Quick PC Question-Gaming: More RAM?

[Okiewan]

and this is a newer, faster card, by a highly rated mfg: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=542035&sku=P56-2700

Much better deal imo, will be good for some time to come.

But, the ugly truth? If it's my money? I'd do this one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=671804&sku=P56-2714

 

[mrmodine]

I agree with Bob...the 2nd card he recommended would be the best bet.

Personally, I don't really think the brand name matters on the Nvidia chipsets because Nvidia puts out the reference drivers themselves on their website and you can download them for free. If you download the drivers for the namebrand stuff you also get a lot of crap you may not want and you are subject to them f*@%ing it up.

Just make sure you compare apples to apples with the chipset version...the one Bob recommends is MUCH faster than the one you had pasted in earlier.

 

[biglou]

FWIW-I just spent 4 hours playing Halo and I bumped the resolution up from the lowest setting to the highest, 1200x700 (or whatever), and also sharpened the details as much as they would go and bumped the sound quality up from med to high. Still plays the same, with the occasional nanosecond hangup, but sounds much better and looks way sharper. I'm more inclined to buy the $90 card than the $219 card since it should still be light years ahead of what I have now. I still plan to bump my RAM up with another 512meg here one day soon, too. Thanks for all the input everyone.

 

[biglou]

Can anyone tell me the diff between these three cards beside the price? Nothing on the Nvidia site, and the numbers are different than TigerDirect's.

VCGFX52APB
VCGFX52PPB
VCGFX52UAPB

 

[mrmodine]

The VCGFX52UAPB has TV Out support using Mini DIN (SVideo) and DVI support (for your vid cam)but only supports AGP 8X. (You need to make sure your motherboard supports AGP 8X.

The VCGFX52APB has TV Out support using Mini DIN too but does not have DVI support. It supports AGP 8X as well as backwards compatible to 4X.

The VCGFX52PPB is the same as the above EXCEPT, IT IS A PCI CARD RATHER THAN AGP...YOU DON'T WANT THIS ONE.

FYI, if you do buy a new card I would purchase your old one from you...its better than what I've got now...money has been tight so I have not upgraded in a long time. Maybe you can make me a deal in exchange for tech support and installation !! ;)

 

[jeffd]

Originally posted by BigLou


Also, when I shut the game down, I can hear the processor grinding away and the PC is slow to react compared to other times until it gets finished doing whatever it is it does. Then it's back to smokin' fast again. Is this also a RAM issue? Keep in mind, I capture video into huge AVi files and do all my editing on this box and it seems to chug right along, with the occasional stall. RAM? More RAM?!

The grinding away sound is your hard disk drive being used for virtual RAM. When you use up all of your physical RAM the OS starts dumping pages of memory to disk. Although this allows your very resource hungry MS OS and game to continue to operate - the act of swapping to disk is a performance limiting action to say the least (aluminum oxide on a spinning platter is always slower than silicon oxide on a chip). Not to mention that IDE (or even EIDE) disk drives are very CPU intensive when a lot of disk IO is going on. So once yuou start dumping to disk a lot of things can slow down. Sort of a chain reaction...

I would bump the ram to 768 at a minumum and if you are getting anywhere near serious about gaming I'd invest in a good gaming video card.

-jeffd

 

[Chili]

Now it's been quite some time since I did any serious gaming and I may have the facts here a little confused due to my RAM having to dump everything to my brain. In reference to Jeff's post it seems to me I used to preset the virtual memory to 4x the amount of RAM instead of letting windows manage the virtual memory, this stopped windows from constantly resizing the swap file. I also recall that anytime on a multi HD system placing the swap file on another HD to reduce any accesses on the HD you were gaming on.

This was many moons ago and on a win98 system so I'm not sure any of it is still valid or useful but perhaps some of the more savy gamers will be able to decipher my drivel and update it into something useful :laugh:

 

[KelvinKDX]

Lou,

<ake sure you use something like NexTag or PriceGrabber to find the best price on the card you decide upon.

Also - don't forget that whatever you get - you will find the same or better card a week later at a better price!  :eek:

I would also reccomend one of the FX cards over the older Ti cards - just Keep doing your research and soon they will be dirt cheap.  :laugh:

JimK

 

 

[biglou]

Danman and anyone else-Looking at these settings, would you increase them?

Click

 

[mrmodine]

In windows XP, I would leave the swap file alone. Windows takes good care of it.

You have good advice and a good course of action now...just go with that imho.

 

[Okiewan]

Lou,
Something to keep in mind about buying RAM.. most new machines/RAM require that the ram be put in in pairs ... ie; you can't just buy one 512 and install it... you'd have to go with 2 - 256. You need to see how many slots are open on the motherboard to determine how to upgrade. There "should" be 2 open slots for more RAM, but sometimes the MFG uses it all, meaning you'd have to actually remove the RAM that came with it to upgrade. That means taking in to account how much you pulled out....

Also, make sure to get the right kind of RAM and that the rated speed of the RAM is eual to or greater than the RAM you have, assuming you don't have to dump the current.

 

[biglou]

Yeah, I'm hip to the RAM thing. I got four slots, PC1066 RDRAM (the most expensive and scarcest available, apparently...). Currently, two sticks of 128, so if I added two more sticks of 256, that would give me 768meg. Not worth it to go the full 1gig for me right now.

Edit:Doh! Maybe if I looked for the right RAM. PC1066 not PC1600...

So, that said, I think that's my next move-2x256 and grab a new card one of these days. Thanks for all the help everyone. Now, lets go look at Speedy's TV thread, as there are many questions there that I am interested in, too! :)

 

[holeshot]

I'm not much a gamer these days, but I do have Halo for the X-box. I still have an interest for these types of games (played it to the end on the easy level). My kid pointed out that I wasn't a very good player because I didn't use all my weapons effectively. :eek: