[Honzo]

Hope you all had a great new years! Looking forward to playing with you this year, am I right? I hope I'm right...... Maybe even sooner than we think!? ... Prob not... lol. WISH YOU ALL THE BEST in the new year anyway xD

[Soultaker]

Oh yes quite so :) honzo we also been using guild site more

[Jayrune]

"we" currently consisting of manes, Soultaker, and myself to varying degrees.

need more peeps posting or shoutboxing

Here's hoping B&S comes out in the states before the summer solstice!

[Soultaker]

Hey jay theres a poor soul here at the dojo who cant even run BnS on low settings. You got anything laying around by chance to help him out? I'm going to see about buying a new case, ram, heatsink and power supply for him unless others here at the dojo are generous

[Jayrune]

unfortunately the only spare parts i had was a vid card, and it was already claimed by my buddy who's vid card got fried (not sure how it got fried, but this guy has a reputation for breaking stuff without leaving a trace of how the thing got broke, friggn uncanny)

Also, who is the poor soul who has inspired the wal mart salaried guy to buy them parts? and those specific parts

[Soultaker]

Well he hasnt really replied in his thread about us at the dojo trying to help. so i might not do it now. its the Zero_ guy

[Manes]

Not sure if I should upgrade my current 2 year old computer, or just buy a new one...

Old Comp: 2.5 years old, Windows Vista 64

Crap Graphics Card, wont update anymore because Dinkleburg, and the tower is stock HP.

What do you think?

This post has been edited by Manes: Jan 09, 2013 - 12:00 PM

[Seraphy]

It's hard to say without knowing your other computer parts. If it's super old, chances are you'll wind up upgrading all the parts. May be cheaper than buying a computer built by a company like HP though.

[Jayrune]

when it comes to upgrading vs a new computer, the most important question is how much time you are personally willing to invest into making your computer work, and thus how much money that time is worth to you. Upgrading a computer via some kind of service is not something i would ever recommend, so it's down to you opening up your current computer and swapping out some or all parts, vs buying something ready to go out o' da box.

So, it's entirely subjective, myself for example, go for the upgrade route. My desktop could be considered to be the same computer i had in college due to the fact that i only would replace a few parts at a time, but there is not a single original part, not even the case. This makes it easy to upgrade only what needs to be upgraded thus keeping me near top tier power without breaking bank. but it also amounts to quite a bit of time invested, including from trial and error by getting incompatible parts or parts that don't do what i thought they would do.

Buying a whole new gaming desktop straight up avoids pretty much all that hassle, in exchange for being a major investment each time you do it, so you want to basically use your current one to obsolescence before buying the next one.

I'd need to know more about your specific machine before i could provide any better feedback on how much hassle you are looking at, but you're the final word on how much hassle you'll put up with. and the amount of money you're willing to invest in a brand spanking new one, seems like you can get decent power for just over a grand nowadays from dell/alienware.

This post has been edited by Jayrune: Jan 09, 2013 - 2:09 PM

[Manes]

Current PC is a HP Pavilion Media Center m8530f PC

AMD Phenom X4 9550 Quad Core Processor

NVIDIA GeForce9800

750 GB HDD

5120 MB system memory.

Let me know if you need more info.

[Soultaker]

Manes my pc had almost the specs as yours cept i had 6gb of ram and a 8800gts

Id just upgrade all of it maybe not buy it all in one go but piece by piece thats what i did

[Manes]

I'm thinking of just going for a new PC to stay up to date and starting the upgrade practice there.

This is the one I'm currently looking at...Give me your thoughts on it.

http://www.bestbuy.c...2&skuId=6954454

[Jayrune]

Manes, on Jan 11, 2013 - 10:11 AM, said:

I'm thinking of just going for a new PC to stay up to date and starting the upgrade practice there.

This is the one I'm currently looking at...Give me your thoughts on it.

http://www.bestbuy.c...2&skuId=6954454

if you're going for ready to game right out of the box, I would not recommend that one. Unless you are intending to buy a separate video card right off the bat to upgrade it defaults to intel integrated graphics which can't play anything more intensive than team fortress 2 or original counterstrike. Also the hard drive is 5400 rpm which is the slowest still on the market which will in turn slow down any loading screen you have to deal with in a game. In short, it's not a gaming rig to start and upgrading hard drives can become annoying.

This desktop Would be much better "out-of-the-box" and at the same price point, but would still need a new video card to play blade and soul at decent setting i think.

I'll be honest, i am not well versed in this price point range, or in pre-built machines in general. My first go-to is the motherboard model so i can see the upgrade potential but that's not shown most of the time. The pc you linked has 1 PCI express slot so it can be fitted with a gaming graphics card, but i can't say if the rest of the rig can make use of a high end card or not.

I'm not going to be much help on finding and buying a pre-built machine that does good gaming beyond check out alienware, but then you're looking at some price hiking. even so they do offer a gaming rig at $699 Alienware

Best advice i might be able to give is to look for a PC with a processor that is an intel i5 or better (not sure what the amd equivalent is) and to look for a graphics card that has a higher secondary model number. What i mean is, go after a geforce 660 rather than a 640 or 630, and go after a radeon 7750 over a 7450 and so on. the reason is that within each generation from both of these manufacturures, they make deliberately weaker powered models to sell for cheaper, and the power lost is more significant than the generation leap. For example, a geforce 590 outperforms a geforce 660, and anything ending in 40 or below doesn't even make the performance charts. Of course the higher the number the higher the price, and with just about any gaming rig you buy, you can upgrade it later

Fatal over in that tech thread might be more help

[Soultaker]

Manes, on Jan 11, 2013 - 10:11 AM, said:

I'm thinking of just going for a new PC to stay up to date and starting the upgrade practice there.

This is the one I'm currently looking at...Give me your thoughts on it.

http://www.bestbuy.c...2&skuId=6954454

Heres a build i did that's $50 less http://pcpartpicker.com/p/x2b8 opinion and others opinions as well?

-edit-

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/x2gy Look at this one instead

This post has been edited by Soultaker: Jan 11, 2013 - 11:27 AM

[Jayrune]

manes, looking through the best buy website, i was surprised to see some decent rigs on there. here are 5 rigs i spotted that i would consider good pre-built gaming rigs for their price.

The least expensive it only sports an i3 processor, but it has a geforce 640 which is decent. hard drive is only 500 GB but the cost is also only $680

The sweet spot this one sports an i5, same size hard drive, but rocks a Geforce GTX 660, i'm honestly impressed that this only costs $850, not bad for a mid grade comp.

Getting a little fancy Rocks an i7, GTX 660, 16 gigs of ram, AND a second solid state hard drive. dunno if the OS is on the SSD or not, but at 120 gb you could easily put B&S on it and the OS and get hella fast loading times. Starting to get up there in price at $1150

same as above, but more hard drive essentially same specs as the last one, but a terabite HD along with the 120 SSD, for 190 more bucks... couple other smaller improvements.

Beast Cheapest one i found that sill rocks a GTX 670 (arguably the lowest rung of the "beast" cards. also rocks an i7 CPU and a terabyte HD, but costs a significant $1750.

Hope that helps you in your search for a new comp. :)

[Manes]

I like the sweet spot computer you listed...But it looks very cramped and compact for a long lasting computer I would like to upgrade later on down the road. Very nice it's water cooled though, quite the upgrade from a fan I'm use too.

I know it's a LAN "Pick me up and go" kind of computer, but I don't do any of that.

[Jayrune]

I didn't even see the water cooling bit :( i actually consider that a bit of a liability cause if it ever gets a leak, you're looking at potential damage to other components.

Alternative sweet spot

this one is a full tower with AMD processors (cpu and gpu) that i think is roughly equivalent in power, plus it happens to have more ram and more hard drive for only 10 more bucks XD

This post has been edited by Jayrune: Jan 15, 2013 - 9:47 AM

[Manes]

Jayrune, on Jan 15, 2013 - 9:46 AM, said:

I didn't even see the water cooling bit :( i actually consider that a bit of a liability cause if it ever gets a leak, you're looking at potential damage to other components.

Alternative sweet spot

this one is a full tower with AMD processors (cpu and gpu) that i think is roughly equivalent in power, plus it happens to have more ram and more hard drive for only 10 more bucks XD

I like it, I think that just might be the one I need.

[Soultaker]

Alright so we now have something that we can use and it's free called Raidcall. It's actually a pretty decent voice/message program on par with ventrilo and teamspeak.

You can get it here www.raidcall.com

Then when you sign up and log in search for this ID 5531318 and from there we can accept you in to grant you access to our channel server...thing lol

[Manes]

Soultaker, on Jan 20, 2013 - 3:35 PM, said:

Alright so we now have something that we can use and it's free called Raidcall. It's actually a pretty decent voice/message program on par with ventrilo and teamspeak.

You can get it here www.raidcall.com

Then when you sign up and log in search for this ID 5531318 and from there we can accept you in to grant you access to our channel server...thing lol

Indeed we do! But it's missing something...Something magical. That magic being YOU!

So join up! Hoping to get fellow TD's and Non TD's together so we can try out some fun FTP games and to just have a fun time chatting it up.

I might even talk about my cows...Because, you know, why not! Magic happens.

This post has been edited by Manes: Jan 25, 2013 - 9:19 AM