Relatively Noisy, Relatively Budget Blowing PC

[BigDXLT]

Adapter in video card box?

Oh, I don't care what anyone says. You truly are a great guy, and oh so wise in the ways of things I don't know about!

There were two in the box even. That's enough to spill some credit over to Mr. Owl.

Now, you'll have to excuse me, good sirs, for I must promptly kill this machine.

[BigDXLT]

Guh-hurrr

HELLO FROM NORWAY!

[Darwin]

Glad that worked

[Niteowl]

*feasts on the dribblings and leftover credit*

What's with the Norway reference?

[BigDXLT]

Well, my old computer was Mexico. And I happen to drive a Fjord.

Ba-dum-bum-pish!

[BigDXLT]

But no really, I don't drive a ford, so that joke was actually not of the accurate variety. Maybe I will in the future, who knows. I just thought, well, what sort of ludicrous name could I give my new computer ("Steven-PC" just wasn't gonna cut the mustard.)

[Nikon]

Adapter in video card box?

QFT!!???

DOOOOOOOONGLE POOWWWWAAAAH!!!!

[BigDXLT]

Well, I was able to get about 20, maybe 30 frames out of the Crysis demo at the maximum settings. That's okay, even at the mix of medium to high settings, it still looked damn good. Quite fun too.

I think my favorite part was looking down and seeing feet. And hands moving as I swam, grabbing things with one hand while holding the gun with the other hand.

Little touches like that, I haven't seen much in other first person shooters. It's not all perfect by any means, but it's still a nice touch.

Flight Simulator X came with the machine (I've been craving a flying game for a while and it was $30 with pc, so what the hell.) It runs very nice. Love how they included the stupidest of little airstrips even up yonder here in the middle of nowhere!

Orange box is gonna be downloading all night.

I find it very difficult to just sit at work and not think about being at home playing games!

[Ni]

I think my favorite part was looking down and seeing feet.

Sounds like a quote from a Weight Watchers commercial.

I find it very difficult to just sit at work and not think about being at home playing games!

You don't usually do this? What kind of uber interesting job do you have?

[Niteowl]

LULZ ni, LULZ!

[BigDXLT]

I think my favorite part was looking down and seeing feet.

Sounds like a quote from a Weight Watchers commercial.

Hahahaha! Good call!

I find it very difficult to just sit at work and not think about being at home playing games!

You don't usually do this? What kind of uber interesting job do you have?

Another good point. But to clarify, thinking about playing all the sweet games I don't have yet but can now play and couldn't play before.

[BigDXLT]

Nearly a year later, here's an update on how things are going:

• The door hiding the power button and dvd tray on this case is quite annoying.
• So far, this is the type of machine that Vista was made to run on. It loads up pretty quick, faster than my old computer loaded XP I figure, including the 8 second wait as it asks me if I want to run Kubuntu. I'm sure I could optimize the boot process furrther, but this is good enough. Vista on my underpowered work machines is crap crap crap.
• Cheap sound card is garbage, due to the lack of decent drivers. Took Creative forever to make a decent Vista driver (I still had to jump through hoops just to get the stupid crap to install) and there is no driver at all for Linux, which is annoying as hell. Pretty much have to upgrade it at some point. (And on that note, I'm gonna make a point to go with Linux friendlier companies in general in the future.)
• 2 gigs of ram just wasn't enough so I recently slapped in 2 more. The difference has been noticeable. Crysis runs better, to the point where I can keep everything maxed out (except the AA stuff that I don't care about so much.) I mean, it's only 1280x1024, but it's optimized for this resolution now. At first I thought I didn't have enough video memory in the video card, but the 8800 gts is working good now just the same. The other place I REALLY notice it, is when I close TF2, it has always basically just crashed, and Windows says an error occurred and that sort of thing. This was painfully slow, and I couldn't do anything until the error message popped up. Now, it still pops up the error message but it just snaps right up and steam can be closed really quick. That's tolerable. I was meaning to try alt-tabbing tonight to see if that's better...
• I really ought to get a Raid array going like Beef mentioned deep within the bowels of this thread. But I'm actually tempted to instead wait for those SSD drives to come down in price and move important files (operating systems, games, etc.) on to one, and meanwhile have my pictures, music and less used crap on the HDD. Keeping my eye on a setup like that. (While bearing in mind that, yes, some cheap SSD's aren't much, if any, faster, but I look forward to the future in this regard.)

[[OldF] DIRTY DEALER]

Boot : 2 X WD360GD stripped 16kb blocks
Games : 2 X Maxtor 40gb 16KB blocks
Storage : 1 Western Digital 40 gb drive

When preparing RAID block size does affect read/write performance more then I thought it would. Three days of benchmarks tought me that 16kb blocks is the best size for my machine. So yes you read this right, I have five hard drives in my box. A little overboard ? maybe dementia is setting in....

But who cares ? IT'S A GAMING MACHINE !