Out of date....

[Cashman]

Boys...

Ive been away from the scene for a while.

Im aware that conroe is here and that its better at everything than my A64 X2. Ive just been reading about the 8800GTX, sounds very impressive indeed.

Anyway, My spec is in my signature, my biggest constraint is my monitor as it runds everyhting perfect atm with my system.

Id love one of these 22" or 24" widescreen LCD's as I currently have a 19" VX912B.

My questions are:

Is my base system, eg RAM, CPU good enough still or should I really be looking at 680i and quad core conroe or is the upgrade not that essential?

I assume if I upgrade to 22" or 24" then my 7800gtx 256mb will start to be shown up?

BTW I play BF2, BF2142, Company of Heroes & Fear / HL2.

Cheers for the help

 

[MoD_Callidus]

I'd say you're pretty safe with your current rig, of course an upgrade as you outline would give you a gain but I don't consider you'd be held back too much by the current setup. 8800 gtx would be a sweet addition

 

[The $6m Dan]

If you went for a 22" monitor with 1680x1050 resolution you'll be fine, perhaps having to turn a few lighting/shadow options down in some games. If you went for a 24" monitor at 1920x1200 resolution then you'd be able to run at that resolution but you'd have to turn more options down.

For example my opteron 170 @2.7GHz with an X1900Xt-X runs FEAR at 1920x1200, but all the settings are on medium apart from texture detail and the shader detail is set to maximum. It doesn't look much different tbh, but that only gets me around 30 frames a second and I'm only be going to turning more and more settings down as more demanding games come out.
Oblivion also had to be tweaked quite substantially and I still only get around 25 frames in the grassy areas outside the cities.

An upgrade would allow you to run all games at 1920x1200 with all settings on high/max, but it would be a lot of money for a relatively small IQ improvement. Wether or not it's worth it is something you'll have to decide

I know I'd like to upgrade to something similar you mentioned, and I actually have the cash after getting a nice bonus this year, I just don't know if I can justify it. Maybe early next year when things have settled down, I'll take a serious look at upgrading.