I thought I'd start a thread for all of us computer geeks, fanatics and/or whatever you want to call it.

So here it is

I'll just start this off by saying I have spent some time getting up to date with the newest video card technology. It's amazing what they can do these days.

Anyway, I realized I wouldn't be able to buy any of these newer video cards (at least the one I want) without a bigger power supply. I can't believe most of the good ones require a 500W+ supply. One of the ATI ones requires a 750W if you run it in dual mode.

So today, I ordered a 600W power supply specifically for my Dell with Sata and Vid card power plugs. My current power supply is 250W. No wonder my new SATA drive won't spin up half the time [&o]

I also installed Vista last night. I don't know why so many people hate it so much. It runs great on my computer. I only have a 2.53 Ghz system with 2 GB DDR2 RAM. It runs pretty quick in full graphics mode. The chinsy $50 vid card I bought I unfortunately found out today is about as powerful as a GameBoy, even though it has 512 DDR2 RAM on-board.

So, there are my computer geek adventures so far. Once the power supply comes, I'll think about buying one of those newer cards, even though I only have AGP 4X. I kinda miss tweaking and maxing out what I have.

Let the upgrade addiction begin

 

doin what with a who now?

 

I figure since Muddy and I are both into the PC building thing, well, used to be, and some other people on here are into it, why not.

 

What are wanting to do with it? High Def Photo work or play games? If it's only games then you really need at least 2 GB of RAM and a nice CPU (3.0 GHz). The video card depends entirely on what kind of game you are running. Crysis or F.E.A.R.? If you want to run Crysis at full graphics it's basically impossible right now because apparently the proper equipment for it doesn't exist yet.

Don't know half of what I just said. Son just told me all of that so that I could be included.

 

Guess I won't be posting in this thread.

 

FUNNY, as soon as I saw the thread title, I knew it was MIKES!!!

 

I'll have to get my IT guy to join now. This will be his type of thread.

 

You have an "it" guy???

 

Yeah Bob, you know it

So Rich, ya see buddy, when you have a good GPU on your graphics card (Graphics Processing Unit), it basically takes most to all of the graphics processing away from the main processor, ie the Intel 3.0 Ghz, and processing the graphics using it's own processor and memory. A top quality graphics card has it's own processor (GPU) that is only made for graphics, whether it be gaming or HD video. The standard for the newest generation of games is DirectX 10 certification and a minimum of 512 MB of GDDR Ram, or memory on the graphics card just dedicated to storing the massive amount of texture mappings (pretty pictures) that are overlayed onto the 3D models in the games.

Also, the new PCI-E expansion slots allow for faster communications between the main processor on your system, your computer's memory and the graphics card, although in this day and age, it is ideal for the games to use only the memory and processor on the graphics card to keep the data transfer between your main processor and your computer memory as little as possible.

ALSO the newer generation of sound cards now typically increase your gaming performance 10 to 15% because they take the sound effects and store them in the sound cards memory as well, again, alleviating the bottleneck between the main processor and the sound card, where now the sound card takes care of most of the sound data, and the video card takes care of most of the graphics data, leaving the main processor free to control your keyboard, mouse, data transfer to and from the hard drive, and internet connection for online gaming.

Therefore, as long as you have a decent motherboard and processor, you can buy a top-end graphics card and get the kind of graphics that a $4000 machine can get with most games.

Having a faster processor and motherboard helps, but games are more dependant on the power of your video card rather then the power of your main processor.

And this is probably all I got out of my 3 years of electronics engineering

See, wasn't that easy?

 

Yep. Actually have two and a service that supplements them.