[…] old gaming rig has started to fall apart lately. Last year my video card blew up and took one of the PCIe slots […]

[…] for the computer I am using right now, you already know about it. It’s this one. TL/DR: In this post we age ourselves by talking about using computers that belong in the museum […]

I honestly think now-a-days its about the same price (cheaper?) to buy from companies like dell, instead of building the computer yourself + you get a warranty so if anything gets fucked… you are not out of luck.

Fallout 3 does indeed have 64bit executables last I checked. Also there are 64bit variants of the Source engine also (HalfLife2, TF2, L4D, etc) if I am not mistaken. Mozilla put out a 64 bit developer release of FireFox called MineField and it is pretty snappy under Vista64 and the new Windows7 Release Candidate. If you want to try out the Win7 RC it is free to do so. Microsoft will give you the License Key and the downloadable bits to try out against your machine.
http://tinyurl.com/9agzvs
You can do a dual boot install, so as not to wipe out your existing options. I have gotten Steam installed and FallOut3 and TF2 working under Win7 64 and I get better frame rates than on my Vista32 box.

@Zel: Yeah, that sounds about right. Then again I bought it on Memorial Day so I think they were applying some discounts that are probably no longer in effect. :)

Also I know that the GTX285 has a reputation for being overpriced but in this setup it was actually the mid-range option. The ATI alternatives they offered were $200 more expensive and seemed to offer only slightly higher performance on the benchmarks I looked at.

My screen is 17″ I think and it’s an older CRT. That’s the next component I’m replacing but I’ll wait a bit till I pay of this beast a bit. In the meantime I will enjoy my overkill. :)

@Alphast: Sigh… Yes, 8GB is an overkill. Still, I’m pretty sure I can fill most of it just by leaving Firefox open over night. I love that browser bleeds memory like there is no tomorrow. :)

Also, thanks for the Morrowind link. I have seen most of these tricks, but it is nice to have them all in one place like that.

[…] Terminally Incoherent Utterly random, incoherent and disjointed rants and ramblings… « The New Computer […]

I would be jealous if I hadn’t just done the same last week… ha ha. Nothing as über as your 8 GB of RAM (why in hell would anyone need 8Gb of DDR2 is beyond me…), but still a respectable machine.
So I thought you might be interested in this: http://morrowind2009.wordpress.com/
at least if you don’t know it already… :-D

When I tried to look for more detailed specifications on the DELL site, I came up with $1399 for your setup, did you have a special discount or anything ? What about your screen, this computer is overkill in terms of (gaming) power for anything smaller than a 22″.

The only component that I would stay away from is the Nvidia GTX285. It’s good, but much too expensive for its gaming performance when compared to ATI-AMD’s alternatives.

@Luke Maciak: Yeah, DDR2 ram is super-cheap these days, so why not 8GB. Hmm, I hope you won’t see that problem with Vista 64 + 8GB. I’m using Vista 64 at home with 4GB ram too, and I find running multiple apps is quite good. A friend of mine was surprised at the number of items on my systray (AV, Steam, Impulse, IMs, etc), yet the desktop still runs smoothly.

Be sure to post a review of your PC soon yeah.

@Mart: You would think that 8G is an overkill but I look at it this way: this machine will hardly ever go to swap – this is a good thing, especially when it comes to gaming.

Also, at work I quite a few od WinXP machines. Most of them have 2.6GHz Dual core CPU’s and 4GB of RAM and are running nothing but Microsoft Office 2007 and an Anti-Virus of some sort. You open few windows of IE on them, Outlook, and 2-3 Excel documents and the damn things grind to a halt. You’d think that 4GB of ram was plenty but time and time again I see that it is not. Go figure.

Also, the RAM upgrade to 8GB was surprisingly cheap. I probably wouldn’t get full 8 if it was expensive but it was not.

@Rob: Yeah, I was considering a quad core but the options were limited. I could have paid $300 more and got 2.5 GHz Quad. I figured that higher clock speed + lower price might actually be a better idea. How many games fully leverage Quad core architecture anyway? As we add cores to our CPU’s we are getting into the area of diminishing returns. Having n cores does not mean your code runs n times faster – it means it runs m times faster, where m is a function of how well you can parallelize your code.

And no, bumping the spec down to 4GB RAM would not make up the difference.