some advice on buying new computers?

[Delisha Zrazorian]

Greetings all,

Zack and I are going to replace our old computers this spring, both are four years old and failing.

I plan on a laptop and Zack will get a new desktop.
99% of all usage for both rigs is playing and building for NWN.

Here's what we have now...
Dual core Pentium 4200+ 2.21 ghz
1.00 gb RAM
NIVDIA GeForce 7600

What configuration (specs) do you all suggest for our new machines?

Thanks,

at your service,

DZ

[masterstrife]

This is probably a little late in coming but Ive recently built myself a brand new custom rig that I will be putting together in the next week or so. Im planning to use this more as a workstation PC in the future using 3D modeling and so forth so what I have is a lot more cost defective then what your probably looking for.

For building in pretty much any game engine or even professionally your going to need a lot of memory. I would even go so far as to say get something like 6gigs for building. This will drastically reduce rebuild time.

As for your processor, thats really not all that bad considering your going to be building in NWN exclusively. Quad cores have dropped in price significantly and if you can still find some of the core 2 duo or quad processors that would make for a nice and fairly cheap upgrade for your new system. Not to mention that extra processing power will really make compiling times shorter. Youll probably need to upgrade your Motherboard for a new processor so some good names are Asus and Evga. If you plan on looking to compare specs to some more affordable boards these are good companies to use for reference.

Video cards arent much of an issue here, tho I would stick with Nvidia personally. ATI seems to have driver issues with some games and even some of their updates seems to cause more conflicts then they fix. Especally now with new games coming out and new drivers being updated, hardware that ran NWN is becoming simulated instead of hardware handled in the cards. This is significantly slower then the original way so getting a new card might not be necessary but at the same time it might make up for this simulated computation that is used to run NWN due to its older hardware.

Other then that I love dual monitors for the ease of use if you plan on building (which seems like the case). Makes it really easy to manipulate from the toolset back to the desktop without having to alt+tab out all the time and fear the toolset crashing on you.

I strongly suggest you shop online for components rather then buy a stand alone system. Speaking from a tech savy standpoint I think this is good but if your not as computer literate you might think otherwise. A lot of the pre-built computers are affordable due to some rather cheap and unreliable components or performance bottlenecks. Do your homework if your considering getting a pre-built. There are some good built computers out there for the money but you have to know your stuff to separate the garbage from the ones that shine.

Some good sights to look at for tech stuff are:
www.hardwarecanucks.com
www.tomshardware.com

There are more but the websites escape me at the moment.

Hope this helps with the computer build if you haven't gotten it done already.

-MS

[Delisha Zrazorian]

Thanks MS,

You were just in time! And just the info I was looking for!

*peeks over her shoulder to make sure no one on Talus is listening*


On a different note...
Have you ever considered being the sever administrator for an online PW?

I can create and build... but would need a partner in crime... so to speak, run an online PW.


Any interest?

DZ