Game system update
Long story short, my gaming system is up and running.
The longer story of course is that:
So a friend of mine graciously volunteered to help me assemble the machine. I brought all of the equipment over there except the hard drive which for reasons unknown, I had simply left behind.
We started with the case and with the exception of a few minor hookups, we were up and running (at least passing POST) in no time. The only real negative part of the whole deal is that the dominator ram that was shipped to me had a little hole in the corner and one of the mounting brackets for the fan and all of the screws were missing. Hopefully NewEgg will just send me a new mounting bracket with requiring me to RMA the RAM. :P
After getting home, I installed the WD Raptor drive and the Creative X-Fi card out of my old rig and proceeded to install Vista Ultimate.
For those familiar with Vista, Vista has a system rating that it gives a score of 1.0 to 5.9 depending on how awesome your system is. It grades over a variety of categories including hard drive, RAM, CPU, Graphics Card, and one that escapes me. Whichever area scores the lowest, that is what your score is.
My computer scores 5.9 in all categories except for RAM where it scores a measly 5.6. wtf?
I checked out the performance of some of my old games including Counter Strike Source. CS:S has a video stress test option that my old system would get about 50fps on a good day. This system got up to 249fps on the stress test. With that I decided to crank up all of the details to max setting and go with a 1600x1200 resolution (old system I played at 800x600). The fact that I consistently got 100+ FPS just amazes me.
Next step was to install Crysis. Crysis is a new game that can take advantage of Direct X 10 if you have it and reduces even the most high performance cards to a frame rate of 10-15 at the highest settings forcing most people to turn down the level of video detail.
At 1280x1024 resolution with the highest settings I average around 35fps which is respectful and my what a pretty game it is.
I also bought the Orange Box which I will try out tomorrow. All in all, a pretty good system so far and no driver issues despite going with 64bit Vista although my copy of McAfee won't work with it.
The longer story of course is that:
So a friend of mine graciously volunteered to help me assemble the machine. I brought all of the equipment over there except the hard drive which for reasons unknown, I had simply left behind.
We started with the case and with the exception of a few minor hookups, we were up and running (at least passing POST) in no time. The only real negative part of the whole deal is that the dominator ram that was shipped to me had a little hole in the corner and one of the mounting brackets for the fan and all of the screws were missing. Hopefully NewEgg will just send me a new mounting bracket with requiring me to RMA the RAM. :P
After getting home, I installed the WD Raptor drive and the Creative X-Fi card out of my old rig and proceeded to install Vista Ultimate.
For those familiar with Vista, Vista has a system rating that it gives a score of 1.0 to 5.9 depending on how awesome your system is. It grades over a variety of categories including hard drive, RAM, CPU, Graphics Card, and one that escapes me. Whichever area scores the lowest, that is what your score is.
My computer scores 5.9 in all categories except for RAM where it scores a measly 5.6. wtf?
I checked out the performance of some of my old games including Counter Strike Source. CS:S has a video stress test option that my old system would get about 50fps on a good day. This system got up to 249fps on the stress test. With that I decided to crank up all of the details to max setting and go with a 1600x1200 resolution (old system I played at 800x600). The fact that I consistently got 100+ FPS just amazes me.
Next step was to install Crysis. Crysis is a new game that can take advantage of Direct X 10 if you have it and reduces even the most high performance cards to a frame rate of 10-15 at the highest settings forcing most people to turn down the level of video detail.
At 1280x1024 resolution with the highest settings I average around 35fps which is respectful and my what a pretty game it is.
I also bought the Orange Box which I will try out tomorrow. All in all, a pretty good system so far and no driver issues despite going with 64bit Vista although my copy of McAfee won't work with it.