Hi,

the new PC has Vista 64 bit and a Quad core with 4 Gigs of RAM.

Vista 64 SP1 is fine. As most games need loads of memory I would suggest not to go with a 32bit OS (like XP or Vista 32bit). I have been running 64bit Vista for a few weeks and everything runs fine, both new and old games. There is no problem with drivers, if you see any horror stories on the net... that is old news.

Quad: Four CPUs rule. 2 for the game, one for the background tasks and one for anything else you might want to do. True if you pare down all the processes then you can do with a dual core... but there is no room left to grow.

Most modern games run with low frame rates on my machine... be it Witcher or Hellgate:london they all take ages to load and jerk around on my trusty P4 2.8Ghz, 2Gbyte DDR-240 with a nVidia 7800 GPU

So I ordered a new build-to-order PC on the 15th of August... the only thing that was on hold was the new ATI 4870 1024 MB card. Looks like they finaly have them in stock today, so I am hoping for delivery next week.

I got Vista64 because of the high-RAM requirements of modern games, checking the net it looks like others are doing fine with it. The driver problems seem to be a thing of the past. (Personally I thought it was silly Microsoft brought out a 32 bit Vista with the CPUs all going for 64 bit support.)

Theoretically this machine should be at least 3 times faster at everything since I made sure all things were times 4. Four times the RAM speed, 4 CPUs (Intel Quad 9550, each faster than my present one), 4 Gigs of 1066 DDR2 ram instead of 1 Gig of DDR-200 I had at the time I ordered the machine. The ATI 4870 is not quite 4 times as fast as the nV 7800 I have no, but it doeshave 4 times the video RAM (1024 MB GDDR5). SATA-II 300 drives instead of IDE.

I also tried for low power components and low noise: extra big CPU fan, Asus P45 motherboard (low power 45 nm chips), silent power supply, silent fans... this thing can be overclocked and still run quietly. Of course the graphics card will eat power, but that can't be avoided for 3D gaming as yet. I am hoping for moderate power usage when I am not gaming.

Of course it costs about twice what an Xbox or PS3 cost (just over 1000.-) but of course I use for other things than just games as well. ;-)

Hellgate: London

I got myself Hellgate: London for 9,95 euros, thats about $15 US. If you like RPG or Diablo type games, then get your self a copy!

It is really a great hack and slash game. Personally I think it is the best Diablo type sci-fi game around.

The game works well for different hardware but is very memory hungry. You should have 2 GBytes of RAM to play this game without long load times.

EDIT: the story is not as good as Diablo II but the game has the same basic additiveness. I believe the longterm fun is there, especially a replay with a different character build and at a different difficulty level. It does generate random maps, which helps. Note though I havn't had/played it more than a month so far.

PC RAM Upgrade:

My old Windows XP rig with 1 GByte of RAM was having long load times. I have ordered a new rig as the old one is 5 years old now and getting a bit slow. I will give my old system to my significant other. She has huge spread sheets, so extra RAM and a new and much faster hard disk will do her fine in this system. Using 2 Gbytes made Hellgate run fairly smoothly, even on this older 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 machine.

The old RAM consisted of 512 MB 133 PC DIM and another 512MB 133/166 DIM. I added 2 Gbytes of DDR2-400 RAM. The system boots but after a few days I noticed it was unstable. Hellgate was giving me sound problems and freezing for a few seconds occasionally. Of course I had set the timings to the slowest RAM to insure that everything works, but it seems the hardware had troubles with this setup.

I have come to the conclusion that the PC can handle two different timings on RAM but not three. Even if you set the timings in the BIOS to a single speed manually the system has problems.