Alienwere: Area-51 7500 PC

[mikemike]

yes, for sure building your own system is the way to go. building a computer is very easy -- everything's modular and much easier than, say, building a fine cabinet or replacing an alternator. the 8800 GT OC is a card i'm checking out now from best buy, on sale for 200$ and they let you return it within 30 days. newegg i've had very good luck with, with very quick service and good prices.

one thing about the new boards and chips -- the duo-cores -- is that the new boards improve the graphic card's performance.

on thing to do is do the research, check anandtech.com for reviews, and see how involved you want to be with your computer. basically, it's better to save up and get a better cpu, motherboard, graphics card and memory -- ddr2 is really cheap now and everyone should get their full 3Gigs out of XP -- and, yes, not get vista yet -- even the savage marketer at microsoft admitted that vista was still experimental.

a good system is really satisfying, much more so than those piles of empty brew bottles you've emptied -- money is for hardware!!

If you want to go the build-it yourself route, check out NewEgg at www.newegg.com . They have reasonable prices and a nice selection of components along with user reviews so you which ones are junk and which ones are good buys.

I built my high-end machine last year, which I use for other things besides Trainz, for around $1500.

Intel Duo-2 2.4 ghz
4Gb RAM
1x 250GB hd
Soundblaster Sound.
EVGA 8800GTS 640MB

John

 

[mikemike]

it looks like future gaming in DX 10 is going to be a few years and a lot of dorky role playing real time thrilla games, which won't help us at all. it may in fact be that WINE over linux is going to offer us some relief from nagging windows call loops. who knows?

I would say go with XP for compatibility, or Vista if you want to do future gaming. I have both XP & Vista, and I couldn't be happier!

 

[omber]

... people who say multicore computers for Trainz are useless.. yes you are correct but if someone is upgrading a multicore CPU is the only option - single core CPUs are almost non-existent now..

IF you want to, upgrade the card to 8800 GTX - this is what I have and I can play brand new games at between 40 and 60 FPS at maximum settings.. Trainz being an older games works like lightning. Otherwise seems like a good choice

 

[mikemike]

yes, i think that's correct. i'm running an 8800 on a single core - p4 3.4 and am showing sometimes 20 FPS, and, as i understand it, the new boards with their new chipset have as much to do with better video than the chip per se, thought the faster chips do increase frame-rate.

... people who say multicore computers for Trainz are useless.. yes you are correct but if someone is upgrading a multicore CPU is the only option - single core CPUs are almost non-existent now..

IF you want to, upgrade the card to 8800 GTX - this is what I have and I can play brand new games at between 40 and 60 FPS at maximum settings.. Trainz being an older games works like lightning. Otherwise seems like a good choice

 

[collinsl]

Don't forget that PCI-E 2.0 has recently been released, increasing the speed at which the graphics card communicates with the motherboard. However, newer chipsets/CPUs are faster.

 

[omber]

Don't forget that PCI-E 2.0 has recently been released, increasing the speed at which the graphics card communicates with the motherboard. However, newer chipsets/CPUs are faster.

Have they managed to utilize the bandwidth of PCI-E 1.0 yet? Last I checked that was not the case, if it still is, then there will be no performance gain on PCI-E 2.0

 

[whitepass]

"No Monitor (as I have an old 15")" ether get a new one or get a lower vid card as the 15" monitor will not support high resolutions.