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Post by Intrepidacious on Mar 28, 2007 4:43:00 GMT 1
I picked up a new AGP Geforce 7300GT card from a dealer on eBay for under $100 US to fit into my old 2.4GHz P4 machine. The card is AGP 8x but it works fine in the old AGP 4x slot on this second PC. With 1.5GB of PC2700 RAM in this old P4 clone machine, the 7300GT card is great! The old machine runs Oblivion just beautifully at 1680x1050 on a 20" LCD. Video settings are not maxed but they're quite high, with large texture setting. I really installed Oblivion on it thinking it would NOT be too great on that machine, but figured it would be a good exercise/experiment for the old box. I sure didn't expect it would run nicely. I bought a new machine in late December 2005 just because I figured the old one wouldn't be very good with Oblivion. Of course the old video card was an FX5500 which would have been poor with Oblivion. But I guess it just needed a new video card after all.
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Post by Nostra1 on Mar 28, 2007 17:06:32 GMT 1
Thanks for the information intrepidacious. Its always nice to see how well the various different vid cards do and since your review is for an AGP card, its even more appreciated. I remember that a rig about 2-3 years ago ran 2.4Ghz P4's (my daughter's rig is about that old and is a 2.6 Ghz Celery rig ( but alas no AGP nor PCI-e). Desktops had about 500Mb RAM as default often (my daughter's had like 250...was a cheapo eMachines ) So if this is a typical system we are thinking about, and so long as it has either a AGP or PCIe then PC2700 RAM is about $70/Gb (I saw some for that price at Circuit City the other day) and with your card, thats an upgrade for only $170. Pretty nice to then be able to play OB with a 20" monitor at nice resolution. Wow you can now run OB double barreled! ;D ;D Edit: By the way, what is a P4 clone? Sorry for my ignorance.
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Post by Intrepidacious on Mar 28, 2007 19:44:11 GMT 1
By 'clone', I mean it's no brand name, just a put-together PC. It's good to have the second machine, too, for 'experiments', like installing the 1.2 Oblivion patch.
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Post by Nostra1 on Mar 28, 2007 20:05:15 GMT 1
Wow I never thought about it that way but you're right. I often hear people say they are to busy modding to play the game or vice versa. However if you have two rigs one for modding and one for playing, you can actually do both without either getting in the way of the other. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. You can use the other for experiments as well and keep your precious avatar happy and healthy in the main rig. By the way, your 'clone' seems to be running pretty well.
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Post by Intrepidacious on Mar 28, 2007 22:42:21 GMT 1
Seems like it -- I just did a search in Outlook and found that I bought the parts in early March 2003, so it's getting on in years. Hmm, now that you mention it.... I wonder if you could be in the CS working on a mod, save the CS, minimize the CS, copy the file across the hub to the other PC, test the mod there, and do more work in the CS? That'd sure save some time with doing it all on one PC, whether working on Morrowind or Oblivion. You'd always have a nice clean savegame and a lowbie character, which is always nice for testing! If that works nice, I'll want to get another Oblivion CD and another Morrowind CD so I can do less CD-swapping. Morrowind CD's, particularly, seem to get lost sometimes. And Oblivion packages aren't exactly cheap and probably won't be for a long time.
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Post by Nostra1 on Mar 29, 2007 3:10:42 GMT 1
Lol. Bethesda will love you for your support.
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