What PC setups do you all have and do you play games on your PC?

In two weeks,I will be using these specifications:

15 inch TFT monitor

AMD ATHLON 64 3000+ Processor
(About 2.6GHz in speed)

1024mb DDR ram Memory

200GB hard drive

256mb ATI Radeon Graphics card(8xAGP)

DVD RW,DVD R,CD RW and so on

DVD rom drive and cd player (seperate drive to one above)


Against my current:

17 inch VGA monitor

Intel Celeron 1.4GHz

256mb SD RAM Memory

2 X 40 GIG hard drives

INTEL onboard/shared graphics 32mb

CD RW and DVD drive combined

I can play Half Life and Soldier Of Fortune okay on my current setup but as soon as any flames flicker on screen it causes long lag.


Will anybody be playing Half Life2 when it eventually gets released?

I don't know much bout PC specifications or Half Life, but I do know that my brother was senior engineer/developer/designer of the Athlon chip in your PC!!

I expect that your juicy new system will be more than enough for a very very pleasant gaming experience..heh Nice box!

What chipset is on the main board? I've had a couple of flaky nvidia2 chipset troubles that have me running from those chips.. but like I said.. I'm no gamer.

Cheers! Ian.

I hate you Emma... :-( *Bitter E-boy*

I feel so inadequate! It's not my fault though! My wife bought this PC instead of letting me build it! I told her, "honey, I'm a tech, I do this for a living, just let me handle it. I'll save us a buck or two and it'll blow the socks off anything in the neighborhood." Instead I go on cruise and come home to the thing on my desk... I don't even want to talk about it. :-(

I don't really hate you Emma... No, wait... Yes, yes I do. ;-) J/K

Originally posted by Emma S

on my current setup



The new system sounds like it wil do just fine. I'd be concerned about going from 17" to 15" screen even though the TFT will likely give you better definition. You'll have to get use to the diff.

What are you doing with the old system?

My son is playing similar games on a 550mhz P3. And you can imagine the complaining I hear about loading times and screen jitter. I think Halo is the only game that seems to play well on his PC.

SIGH! You people are killing me....

I used to get the wholesaler and all sorts of other catalogues because of my work at the Space and Naval Warfare Center Charleston. They'd always have all these conventions where the defense contractors would all come and hawk their stuff. Being that SPAWAR is primarily and electronics engineering facility, and I'm an electronics tech (at the time I was playing mobile systems field engineer, but still a navy tech, having the same fancy title as the civilian engineers I worked with didn't get me their pay checks... :-( ) So to me it was a total drool fest. :-) TOYS!!!!! Spectacular toys! Of course, I was more interested in the hardware than the software, though a lot of the software was cool too. Sometimes the hardware vendors would demo the speed on their various boxes with video games. BIG SMILE! Hey, when you think about it, there aren't too many apps that require that kind of number crunching, rendering, etc. that are readily available spur of the moment in vivid living color. Not to mention the U.S. Government has actually funded a few such video games for the purpose of teaching classroom tactics. You know, the part right before they take the newbies out on a paint ball exercise for the first time or something and embarrass them. ;-) I digress badly though.

Point is, I used to get all these catalogues. I actually built my at work desk top at SPAWAR using spare parts because I was an unexpected arrival, and they had just given up their extra desk tops to the carrier lab just prior to my arrival. The carrier lab was big money, mobile systems relatively small potatoes. Them that has the money has the say so, as they say. The carrier labs stole about 50% of our lab space and about half our tools too. Heck, they used to steal me all the time. I was basically on rent from the Navy. :-)

Man, I'm rambling. Okay I'll shorten up. The wife saw the catalogues,and asked what they were before she threw them out. I told her, and asked her not to throw them out. She asked if I bought the parts if I could build a computer for the house I said HECK YEAH. So that was the plan until she bought the icky think sitting on my desk. I upgraded it a little bit, and she ain't too bad, but she needs a lot of work.

I'm thinking of starting from scratch and building a whole new one. With the old one though, I would drop in a more up to date processor. Over clock the crap out of it. I might consider refridgeration, but only if its worth the trouble. I can probably work a cooling scheme the will do the trick. These chips are designed to last ten years under normal operating conditions. What I'm going to do will shorten the chip's life span, but only by fifty percent, and it's be obsolete as hell by then anyway. Of course I'll have to up the memory again, but I'll need to dig to find memory compatible with my older mother board. They don't make the really big sticks in the old stuff either. I think it only goes up to 256 Mg. Only two slots available. Probably enough memory for a second line computer though. I don't even fill my hard drive now, and it's only a 40GB. Good sound card. Good graphics card. Not thinking specific manufacturers right now because it's been so long since I have even browsed.

Actually Ian, you have got me thinking so much lately I am not even really sure I really want a PC now. The machines I work on for a living are all unix monsters. UNIX has it's issues, but the machines scream. 50,000 item true simultaneous multi tasking and that's an ancient machine none of this NT multi-threading crap. Of course the hardware is that fast and that good because it really is better. Bigger better chips. That's why the old Tac-3's we used to buy were fourteen grand a'peice. They're commercial computers though. I wonder what one would cost straight to the consumer? I know you can run other operating systems as shells over top of the unix kernal. Ah well, outside my budget. Not exactly upgradable either, but then how much upgrading would you need to do? One of the old DTC2 Machines I worked on in 1990 could out perform any PC on the market today. Any custom PC for that matter. That would probably include the parallel processor models. But only probaly Those puppies are pretty slick. :-)

I'm sad now. My PC is pathetic.

I am a seroius computer geek and I have a wireless network with 3 pc's, two laptops and a laser printer attached to a wireless print server in my home. The system I am working on now is a P4/ 2.66Mhz laptop with a half a gig of ram and an 80gb HD. I play Finaly Fantasy on this machine and it does very well for a laptop.

E-boy, you speak my language. I never buy any desktop pc's or file servers. I built them all(except for the laptops) and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's not always cheaper, but at least you know whats going into your new machine. I love going to computer shows and taking advantage of thier bargains. That is the best way to keep the price down when building your own PC.

.........Final Fantasy....Halo......

brings back memories...


before the fire I would always have a house full of teenge boys playing both these games...

Yeah, I can never convince the wife to let me play hookey. :-(

I am way out of the loop on mainstream hardware these days. Not so out of the loop I couldn't build a damn fine PC, mind you, but I'd have to catch up while shopping. :-) You can get some really good deals on the internet too, but they're only REALLY REALLY good in bulk. Which I was able to capitolize on for ol' uncle sam, but it doesn't do crap for me. So, the shows are cool, if I can ever manage to get to one. In the mean time it's all about selling the virtues of a slicker hardware achitecture to the wife. "Oh, honey! I hate those popups too! I hate how long it takes to do that too! You know we could do this and that, and that other thing, easily and faster too, if we had more memory." :-) The pop ups have never REALLY been that big a problem. It's always really been the two kids. :-) They download more harmful code onto that box, and find more new ways to do it! Oh, I could stop them easily enough, but why destroy my job security. ;-) I never save anything critical on my PC. I already told my wife not to. She is the one encouraging me not to institute passwords and administrative controls. So, I said, "SO BE IT".

I might wring a few more years of life out of the mother board I have, but she won't accept much memory, is generally teeny, and Beyond just adding some basic hardware, upgrading the processor, and some additional memory fill, if I can ever find the dim sticks I'm looking for (their kind of old) and she's done. Couple years after that and she's a paperweight.

hey, E-Boy nd Beach Bum....maybe I should hire you two as consultants..I'm going to need to set up a home network soon...ad I haven't got a clue how to do it. What do you say, you boys for hire?

Emma it sounds like a awesome setup...would love to have something half that fast...am sitting on 40GB and 112 MB RAM i think it MIGHT be a DDR but not sure and dont feel like pulling the info up. although it is better than my old setup that i was lucky to go online at all...it was only 2GB and maybe 64MB RAM boy was i hating it. Good Luck with new system and enjoy it.

Good Lord, Girl---Please tell me that the gaming capability is just an added benefit and you'll do something more "worthwhile" with that monster. :frog: <---jealous

Erin, Ian, might be worth your while as a consultant, and I am sure, Beach bum would be too. I am out of the loop on the commercial PC end current products available. I have to get around to updating myself. Now if you need help with a tactical interface, or real time display and tactical data system, or over the horizon strike targeting type deal I'm your man. ;-) I could help, but I'd never dream of charging you.

i'm jealous. my dinosaur of a computer has 2 hard drives, and together they're only 10gb..... ecchhh.... this thing is slow and freezes up regularly. I would love to replace the hard drive with something bigger, but that would necessitate changing the processor, and i hesitate to do that on my own.

Originally posted by pembroke
i'm jealous. my dinosaur of a computer has 2 hard drives, and together they're only 10gb..... ecchhh.... this thing is slow and freezes up regularly. I would love to replace the hard drive with something bigger, but that would necessitate changing the processor, and i hesitate to do that on my own.

The processor does NOT need to be changed to accept a larger hard drive. What type of system do you have?
You should be able to put in a 40GB FAST drive without changing the processor or anything else.

Compaq 7260
the processor is an AMD-K6
I replaced the cd-rom with a cd-write and a few other things, but am a little leery of touching the hard-drive.

Judit,

Do you mean the mother board or the processor? I have seen mother boards with embedded drive controllers but even that shouldn't be any kind of problem....

BIOS? Is the BIOS telling you you can't have a drive any bigger than that? If that's the case technically you can, but that doesn't really count so I won't go there. You can replace your bios. No need to replace the processor.

I may be missing something....? I miss quite a few things on the PC end and then bang the palm of my hand against the forhead hard and go "DOH!" Comes from getting to used to similar, but not quite the same unix boxes, and quite dis-similar and very old discrete component military systems that will nonetheless turn your hair white with the nasty things they can do. ;-) I mean nasty in the Janet Jackson sense of the word as well as the warfare sense of the word in this context. Still, I can't see how it could be the processor as it would have no direct hardware connection to the device beyond the bus, and address bus. Even that would still be going through the controller. *Wishes he could open up Judit's PC and start tinkering now... :-(*

E-Boy... The closest I get to "tactical" is planning a h2o balloon ambush. LOL
Seriously though, that's interesting and cutting edge stuff you work with. Pretty impressive!

Most of it is more out of date than you think. The applications are just so... Specialized that there isn't a whole lot of competition out there to compare them with. Now that things are going commercial off the shelf, and country with a decent brain trust, and and a reasonable budget could easily duplicate them. It's the weapons systems and sensors that are unique.

Originally posted by E-boy
I hate you Emma... :-( *Bitter E-boy*

I feel so inadequate! It's not my fault though! My wife bought this PC instead of letting me build it! I told her, "honey, I'm a tech, I do this for a living, just let me handle it. I'll save us a buck or two and it'll blow the socks off anything in the neighborhood." Instead I go on cruise and come home to the thing on my desk... I don't even want to talk about it. :-(

I don't really hate you Emma... No, wait... Yes, yes I do. ;-) J/K
:D :D
My current computer has been causing a lot of problems and won't run a lot of games...but,how much do you think new PC costs? :D
I got it for £699 including VAT @Tiny.com (according to Xe.com,it's 1,239.46 in US dollars)it was a limited deal and I do not have to pay anything back for one year. :D

Just go and buy a PC and tell your wife it was a cheap offer/don't tell correct price. :D

Kat-if you want to find out the details,go to:
START
RUN
TYPE dxdiag (lowercase)
CLICK OK

And it'll give computer details :]


-By the way,I am going to be writing more to reply to everyone on here,I cannot do it all at once but I will so I am not ignoring anyone. :]
-Emma

PC's are cheap and getting cheaper all the time!
I worked in that business for more than 10 years and can tell you the best times to buy a PC are usually either at the end of a quarter or when a NEW model is launched. When a new model is launched they liquidate the old models for cheap. And the old models are usually more than enough power to do whatever you need!

At the end of the quarter every publicly traded hardware reseller is trying to boost sales to report better quarterly earnings. So, instead of buying one online you call up and beat the sales person up and they will give away all kinds of stuff to get the deal.
Try somewhere like CDW (cdw.com) or tigerdirect.com. Like I said, do your research on their website and then call and make a deal. Their website prices are typically anywhere from 8 to 18% margin on big hardware items. Accessories can be marked upas much as 40%!

Unless you are a PC tech I would just swap the box out with a new one. Just make sure that whatever you buy is suited for what you want to use it for. One Size does NOT fit all!