Windows Xp

[finty]

Is this type of RAM not good?

 

[pubjoe]

Is this type of RAM not good?

It's not bad, but it's a bit slow (PC2100 = 266MHZ) and I'm planning on running the processor at 333-400MHZ

After looking around I realised I was going to have to spend at least £180-£200 for unbranded ram. I'm not really fussed about this so-called "gamers ram" but ~£300 (at current USD-GBP exchange rate) for ram, I know will be compatible and good quality, I think is really good. Check this out; ebuyer are selling just the one stick for £274.91!!

I thought that If I'm going to spend that much, then another £100 for decent stuff is worth it.

...Still not sure though. I might just buy 2x512MB for now.

 

[finty]

Does your ram need to run at the same speed as your processer? (Sorry im a total n00b at this).

 

[Rico]

FSB speed -> if your processor is 233 MHz and your RAM is 400 MHz, I believe your ram can only go at 233. Similarly if you chuck a 233 and 133 together the ram will only run at 133 MHz. This is my limited and probably incorrect understanding, so someone clever like pubjoe: please correct me on this.

I'm not made of money, so I'll probably wait a little bit, but basically I have a 1.8ghz, gf4 64mb ti4200 and 512mb ram. I'm going to buy an extra 512, a much better graphics card, probably a geforce fx 5950 xt, and a 3 ghz processor once it becomes affordable.

Pubjoe, memory prices as you know are just ridiculous. I think a 512 stick was £50 incl. VAT when I went to buy it, and while my mum was deliberating about lending me the cash it went up to £100. Or something. It's now about £60. With prices as high as they are I'd just get 1 Gb max. You're unlikely to need anything more; most things seem to need VRAM instead.

I was looking at the difference between Low and High quality in DOOM3... and there is barely any difference. My current system will run low at 1024x768 and probably med at 800x600... with the lack of real addition to detail when you go to high or ultra quality, it might not even be worth upgrading. OTOH, there is Half-Life 2 to worry about.

 

[pubjoe]

Don't worry, so am I.

Apparently it does matter, or rather, it never used to but it does now. Afaik, it's something about information getting bottlenecked if the speeds are different *waits to be corrected by someone who actually knows what they're talking about*.

Say, if I'm planning on overclocking my Athlon to 3200 (Which is somewhere around 2200MHZ). Then I'd have to set the chip at something like 11x200MHZ (=2200). But the ram is also going to have to run at 200MHZ. Btw, just to confuse things, the DDR stands for double data rate so 200MHZ = 400MHZ.

 

[finty]

Thats what im building a PC for, ATM mine runs GTA3 slowly.

So 2 500Mhz ones would be ultra fast? like 2Ghz. I need to rob a computer store.

 

[Rico]

Wonderful, I refer my explanation to pubjoe as he's "clever" and he refers it to someone "who actually knows what they're talking about"

 

[pubjoe]

I know... I was just about to mention that!!

Thats the trouble with computers, there's so much shit to learn and you can't give an explanation of something without some smart-arse coming along and explaining in great detail where you got it wrong!

...And the more you learn, the more confusing it gets: to check compatability, I started looking into Ram Density and CAS latency and stuff (don't ask!!) and the more I read, the more other shit I had to learn before I could understand. I gave up after about 3 hours.

Pubjoe, memory prices as you know are just ridiculous. I think a 512 stick was £50 incl. VAT when I went to buy it, and while my mum was deliberating about lending me the cash it went up to £100. Or something. It's now about £60. With prices as high as they are I'd just get 1 Gb max. You're unlikely to need anything more; most things seem to need VRAM instead.

I was looking at the difference between Low and High quality in DOOM3... and there is barely any difference. My current system will run low at 1024x768 and probably med at 800x600... with the lack of real addition to detail when you go to high or ultra quality, it might not even be worth upgrading. OTOH, there is Half-Life 2 to worry about.

Yeah, if that beta is anything to go by, then my system held up surprisingly well aswell (XP1600+ with geforce 4200ti-128MB and 256MB ram). It paused to read the hard drive from time to time because of the really low amount of ram).

As far as buying 2GB of ram, I can justify it a bit because I use a lot of Photoshop/Quark/Flash/Dreamweaver/lots of fonts etc etc... I also share the PC, so we switch-users quite often (usually leaving all my crap running). So my system is always using the scratch disk (harddrive used as virtual ram).

I know 1GB alone is still a big jump from 256 (it will make a big difference to games) but I'm worried that the computer will still be using the scratch disk quite a lot, making the upgrade a bit pointless.

I think I might buy 2x512 for now to try it out and I can always sell it and upgrade later (My MB only has 2 ram slots btw).

 

[bringoutthegimp]

i didnt read the last 5 pages but if youre still looking for a firewall check out panda antivirus platinum. its a virus scanner too and ive been using it the past couple days. its probably the best one ive used and its very simple to use

 

[Rico]

I ran the (two year old) alpha fairly terribly. But they have done a whole lot of optimisations and that build was optimised for their E3 machines, so I think it'll improve. The major input towards how I think it'll run was the HardOCP hardware report. Basically they did 65 hours of testing on all kinds of machines at Doom 3's offices and found that, lowest settings (but with all advanced stuff on) it would run 30fps average on a 1.5 GHz, Geforce MX-440, 256mb RAM.

http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQ0

 

[generalnmx]

Pubjoe, memory prices as you know are just ridiculous. I think a 512 stick was £50 incl. VAT when I went to buy it, and while my mum was deliberating about lending me the cash it went up to £100. Or something. It's now about £60. With prices as high as they are I'd just get 1 Gb max. You're unlikely to need anything more; most things seem to need VRAM instead.

The hell? I bought a 512MB SDRAM stick about two months ago for about $60, SimpleTech brand. The DDR versions are like $10-20 cheaper. They're not the best, especially if you want to overclock, but I never feel the need to overclock. If you're running Athlon you definately need to buy expensive shielded RAM if you want to overclock, since Athlons run pretty hot without speed throttling (which the Pentium series has).

 

[thecheat]

*shudder* Windows Me is what fianlly convinced my mom to get a Mac

 

[pubjoe]

If you can't wait the few more days there's a "beta2" flying around somewhere, it's basically just the 2 year old alpha with a few extra levels added and all the settings optimized. But it makes the game run a LOT better without spending hours tweaking and crashing your system.

If that's anything to go by then the final release is going to run very well. I think ram is the best thing to upgrade for it.

 

[finty]

Im getting the beta 2 now.

Does anyone know a guide for overclocking? I have a Duron 750Mhz, but it can be O/C to 1.1Ghz, but I dont know how to.

 

[Rico]

The hell?

Well, I only reference ebuyer, which is not the de-facto cheapest. And although you mention DDR, I have no idea what speed your ram is, or for that matter what speed MINE is.

Pubjoe: That's promising news, for a second I thought the beta ran great for you and I just got unlucky. I think VRAM is my biggest problem, as 64mb is barely enough. It's gonna force me into low quality even if everything else can handle medium. To compensate I'll just jack up the resolution. I've ran Far Cry at 1024x768, Painkiller at 1280x1024 (!) etc. so I think the card just has a good fillrate. I'd look into overclocking it since it's supposedly a Ti4600 with limitations applied, but my temperature is high enough as it is.

 

[generalnmx]

Well, I only reference ebuyer, which is not the de-facto cheapest. And although you mention DDR, I have no idea what speed your ram is, or for that matter what speed MINE is.

133MHz for my SDRAM. With 1GB of RAM on a P4 2.0GHz with 128MB GeforceFX I've had no slowdowns playing games so far. Memory bus limit isn't THAT big a deal, since most of the slowdown is in graphics, which mostly resides in VRAM.

http://www.newegg.com isn't the cheapest either, but they aren't as expensive as what you are talking about.