Was:Replace my Geforce 8800 GT / Now: upgrade my whole PC

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Edit: Eek! I see it's even worse when I scrolled back up to the OP: 32 Bit Vista.

/twitch

muraii wrote:
Thin_J wrote:

Still, you're all forgetting WWMA - "what would Malor ask?"

Where's (s)he been?

I believe he's been off somewhere for work or vacation, not sure. I think he said it'd be a month. Either that or I'm confusing him with someone else who is gone for a moment that.

Curiously, while looking through CL for various cheapo stuff I might actually be able to afford, I came across several 8800 GTs. I'm hoping to procure a C2D 3.0 (not sure Wolfdale or Conroe) machine from my employer. I intend to pair it with a large CRT if I can get one from work, or maybe purchase a used LCD display. The intent is to cheaply build a more capable machine as a stop-gap until I can build something nice.

Will 8800 GT work well in the confines of a typical Dell corporate box? Are they sufficiently old that used cards are probably toast-ready?

Eventually I'll stop weighing threads down with my cheap-ass questions, but today is not that day.

I'd be nervous of an older 8800 based card now. They were good cards, but with the habit of crapping the bed after 18 months.

Any one existing now is living on borrowed time.

Compared to more recent cards, 8800 GT's require a bunch of power and I'd be wary of the PSU a Dell has having enough power.

And, yeah, they tend to blow up.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

I'd be nervous of an older 8800 based card now. They were good cards, but with the habit of crapping the bed after 18 months.

Any one existing now is living on borrowed time.

Not all of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce... (two threads served by the same article)
There will often be a few chip designs/revisions for the same series/generation of cards.

Yeah, I know there are variations, but after having my 9600GSO(aka 8800GS) join the casualty list after just over 2 years I would stay well away. It's just too risky IMO, and I don't trust second hand graphics cards at the best of times.

For a corporate Dell box I'm sure the HD 7750 is a good bet, it's even purely bus powered. I'm getting one on Monday or Tuesday and will offer impressions for fellow cheap-asses.

Thanks all for the perspective.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

For a corporate Dell box I'm sure the HD 7750 is a good bet, it's even purely bus powered. I'm getting one on Monday or Tuesday and will offer impressions for fellow cheap-asses. ;)

I'll look forward to it. I'm trying, in true cheap-ass fashion, to minimize what I'm spending on a stop-gap, and $30-40 was attractive. The more I save now is potentially the more I'll have later, or equivalently the sooner I can build proper. I'm probably a good 8 months away from building a machine. I'll keep looking at other used options.

Look, at $30-40 you may be lucky and it may be worth the gamble, but the power supply would probably be a problem.

Re: the 8800 GT,

I think the main reason it lasted as long as it did for me is I got a 3rd party cooling system and put it on it. The first Left 4 Dead game was overheating the card on a regular basis. I found the cooling system at Newegg, installed it, and forgot about any problems with my graphics card until it died last week. I'm not sure how easily you'd be able to find a 3rd party system like that these days though.

Update on my PC. I now have a brand new Geforce GTX 660 Ti in it and Skyrim looks AMAZING on ultra settings. Huge jump up from the 550 Ti I just returned today.

Nice. Hot off the metal press, that card, yeah?

Yep. Today is its official release. Pretty decent timing for me to have graphic card problems. It's just around $20-$30 more than the 560 Ti- which most likely would've been the card I wound up with if the 660 didn't come out.

That's great! I think you're the first Goodjer to get one.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

That's great! I think you're the first Goodjer to get one.

Guru's probably already selling 4 of his.

I dunno.. 660Ti almost seems beneath him somehow.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Oh dear, you're still running Windows XP? Yeah, Windows 7 will be a huge upgrade once you get a new MB/CPU/Memory. We had some budget builds going in the Help me Build a PC thread. You might take a look at those.

Edit: Eek! I see it's even worse when I scrolled back up to the OP: 32 Bit Vista.

What's wrong with 32-bit Vista? Been working fine for years now on my box.

I don't like upgrading until I have to, like when my OS drive dies or new versions of stuff I need stop working. When this drive goes, I'll get an SSD and go the latest whatever. Until then, everything works just fine.

It inefficiently uses up resources. It won't utilize more than ~4gbs of RAM. Really, the former more than the latter. It's a resource hog.

AnimeJ wrote:

I dunno.. 660Ti almost seems beneath him somehow.

I don't know his backstory, but if he's on the cutting edge, then yeah he may already have a 670 or 680 and is wondering why anyone would buy a cheap, crippled version of those cards.

All true. Still, all I care about is that it works good enough for what I do.

The biggest problem with 32-bit Windows, as garion says, is that only server versions can use more than 4 gigs of memory. And of that four gigs, you lose at least a gig for device address space, meaning you only have 3 actually available, which the OS and all your programs have to live inside. Normal 32-bit programs won't take more than 2 gigs each, so you can run any one 'main' program, along with several utilities, just fine. But the minute you fire up a specialized program, like Photoshop, or if you want to run a second 'big' program at the same time, you've got issues on any 32-bit Windows. It's worst on Vista, because it has a higher memory footprint than any other Windows variant, but it's bad on XP and 7, too.

The big win is going to 64-bit Windows 7. Individual 32-bit programs will still only use 2 gigs each, but you can run many more of them, and the OS will do very nice drive caching with the memory you're not currently using for anything else. And 64-bit programs, of course, can use any amount of RAM you have.

Malor wrote:

The biggest problem with 32-bit Windows, as garion says, is that only server versions can use more than 4 gigs of memory. And of that four gigs, you lose at least a gig for device address space, meaning you only have 3 actually available, which the OS and all your programs have to live inside. Normal 32-bit programs won't take more than 2 gigs each, so you can run any one 'main' program, along with several utilities, just fine. But the minute you fire up a specialized program, like Photoshop, or if you want to run a second 'big' program at the same time, you've got issues on any 32-bit Windows. It's worst on Vista, because it has a higher memory footprint than any other Windows variant, but it's bad on XP and 7, too.

The big win is going to 64-bit Windows 7. Individual 32-bit programs will still only use 2 gigs each, but you can run many more of them, and the OS will do very nice drive caching with the memory you're not currently using for anything else. And 64-bit programs, of course, can use any amount of RAM you have.

Glad to have you back. Seriously. Have fun answering all the tech questions that we haven't solved.

I haven't moved to Windows 7 myself yet, but can attest that the 64-bit version of Windows Vista is fantastic, as long as you have a solid chunk of RAM.

tboon wrote:

...SSD...Profit?

Hey, if you ever ever need someone to help you spend your money, you can ask ol' tboon, I be more than happy to help!

:)

So sell me on a SSD. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the concept. Is it just primarily used to boot the OS? Or for most commonly/currently used programs. How big of one should I be looking for if I'm planning to have something like a 1.5 terabyte sized HD as well.

SSDs sell themselves. Once you use a good one, you'll never go back and everything else, even 15k drives, will feel slow. Everything is zippy, double click on a program and it launches in a finger snap. Open a file explorer and it's instant, none of this spinning, searching, indexing, waiting... It really is night and day.

How big depends on what you're putting on it. Assume windows itself needs 30gb and you disable the hiberfil file. The rest is for applications. You can use your 1.5tb for storage of things like photos, documents, music, whatever but put applications, games and whatnot on the SSD or you are just wasting your time. When SSDs really took off a few years ago, I lived with a 32gb for a while and that was painful. Now I've got a 128gb and I feel fine but I only keep 2 or 3 big games installed at one time.

Would Steam work nicely with a SSD? I'm not sure it's possible to choose which drives to install to certain games.

My current Steam folder is around 160GB, and that's after recently uninstalling some backlogged games to make more room.

Tscott wrote:

Would Steam work nicely with a SSD? I'm not sure it's possible to choose which drives to install to certain games.

My current Steam folder is around 160GB, and that's after recently uninstalling some backlogged games to make more room.

There are ways to move the Steam folder quite easily. I haven't done it, but you can keep your games on the 1.5T drive. Otherwise, if you have the budget you can add a 480 or 512GB SSD (400 bucks and up) and keep everything on it.

Tscott wrote:
tboon wrote:

...SSD...Profit?

Hey, if you ever ever need someone to help you spend your money, you can ask ol' tboon, I be more than happy to help!

:)

So sell me on a SSD. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the concept. Is it just primarily used to boot the OS? Or for most commonly/currently used programs. How big of one should I be looking for if I'm planning to have something like a 1.5 terabyte sized HD as well.

It's just a drive. That is super super fast for reading (and writing) data. Like starting Windows and loading games.

I don't have one, but it's the next thing I am going to get to add to my box.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
Tscott wrote:

Would Steam work nicely with a SSD? I'm not sure it's possible to choose which drives to install to certain games.

My current Steam folder is around 160GB, and that's after recently uninstalling some backlogged games to make more room.

There are ways to move the Steam folder quite easily. I haven't done it, but you can keep your games on the 1.5T drive. Otherwise, if you have the budget you can add a 480 or 512GB SSD (400 bucks and up) and keep everything on it.

Having games on an SSD doesn't really do much other than reduce load times. At this point, unless you're rich, spending the money on a large SSD so you can put games on it is a waste of money imho.

garion333 wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:
Tscott wrote:

Would Steam work nicely with a SSD? I'm not sure it's possible to choose which drives to install to certain games.

My current Steam folder is around 160GB, and that's after recently uninstalling some backlogged games to make more room.

There are ways to move the Steam folder quite easily. I haven't done it, but you can keep your games on the 1.5T drive. Otherwise, if you have the budget you can add a 480 or 512GB SSD (400 bucks and up) and keep everything on it.

Having games on an SSD doesn't really do much other than reduce load times. At this point, unless you're rich, spending the money on a large SSD so you can put games on it is a waste of money imho.

I thought reducing load times was the entire point of an ssd... Otherwise, why bother at all?

ibdoomed wrote:

I thought reducing load times was the entire point of an ssd... Otherwise, why bother at all?

I think the issue is that some things are more bothered by loading than others. A lot of games have pretty intelligent loading that is very quick initially and streams in the background, some multiplayer games an SSD will get you in the server faster but never load after that, others like an MMO where you can hop around the world and could need to see any random armour model from anywhere at any time could benefit from fast loading.