straight GeForce 5500 test on the Demo Gold
Chopa,Originally Posted by chopa
"Owa fwend fwom Woam" is quite right, but first let me tell you about our test of the non over-clocked Ge Force FX5500.
Motep,
The straight 5500 Norwood ran the gold demo. Not particularly well, but it was playable with everything on minimum, shader 1.0, and no grass or shadows at all. We found we had to increase brightness a little bit and had reflections and bloom also off. No AA or AF at all. The intros were a bit jerky and so was the action, but not a full stutter/strobe effect. Camera control was poor under the laggy conditions. All the battles played about the same, with some of the effects (particularly the thundering of cannon and musketry) being still quite effective.
The sys we used featured a 1.8 ghz socket-A Athlon CPU (at stock) juiced to just about 2.0 ghz, 1.5 gigs of DDR (but not very fast being 266) with the Norwood 5500 running at factory settings. It was much more attractive than MTW, but way LESS attractive than anyone deserves to see the game at. Sort of a MTW in 3-d with better unit detail. The degrading of the colors and detail beauty as well as some of the more interesting effects on armor and so forth was high and it was clearly laggy, but the full game is likely to play slightly better.
Hope that answers your question Motep... Since there are more modern systems in my house, only in grave desperation might I play the game on that sys, but your cousin might mind less if he has no other option. Your 5800 will play it a bit better but not much. Truly is the 5th Gen. NVidia scraping the lower bound of being able to appreciate the game.
Chopa,
Aye Chiwawa... I don't want to steer you wrong but if you make me give you an opinion on what to do with your budget, I can only advise you that if you are limited to about $400 (I can't think in pounds being a 'colonial') you do not have adequate funds to meet the needs you will have by upgrading to a new system that a modern Mobo will require.
As Biggus stated (and I think I did also) the new generation of mobo will have PCI-ex interfaces for graphic cards, will probably incorporate dual core sockets which obviate front side buses (using HT technology instead-light years ahead) and in many cases not even having a northbridge if you are using AMD. There is also the DDR2 memory you would have to buy (the "2" standing for two-channel, where the data streams on alternating channels for theoretically up to twice the speed; although this is hardly true in practice it _is_ faster by an easily perceptable margin). You would also have to have the new vertical-storage, SATA drives if you didn't want your HD to be a bad bad bottleneck, AND you would need a significantly more beastly power source since all of these things suck in energy like the government does your income.
Lets look at what you have now:
Your card is good enough to play the game, though hardly at max settings. Since you can't change mobo's with your cash constraint, keep the card for the moment and upgrade the CPU within the limits of a socket 478 as I mentioned above. Probably a 3 gig Pentium 4 Prescott so you can get the Hyperthreading... It seems to me that components look a bit more costly on your side of the pond, but still you should be able to score the CPU for $100 or thereabouts. If it is a bit more, pay it if you have no chance of shortly saving up a few hundred more to replace the entire system. Now this should leave you a bit more than $200 US to muck about with your memory. You need to find out what rate and speed it is (SD or DD, AND 266, 333, 600, 800, etc), is it buffered or unbuffered, is registered or unregistered, and if you can, its CL or latency. Whenever I can I exactly duplicate the existing memory unless I am going to remove it altogether down to and especially, the manufacturer. If you don't know how to get these, drop me a message through the board or PM me. Once we know what kind of mem you have we will look to see what kind of sticks you already have in your board, how many slots for memory your mobo has, and what the best way is to increase what you have is... This way we eliminate most of the constraints at the CPU and memory, and the limits will be all about your graphic card. Alternatively, you could go ahead and buy that NVidia 7600 mentioned elsewhere, but it would be limited by the AGP interface your mobo has AND the very bad bottleneck represented by your CPU and probably your Ram.
There, I've said it. Have you trie dthe gold demo with the sys you have right now? Would you and tell me about it?
Al Jabberwock
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