posted 07-28- 03:21 AM               

What are the spec's of ya PC mate ?

I have a P3 450/64 RAM/8 Vid Card (no teasing here guys ).

runs ok at 800x600 as long as I keep the clouds off.

It'll depend on what combination of processor/RAM/Vid card you have.

Cheers,

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AGAS 5

posted 07-28- 12:27 PM               

AMD K6-2 333MHz processor with 3DNow
128MB RAM
Diamond Monster 3D II Video Accelerator 12MB(used in conjunction with onboard video)

While I'm at it, I'll ask this question. What is 3DNow? I recently came by the AMD processor and swapped it with the 233MHz performing 300MHz Cyrix 686 I used to have. Is 3DNow of any benefit to me? The system seems to run fine but is there anything I need to do to "enable" 3DNow?

What the heck, I'll also float this one. My main video is onboard shared AGP 1 to 4MB. As I said, I use an elderly accelerator with it. I have no actual AGP port, so I am considering a more robust PCI graphics card for my video. Would this be worth it?

This has all been prompted by the fact that I have been trying to play some complex missions lately (number of planes) and I often get to the point where the loader screen goes, the engine sounds start, and then it just ends. No error message, no nothing. Just back to the desktop.

Any help or advice appreciated.

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Be seeing you,
3dp
Visit RAF Harkness!

posted 07-29- 06:51 PM               

Well, the 3DNow has pretty much been covered, it's a similar system to having MMX processors, they are new commands to speed up and improve 3D rendering, but the game has to be written to use these commands, at the end of the day it's a plus to have 3DNow because it also supports MMX anyway.

With the video Katana has covered that aswell you should be able to disable your onboard graphics via your system BIOS, but yes you should check to make sure you can. As to the improvement you can expect.. not much to be honest. My previous-previous machine was an AMD K62-300 @ 366mhz + ATI Rage3D 4Mb, I uprgaded it with a Voodoo3 and went from my usual 9Fps to about 19Fps, this made the games playable, but not by much. Even after upgrading to the AMDK6-2 500 @ 550mhz I only got up to between 25-30 fps.

So, whats my honest answer here, well, a Voodoo3 will cost you about (over here) £80.. You could on the other hand save a little more cash and get a Duron900+M/B with GF2 onboard graphics for about £130. What I'm saying is you wont get a good increase in speed until you get a Duron (cheaper and a little faster than a Pentium3 and some Pentium4's) or an Athlon/P3 or P4. You lack of speed realy is processor related, I can say this after my experiences with AMD CPU's, which I love to be honest, but I know the K6-2 series are slow on floating point calcs which means even with a good g/card the game runs slowly.

Really man, look around for a Duron and mother board for it, a Via KT133a motherboard is very fast and very cheap, and my Duron 900 is running at 1008mhz just by setting the BIOS properly, using SiSoft Sandra 2001 Pro to benchmark, it runs faster than a Pentium4 1.2Ghz for a fraction of the price. You realy wont be happy if you upgrade your graphics card because the speed gain is so little for the money you've paid.

Damn.. thats a long explination lol But I know exactly where you're comming from because I had simlar systems.

Hope this helps and give you something to think about

posted 07-29- 09:43 PM               

I've actually wanted to upgrade for a while. Unfortunately, as many may know, I've been unemployed for almost five months now. Even though things may be looking up (emphasis on "may"), my main priorities if they do will be things like bills, auto repairs, deferred medical care, and many other far more important things. So it looks like I'm in "Slowville" for the forseeable future. Therefore, I'll keep wringing every last drop out of what I've got for now!