And does anyone know the status on the patch, have not heard anything in awhile.

Thanks in Advance.

Athlon 650
128meg.
GeForce SDR

Dont listen to bighead, he is a commie sympathizer : )

And there is no such thing as overkill, whats overkill now will eventually become obsolete anyway. You drop a couple more dimes now but you extend the life of your rig. If the patch allows for play under Win 2 K, here is your target rig.

Dual P3 Gigs
1Gig PC800
2xVoodoo 5 6000 in SLI

Well ditch our cable modems and build a PVC between our houses with 56K digital subrates and a couple of Cisco 1600's.

If that dosen't work, we could always sneak onto the flight line @ Oceana this coming summer. The anti-sniper skills we built up playing counter-strike should come in handy!!!

Seriously, If I cant play this sim on an 800e, with 768 megs and a voodoo5 in all of its hi FPS glory, im gonna be upset.

------------------
guns-guns-guns...
splash 1 bandit

What's up man? Nice to know you are still out there!!

Snowman

Oh yeah, I've got 7000 ft of single mode sitting in the 'basement' here as well. That'll at least get some of us to our trunks.

Heh,heh.

Anyway, I just upgraded to a Slot 1 550e overclocked to 803. I'm using 256MB Ram and a Viper 770 Ultra. Smooth as Shania Twain's A$$. Let me know if you have any questions.

The main cost is the RDRAM which is going for $600 per 128 meg module.

Make sure you get a Motherboard with 4X AGP, i820 chip, and 133 mhz cache capability.

As a matter of fact I went boarding last Saturday! Spring spraying is where it's at. It actually leaves marks when sprayed with that heavy wet snow, but I am the one spraying so no worries here! Anyway, nice to see you back in the fray here. Upgrading is way too fun. I just upgraded from my P2/300 to a P3/600 with new ram as well. Running really smooth here. Catch you later.

Snow

I have 256 megs of Mushkin PC-133 ram! Definately worth the expenditure. I'm finally content,atleast for another year anyway.

People have had luck with the BX-6 Rev 2 also. So many processors, SO little time..

:-)

Hope this helps

The reason I'm waiting on the 1ghz chips is simple: both of the AMD and Intel offerings at this speed right now are older architecture chips. In Intels case, they are using an older coppermine chip based solution, and in AMD's case they are using a chip with external L2 cache running at a significantly lowered speed.

Later this year (around q3 IIRC) both chip makers will be releasing chips with new architectures which will significantly increase performance. In other words, the 1ghz chips released in q3 will be much faster then the 1ghz chips you can buy today. The price should be lower as well.

Since I have several hundred dollars to burn, and already have an excellent video card, I'm going the cheap route and am ordering an intel 600e chip with a new mobo.

I'm doing this for a couple of reason. The first is the 600e chip is VERY overclockable. Most people can get it to go up to the mid 800's, and a sizable amount of people can hit 900 or more. This is because the 600e uses the same exact design as the current intel 1ghz chip.

The second reason has to do with the on board L2 cache that the 600e (which is a coppermine design) has. The onboard L2 cache of the 600e is running at chip speed. The current AMD Athlons running at 750mhz and above have their cache off chip, and thus have their cache running at one third of the chip speed. The result of this is that for gaming purposes, in a cpu bound environment, the intel chip will have better perfomance.

Note that that is only applicable when you are thinking of buying an Athlon that is 750 mhz or above. Under that speed, the Athlon is a better chip. But at above that speed, the coppermine based Intel chips have a significant advantage. An Intel coppermine running at 800 mhz will often beat out an Athlon 950 mhz in cpu bound games.

So knowing all of this, and knowing that I will need two new computers by the end of the year, I decided to get an Intel 600e and a motherboard running the Via 133 chipset. This allows me to use pc133 memory instead of the much too expensive Rambus, and allows me major choices when o/cing my new chip. I'll then wait till the new chips are out before making my next major purchase (and the price of the 1ghz will have dropped alot by then as well.)

My total cost will be around $400 to get performance better than an Athlon 950 (at least in the above situation). I already have 384 megs of memory that will handle 150mhz plus bus speeds, so that isn't a problem.

If I could, I would try and wait at least a month for the new Voodoo and Nvidia lines to come out. Both companies are releasing products that will eclipse the current king, which is the GeForce DDR cards.

If you only play flight sims, I would lean towards the 3dfx offering because of the hardware anti-aliasing that it does. However, you take a significant performance hit using it, and the lower end new cards won't go over 800x600 when doing it. I haven't heard what resolution the v5500 will do when doing anti-alising. If it was resolution bound I would personally be very dissapointed. (By the way, when I say significant performance hit, I should state that this shouldn't be that big of a deal in a flight sim, since a frame rate above 30 is good. In an FPS, the frame rate during anti-alising will prolly be below the magic 50-60 frames per second, and will be jerky. But I imagine that it will still be over 30, and will thus be very nice for a flight sim).

The voodoo will also support glide, which is great if you play older flight sims like F4 and such (and also anything based on the Unreal/Unreal Tournament engine). However, the 3dfx developed opengl drivers suck pretty hard. They are supposedly fixing this, but I'll believe it when I see it. They've been saying that for years. There are some good opengl drivers available for the Voodoo (the WickedGL drivers IIRC) that are much nicer than the 3dfx ones, but they still aren't up to snuff.

If you play other games besides flight sims and Unreal/UT based games, I would really consider the new Nvidia card coming out (although I would definitely think hard about this one.) It is shaping up to give the new voodoo's a run for their money, at a significantly lower cost. The Nvidia products have a much nicer 32 bit image quality (at least in this state of driver development...more on this in a sec), support DXTC (the new directx texture compression) in hardware, and have much better opengl and directx drivers then 3dfx.

I am a bit dissapointed by the 32 bit image quality of the new 3dfx offering. In 32 bit mode, you can still see MAJOR banding and artifacting. It still looks like it is using 16 bit color. I would normally shrug and write it off to beta drivers, but 3dfx is releasing the cards next month. This leads me to think that the cards when released will have iffy drivers when it comes to some features. Nothing that a few driver revisions won't fix though.

To sum up, if you play mostly glide based games...get the 3dfx. If you play mostly flight sims, lean towards the Voodoo because of the anti-aliasing (but be aware that the new Nvidia cards, along with the current GeForce, will be able to do something similar in software mode. This feature may only work in open gl based games though, because I haven't seen it working in direct x games as of yet.) If you play mostly direct x and open gl based games, you might want to consider the Nvidia offerings. No matter what, you should wait till both companies release their new products in the next couple months and then compare.

"If I could, I would try and wait at least a month for the new Voodoo and Nvidia lines to come out. Both companies are releasing products that will eclipse the current king, which is the GeForce DDR cards."

Since the Voodoo I saw was not using finalized drivers, I hesitate to make a final decision about it until its release.

I can definetely say that the upper end voodoo5 (not the budget model that they will be releasing) looks like it will outperform a GeForce DDR in most situations when not using the hardware anti-alising. When using anti-alising the GeForce will definetely have the edge. The anti-aliased image quality of the Voodoo is pretty good, but in the current development stage of the drivers the 32 bit quality is kinda funky looking. If you only play 16 bit color games that point is moot.

I wouldn't bother buying the lower end voodoo line. They really don't have the "oomph" to do anti-aliasing, which is the only reason I can see to purchase one of the Voodoo's (IMO). You will get similar performance, better image quality, and better driver support with a GeForce for the same or less money. (That is, if the prices on the GeForces drop as scheduled.)

I have yet to have recieved an official release date for the GeForce2. While I can't be specific, I will tell you that the difference in performance between a GF2 and a GF is greater than that of a TNT2 and a TNT2 ultra. I think alot of people will be surprised by the difference.

In case you missed it since I have a tendency to ramble, I have hands on experience. Unfortunately, I don't have hard benchmarked figures, because I was not able (or allowed, depending on your POV) to run any benchmarks. So my observations are purely subjective. I can say that they are better than any card I have sitting around here, and I have plenty of them. I have in my personal possession a great collection of video cards (well over 20 different kinds).

Subjectively, both of these cards are much better than what I am currently using on any of my machines (for gaming purposes, the v3500 and a GeForce DDR).

Benchmarking at this point of time (and using those figures for a purchasing decision) would be somewhat pointless anyways, because the drivers for both are pretty immature. They both will change greatly (I hope) before they are finalized.