Monday, April 02, 2007

New EVE Online Poll: your next hardware upgrade

So I'm thinking of my next upgrade to improve the visuals of EVE. Since I play this game regularly, I've always had it's requirements in mind. When I changed my CRT to an LCD, I made sure that it had a native resolution supported by EVE.

My last upgrade was going from my old and trusty Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb (
378 MHz / 338 MHz) to a new NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT (579 MHz / 747 MHz). Both these cards are AGP, and that was intentional. As do most of you, I have a budget to follow when it comes to spending money on gaming and PC upgrades. And if I don't follow it there's always the Minister of Finance, aka the wife (wink wink), who'll remind me of it. It's an arrangements that actually works quite well. She makes sure I don't spend our hard earned money on whim, and when the time comes to actually spend it, I've done my research and buy knowing it's money well spent.

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In the case of my new graphics card, I wanted to make sure I didn't spend too much on an AGP card, knowing that I'd eventually move on to a PCI-X card, but enough that it would make a difference. At this point in time, changing to PCI-X is investment was a bit too high (new mobo, new RAM, new card).

My 3DMark03 score went from 5752 to 7449; not bad. Now you may think that this a very low score, but for EVE, and for me it's more then enough. I'm trying to get as much value out of this old PC that I build myself, and before I make the leap to bigger and better, I want to have pushed it to its limits. I know that's not the case yet. I can still upgrade the CPU and increase my RAM. Current set-up is as follows:
  • Asus P4P800SE
  • Pentium 4 2.62 GHz
  • 1 Gb DDR Ram
  • 320 GB SATA HDD
  • Plextor DVD-R SATA
  • Sony CD-R
  • NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT with 256Mb DDR3
I'm thinking of increasing RAM up to 3Gb (XP's limit, not the mobo), then getting a 3.2 GHz processor. That's about it actually, though this should give me a lot more usage out of it. Once Vista is stable, and mid-range Direct-X 10 cards are affordable, I'll consider changing the system.

If you've got any suggestions, please feel free to comment. And while you're at it, have a go at the poll and let me know what you'll upgrade next yourself!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, well I regularly run two Eve instances(both windowed) on my PC and it's handling it quite well, so don't plan to upgrade any time soon :D

For the reference, I have a AMD64 3000+, GeForce 6600GT and 1GB DDRAM. So not exactly top of the line, but it can handle one Eve running at 1600x900 and the other at 1280x1024.

Anonymous said...

With that setup, the main thing that's gimping it is that ancient P4. I know they have huge numbers when it comes to MHz, but when you compare the performance to today's Core 2 Duo or recent AMD chips, the newer ones are quite a few times more powerful. The 3+ GHz chips were made in a time period where intel was focused only on making the cycle numbers as high as possible, today's chips give a FAR higher performance with fewer cycles.

CrazyKinux said...

Thanx for the info b. I do know that the new Core Duo have a completely new architecture that makes them that much more capable then the "faster" old P4. But the purpose of my upgrades was in relation to EVE Online.

And as such, I certainly don't need the latest and most powerful gear. That may change when CCP roles out the DX10 version of the EVE client, but I still believe I can still get a bit more out of that set-up.