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Anything much happened in PCs in the past six years?
RadioElectric
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm looking to replace quite an old PC that has finally kicked the bucket (motherboard problems). Over the past six years I have actually replaced quite a few of the parts in it (it ended up with a 6800GS, 4 gigs of RAM, etc.) but it was still a very old machine underneath. It was still able to run most new games though, most importantly New Vegas.
Anyway, I want to know whether a modern "desktop" PC would be adequate as a replacement for this ancient "gaming" PC, or whether I still need to spend £500+ to get something that can run games. I'm not averse to taking some of the parts out of its corpse to rejuvenate a new machine, but I guess I'd like to avoid that if it means I'd void the warranty on a new computer.
There was a time when I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing PC-wise, but many years of contentment have left me hopelessly out of the loop. Any advice?
Anyway, I want to know whether a modern "desktop" PC would be adequate as a replacement for this ancient "gaming" PC, or whether I still need to spend £500+ to get something that can run games. I'm not averse to taking some of the parts out of its corpse to rejuvenate a new machine, but I guess I'd like to avoid that if it means I'd void the warranty on a new computer.
There was a time when I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing PC-wise, but many years of contentment have left me hopelessly out of the loop. Any advice?
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Six years is like a hundred years in the PC world. Your case might be adequate, but you'd definitely want to replace the guts. For that amount of money you should be able to get a great computer.
1024x768, and I was glad for it. /Yorkshire
I ended up buying a new low-end "gaming PC". I still don't understand the difference between a "Desktop PC" that costs £500 and a "Gaming PC" that costs as much. It's running Windows 7. Apparently, "the future" is blurry and transparent.
New Vegas autodetected Ultra High Quality on this new machine, and it runs very smoothly. Having said that, it doesn't look markedly different from when I had my old computer and I was running it at Dogshit Quality. I think the view distance is much higher now, that might be most of it.
You probably would have been better off building your own computer (Its easy I swear) but that's a solution too.
I used to build them myself quite often (I was the drafted "IT Guy" for my Dad's business), and I designed the last one. All of my knowledge of how is hopelessly dated though, and I wanted a fast solution. Thanks for the advice.
lul wut?
I remember playing Oblivion on an older single core with an AGP GPU (7800GS) and it looked awful.
Multi-core CPUs
PCI-Express
Liquid cooling
Everything else is basically the same. I mean yeah, we've got new sockets and RAM sizes, but for the most part everyone's still using the fifteen year old ATX formfactor for their mobos and cases, only now they have more fans, windows, and lighting.
If you knew what you were doing five or six years ago than it would have been really easy to build your own modern machine today, and you would have saved money versus buying a prebuilt. £500 comes out to almost $800USD, and you could have built a pretty nice system with that budget.
But you seem to be satisfied with your new computer, and you can play the game you wanted to play, so that's all that matters.
Finally, someone else who can tell Aero looks like shit. I thought I was taking crazy pills.
man what
Because its transparent?
It's not like it's either or, though.
The OS is supposted to be bland and uninteresting, so that you focus on the actual software you're using, and do some work
hth
Yeah, attractive OS interfaces just encourage people to waste time posting on webcomic forums.
I don't like the obscured glass effect, it's a powerdrain and just doesn't appeal to me, so I turn the transparency off, animations off and a bunch of other stuff off. I have a colorful palette that doesn't look a thing like XP or default Aero.
Well there it is. That's fine.
yeah man, you're right, distractions don't exist.
I'm going to find where you live and put a fuck ton of disco balls and klieg lights outside your front yard. The soundtrack?
Cats fucking. autotuned.
Gonna go to Falken's house the next time I need to get some work done.
No distractions. That's some zen shit right there. Just looking at it makes me feel more producti-...
Crap, what were we talking about? I started staring in transfixed fascination at my taskbar.
SSD hybrid
Only now with Sandy Bridge is this the case. Since I can re-use my gpu all I'd need is some extra ram. However, I'm also in the market for an SSD and holding out for the next gen Intel SSD's which has been delayed... So I'm on the fence really.
The additional question is; what are DDR3 prices going to do between here and say march?
Seemed like everyone was going all multi-core and now they stopped.
My current CPU uses 12 virtual cores, anyone pushed higher than that? 24 cores?
God is it a boring time in the PC realm. Fuck this decade.
Um...yes, multi-cores were just a passing fad? O_o
Is this an entirely ironic post? Are you the hipster-iest of computer people?
Pentium II was too mainstream for him, so he's probably still rockin' his K6.
You can get a very fast 64GB SDD for around $100 now. You'll go from waiting for things to load to things loading instantly or almost-instantly. I plan on building a new PC this Fall. I'm probably going to go with dual SSD's in RAID 0 as my primary drive because I don't want to wait for anything.
USB 3 is another one that people underestimate. An external HDD will appear to be nearly as fast as an internal HDD in most cases.
Someone mentioned liquid cooling. It's not new, but the proliferation of self-contained systems that require no maintenance is a huge deal. If you're buying Dell's it won't matter to you, but if you're building from scratch and hope to overclock it's a Godsend.
I love my Macbook Air, which came with one. But i'm holding off on a PC one until the price point is better for the storage space i'll need for steam, etc. Even if affordable SSDs exist there will be much better deals by june, the current pricing seems to be $2.2/gb. I'd guesstimate it could be $1.5/gb by mid-2011. Meanwhile newegg today is offering a 2TB WD HDD at $100, or at $0.5/gb. More usual deals still seem to be in well under $.25/gb. We're at an affordable price point for SSDs with the space needed for a regular user's drive, but not for the sort of things we get up to.
On that note, how have people found the user experience when the OS is loaded on the SSD but game files are installed on a second regular HDD? Obviously the load time for files on the HDD is going to be the same but does it rob the user experience of the benefits of the SSD?
It's pretty great, though it'd be nice if Windows had some less kludgy ways to automatically set up the user folders on a separate drive from the operating system.
Anything I really want to open fast goes on the SSD, so the OS and really common stuff like media players, web browsers, and my office suite are there. The vidya games and whatnot don't really need that sort of luxury, so they get tossed on the 1TB data drive.
An SSD would be less than optimal for that kind of thing. And I'm too lazy to move the games back and forth.