N3O Age Of Empires and Starcraft 2 Clan

Hi!

Since i have a E6400 with an ASUS P5WDH Deluxe lying around, i asked myself what to do with it. I was too lazy to sell it and now i don't think i get that much money. Just PSU and Graphics card was needed. First i wanted to buy Radeon 4550 and bequiet 300 W PSU and use it as HTPC.
My main computer is a E8400/ASUS P5Q-E/Nvidia 8800 512 GTS

Since i bought E8400 and p5Q-E last june they became more expensive by now, very strange when everything becomes cheaper.
Then it came to my mind, that is the best time to sell things and look for something better which suits my needs.

Since my main OS is Gentoo Linux i decided to get a quad-core because Gentoo compiles all programs/libs during installation, so it will get it done much faster. On the other hand i didn't wanted a big graphics card inside because i only need it for AOE3. I play almost nothing else. The last days i like to play BombJack. Does anybody know this 80s game? I am quite bad at it
So back: Graphics card is almost all the time idle and so i decided to get a AMD Phenom 2 with a Foxconn A7DA-S which just dropped in price by 50 € two days ago.
Why AMD?
1. Someone has to buy their CPUs so Intel CPUs stay cheap. So thank me guys for it.
2. Their open source policy is appealing to me. They published all the documentation about their graphics chips so free drivers can be implemented. Well but this is non-so important or a "weak reason" since intel has also a good open source policy
3. The onboard graphics is the best in the market so far
4. Power consumption is relative low, so less heat, system is very silent
5. Next generation virtualization functions since i run a windows xp desktop seamlessly integrated into my Gentoo Linux KDE4 Desktop, so i can use windows applications under linux (except games). Also for experimenting with XEN,KVM and VirtualBox.


The 8800 GTS 512 will go to the E6400 Rig so i have something for playing AOE3.
So now the systems will be:
Main PC
Phenom II 940
Foxconn A7DA-S
On-board Graphics HD3300
300W PSU Bequiet
8 GB DDR2 RAM
640 GB WD Blue
320 GB Seagate Barracuda

AOE3 PC
E6400
Asus P5WDH Deluxe
2 GB RAM
160 GB Samsung
Nvidia 8800 GTS 512
Amacrox Free Earth 400W PSU

Fileserver/Backupserver (stays like it is)
AMD BE-2400
Asrock NF7-G
bequiet 450 W PSU
2 GB RAM
160 GB Samsung
2 x 750 GB WD running as RAID 1 (Linux software raid)
onboard Nvidia graphics

So lets wait till parts arrive (hope till end of week)

Very nice. Is that Phenom II the triple core one? Also, never heard of Amacrox before, is that a foreign company, or is it a name owned by one of the bigger companies?

No the quadcore one.

Amacrox is a small company in Germany. When i bought this PSU a few years ago there was a test in ct (Germanys biggest computer magazine) about PSUs and it was one of the best concerning effiency etc. So i bought it. And it never let me down so far. Running with E8400/2HD/2DVD/8800GTS without problems.

http://www.amacrox.com/

Cool. I need to think about getting a new graphics card for my PC so I can play Empire:Totalwar on full graphics when it comes out. Only problem is I have no money...maybe I can 'borrow' my dads 512MB graphics card in his PC and swap it for my 256MB one...

[quote=""Blackadderthe4th""]Cool. I need to think about getting a new graphics card for my PC so I can play Empire:Totalwar on full graphics when it comes out. Only problem is I have no money...maybe I can 'borrow' my dads 512MB graphics card in his PC and swap it for my 256MB one...[/quote]

I've not seen the specs on Empire yet. You only really need a 512MB over 256MB if you have a high native res, so an upgrade may not be necessary as long as the card is recent enough for say Shader Model 3.0 and you have a dual core processor. The game does look quite a beast from screenshots though, although the total war franchise has previously manged to get great looking games on reasonably specced PCs.

Comadevil, interested to see how the AMD quad core goes. I'm still running LGA775 at present, as the core 2 duo equivalents weren't that hot a couple of years ago ...

MInimal specs for Empire Total War are
- CPU: 2,6 GHz Single-Core
- RAM: 1 GByte (XP), 2 GByte (Vista)
- Graphics: DirectX 9.0c-capable with 256 Mbyte V-RAM

I have minimun specs but I want max graphics.

My important specs are:
E6600 dual core @ 2.6GHz
nVidida7900GS
2 Gigs RAM

7900GS is really hardcore

What about getting graphics card of an older generation like Radeon 3870 (maybe even used). Should be much better than this one. 3870 costs here 70 Euro (the cheapest) if u buy it online e.g. this one
MSI RX3870-T2D512E-OC

And used it must be even cheaper. Just look for a forum for hardware enthusiasts. They always want to get rid of older things at such forums without the hassle of ebay or amazon. At least in Germany we have a few of such forums.

Cool sounds like a good idea. As ruminator said Totalwar games give a lot of performance from average machines so I'm hoping it will work pretty well if not I will try doing as you suggested.

Give me your exact specs on the 7900GS adder, I may be interested in buying it off you if the price is right. Would help fund a new card for you....

Not sure what your after Jim its 1 1/2 - 2 years old and the stuff it says when I run dxdiag is:

[quote=""Blackadderthe4th""]Not sure what your after Jim its 1 1/2 - 2 years old [/quote]

Usually for putting a computer together out of components which someone collected during his computer career to try out something, giving mom, some friend who needs it etc.
Before i decided to get the phenom i also looked for a cheap PCI-E graphics card

Well, the reason I am interested is that I have a 7900GS and an SLI board..... enough said.

well i have it now since one week and had the time to install windows XP and 7 beta this weekend. And i must say i am quite impressed by the IGP (790GX Chipset, Ati HD3300).
My IGP has 128MB DDR3 Sideport Memory and uses 128 MB of my RAM.
But it seems u are able to play AOE3 with it. I watched a rec of rumi vs Indy on New England with it with a 1280x768 resolution and all graphic features turned off and the frame rate didn't drop below 25 frames/s.

The processor of course is also great for me since on Gentoo Linux i have now 4 cores for compiling the packages.
Maybe later i make some benchmarks with the 8800GTS but this isn't so much interesting since that can be found on the net.
Maybe i will buy myself a small used ati card just to try Hybrid crossfire.

Edit: I think i won't try Hybrid crossfire since no card of the HD4000 series supports it with current IGPs