How's your hardware and gaming performance?

Well I finished work on my new computer and figured I'd share the specs.

AMD 64 +3200
1024mb DDRSDRAM
Geforce FX 5600
Weston Digital 40gig HDD

I've had some really nice perfomance tests playing quake and F.A.K.K.2 which were flawless at the highest resolution settings with all features supported. Some of the games that were smooth, but had rough spots were alien vs predator 2 or giants, which the frame rate barely stutters. The big problem I ran into was when I had Marrowwind installed, I noticed a huge drop in performance and that's something I'm a little ticked over after having to do a complete upgrade.

Also I've noticed something not right when I ran my genesis emulators, for example wgens would sometimes get garbled music and kega causes my system to freeze up. On the other hand, mame works perfectly fine.

I'm thinking of next year I'll get a new graphic card since this one was stored for awhile being that it could get 8x support on my last system. I'm wondering how PCI express compares to the format I'm using considering this just came out.

My 2003 PC:

AMD Athlon XP 2600+
1 GB DDR SRAM
Ati Radeon X700 Pro (Upgraded in from a 9700 Pro)
Western Digital 80 GB HDD

If you don't have Windows XP64 does the processor actually add anything? Can games written for 64-bit bypass the OS to use it?

My PC is an ancient P4-1.3ghz with a GeForce FX5200. It has 768 megs of RAM and a 40 gig HD.

Very depressing. Im currently thinking about building a brand new one, but that might not happen for a while.

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If you don't have Windows XP64 does the processor actually add anything? Can games written for 64-bit bypass the OS to use it?

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Yea, if they write the entire game in assembly language and dont touch 32-bit DirectX or anything like that.

I'm checking in for another gig of memory tomorrow (that's if my shop has any in yet). What is XP's limit when it comes to maxing out?

It's whatever your motherboard is limited to. I've heard XP isn't doesn't utilize anything over a gig of ram well, but I can't remember where I heard that and it's easily a bunch of bologna.

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Originally Posted by voltz

I'm checking in for another gig of memory tomorrow (that's if my shop has any in yet). What is XP's limit when it comes to maxing out?

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good god man, forget the ram and get a real gpu. your bottleneck is your card atm not ram.

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Originally Posted by Rumpy

It's whatever your motherboard is limited to. I've heard XP isn't doesn't utilize anything over a gig of ram well, but I can't remember where I heard that and it's easily a bunch of bologna.

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its win98 that doesnt do well around a gig. xp i believe is set to 4 gigs before theres no noticable difference. and really anything over a gig is overkill. itll only help with video editing, photoshop filters and loading game maps.

XP 3000+
512mb DDRSDRAM
Nvidia 6600GT (AGP)
80gb (Maxtor) + 20gb (Seagate) HDD

Plays CS: Source just fine (1024x768, medium texture and quality) which is all I play on my computer right now.

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Originally posted by Voltz
I'm thinking of next year I'll get a new graphic card since this one was stored for awhile being that it could get 8x support on my last system.

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You must get a new graphics card. 6 months ago I had an Nvidia 5500FX, which I guess is just a bit worse than yours, and from changing the difference is phenominal. You should be able to pick one up for less than $150 - not that much.

for ~$500 bucks last year, I got:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+
ASRock mobo with Firewire and USB 2.0
Radeon 9800something
120GB HD (Seagate?)
1.5GB Dual-channel DDR RAM (two different brands, one is Kensington)
Dual-layer 16x DVD+/- burner
32x CDRW
Rosewill case
keyboard, optical mouse, 17" gateway CRT ect.

Does all I need it to and didn't cost as much as I thought it would.

Ye gads!

My 2003 PC:
ASUS A7N8X2.0 Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.1 GHz)
512 DDR SDRAM
80 GB Western Digital ATA Drive
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
nVidia nForce onboard audio

It ran Half-Life 2 nicely, so for now that's all I can ask for, but I think I'll have to upgrade soon.

Athlon 64 3000+
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe
1gb DDR400 RAM
140gb SATA
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb

Still a decent mid-range system. Runs everything well so far. Latest game is Battlefield 2 at 1024x768 with everything set to high, and AA turned to 2x. I might fudge a little more with the video settings later.

Depending on what comes out next year, I may upgrade a bit next August.