Noob looking for graphics card advice

[Merc1138]

I call BS.

It's entirely true if he never bought anything more recent than a TNT 2 trying to play quake 2, lol.

But seriously, a little game called "Crysis" makes that statement instantly false unless either

a: You consider 30fps with constant spikes down to 5-10fps to be playable
b: He meant any games that he played, and they didn't involve Crysis(or a plethora of other games over the years that would not run at a steady 60fps on a sub $200 card with everything maxed at launch).

[NYT]

Sword is out! Time to defend!

Well I am sorry but when I went looking for reasons to get 16GB of RAM I found NO good reason on several pages that I came across. Well, for the AVERAGE user and most gamers anyways. If your only reason to buy RAM is because it is cheap then you are a fool. Sorry to put it that way but please STOP and think, if you buy 16 GB of RAM and it never gets used beyond 4,6,10GB, then that extra RAM IS WASTED MONEY. The idea of putting together machines where you just throw money into it until it goes fast is absurd to me. OKAY, if you want to go for it, but are we talking about a server here? Sorry, I saw no mention of a server. I am not a server guy though I am usually a desktop/laptop guy and everytime I see MY ram usage it is hardly EVER up past 1-2GB of ram. Durring a game I do not care because I am playing a game. And when I play games it is only habit to NOT do anything else but play games. MAYBE my attitude will change when I make the move to windows 7 but until then. Sorry, I have found NO good reason to go MAX in ram. You are just a sucker for the big box stores and alienware propaganda...

As for sysprep, well, hold a sec, I gotta read what the **** I shot my mouth off about to get that blasted at me... OH yeah. YEah maybe they fixed something but last year I did an upgrade for a XP pro based machine and it was an OEM installation of Windows. I DID sysprep, It shutdown, I did the change and upon bootup NOGO. I ended up doing a REPAIR install and THAT was a nogo. I ended up then doing some research and found that that OS installation was married to that mobo (not really married, but it IS oem) and since that OS was installed with THAT mopbo, I was not allowed to upgrade that mobo. I had to WIPE and reinstall XP fresh and THEN it was FINE. No problems since and everything is running great.

NOW, about your sysprep for windows 7. Good for you, but I had the poor experience of getting two different machines brought to me that did NOT work. BOTH needed new mobos. BOTH machines were OEM windows 7. I fought and fought after booting up and it never really made it into windows, it got to the desktop and then BSOD. The damn startup repair disk did NOTHING. I had to wipe and reinstall and what a coincidence, BOTH machines were fine after I entered the info in again. I DID have to activate two of them by phone but they worked.

FINALLY, My friends machine went down due to a bad mobo, This was about 4 months ago. We thought it was the PSU but no, it was the MOBO. OKAY, well, a new MOBO fixed the problem... Anyways, HE had windows 7 ultimate and I was SHOCKED because I expected a fight but it was a seamless boot and installation of drivers. I was so thrilled I about **** my shorts because now I had a whole weekend freed up to do whatever instead of data moving and reinstalling games and ****. SO bottom line, THAT worked GREAT and I am thankful, but when you can't sysprep a dead board with an OEM os on it, then you might be in for a fight when it wakes up.

I can only tell you what I have experience with and from what I just read, even with many browser windows open windows rarely uses more then 3GBs of ram...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-module-upgrade,2264.html

http://lifehacker.com/5415355/do-you-really-need-more-than-4gb-of-ram?

http://www.desktopreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1465&Review=How+Much+RAM+Do+I+Need+Kingston+HyperX

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7

I multitask too, but I play games on a game system, I do NOT burn things while I am playing games. (okay, ONCE I did) but I think if you just buy ram because it is there then well, that is a foolish choice. That is what they WANT you to do. Now if it were an AK-47 then things are different, but it aint, it is RAM and I seem to be collecting it as I go through life with all of the upgrades that I do for me and others so Anyways, I am sticking by my 4GB of RAM from what I have read.

Haha stilly, it's time to upgrade man.

you're right about how xp marries to the mobo. it's called HAL, hardware acceleration layer. it was used to dissuade people from building and imaging one pc, then cloning that image and all activated software to other machines.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

[bigbearbear]

It's entirely true if he never bought anything more recent than a TNT 2 trying to play quake 2, lol.

But seriously, a little game called "Crysis" makes that statement instantly false unless either

a: You consider 30fps with constant spikes down to 5-10fps to be playable
b: He meant any games that he played, and they didn't involve Crysis(or a plethora of other games over the years that would not run at a steady 60fps on a sub $200 card with everything maxed at launch).

Or he is using a 15 inch monitor with a max resolution of 800x600.