Planning on buying this desktop, opinions?
By
Dark Ether,
Posted on: 2009-11-22 10:39 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
I haven't found any information on the power supply included, and on a search for the graphics card I find several posts of people who cannot find a driver for it as yet.
Hopefully Father Xmas, who sees all and knows all, will see your post and provide some help.
I'm a bit leery of it coming with Vista. If it were me, I'd find a copy of a 64-bit Win 7 and install it.
Edit: Found drivers NVidia posted a few days ago on their site, so that part's ok. Odd that they don't list that card it in their GeForce product list, though...
My Deviant Art page link-link
CoH/V Fan Videos
No, the GT 230 should be a rather lightweight card. The GT 240 for instance is slightly less powerful than the 9600GT (but more expensive, go figure) and the GT 220 is slightly more powerful than the 9500GT so I'll guess that the GT 230 falls in between those two. Problem is there is little to no hard info on these nVidia Dx10.1 cards that were once OEM only until they are available to the general public.
It's also likely that the PSU in that system wouldn't support a reasonable high end card (only 350 watt, ??A @ 12V) so budget another $100-150 for your eventual upgrade.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
Yeah, that kinda threw me as well when I was trying to look up info on it. The only reason it comes with Vista is simply because it was released shortly before 7 became available. As far as I understand it though, microsoft is offering a free upgrade to 7 to anyone who purchases a machine with vista on the market. I'm going to take advantage of it but with all the complaints I've been hearing about COH arguing with 7 I may hold off on actually upgrading for a few weeks until things smooth out there, though I'm definitely looking forward to the upgrade.
I take it there's no real concensus on whether this will run COH decently? I mean, I'd imagine it will as what I've gather on it is that it's basically a re-branded 9600 with a few small improvements, and this one comes with a massive amount of memory. Considering I'm running on an integrated 8200 with 512 megs of video ram and managed to get a decent performance from nearly maxed settings I've got high hopes for this one, and like I said, I'm planning to upgrade at some point anyway, and when I upgrade to 7 I'd imagine I'll have an even smoother performance since it does away with alot of the background nonsense of vista.
EDIT - And Father Xmas beat me to the post button. So what you're saying is this card is probably not gonna handle COH well, or just not at maxed out settings? I had counted on having to upgrade the power supply just from a review I read of the box when I searched it earlier, so that's not an issue. I did check out the Nvidia page for the 240 and 220 and bother mentioned games like Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3 and Spore, which (at least in the case of the first two) are pretty graphically instense, especially compared to COH, so I'm kind of trying to wrap my head around it. Are Nvidia just spouting marketing crap and blowing smoke up my backside or what?
I think you may have to run with settings turned down a bit, and I'm doubting this will do much in the way of the Ultra options, although wee don't really know much about the requirements for that as yet. As there aren't any specs that I've found on the 230 card, this is just speculation.
My Deviant Art page link-link
CoH/V Fan Videos
The only part in doubt is the video, and if Father Xmas is right about it being slightly less powerful than an Nvidia 9600GT, then personally I don't think that'll be a big problem. I run CoH on an Nvidia 8600GT with 1GB RAM and I've got sliders set to over 100% and all sorts of options set to ON and have no issues that bother me.
Apart from that (which you admit is potentially upgradable anyway) I'd say what are you waiting for? If I could get an Intel Quad Core machine with 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, DVD-RW, Blue-Ray, all for $US750, I'd be all over that puppy.
Vista...yeah, well, I'm on XP SP3, still not sure why anyone bothered to leave it.
K5K - The Killbot 5000
A Spanner In The Works Part One, ArcID: 336662, A Spanner In The Works Part Two, ArcID: 336665, Enter Japes, ArcID: 96001
In The Darkness Creeping, ArcID: 347709, When Dimensions Collide, ArcID: 412416.
Yes, I better explain. The 9500GT isn't a bad card relative to what you have (you should see a huge improvement compared to what you currently have) or what was around say three years ago, and the GT 230 should fall between the 9500GT and the 9600GT in performance.
Now it's easy to poo-poo the performance of a 9500GT/9600GT compared to say a GTX 285 but in the last few years GPU performance has shot through the roof to the extremely silly range which then causes game manufacturers to code up an engine with maximum setting that can bring even these extreme cards to their knees, which causes GPU manufacturers to make even more extreme cards and hardcore gamers to but two or three into their rigs, rinse and repeat.
Remember the original 8800GTS with 320MB of memory way back when, late 2006 I think. The one based on a cutdown verson of the 8800GTX, nVidia's first Dx10 card? Well I'm guessing the GT 230 is about that powerful so it's nothing to sneeze at.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
Well, I ended up buying it, and I'm very impressed with it's performance. I'm running at max settings out of the box and no slow down. I DID turn bloom down because I couldn't really see much difference between normal and heavy, but that's it. Everything else is cranked to max and high settings and I'm running at a flawless framerate. Ran a full team of 8 and had no slowdown when the powers were flying every which directions. It's been a glorious experience.
Definitely going to upgrade closer to Going Rogue time as I can kind of see an upper limit to how much the machine can handle (i.e. it jerks for a split second when a large open area comes into view) so it won't be able to handle Ultra, but until such time, I'm perfectly content with this. Plus it's running skype alongside COH with a full chat of 6-8 people with no slowdown on either end. Very useful. If anyone is looking to upgrade and you can find one of these still on the market, it's a VERY nice box.
Here's the dilemma people. We have a computer that went on clearance at work when windows 7 dropped, but it was a relatively new machine, has fantastic specs and is just far too tempting to pass up now that it's priced at 750 dollars down from 1000. I'd consider myself fairly knowledgable on computers but nowhere near the level of these people who build their own custom rigs, so I need a hand in determining what's the best route to go here.
http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/hp-....html?tag=psum
That's the full specs on the machine. It's got both a Blu-ray drive and a lightscribe DVD drive which are nice amenities (and the machine will handle blu-ray video which is fantastic for me as I like to watch HD content when available, but that's an aside from COH), 1tb harddrive at 7200 RPM, 8 gigs of ram, all fantastic stuff. This suits my purpose very nicely as I like to run skype alongside COH when I'm playing so I can chat with my buddies easily while saving the world, and sometimes I'll even find myself in need of a couple browser windows if I'm trying to remember where a particular badge is or what contact I need to speak with, or something else random. I'm not buying this box STRICTLY as a gaming rig though I do want it to perform well in that area (with the eventual aim of having it run Ultra Mode at top settings when GR comes out, preferably with a flawless frame-rate, I'm a graphics snob).
I know COH isn't the most graphically intensive game out there so for the time being I'd like to be able to play it with settings maxed (or as close to that as possible) without all the frame-rate loss and slowdown I get on my current rig (storebought present from last christmas. It's a slimtower. >_<) so I know I'm not gonna need the world's most powerful card at the moment. However, I'm unsure if the card that comes with the machine standard is any good or if you guys think that it'll be able to run COH to the standards I mentioned. It's got 1.5 gigs of dedicated video memory which is absolutely ridiculous, but does it have the muscle to handle FAA x16, bloom + DOF settings cranked to max and high quality water effects and textures without slowing my framerate to a crawl. I'll admit this is a totally amateur guess but it seems to me that if the card is capable of producing the graphical quality it's really just a matter of if it has enough ram to display all of it without slowdown, so 1.5 gigs sounds wonderous and seems like it wouldn't have any trouble, or am I totally off base?
Either way, I plan to upgrade it closer to Going Rogue when we have some more concrete system requirements for Ultra Mode so I'll be sure that I can run it smoothly (And I know I'll need to upgrade the power supply as well to handle a nicer card), the big question is, until such a time, is this card going to do what I want, and if not, will it at least run COH with decent graphical settings to hold me over until I can upgrade?