First thing I gotta say is. Vista is fucking anoying.
Anyway, I was suffering from an outdated PC for a while now.
Picked me up one of these.
So far I’ve ran Crysis and Bioshock. Graphics are pretty sick.
Is there any other game I should check out that are pushing the envelope as far as PC gaming goes? Or any great games for that matter.
Also does anyone know of a program that will allow me to hook up my ps2 to my comp via my tv tuner’s a/v inputs?
gears, ut3, mass effect, cod4
dmc4 soon
750 gigs?
I’m getting one of those. Thats gonna be my new porn machine.
120 didnt cut it.
6G of ram, wow. Looking at that makes me cry over spending $2.3k on my machine 2yrs ago.
so does every game ever made always end up on pc…
Did you get a Dell as well? I know I did… :sad:
get GGPO and get to playing!
$2.3k (with shipping) for…
Alienware
AMD 62x2 dual core 4200+
2.21 ghz
1gb ddr2
150 gb
Nvidia geoforce 7900 GT (That broke after a year)
Thats with no word or other school/professional programs. I used the pc’s at school. I bought it to run and play games, and eq2 at a high level and I havent played anything except wow for 6 months and dota since. :shake::sad::looney:
Same here, hi5, that ought to teach you not to buy shit from alienware.You could have seriously gotten the same thing for a little more than half the price.
Team Fortress 2…
That is a godly computer…So how’s bioshock? Thats a game that always sparked some interest. Simply because it has a small horror type feel to it.
I don’t know any games that’s really punishing systems other than Crysis at max everything settings. I’m pretty sure its still unplayable at over 40FPS average even on tri-sli machines with GTX 280.
I’m running e8400, 1066Mhz 4GB RAM, 8800GT @ 700/1650/1900 (Overclock for Crysis only) and I still only get 36FPS average on 1280x1024 (max everything except medium shadows, shaders and post-process).
These games are great and run smoothly on a default clock setting of my 1280x1024 - 8800GT (650/1620/950):
CoD4 - not graphic heavy, but gorgeous and great gameplay. You’ll probably get addicted to this for a while. CoD2 aged nicely too. Still plays great.
Half-Life 2 (including episode 1 and 2) - Great gameplay. The first one isn’t very graphics heavy but after playing the first 5 minutes you’ll realize why this earned so many game of the year awards. Get Orange Box, it comes with all the games including Portal + TF2. (Max frames are set at 72 to minimize frameskip. Average FPS = 71)
Mass Effect - UT3 engine, looks great except the dynamic shadows look like shit and several graphical glitches (like the hair looking ‘boxy’ and polygons overlapping, not really a big deal to most people though). Boring driving areas, repetitive gameplay (it’s a console port), also pretty goddamn short game play for a 12GB install. (Max frames are set at 62 to minimize frameskip. Average FPS = 61.5, MAX Everything except for Film Grain disabled which I found annoying)
Bioshock - UT3 engine as well. You can check out the PC gamers united thread here on GD and check my last few posts about dealing with bugs on these games. I was finally able to run this without any problems after calling tech support + patching + applying an ‘unnofficial’ crack. lol Graphics looks much better than Mass Effect even though they are both using the same engine. Everything looks shiny though, like those old school games when bumpmapping was first introduced, somewhat excusable because the graphics have a slightly ‘cartoonish’ feel to them. The closest I could get to describing it is fallout+system shock in an Firstperson game. Very enjoyable gameplay once you actually get to play it. (Average FPS = 72, MAX everything, World Reflect ALL enabled, Vsync ON)
GRID - Best looking racing game out right now. People say its too easy but I really suck at driving games esp with realistic damage settings so I still didn’t have enough money to buy my own car in the game. haha. (Average FPS = 59.1, Max everything 16xQXCSAA whatever that highest multisampling level is forthis game because it had like 20 options. compared to 2 or 4 for most games)
Coming out soon - Far Cry 2 (featuring a ‘wind engine’)
Oblivion, Call of Juarez, etc should also push your system. Just checkout benchmarks for video cards and the games they use to test. They are usually the most demanding games.
http://systemrequirementslabs.com/ <---- Great website for checking what your system can run, showing minimum and recommended requirements (requires ActiveX enabled to install on your browser)
Did you at least get it RMA’d? Doesn’t Alienware have like warranties for individual parts?
My video card (8800GT SC retail) died after like a day of playing Crysis and had it RMAd immediately.
You can get a top of the line mid-high* gaming computer now for 800 bucks (check out the Computer Help Thread), I got mine for like $900 CDN.
*Mid-high being 8800GT or ATI 4850 with Core2Duo or Core2Quad. High level gaming being Core2Extreme processor+980GTX SLI.
There was a one year warranty and it died within a week of that. With school and everything it slipped my mind and when i called they were just like, “oh well your screwed then” I could have sent it in for repairs but with shipping etc thats a couple hundred and it wasnt worth that by then.
However much thats SUCKS, its not even a big deal because a friend gave me an old card that ran WoW and wc3 fine, and I havent played WoW in over half a year so meh.
That sucks. Yeah, I made sure I got lifetime warranty on my video card this last build and registered everything right after I got it.
Are you getting any compatibility issues using a 64 bit OS?
I am going back and forth between using XP 64 or 32 on a new build that I am putting together and have read so much about driver incompatibility. Only using 4gigs of memory but plan to upgrade that if 64 edition doesn’t cause problems.
Nah not really. For the first few days I attributed everything to it being Vista but everything except 3 programs were perfectly fine. Crysis gets an extra 5 frames on Vista 64 too.
(-)
UrenameIt (File Renaming program) - It works but the window edges don’t fit, so the buttons below are cropped). I just replaced it with a free renaming program.
(-)
Asus Wireless Solo (for Wireless LAN config from onboard) - Same problem as Urenameit. Cropped edges. I can’t see the OK button but the settings Wizard works fine. Called Asus tech support and they said they provide the Vista64 drivers but the software wasn’t made for Vista64. lol
(-)
I’m assuming a lot of Visual Basic made programs that weren’t tested very well won’t run.
(+)
No problem installing old DLLs and Libraries though. I’m running a CD/DVD indexer which requires VB5 runtime and comctl32 loaded and its working flawlessly.
(-)
Partition Magic doesn’t work on Vista 64 
(+)
My old *Photoshop 7 *works perfectly fine though. For the first time in my life I could load this program in under 1.30 minutes (loads in 5 seconds). ACDsee 4 loads perfectly fine too (icon set looks like shit though because this thing is almost 10 years old), still the fastest image viewer program ever.
(-)
Samsung Laser Printer Driver - This is the only hardware problem I have. There are no drivers available for this except for the XP version which actually works perfectly fine with Vista64 if you force install it.
That’s about the depth of my problem with the OS so far. I play a lot of old games (Starcraft 2, Red Alert 2/Yuri’s Revenge, NOLF2, The Sims/Sims 2, Arcanum) and they all work perfectly fine. The bugs I did encounter with them were not bugs inherent with Vista (namely NOLF2 crashing on loading when the character hasn’t appeared on screen yet. Also produces the same crash on my XP). I heard there was a problem with HL2 and having 4GB or more memory though. I just installed all game updates and it worked perfectly fine (I just finished HL2 episode 0).
If you have a decent video card and more than 4GB of ram, I’d say definitely go for it. (Although if your video card isn’t as strong you could always just disable Vista Aero)
how much u got it for? says 1000$ but its crossed out. thats a pretty good damn computer if it was 1k.
Holy shit that’s a good buy.
Even comes with an Nvidia 9500GS vid card.
I was pricing a Vostro 410 (Dell) with a Quad Core (6600), Nvidia 8800 GT and 4 GB RAM and it was still more expensive.
Although, I’ve had bad luck with my HP’s in the past. This looks like a good deal still.
recommend me a vid card :]
oh and oblivion fucking sucks