machines in the last 9 years, and my recommendations were to allow you to get the best gaming rig out of your system...

You see, like I said - buying low quality or having inconsistant RAM in your system will cause you a diminished performance in games.

The 9600 GT is not even comparable to the 8800 GTX, if you can fit the card in and get it at a good price like I've seen.. you should absolutely choose this card.

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Damn... I already bought the 9600... not because I thought it was better (I definitely trusted ammandel's suggestion 100%) but I was a bit worried about my power supply (as ricardo said the 8800 takes more power) but no worries guys, I get excellent performance (actually I could call it "superb" compared to my integrated POS) from this one. MLB 2k9 looks incredible, and runs smooth as butter (anyone wants the game BTW, I can give you the RS links)!?

I also bought an extra 2GB RAM.

I didn't want to install everything there but gave 20€ to the nerdy kid in the computer store. I said "I'll give this to you for installing the stuff... if I see you to put it into your own pocket". :D

He set up everything for me and it's working like a dream. I get totally different performance from this machine now.

Next time I'll just buy the best gaming machine that money can buy. In the long run it's much easier so you don't have to do these updates which are always frustrating.

Millions of thanks to all of you. I'm happy. :)

PS: Why those integrated cards are so bad? I mean, I almost got the same performance from my ancient Celeron 1300 in the old days (in some old games).

@its_urabus: Much appreciated my old friend... but all cool now! :)

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No worries BT. The 9600 will serve you well. On a side note, we used the 8600 in workstations with 350 watt power supplys with no issue. Dual core amd's with 4 gig of ram and 2 raptors. Switched the 8600's out to quadro boards as we needed to run certified drivers for our cadd/bim programs.

As for buying the best system you can, if you have endless $ sure, but usually one step down in performace will save you 30% in $ but only decrease system performace by 10% or so. That is what I do at home. At the office, it's the best of the best.

If anyone else is looking for an upgrade, maybe with a small donation to the board the 8600 could be yours. :)

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Intigrated cards aren't the best on any machine, they tend to be just stock low end GPU's because they are cheap and of course, you wouldn't be able to integrate somethin the size of the 8800 on a mother board and have room left for the important stuff!!

It's like everything else in the markets today, be PC's, cars, motorcycles, watches, the after market parts industry thrives on 'upgrading' from your stock "insert product of choice here". The aftersales market is massive and it pays back to the main Industry by ways of the original maker normally having a working relationship with the aftersales company.

As long as this market is alive, and trust me, it will never die. Your 'stock' machine of choice will never be 'as good' as it could be!!

It's kind of like us on here, asking why the factories make stupid mistakes or miss something we feel is really important, so we go find better parts, better dials, hands, movements. And so the wheel keeps turning.

There will NEVER be a 'perfect' product as there will always be someone who wants, bigger, better, faster and louder!!

Glad you got fixed By-Tor, enjoy the Baseball, game of champions it is!!

Sixx :bones:

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XP64, vista 64, certain server OS can all address more than 4gig. I use XP 64 at the office with 12 gig of DDR3-1600. My home machine is a dual xeon workstation with 8 gig of ddr2 4200 running windows 7 64 bit.

Neither machine runs out of memory, and I've never used more than 10 gig on the Xp64 machine. Gaming machines need no more than 4 gig.

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Being a daily windows xp user, and a beta tester for both vista and windows 7, I can tell you that vista is nothing but a speed bump on the path to windows 7. IMHO windows7 is head and shoulders above vista. Windows 7 should be a service pack for vista, but there are too many changes to the behind the scenes to do it that way. If there are vista users out there, you should be getting a $99 upgrade option, and trust me, you will love it. And 64 bit supports more ram than you can fit on 99% of all systems.

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This might already have been addressed but from the photo of the interior of this PC, I can see that there is only 1 RAM chip stick in there. This prevents the memory bus from running in Dual Channel mode ... when you install RAM in pairs, your motherboard interleaves the RAM addresses and can access the RAM almost 2x faster, since it treats each RAM chip stick as a different memory "channel" ... if you have 1 2Gig stick in there, it would probably be better for you to to have 2x 1G sticks!!

When you make this change, your BIOS boot up message will now say "Memory runs in Dual Channel mode!"

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XP64, vista 64, certain server OS can all address more than 4gig. I use XP 64 at the office with 12 gig of DDR3-1600. My home machine is a dual xeon workstation with 8 gig of ddr2 4200 running windows 7 64 bit.

Neither machine runs out of memory, and I've never used more than 10 gig on the Xp64 machine. Gaming machines need no more than 4 gig.

:drool: You have some mean monsters, dude! :Jumpy:

I'm only running a core2quad with 4gig and 9800GTX at home... :blush:

Being a daily windows xp user, and a beta tester for both vista and windows 7, I can tell you that vista is nothing but a speed bump on the path to windows 7. IMHO windows7 is head and shoulders above vista. Windows 7 should be a service pack for vista, but there are too many changes to the behind the scenes to do it that way. If there are vista users out there, you should be getting a $99 upgrade option, and trust me, you will love it. And 64 bit supports more ram than you can fit on 99% of all systems.

That's great to hear too! Looking forward to its launch!

This might already have been addressed but from the photo of the interior of this PC, I can see that there is only 1 RAM chip stick in there. This prevents the memory bus from running in Dual Channel mode ... when you install RAM in pairs, your motherboard interleaves the RAM addresses and can access the RAM almost 2x faster, since it treats each RAM chip stick as a different memory "channel" ... if you have 1 2Gig stick in there, it would probably be better for you to to have 2x 1G sticks!!

When you make this change, your BIOS boot up message will now say "Memory runs in Dual Channel mode!"

How so very true on that count... :good:

And By-Tor... grab a new gfx card, it's gonna do you a world of good... :)

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@ coolfire, my office machine is a BEAST:

supermicro 5046a-xb barebones

intel i7-965 extreme edition

12 gig of OCZ platinum ddr3-1600

2 intel x-25-e solid state drives

dual quadro fx3800's

windows xp64

faster than anything I've ever used, if something is slow, its the coding of the program not the machine. OTB, with no overclocking can calculate 1 million places in SuperPi in 12 seconds. Yea, its fast...

Home is just a dual 3.2g xeon work station with 2 raptors, and dual 8800gtx's, and its like a dinosaur compared to my machine at the office. If I ever get laid off, I am telling them I want the PC...

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@ coolfire, my office machine is a BEAST:

supermicro 5046a-xb barebones

intel i7-965 extreme edition

12 gig of OCZ platinum ddr3-1600

2 intel x-25-e solid state drives

dual quadro fx3800's

windows xp64

faster than anything I've ever used, if something is slow, its the coding of the program not the machine. OTB, with no overclocking can calculate 1 million places in SuperPi in 12 seconds. Yea, its fast...

Home is just a dual 3.2g xeon work station with 2 raptors, and dual 8800gtx's, and its like a dinosaur compared to my machine at the office. If I ever get laid off, I am telling them I want the PC...

Wow your not kidding! The i7 is awesome! I built a computer for a kid a little bit after these were released, and let me tell you, that computer was blazing! I think the kid ended up paying a little over 5,000 for it. He wanted the extreme, 12gb ram, dual radeon hd cards (4gb total graphics), coolermaster cosmos case, 1200 watt psu, 2 raid 0 raptors, couple terabyte drives, water cooling...the works! I played a couple games on it, and it was really really fast. I think I pocketed 100 bucks from the kid for building it, i usually build them for gas money!

My computer I have now, is a dell...i got it for work. It is really pretty nice. It's the Dell Studio XPS 1640 laptop. Core 2 Processor, 512 gpu, 8gb ram, 320hdd, rgled screen, FULL 1080p in liquid led! Nice and fast but get's really hot...

-Ricardo

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