boiler

Here's a pretty solid system that has room for upgrades in the future (all of this from Newegg): Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz 2M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - Retail ASUS P5B LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail EVGA 256-P2-N624-AR GeForce 7900GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 KO Video Card - Retail CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory - Retail Rosewill RD450-2-DB ATX V2.2 450W Power Supply 115/230 V UL, CSA, TUV, FCC - Retail Grand Total: $578.96 This doesn't include a case of course, but all those components are pretty solid. The PSU is not the most extravagant, but I have used a couple of those in other builds and they are solid enough until you're ready for a more major video card upgrade. The ones I have installed have been running with no problems at all for almost a year. That card is also going to be pretty good, especially for a middle of the road graphics setup. I have 2GB of that RAM in my own setup, no complaints. You may want to consider adding another GB at some point, but 1GB should be alright as long as you're running XP. Hope this helped you some!

I spent just over 30 minutes digging my car out of its parking place this morning because the %$#@*&! maintenance guy from my apartment complex spent the whole late afternoon/evening throwing snow from his snow blower from the sidewalk onto my car. Needless to say I was late to work. btw, when I added my smiley, I found this. what the heck is up with this??

I must not be as sadistic as some people out there....

Your man-card has now been revoked. Please return it at your earliest convenience. Thank you. FTR: I ride a V-Rod, Harley-Davidson ftw now if only the weather would warm up so I could get my baby out again.....

I was thinking of getting this game, but I think I would be considered one of the "pubbers" to be hammered.... got me all scurrrrrrred

just read IGN's review of Crackdown. Kinda said everything I've thought myself after playing the demo. I have found that I am rather addicted to scaling tall buildings, upgrading powers, and whuppin some gang members. I think I'm going to be getting this next week (assuming there will still be copies available and all the Halo 3 junkies don't raid my stores first)

Alright, here's my take on all this nonsense: Never pay attention to the raving fanboys of anything. Never pay attention to the doomsday predictors and trash talkers. Take all the garbage these two groups say, put them together, look somewhere in the middle, and there's the reality of it all. That guy does make some valid points about DRM, but I think a lot of it was exaggerated and he was making some pretty big leaps to conclusions. I'm not going to NOT buy something (double negative, I know) because some liberal whack-job is screaming at me not to. I have Vista running on this laptop, not because I was anxious to upgrade to it but because I ordered it from Dell after they switched to Vista. I don't think Vista is a great deal different functionally than XP, at least for what I need it for. I also know that it's not the satanic evil operating system some are making it out to be. I like the visual and organizational changes they made. Not thrilled about hardware usage up to this point. The security warnings are a little annoying, but that can be worked on. The dang OS has been out for all of two weeks, give it some time before calling for a boycott and searching for copies of XP on the black market in two months. my two cents anyways

MOZZ!!!!!!!! holy crap, good to see you around again! please refrain from pointing your p90 in my direction, k thx

cracks me up that PS2's are killing the PS3's in sales like this. I have to admit that once I got my third (3rd !) PS2, the new design is pretty solid and I'm not worried about it crapping out on me over the long run. So I will still be able to fire it up in 5 years and enjoy some good old fashioned GTA or MGS fun! thats one of my favorites! LOL

Since I let my trial XBL Gold membership lapse (I hadn't played a single online game once while I had it), I wasn't able to download the demo until this past weekend. I played it for about a half hour, and I was pretty impressed. It was more fun than I was anticipating! The lock-aim was a little wacky and didn't seem to target the guy I wanted to shoot a lot of the time, but it wasn't life threatening most of the time. The cheesy announcer guy was crackin me up though. Good stuff! I'm thinking about getting this when it comes out now. and with the Halo 3 beta attached, I might consider upgrading to a gold account. I'll challenge someone to an NHL07 battle go wings

I have never played HL1 I was stuck in console land and had crappy non-gaming PCs during that time.

so are you not going to be replacing your 360?? I am on my 3rd PS2, first one died after a year (which I replaced out of pocket cause of no service plan), then second one died (I did get the service plan this time) and got replaced with the "gen 2" version. The smaller gen 2's are more reliable than the older ones, but I replaced the one out of pocket because I didn't want my investment in all those games I had to be worth nothing

nah he's talking bout M2, who just built a smoking fast and expensive computer with the works and who said it had so much power he didn't need to overclock

yes you have a nice rig, but people that post scores a lot higher than yours have nicer ones with top-end graphics cards, processors, and RAM. My gaming computer has the following specs: Core 2 Duo E6600 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 667 eVGA 7800GT CO My score the last time I ran 3DMark06 was around 4300 or so, but my CPU, RAM, and (I'm guessing) video card are all faster than your setup. One thing to note is that the same setup scored nearly 8000 on 3DMark05. The new benchmarks are a lot harder on older hardware. I'm guessing your CPU is the bottleneck in your setup. The graphics card and my monitor are the things holding me back on mine. Honestly, benchmark scores don't really mean a whole lot most of the time. Even with your "low" benchmark score, I'll bet you get very good framerates in Source with most of the visual goodies turned on. In the end, isn't that the most important thing? Seems like some people use that benchmark to brag about their setup. I use the benchmark just to get an idea as to how fast my system is compared to other people's. My benchmark scores are more middle of the pack compared to the mosters that some people drop money on, but as far as gaming experience, I don't think I'm much behind them at all. Anyways, just my 2 cents. Don't upgrade just to get higher benchmarks, do it to improve your gaming experience Any minute now, Cujo will come along with his opinion and everything I just said should be completely ignored, as he knows 234,683,308 times more about this stuff than I do!

if you included your rig setup in this thread instead of making us look for it somewheres else it would vastly decrease your waiting time

just as there are things you wish could be un-said, there are many things I wish I could un-see

My guess from that screenie is bad driver. With your rig, it should not look like that. I'm running an evga 7800GT KO and can run everything max settings at 1280x1024 and everything looks and runs gorgeous. Obviously your graphics setup takes mine out behind the woodshed and beats it into submission, so you shouldn't be having those kind of issues

..............

I've been rendering 3D animations in Blender most of the day for inclusion in my informed consent for patients DVD that I am producing. Hopefully it will make me some MONEH!

The graphics in far cry were bleeding-edge sweet a couple years ago when it came out, and I still think they hold up pretty nicely today. Any of the really open areas with water, etc can be breathtaking with the long draw distances. The gameplay is NOT always run a gun however... it requires a little stealth, a little suprise, and LOTS of firepower and explosions to beat. There are some areas where its full steam ahead blow everything to bits (like the driving sections) but if you try to play the whole game that way it will be pretty hard. It's also very likely that you will be able to play far cry at higher settings than F.E.A.R., as it is slightly older than F.E.A.R., which was known for taxing even high-end systems when it first came out. Anyways, I recommend both games. Both have very fun single player experiences

Follow up on my new laptop (also posted in my other topic): Vista gaming performance is not too bad on this laptop, 3399 3DMark06(v. 1.1.0) roughly 1000 pts behind my gaming rig, but still respectable enough to play source with nearly all goodies turned on. Here's hoping nvidia gets some better drivers together soon, maybe that will help some. Inspiron 9400 Vista Business Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0 GHz, 667MHz) 2GB DDR2 @ 533MHz <--- weak link (speed wise) according to Vista 256MB nvidia 7900GS go <---- which dell underclocks a little too heavily imo 160GB SATA HD (5400rpm) 17" WUXGA Truelife LCD (1920x1200 native)

So much for soliciting people to sign up...

I had to stop playing that for a week because it kept on giving me nightmares. AND I'M 19!! But then my comp crashed and I couldn't find where they keep the saved games. I'm too much of a coward to redo it all. Suck it up man! It's not THAT scary I really enjoyed playing through F.E.A.R., great combat and effects. Some good "make you jump" scares but nothing too traumatic. Oh, and that Alma girl needs to seek professional help. I liked the whole game. Got a little repetitive at times, but that didn't really take much away from the experience for me. The story was one of the main driving forces in getting me to storm through the whole things as quickly as I did.

Update on my new laptop: It just came in today! Took me about an hour to clean all the crap off of it that dell piles in and adjust the settings in Vista to my liking. I must say that I am VERY impressed so far. The display at 1920x1200 is absolutely gorgeous! I've never worked on a monitor high resolution higher than 1280x1024 before, so it's crazy how much screen real estate this gives me. On the performance front, here are some results I got for benchmarks: 3DMark06 (v1.1.0) 3399 - stock drivers and specs listed in first post. (This is Vista as well, not sure how much of a performance hit I'm taking) CS:S Stress test: (Maxed settings @ 1920x1200 except no AA - "suggested settings" for my system + max water fx) 101.9 fps 38.4 fps (same max settings but with 2xAA) I'd say thats not too shabby for a laptop (at least one in this price range). Since this wasn't meant to be a "gaming laptop" I'm very satisfied with the performance thus far. I know Dell underclocks their cards horribly (clock speeds much lower than standard 7900gs), so maybe someday I'll flash my BIOS and get some extra juice out of it for reference, my home "gaming rig" with XP Pro, E6600, ASUS P5B, 2GB DDR2 667, evga 7800GT - scored 4307. methinks that my graphics card in my gaming rig is starting to hold me back I might have to start looking into an upgrade if ATI ever gets their acts together to provide some competition with nvidia to bring the prices down a bit on the dx10 cards

omgh8u..... I've just blown an hour at work on this thing! lol