Doom3 Capable Budget Upgrade? Update: Bought Xbox Instead, But New Dell Deal Linked

[BenSkywalker]

Are these benches close to accurate? How would the $600.00 AMD system rank on there?

One- the benches you are looking at for the Dell are with a $300(retail, $210 NewEGG) vid card(R9800), two- the 'most demanding' test they have is 3DM2K1 at very low settings(10x7x32 and 16bit color.....wtf?).

Well, I for damn sure ain't paying $210.00 for a video card!

You won't get very good DooM3 performance if you aren't willing to spend close to that at least. The machine Nick configured will push about 40FPS, my suggestion for a major upgrade to your son's existing rig will get a bit more then double that(for less money). New mobo, budget processor and some RAM paired with a good vid card.

If that's what it takes to get the job done, then I'd be more inclined to wait till the $200.00 video cards cost $75.00. I know that doesn't take too horribly long.

That doesn't happen any more. High end boards are simply dropped and low end parts are replaced with new low end parts that perform slightly better then what they replace. IE- The GeForce2MX was replaced with the GF4MX, the GF4MX was replaced with the FX5200. When the GF2MX was the $75 board of choice the GF2Ultra was king of the hill which is about as fast as a FX5200, that was three years ago though

You won't see a $75 that can touch the 5900XT/SE in DooM3 likely until around '06, maybe '07. There is no longer high end trickle down in terms of performance, transistor budgets are way too big to waste on cores for people who won't use them. The low end progress is sloth like, we are now seeing 500%-600% rifts and this has been growing for the last several years. Within a couple of years after DXNext's launch(around '08) things should start getting a bit better in terms of the low end being remotely comparable to the high end in terms of video cards.

I've already been looking at Xbox bundles, just to give you an idea of where I'm leaning at this point...

If your son isn't too interested in anything on the PC other then DooM3 it is almost certainly a better choice. Yes, for us more hardcore FPS fans a controller sucks, but for those not as rabid the XBox does a pretty d@mn good job. I own all the platforms(XBox, GC, PS2, GBA and a high end PC with one of those obscene $300 vid cards ) and at the moment the XBox sees the most gaming time spent on it for everyone over the age of seven in my house(including my eight year old)........ excluding me on the PC of course

BTW- If you haven't picked them up for the Cube or PS2 yet, Beyond Good&Evil and Prince of Persia Sands of Time are excellent titles that can be had for about $20 each right now, I highly reccomend them both(the Box is going to save you quite a bit of cash so you can at least pick the kid up a few extra games right? ).

Edit- Before I get flamed for reccomending a console over a new PC I want to state that this comes from a father who knows you want to buy your kid what they are going to get the most enjoyment out of, and winning a p!ssing match on PC specs doesn't sound like his son't main concern

 

[JimRaynor]

How can you have 12000+ posts and be so ignorant?

 

[Davegod]

12000 x trolling?

or 12000 x OT forum.


wait.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: Ornery
I don't want to listen to screaming fans needed to keep an Athlon cool. I've got Zalmen fan speed controls on ALL fans in the system for that reason. Can I trust the Athlon to keep running with low RPM on the fans? Will it it croak if the fan happens to not spin up, due to a low RPM setting? I think we both know the answer to that. I don't want to buy an expensive P4 rated PS, to meet requirements of an Athlon CPU, or be wondering if a lower powered PS is causing issues. Dell gets by with cheap 200watt PS units in their Intel systems, and they're rock solid. I'll stick with what I KNOW works.

Athlon system is no louder than P4, stock for stock coolers... and they run better too.. (clock for clock of course)

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: Mik3y
i wonder if any bosses would allow people to build their own pc's and bring them to work to use instead of the crap they have?

Short answer: yes. Can you tell which two of my rigs I keep at work? Hint, they both have 15000rpm SCSI drives.

Incidentally, with the 30 "kids" being nForce 220D (classic nForce with IGP and single-channel memory controller), I have no problem endorsing nForce or nForce2 for people wanting stable systems, as long as they don't go and pair up the nice boards with cheese-O-matic RAM & PSUs. They're a delight to support. Got parts for another six of those coming in on Monday

That's quite an impressive "family" you have there. And I agree totally with you on the nForce boards. They are great so long as you keep them happy with good quality RAM. My only complaint is installing the MCP2 IDE driver can be a bit dicey at times (especially if you are upgrading). Besides that my NF2 board has kept me quite happy and has been solid as a rock. When I finally upgrade out of it, I'll probably still keep it around and use it to build a HTPC for my living room, since the onboard sound is full of Dolby Digital goodness.

 

[AIWGuru]

Well, if you do end up putting a system together for Doom 3 make sure you get a GeForce FX. Take a look at anandtech's sneak peak benches of doom3. The 5200Ultra plays the game very well and the FX 8500 Ultra beats down the radeon 9800 pro by about 23% faster and the 5900 is even better (over 100fps) Of course, nvidia did always own in OpenGL.

You won't get very good DooM3 performance if you aren't willing to spend close to that at least. The machine Nick configured will push about 40FPS, my suggestion for a major upgrade to your son's existing rig will get a bit more then double that(for less money). New mobo, budget processor and some RAM paired with a good vid card.

Wrong. Take a look at anand's benchmarks. The 5200U (a $80 card) does 40fps at 1024x768. KTHX

 

[0roo0roo]

where are these doom3 benchs?

 

[AIWGuru]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
where are these doom3 benchs?

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1821&p=22

 

[0roo0roo]

interesting. also interesting that all were only tested at "medium quality"

 

[AIWGuru]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
interesting. also interesting that all were only tested at "medium quality"

"The only options that we could change in game were the quality settings which we could set to low, medium or high. We benchmarked medium and high, but on the fastest cards the performance drop in high quality mode was negligible so we stuck to reporting the medium detail level scores due to time constraints. "

They did test with AA and AF however, and Nvidia still came out hugely on top. Note that with these settings, the 9600 Pro isn't even playable.

 

[Childs]

Just buy two Xboxes, keyboards and mice, and play D3 in Coop with your son. I haven't read the entire thread (redundant) but you don't want to go AMD, and you don't have to. I won't go Via for anything, been burned too many times, and I don't care what anyone says, I will not purchase any Via stuff ever. That's the way things are sometimes.

Depending on where you live, you can put together a decent system for cheap. In the last two weeks I picked up a P4 2.6C for $129, $10 Coolmaster cooler, Kbyte 512MB PC3500 for $89, and a MSI 848P for $79 at Frys. Also got ATI 9800 Pro for $129 from Compgeeks. Reused my dvdrom and case, used onboard sound, nic, etc, and this system is just as fast as any system for the money, especially since the 2.6 hit 3Ghz without even trying. If you don't live in a place where you can get cheap stuff, use newegg, as these prices are nothing special. Granted, the 9800 Pro is cheap, but they 9700 Pros aren't that much more. $500 will get you a decent rig for D3 using Intel or AMD parts. Judging by the first couple of pages of this thread I suggest you go Xbox with Keyboard and Mouse. You will just have to wait a month or so after the PC version ships. Since your sons birthday is coming up, you'd be better off getting an Xbox and a cool game now. He can use the PC for general tasks, and the Xbox for the latest and greatest in games. HL2 will probably be on xBox as well, and HL2 on the PC brings up other issues like ATI vs Nvidia. Also, if you buy a PC now you'll probably feel burned in a couple months when the prices drop.

BTW, the SIS 648FX based motherboards are pretty good for the money as well. I originally got an ECS with 648FX and it was fairly good. I returned it only because I wanted greater OC control. But the board was only $69, and the sound and nic were good enough.

 

[Chiropteran]

Originally posted by: Ornery
If I have a CPU burn up due to the fan not spinning, there goes all my savings. Not to mention the noise issue...

If I buy a $15.00 PS, and the system keeps crashing, that will be the first suspect. I feel confident that a P4 will run fine with whatever PS I use due to Dell's example.

Intel isn't safe either.

 

[Ornery]

Outrageous Two-Day Dimension 4600 Desktop Deal! $399 AR, Free Shipping

Not as good as that last deal, but my sister will be ording this tonight. Depending on whether we can get Dell to sweeten the deal, I'll order one too. (Yes, it has an AGP slot.)

 

[SneakyStuff]

hmmmmm that's actually a pretty decent deal, I'm just not too wild about their choice of memory and CPU. How much does it cost to get an 800 MHz FSB Pentium 4? If you can do that, and save that configuration, that'd be a pretty nice system, provided the graphics are upgraded as a part of the gift :beer:

EDIT: Actually nevermind, I see where they are comming from, and they must be trying to clear out their 533 MHZ FSB processors, which isn't a bad deal for you, because 2.8 GHz fir that price is a fantastic deal. If you get a geforce fx 5900 or something like that when the prices come down, that machine would be primed and ready for Doom III

 

[Ornery]

I just finished rereading this ENTIRE thread. I didn't buy that last Dell deal on the 13th, as a few of my friends did. I didn't really need it at the time, so I held off. Now I'd like to get that same deal for my older son, who is having a graduation party in one month. Naturally, the latest deal ain't so great. It's $75.00 more than I could have gotten it for last month!

I've got 4 weeks for a better deal to come along from them, or I'll have to build. That's why I read the thread over again, to see the different configurations. Just wanted you to know, NONE of the configurations you took the time to compile, were in vain.

Thanks loads!

 

[Mik3y]

the radeon 9600 pro will lag like crazy when runing doom 3. radeon 9800 pro is expected to lag also.