So I'm thinking about buying a new PC some time next month, and I guess I need some advice. I use my PC mostly for coding (3D stuff with Visual C++ and some Java with Eclipse), some graphics stuff (mostly Photoshop), watching movies and very little playing games. Here's what I got right now: AMD AthlonXP 64 3000+ 1 gig of RAM ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 400 gig SATA-II HDD (running as SATA-I atm) Some Asus mainboard Creative Labs X-Fi sound card oh, and I'm running Vista on it I'm actually quite happy with it, but with all those cool games coming out, it's time for an upgrade. So I'll probably keep the HDD and sound card, but everything else has to go. So here's my questions: - Does it make sense to get a quad core? I would like to experiment with multi-threading more, so figured > 2 cores is when it becomes really interesting. - If I'm going to run 32-bit Vista, there's no point in getting more than 2 gig RAM, right? - Do I need DDR3 RAM? - For some reason, I'd like to get another ATI. What do you recommend? It's got to be a DX 10 card. Other than that, I have a pretty big monitor and I would like to be able to run recent games at a fairly high resolution. However, since I'm not a hardcore gamer, I also don't think I should spend > $400 on a 3d card. - How much video ram do I need? Thanks in advance!

dude it depends on your budget. If you can afford, get the best of everything.

Moving to hardware.

Getting a Quad Core can be useful for professional applications that support it however you will see very little to gain at all for games as most games are using mostly 1 and some rare times 2 cores.

There is no point in running Vista 64 bits however to ensure proper system performance I'd suggest you grab 2Gb of RAM minimum. It would have been 4gb for Vista 64bit

You do not need DDR3 RAM at all unless you want to blow lots of money on technology that won't give you that much of a gain. No matter what you buy you will have to change it in approximately the same amount of time so it's useless to get uber mega high end since all the hardware will be outdated fairly quickly.

I would probably wait before getting a DX10 card because there's like 3-4 games max that support it and quite frankly... it's pretty impressive still not OMGWTFBBQ !!!! kind of impressive versus DX9. The market will be more affordable when more games come out. Chances are buying a DX10 card now will result in you changing it anyways because newer better and much more sophisticated cards will be out on the market by then at cheaper prices.

Video RAM is a very touchy subject... a lot of people will say the more RAM the better but it's not true. Let's say for an example that you buy a cheap card with 768-1024Mb of RAM around 100$... Well a 200-300$ card with 256-512 Will beat the holy crap out of it simply because the GPU is much more powerful and can actually take advantage of that much RAM. I'd say these days... if you're going for anything under 150$....256Mb is more than enough unless you want to pay the extra for that exact same model with 512mb one which won't be any better. if you're going over that then consider 512Mb it could prove to be useful but you should probably not waste money on a video card until you have a reason to.

In comparison my Computer system is much worse than you except that I have a friend who lent my a Radeon X1600Pro 512Mb which is working pretty well but the rest of it is bad.

I have an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 512Mb of DDR333 RAM and 200Gb HDD inside a Shuttle XPC.

For anything other than Gaming it's still very good and I won't change until I buy a very good recent game (Something I haven't done in years) and when my programs and games I develop are too big or too needy for 512 MB of ram and my current video card.

I hope it helped you out a bit. If you have any questions just ask ! :)

thanks for clearing up some of the things I was confused about (and sorry for posting the thread in the wrong forum).

@hplus0603: I've been using the X-Fi with Vista for a while and it seems to work just fine. (Maybe I've just been lucky).

Quote: Original post by hplus0603
Last, in Vista, and in XAudio2, hardware acceleration of sound output is going away. The X-fi is known for driver trouble, too, and may cause blue screens. I'd go with some simpler sound card that has good outputs instead -- maybe even the on-board audio, if it doesn't have too much grunge in the sound.

I've been using an X-Fi with Vista x64 since launch, while the inital drivers had problems (such as sound just not working sometimes require a reboot) an update about a month or two back appears to have fixed all the issues.

While people say there is no point in x64 Vista one thing I will say is that the drivers seem to be of a higher quality than the normal x86 drivers. I'm not the only one to think this either.

Finally, on the hardware acceleration front, it isn't totally going away; OpenAL still allows harware accelerated sounds and is used in the Unreal Engine 3 based games. It would be nice if more games supported it, but accelerated audio isn't dead.