Seeking some technical Opinions.

Hi there. As someone who has been a resident now for quite sometime, I was just wanting to get some opinions on a PC upgrade preforming.

Recently I had a HP dv2945se Laptop. Great little laptop but not really what I needed, tons of power but I was hardly ever able to run SL above the LOW graphics setting.

Specs for the laptop were:
4 gig DDR2 RAM
AMD Dual Core Turion 2.6 Ghz
Nvidia GeForce Go M7150 (I believe)
300 Gig HD
And it ran on Windows Vista Homa Premium.

Now I sold my laptop, and am having a custom computer built. I guess my only hesitation is that it wont be able to run SL on the higher graphics settings with a decent FPS rate.

The specs on the new PC are:
AMD Quad Core Phenom 3.0 Ghz
2 Gig DDR2 RAM (I may increase this, as I am still deciding)
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX
500 Gig HD
Also to run Windows Vista...

So Can some uber smart techie out there tell me, if this upgrade is even worth it? Will I be able to run SL on moderate to high end settings and use those ohhh so beautiful windlights?

Thanks,

Curious.As.Ever.

Echo Jolles

I would increase the RAM, but the answer to your question is yes, you should notice a HUGE difference in performance. You'll be going from a bottom of the barrel video card to a top of the line one. That alone will be like night and day.

The quad core won't be a huge boost over the dual core for SL itself, but the whole system will certainly benefit, and SL along with it. If you're multi-tasking, you'll see less of a strain with the quad than with the dual. And of course apps designed to take advantage of multiple cores will fly.

Your only bottleneck is that 2 gigs of RAM. Memory is so cheap, there's no reason not to get more. Make sure to get the fastest memory your motherboard will support.

Im sorry I screwed up on the RAM

lol. I will be getting 4 gig DDR2, the motherboard supports up to 16 Gig. So slow and gradually I will increase. I believe the motherboard supports 1066 RAM so...

Ah, big difference between 4GB and 2.

One word of advice. Go with 64-bit Vista. 32-bit operating systems can only use a maximum of 4GB of RAM, which includes system memory and video memory combined. That 9800GTX is going to have somewhere between 512MB and 1GB of video memory onboard, which means you'll only be able to use 3-3.5GB of system memory with a 32-bit OS, even if you have 4GB physically in the machine. With a 64-bit OS, you'll be able to use the full 16GB that the motherboard supports.

I've been using Vista Ultimate x64 for about 6 months now, and I really love it.