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Best SL PC

Al Bravo
Retired
Join date: 29 Jun 2004
Posts: 373
07-30-2004 17:49
Time for a new PC. I know there are some super geeks out there. If you had around $3,000 to spend on a new box and you already had a couple nice LCD flatscreen monitors and an NVidia GeForce4 Ti4600, what would buy? Assuming that this box was to be mainly a SL box.
Dax Mars
Registered User
Join date: 8 Feb 2004
Posts: 34
07-30-2004 17:56
I'm not current on prices, but I run a 2.4GHz P4 on a Asus P4PE mother oard, 512meg of PC2700 RAM, Gefore 4 with 128meg, two Western Digital 7200RPM drive totaling 120GB and a Sound Blaster Audigy 2, DVD burner, land other goodies that don't effect gaming so I'm leave them out. I'm happy with it :)

Oh yes, don't forget a good TrippLite (or if you can't find TrippLite, APC) UPS, mine has saved that day many times. I recommend staying away from Belkin, it crashes my Linksys router most every time it kinks in.. TrippLite has the best rating for surge protection (source Consumer Reports)

Hope this helps.
Lordfly Digeridoo
Prim Orchestrator
Join date: 21 Jul 2003
Posts: 3,628
07-30-2004 22:23
Let us assume you're going to be playing mostly SL.

Get the fastest processor you can afford with a good front side bus. Get a ton of ram (more than a gig of DDR). Get the best video card you can afford (Geforce based, preferrably).

Get a 7200 RPM hard drive or faster.

That should do ya.

LF
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Chage McCoy
Aerodrome Janitor
Join date: 23 Apr 2004
Posts: 336
07-30-2004 22:43
Video card is not as important as you may think, as a lot of SL is CPU based, so a fast CPU is good. What is important however is video ram. I'd be suggesting a video card with 256MB RAM on Board.

The SL Client on my machine uses about 300MB of physical RAM, so yea, about 1gb of ram or more is the way to go.

Hard Disk would be better if its fast, doesnt necessarily have to be big - keep in mind SL does nt have an "infinite" cache, it limits it to about 1gig.

As Lordfly said, the motherboard should have a good FSB - more data throughput the better.
Eddy Stryker
libsecondlife Developer
Join date: 6 Jun 2004
Posts: 353
07-31-2004 01:58
I've been upgrading my computer piece by piece for a little while now, and throughout the upgrades have found out if your system is sufficiently speedy the main bottleneck is the hard drive, or your network if your bandwidth is capped or minimal. With a ridiculous amount of money like 3K set aside for a computer, you're going to want this to last you a little while so I would put a 64-bit processor high on the priority list. To cover SLs hard drive bottleneck (up to 1gb of data is stored in a DB2 file that is likely fragmented across your hard drive) I would look at SATA drives or maybe 10K RPM SCSI if you want to really start using some of that budget up. Aside from that you can just start frivolously buying overpriced latest generation things like a 6800 Ultra (run two in SLI!) or dual 21" LCDs.

Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical about buying the latest and greatest, I'd rather go midrange and blow the rest of my money on liquid cooling projects :-).
Selador Cellardoor
Registered User
Join date: 16 Nov 2003
Posts: 3,082
07-31-2004 03:15
With regard to the effects of a video card, I used to have a GeForce4 card, and replaced it recently with a 6800GT.

With the old card I was able to use the bump-mapped option, and sometimes, depending on the conditions, local lighting. Everything with a slider was set to the mid position. I used to find that frame rates sometimes plummeted to 1 or 2, although most of the time they were around 4-7.

With the new card I have ticked all the options except water ripple, and have set all the sliders to maximum. Frame rate now is generally between 5 and 10.

The only thing that hasn't been affected much is draw distance, although I was able to take it up one notch. But the new card has had quite a big effect on the way second life looks, so don't dismiss the video card when you are thinking of upgrading.
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Djnog Extraordinaire
Registered User
Join date: 3 Jul 2004
Posts: 34
09-03-2004 18:33
How about a Cray SuperComputer LMAO :)
Catherine Omega
Geometry Ninja
Join date: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 2,053
09-04-2004 03:59
From: someone
Originally posted by Djnog Extraordinaire
How about a Cray SuperComputer LMAO :)


A Cray isn't a PC. It can't run SL.

If I had the money to spend, I would probably wait a few months, then get a dual-socket, nForce4 motherboard, a pair of dual-core AMD64 CPUs and a pair of PCIe GeForce 6800s in SLI mode. I think that might be a little more than $3000 though, particularly if you outfitted it with a lot of RAM and hard drive space.

A quad-core system won't really help for SL much, but you'd have no trouble running several apps at once. :)
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Donnie Donovan
Resident Slax0r
Join date: 4 Jun 2004
Posts: 120
09-04-2004 11:10
Buy the most expensive thing you can find at www.alienware.com
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Catherine Omega
Geometry Ninja
Join date: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 2,053
09-04-2004 22:28
If you know what you're doing, you can get something at least as good as anything Alienware sells for around $1000 less. Just food for thought. :)
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Eggy Lippmann
Wiktator
Join date: 1 May 2003
Posts: 7,939
09-05-2004 03:36
Alienware=computer barons
Buy a standard PC, paint it green, hike up the price.
You might wanna look into RAID. Buy a bunch of cheaper HDs and RAID them together. Instant performance boost and guaranteed reliability. SL is always accessing the HD... must be cause i "only" have 256 megs of ram... it sucks.
Tito Gomez
Mi Vida Loca
Join date: 1 Aug 2004
Posts: 921
09-05-2004 21:42
A couple of months ago, I bought a run of the mill $1200 HP from Circuit City. I brought it up to 1GB DDR PC3200, added a Radeon 9800 XT video card and I transferred in the Audigy 2 Sound Card from my old PC. Total came to about $1800 including wireless, CD-RW and DVD+-RW.

SL and Doom3 run smooth as they can be.

I ran the program that Alienware has on their site to compare your PC to theirs and it told me I did not need a computer, that it was comparable to the Area-51 extreme.

So going this route I ended up with pretty much the performance and peripherals of a $3500 machine for half that.

I love Alienware. I own a Area-51m laptop, but I still think made the right choice on the desktop. My only regret is that if I had known the ATI X800 was going to be out within I month, I would have waited. Far superior to the 9800 XT for roughly the same price.

All I can say is shop around and see what value you can get by getting some peripherals separately.

Good luck,

tito
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Korg Stygian
Curmudgeon Extraordinaire
Join date: 3 Jun 2004
Posts: 1,105
09-05-2004 23:16
WEll, if money were no object, this is the ultimate monitor setup, at least as far as I have seen.

http://www.go-l.com/monitors/grand_canyon/features/index.htm

They also claim to have modded the Windows XP os in order to tweak the drivers for all attached peripherals in such a way as to wring every possible bit of work from every cpu cycle.

I have to say that - for 99.99% of us, I am sure - overkill doesn't even come close to describing this setup. However, I get a stiffy at the thought of a 92 inch wide screen running at 6400 x 1200!

In reality, I run a Celeron (omg, yes I really do run a Celeron, but SL runs just fine on it) 2.4 with 1GigRam and 3 256MB Geforce4 vid cards. Now if I could just win the lottery.

(corrected a numeric typo)