Everquest 2: The Humbling of Hardware

[Noubourne]

Originally posted by Vorph
As for the A64, max price/performance is a toss up between 3000+ and 3200+. Anything beyond that is a steep cost increase for not a huge gain in power. [/b]

Yeah I bought a 3000+ the day they came out for $211, grabbed a new mobo for $175, and already had everthing else, since I had recently upgraded my PSU to an Antec True 420 ($75 or something) and bought a 9800 Pro a couple months before that. I already had 1 Gig of DDR400 (I like to screw around with overclocking) from before, so the whole "64-bit" upgrade only cost me about $386 at the time. You do tend to need to spend about $500 a year on gear or you won't be able to get deals like that though.

At $170 now, those 3000+ are hard to beat bang for the buck. If you're just into games, they're neck-in-neck with P4 EEs, which will run you in the $6 - 800 range for less than $200.

[masteen]

Originally posted by Vorph
Not ... really.

Some people think it's important to load a map 1 second faster than the average joe. Other people get fragged a lot.

I may not have run a suite of business and synthetic applications (shit, I don't even have Word installed at home), but I do know that my 2 friends load faster than anyone else, and we're all on broadband with similar PCs other than the SATA.

[Darkmyst]

Originally posted by masteen
but I do know that my 2 friends load faster than anyone else, and we're all on broadband with similar PCs other than the SATA.

Hell that could be nothing more than the brand of drive. Swapping IBM Deathstar, err Deskstar GXP60 drives for equal size 8MB Cache Western Digital ones caused the boot time on a freshly installed XP system to jump from 28 seconds to 45 seconds. But atleast the WDs haven't failed yet.