more parts
Aug. 2nd, 2003 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationPicking up a wireless PCI network card today, so I can have a little box with an antenna poking out the back.
The two biggest things are waiting for sales or for random influxes of cash (like, you know, paychecks). Those are the monitor (I'm planning on getting an LCD-- this is supposed to be a vaguely portable system, after all) and the video card (which will be wanktastic, because I can).
My philosophy toward computer-building is that if I'm going to build something new, I might as well get the best hardware I can afford and have it be somewhere near cutting-edge for as long as possible. Usually that gives me an extra month or so of bragging rights, but considering that the last gaming system I built still isn't considered too shabby (1.2GHz Athlon, 512MB RAM, 64MB GeForce2 GTS card-- got 7500-8000 on 3Dmark2001, if you consider that indicative of anything), even a year and a half after I got tired of it and sold it off, I think I've got a reasonable handle on this sort of thing by now.
Of course, for half the games I want to revisit (Thief, for example) the system I'm building is total absurd overkill. I first played Thief on a 200MHz Pentium Pro with a voodoo3 card in it, and it had no problems at all (aside from some monitor-gamma issues that led me to dub the game "Thief: The Really Ridiculously Dark Project" until I figured out what was going on).
The next problem will be finding a room in our house dim enough to be able to see the monitor...
The two biggest things are waiting for sales or for random influxes of cash (like, you know, paychecks). Those are the monitor (I'm planning on getting an LCD-- this is supposed to be a vaguely portable system, after all) and the video card (which will be wanktastic, because I can).
My philosophy toward computer-building is that if I'm going to build something new, I might as well get the best hardware I can afford and have it be somewhere near cutting-edge for as long as possible. Usually that gives me an extra month or so of bragging rights, but considering that the last gaming system I built still isn't considered too shabby (1.2GHz Athlon, 512MB RAM, 64MB GeForce2 GTS card-- got 7500-8000 on 3Dmark2001, if you consider that indicative of anything), even a year and a half after I got tired of it and sold it off, I think I've got a reasonable handle on this sort of thing by now.
Of course, for half the games I want to revisit (Thief, for example) the system I'm building is total absurd overkill. I first played Thief on a 200MHz Pentium Pro with a voodoo3 card in it, and it had no problems at all (aside from some monitor-gamma issues that led me to dub the game "Thief: The Really Ridiculously Dark Project" until I figured out what was going on).
The next problem will be finding a room in our house dim enough to be able to see the monitor...
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-08-03 05:34 am (UTC)Dunno about ATI stuff but the out of our items the FX5200 Ultra should be the best balance between cost and performace.
Then again I'm currently (at home[0]) using a non ultra budget version of the same and am perfectly happy (Hey, it runs X11 just fine. ;) I'm probably not the best person for this.
[1]: Then again I might just be a bit dulled to the whole experience since I easily have depending on the day $1k to $3k worth of graphics gear in my cube.....
(no subject)
Date: 2003-08-03 06:30 am (UTC)Unfortunately, most of the current GeForce-based cards need two slots, and simply won't fit into the case I'm using...
...although I see the FX 5200 isn't that ridiculously huge. Hm, maybe I will take a look at it. I was thinking Radeon 9800 Pro (which is skewed pretty ridiculously toward the "price" end of the ratio-- the 9600 Pro seems a decent compromise for ATI cards), just for the sake of not having to upgrade for a long long time... That alone tends to keep me away from more budget-conscious cards.
Ah, and it's missing things like anti-aliasing. Hm. I think (after a bit of quick research) I'd probably got for an FX 5600-series card rather than the 5200, but then, I'm making a wanky gaming system, so as long as it fits in the case and is really really fast, it's okay with me. 8)