Computers

[Taurus]

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Athelon

[AntiochusIII]

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Athelon

You mean Athlon, right? Which Athlon? Ordinary? XP? 64? :P

[sbroadbent]

You mean Athlon, right? Which Athlon? Ordinary? XP? 64? :P

If you want something that you won't need to completly upgrade for 18 months, a socket 939 Athlon 64 is good to get. You want to ensure that you go socket 939 because in the future if you want to add dual core capability, a bios update is generally all that is needed on most Athlon boards (and I'd expect new mobos released in the next 6 months to not require that update). Intel boards on the other hand you basically have to toss if you change the processor. With game developers starting to develop games with dual core procs in mind, multi core gaming will only be inevitable. Sony's PS3 should handle 7 threads at a time (with an 8th for redundancy). Xbox360 will be able to handle 6 threads. As a basis of comparison, Intel's single core P4's with Hyperthreading do 2 virtual threads, while AMD's current dual cores do 2 as well.

Sometime next year desktop processors should jump to 4 cores (meaning 4 simultaneous threads).

Now, if you can hold off purchasing a new processor and board, I might wait until AMD integrates DDR2 memory into it's architecture with the newer socket 940. DDR2 has been slow to take off because it hasn't been shown to be much faster than DDR1, as well as the fact that if you want to use DDR2 you have to use Intel, and most extreme gamers use Athlon for it's superior tech.

My good old PIII 833 with 32Mb GeForce 2 MX runs both R:TW and R:TW BI, the latter with some lag on campaign map though, and most graphical features turned off... but it runs... So a fairly new Celeron ought to be able to run R:TW without problems.

Hmm, I just realized my PIII IBM Thinkpad has the minimum reqs for MTW. I should try installing it. The only problem is that my 30GB HDD only has 400MB free space...