Vista - Waheyyyyy!

Right someone build me a PC for gaming for ?50 and i'll be happy lol.





Shall i get me coat lol.

Right so thinking, how much would it cost to make a PC for Vista that would be solely for gaming?

[northwind]

Originally Posted by plowsie

Right so thinking, how much would it cost to make a PC for Vista that would be solely for gaming?

Well, you could do it cheap, but IMO there's basically no point at all in building a Vista PC for gaming unless you make it cutting edge- as far as I'm concerned the only real advantage it offers is DirectX 10, which so far has been a total damp squib, to the extent that they've deliberately crippled the DX9 version of Crysis to make it seem like Vista offers a performance advantage (some graphics settings are disabled, but you can re-enable them in DX9) There's a few directx-10 games coming along like Company of Heroes, which is an amazing game but with DX10, runs slower and looks not much better

So... Maybe I'm a luddite, but I can't see any point at all in building a budget Vista gaming machine.

Originally Posted by northwind

Well, you could do it cheap, but IMO there's basically no point at all in building a Vista PC for gaming unless you make it cutting edge- as far as I'm concerned the only real advantage it offers is DirectX 10, which so far has been a total damp squib, to the extent that they've deliberately crippled the DX9 version of Crysis to make it seem like Vista offers a performance advantage (some graphics settings are disabled, but you can re-enable them in DX9) There's a few directx-10 games coming along like Company of Heroes, which is an amazing game but with DX10, runs slower and looks not much better

So... Maybe I'm a luddite, but I can't see any point at all in building a budget Vista gaming machine.

No I agree completly. Vista sucks XP FTW. SP3 should be a long soon which is supposed to give XP a 15% performance boost too .

Whats this about getting very high in crysis in DX9?

[northwind]

Originally Posted by ThEGr33k

Whats this about getting very high in crysis in DX9?

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2222414,00.asp

It's not quite identical- and it does apparently run a bit slower- I wouldn't know, it just looks like another boring shoot 'em up to me

Originally Posted by plowsie

Right so thinking, how much would it cost to make a PC for Vista that would be solely for gaming?

Well you can do it on a reasonable budget. The most expensive item will be the graphics card, nature of the beast I'm afraid.

Here is a breakdown of what I consider to be a decent enough gaming rig:

Motherboard:
Asus P5K Intel P35 (socket 775 FSB upto 1333Mhz) - £78.71

CPU:
Intel Core2Duo E8400 (socket775 - FSB 1333Mhz) - £146.86

RAM:
2GB Geil DDR2 PC2-6400 Dual Channel - £41.11

Graphics:
OcUK Nividia 8800 GTX 768MB GDDR3 PCI-Ex16 - £234.99
OR
ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT 512MB - £152.74 (this card will not be as good as the Nvidia card though).

HDD:
Fujitsu 250GB 5400RPM SATA 2 - £85.76

Optical:
Pioneer DVD-RW SATA - £19.96

Case:
Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case - £72.84

Power Supply:
OCZ 600W Silent PSU - £46.99

I assume you already have a monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers?

So all in all this would set you back £707.26 (with the Nvidia card) and about £622 with teh ATI card.

You could save money for example if you had the E6700 CPU and also the 650W PSU from me (say £70 for them) which would give you a new total of £442.65 which would still include the kickass 8800GTX graphics card. If you can use your optical and hard drives from your existing system then yo ucan save even more money.

Originally Posted by northwind

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2222414,00.asp

It's not quite identical- and it does apparently run a bit slower- I wouldn't know, it just looks like another boring shoot 'em up to me

You have it the wrong way round. There is no difference in how it looks (not noticable to any one at all really) and in fact it will run faster by upto 15% in DX9 than it will in Vista. My point here is that so far DX10 seems to do nothing new at all and in fact DX9 is still faster (albeit with some manual tweaks! That will change later down the line though, I just wish they would get multi threaded games going!!!

Crysis, boring!!!?

[northwind]

Originally Posted by HooliganDan

You have it the wrong way round. There is no difference in how it looks (not noticable to any one at all really) and in fact it will run faster by upto 15% in DX9 than it will in Vista.

Mmm, the screenies usually look a bit different. Not neccesarily worse, just different. Most of the FPS numbers are a bit lower on DX9 that I've seen. But then, since I lack a) vista, b), a graphics card that can do DX10, and c) Crysis, I've not tried it so I'll take your word for it

Ok now i know this is lookin like im chasing a lost cause... But...

System Requirements
Operating System: Windows XP • Windows Vista
Minimum Processor: Pentium IV
Min Processor Speed: 2400 GHz
RAM: 512MB
Minimum Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9 or better
Sound: DirectX 9.0 Compatible Sound Card
HDD Space: 18Mb
Other Requirements: Mouse • Keyboard • Speakers


Theoretically, have i not got all of this except for the gfx card? Could i not just get a graphics card that meet these requirements? Or would i still have to update the PSU and RAM?

[northwind]

What's that for? Is there a recommended spec? Minimum spec tends to be gauged very low, and worked out with very low resolutions etc.