Have always had Intel. My first foray into the AMD world and purchased a Velocity Micro 4800+ dual core with 7800 GTX SLI, the ASUS A8N Premium motherboard, Zalman heat sink, 600 wt power supply, 2 meg ram, and the X-Fi soundcard.
It's a very nice machine but I don't feel wowed and I don't know if my expectations were too high or if I need to do more with settings. Some comments: It's used half for games and half for other things (word processing, internet, whatever). I specified with Velocity that I did NOT want anything overclocked and I believe they followed this guideline.
Game performance has been a little disappointing. Don't know if it's a dual-core factor or soundcard factor (more on that later). I installed Dungeon Siege 2 and Guild Wars. GW performance was crummy at first. I'd take a few steps...the game would seem to freeze slightly...and then speed up again. Lots of little hesitations like that. I know they just had an update on the GW server so the bit of lag might be related to that. Had the same thing with Dungeon Siege 2. Based on readings on this and other forums, I downloaded the Microsoft hotfix for AMD dual cores, installed, and made the registry changes. Also installed the newest Nvidia drivers (I think they're 81.85). I think it has improved somewhat but just overall it certainly isn't running any better than my old Intel 3.2. Is that pretty much what I should expect until games really support dual cores?
The X-Fi card. Sigh. Creative says there's a problem with some Nforce 4 boards and the X-Fi, despite some folks having no problem. It works, I get great sound (the positional surround sound aspect is absolutely wonderful), but I *also* get a background static-y type popping sound. Not static exactly. It's more like the sound effect you hear when there's a bonfire in your game, that little snapping of the flames. I get that when there's no fire. It's not all the time. You'll hear it for a few seconds--it will clear--then you'll hear it again. At some point during gameplay, the sound will start to hiccup and loop, causing the game to freeze, requiring a hard boot. Velocity is sending another X-Fi, although I have no real expectations it will work and may have to backtrack to an Audigy. Again, can any of my game issues be related to problems with the soundcard or is this just a complicating factor?
Also, could SLI be a detriment in this case? Meaning, if a game doesn't support SLI (I think I read that Guild Wars doesn't), it might actually be causing game slowdowns?
When I minimized Guild Wars and went to Task Manager to have it use only one core, I thought it seemed subjectively to run a little better, too. Is this something one needs to always watch with dual cores? Shouldn't WinXP be handling that?
Any advice would be helpful. Feel a bit unsure of myself due to being new to the AMD arena and unsure of the dual core scenario.
It's a very nice machine but I don't feel wowed and I don't know if my expectations were too high or if I need to do more with settings. Some comments: It's used half for games and half for other things (word processing, internet, whatever). I specified with Velocity that I did NOT want anything overclocked and I believe they followed this guideline.
Game performance has been a little disappointing. Don't know if it's a dual-core factor or soundcard factor (more on that later). I installed Dungeon Siege 2 and Guild Wars. GW performance was crummy at first. I'd take a few steps...the game would seem to freeze slightly...and then speed up again. Lots of little hesitations like that. I know they just had an update on the GW server so the bit of lag might be related to that. Had the same thing with Dungeon Siege 2. Based on readings on this and other forums, I downloaded the Microsoft hotfix for AMD dual cores, installed, and made the registry changes. Also installed the newest Nvidia drivers (I think they're 81.85). I think it has improved somewhat but just overall it certainly isn't running any better than my old Intel 3.2. Is that pretty much what I should expect until games really support dual cores?
The X-Fi card. Sigh. Creative says there's a problem with some Nforce 4 boards and the X-Fi, despite some folks having no problem. It works, I get great sound (the positional surround sound aspect is absolutely wonderful), but I *also* get a background static-y type popping sound. Not static exactly. It's more like the sound effect you hear when there's a bonfire in your game, that little snapping of the flames. I get that when there's no fire. It's not all the time. You'll hear it for a few seconds--it will clear--then you'll hear it again. At some point during gameplay, the sound will start to hiccup and loop, causing the game to freeze, requiring a hard boot. Velocity is sending another X-Fi, although I have no real expectations it will work and may have to backtrack to an Audigy. Again, can any of my game issues be related to problems with the soundcard or is this just a complicating factor?
Also, could SLI be a detriment in this case? Meaning, if a game doesn't support SLI (I think I read that Guild Wars doesn't), it might actually be causing game slowdowns?
When I minimized Guild Wars and went to Task Manager to have it use only one core, I thought it seemed subjectively to run a little better, too. Is this something one needs to always watch with dual cores? Shouldn't WinXP be handling that?
Any advice would be helpful. Feel a bit unsure of myself due to being new to the AMD arena and unsure of the dual core scenario.