Malevolent-Gaming

I forgot to post these:





I built basically the same rig that Knickie has, except I migrated my current graphics card to it. It's pretty amazing what you can get for a couple hundred bucks these days. I had planned to wait a bit longer, but it was mainly a matter of convenience that Core i5 and Windows 7 came out at the same time, and I didn't want to go through the hassle of an OS upgrade more than once. And Core i5 really sweetened the deal by making performance affordable.

8 GB of RAM makes Windows 7 really fast.

There are more build pics at my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/entroper/s ... 692808874/

Omg...you are right. Now that I'm on Windows 7 64bit...I don't have to limit myself to 3 gigs........ indeeed...

Omg...you are right. Now that I'm on Windows 7 64bit...I don't have to limit myself to 3 gigs........ indeeed...

You get new PCs pretty often don't you, Entroper?

I think the last one I put together was about 4 years ago, though it received a CPU upgrade after a year, and a GPU upgrade after 2 years. I try to stretch my dollars and hardware as far as I can without missing out on the games that I want. Which is getting easier, since computers have gotten much cheaper in the last decade. The computer that my parents bought me for college in 1999 was $2800. This one is 5x cheaper, and it should last longer.

When I was younger, I always felt like I had crappy hardware, but I think it was more the fact that hardware was advancing so rapidly, so decent hardware became crappy more quickly. That computer in 1999 was 550 MHz, and AMD and Intel were just starting their sprint to 1 GHz. And just as soon as they got there, Intel surged forward to 3 GHz. Meanwhile nVidia and ATi were adding new features every year, 32-bit color, T&L, antialiasing (remember when it was called FSAA?), shaders, you name it. Now we have 64-bit multi-core CPUs and unified shader architectures, and... it's not at all clear what we need next, aside from just more incremental performance gains.

Very true. That and the dwindling of the "hardcore" pc market means that system requirements are quite low for most new games compared to yesteryear.

You had a $2800 PC in 1999? I had a 500mhz K6-2 processor and my beloved Voodoo3 2000 (overclocked to a free Voodoo3 3000). It was as much of a computer as I could buy with all of my saved up lawn mowing money, and so proud was I that I put thumb tacks through the back of my Voodoo3 carton and posted it on the wall in my room.

Two years later people were already on Geforce 3 Ti500s and Athlon XPs and I was totally screwed, as all of my money went straight into college tuition.

Nowadays the computer I've got (two years old) still chugs along quite well with new titles, and it's nice to not have to endure poor framerates.

Yeah, but it was just a Pentium III 550 MHz and a TNT2 Ultra 32 MB. 128 MB PC100, 18 GB 5400 rpm HD. UATA66 baby!

God, I can't believe I remember all that. Probably what made it so expensive were the 19" CRT, and the 2.1 Boston Acoustics speakers, that had a Gateway-only digital input. And the 250 MB internal Zip drive (SURE GLAD I HAD ONE OF THOSE!). I rolled into my dorm with a badass computer, and before the end of freshman year, the GeForce 2 GTS had been released, which did 1600 Mtexels/s to my poor old TNT2's 333, and had hardware T&L and FSAA to boot. I did end up buying a GeForce 2 Pro about a year later, and another 128 MB of RAM, both of which helped a lot in Serious Sam. But multiplayer was pretty much out of the question without a 1 GHz CPU.

Yeah, those were definitely the days of keeping up with the Joneses. I pretty much stuck to TFC and Counter-strike as a result.

I remember being excited when my new computer had a math coprocessor - Fuck yeah 3d Studio Max!

Ha! My Voodoo3 did the same number of Mtexels/s as your TNT2!

NyQ! Are you going to be L4D2-ing?

Well, if you wanted them in 16 bits, I guess.

My brother just built a new beastie with the i7 chip.

I love the case you got. It's what my wife and I have.

Microcenter has the i7 920 for $200.00. The cheapest around so far. They have i7 860 for $229.

How's the new PC treating you, Entroper? I went on an excursion to NY for the first time last weekend and when I got back I was surprised to find that my desktop no longer boots.

I removed the RAM and soundcard and after powerup nary a POST error was heard. I'm not whether the mobo or the processor is the culprit, but right now I don't have the free time to figure it out so I'm going to just replace it all and then come back to it later when I get some time.

Would you suggest what you're running or something even newer?

Slight fan/hd movement, LEDs but no indication of the beast awakening? Try a new Power Supply.
You'd be amazed at how quickly this is the culprit.

Fans power up completely, hdds power up, I hear the dvd drive spinning and the light on that works. It ends there though.

The marketplace hasn't changed much in the past 6 months. Core i5-750 is still the best bang for your buck, though there are now a few more higher-performance options that won't stretch the budget too much. The only trouble I've had with this PC is the freaking terrible sound drivers. L4D2 would run for between 2 and 30 minutes, then all sound would cease, and Windows sounds wouldn't even play after quitting, forcing a reboot. Realtek/Intel haven't fixed the problem, I'm currently just running the basic MS sound driver, which works fine.

I'm thinking motherboard BTW, if everything is powered on and there's no POST beep.

1. Check the power button switch, sometimes they stick. Fixed that for an old lady once.
2. Try resetting your bios by pulling the battery out of your motherboard out and then putting it back in.
3. Look for burned capacitors on your motherboard. Thats always fun.