Sanok Posted December 14, 2004 Share Posted December 14, 2004 I'm going to be purchasing a new computer. The only games I play are CM. What should I be looking for in graphics card and drivers? Thanks. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 14, 2004 Share Posted December 14, 2004 You can't go too wrong with Nvidia-based videocards. Which one you get depends on how much you can spend for your new computer. Generally we recommend staying away from the FX 5200 since it is fairly underpowered for the price. The FX models above that should be fine. A nice price point at the moment is the FX 5900XT/SE's (under US$200). If you have the money than the FX 6800 series or maybe the 6600 series would be even nicer (mildly overkill at the moment with the current incarnation of CM). ATI videocards on the other hand have had (subjectively) better image quality according to some users and a little more performance. However some of this performance may be related to a mild form of 'cheating' in the driver code. I assume that you're familiar with ATI's lack of fog-table support so that you don't get fog in CM (which isn't too big a deal for some users). Generally ATI has had some pretty good 'bang for the buck' in their videocards. You will have more options if you build it yourself, though you may find the price mildly higher than what you could get from a major manufacturer (Dell, etc.). However you can get very good components or customize it the way you want. Generally there's nothing that you should get "cheap" on a computer. Good motherboard, memory, power supply, fast hard drives with good warranties, etc. When it comes to major manufacturer models I don't know who or what to recommend specifically. [ December 14, 2004, 10:15 AM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sanok Posted December 14, 2004 Author Share Posted December 14, 2004 From what I've seen advertised, the Pentium 4 processor and 512 megs of RAM are pretty standard. I've seen that some machines have the i875 chipset. Is that any good? My old PC had the i810, so I got a better card. Ironically, it was the FX 5200. Still it was a big improvement over the i810. With a new machine, I shouldn't need to change the drivers, should I? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krazy Canuck Posted December 14, 2004 Share Posted December 14, 2004 If your having this new unit custom built and want to use the 5200, just take it to your builder and ask them to install the card and the drivers of your choice. The i875 chipset is the pinnacle of the last generation motherboard technology for intel based CPUs. It still works very well for most PC requirements today. If your primary use of your PC is to play CM, go with the i865 chipset and save enough money to upgrade your vid card if you want. Btw., chipset and video card are two different animals. Your 5200 will work well with the i875 chipset, a 5900XT will work better. KC 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 14, 2004 Share Posted December 14, 2004 The i875 had a little more performance than the i865 as originally designed. However several motherboard manufacturers found a way to enable most of the i875's performance advantages in the i865's (which will often be sold as the i865PE). The i865G's have the built-in video like the i810 did, only it's better (but still doesn't support fog). With a new computer I would highly recommend backing up what you currently have and installing from scratch, which will obviously take a bit of time to do. Backup your data (games, files, etc.) to a drive that won't be the boot drive, since you will find out that your current drive with its drivers probably won't boot (blue screen error, etc.) if you're running anything newer than Windows 98. Do you have a preferred course of action at the moment... i.e. is this an upgrade to a current box or a completely new system ? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sanok Posted December 14, 2004 Author Share Posted December 14, 2004 Do you have a preferred course of action at the moment... i.e. is this an upgrade to a current box or a completely new system ? [/QB]The computer I currently have, is almost four years old. It's slow and can only be upgraded to 256 megs of RAM. My wife also uses it a lot for typiing projects she does for our church. I'd like to get my own computer, so we can both have our own machines and not get in each other's way. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 14, 2004 Share Posted December 14, 2004 Then you should be able to move your current hard drive over temporarily (as a 'slave') to get the data off and you should be fine. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sanok Posted December 14, 2004 Author Share Posted December 14, 2004 Thanks for all the help. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted December 15, 2004 Share Posted December 15, 2004 There is an endless stream of info to give here but very basically: AMD 64s are faster for the money in areas of games (especially CM, check out the "lets benchmark CPUs" thread in the CMAK forum), scripting languages, webbrowser and other interactive stuff. Pentium-4s are price-performance competitive doing compilation and video/audio encoding. While that sounds like AMD is the better deal, you generally get motherboards for Intel which are less troublesome. For some fun, try to figure out how many RAM sticks you can put into various AMD64 mainboards at what speed (for all three sockets they have). ATI just stinks, IMHO, there are way more problems that just fog tables in CM, e.g. DirectDraw (2D) appears to be entirely broken. I posted a big rant on the general forum, try to look for my name and "ATI". Or just trust me on this and get a NVidia card. You can get a 5200 at $30 which makes nice price/performance and may be reasonable for CMAK but not much else. If you want one of the good NVidia 6x00 cards at a cheaper price (you would do that if you want to play Doom3, Half-Life 2 and the like at a low price point), then build a PCI express system. GeForce 6800GT PCIe are much cheaper than in AGP and the rest of the stuff has equal prices. I wouldn't recommend PCIe otherwise for now. Get a decent power supply. Watch out that modern video cards can be very loud. If you need a quiet PC read reviews of cards or get an alternate cooling solution. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panzertruppe Posted December 16, 2004 Share Posted December 16, 2004 In defence of the FX 5200...it will run the CM games just fine at the highest Resolution,but games like Doom 3,Far Cry,ect you will have to lower options to get a good framerate. Nvidia is the way to go! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted December 16, 2004 Share Posted December 16, 2004 Doom3 on a FX 5200 at any quality? What framerate do you get? "timedemo demo1 usecache" is the benchmark command. IIRC I get 10 FPS at 640x480 low everything. That's not really "a good framerate". 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teotwawki1 Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 Sanok, computers are like cars..."how fast do you want to go" is usually followed by "how much do you have to spend"? Nothing beats an AMD Athlon Barton core on an nVidia 2 chipset mobo for price/performance and stability...you can get a lot more performance from the higher end chips from either AMD or Intel, and newer motherboard chipsets, but how much do you need/can you afford? You really have to define your budget. The fastest system I have right now is the aforementioned 2500 Athlon Barton core, and a Radeon 9800 Pro. The performance from this system is quite adequate even for Half Life 2, although I'm not playing it at 1600x1200. The good news is, even a $100 video card will give you very good performance these days, and the price of RAM and storage is absurdly low. I'm due for an upgrade now...I normally do it around Xmas, but I've already blown those $$ on other toys. All of my stuff is at least a year old, an eternity these days. If you have a $$ figure in mind, post it, and I'm sure the folks here can suggest some stuff. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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