Just thot that id put my two cents in here, i can play WoW 8-10h in a row, with my gef3 ti500 64mb card on med settings, so the code of the game has a great deal to do how well you can play it. Yes, with a high end card it doesnt matter but with outdated cards its 50 50 if you can play ok or not. Depends on the code.

I haveto disagree on your first point Satis. Ive been happily playing Rome Total War on minimal settings, resolution and large army size. And i mean "Happily" with a Laptop Radeon 9000 64MB DDR card! Another thing, you have to remember that when it comes to minimum graphics detail, my tolerance is surprisingly high. Just shows how poor i am!

As with your second point, AMEN brother. Im gonna do that shit ASAP. The first and foremost thing i HATE is a fragged up, chugging HD.

EDIT: Cant wait to play Operation Flashpoint with all the graphics RAMPED!

heh...I must be a graphics snob then, I suppose. To each their own. And yea, xp pro kicks home's ass. Bleh.

same here, i like it maxed baby.

getting a 19' tft soon, native res 1280 x 1024. you NEED a decent card for that.

I have as 17" LCD, same native resolution. Yea baby!

Theres a new LCD out with a native res of about 1900*1600 or summin. Its up there in the horizontal 1900's anyway. The only realy CRT resolution competitor.

though technically CRTs are still 'better' than LCDs, I prefer LCDs regardless.

1. Smaller
2. Lighter
3. Lower power consumption
4. They turn on and off instantly
5. No glare
6. If you shoot it, you won't risk being killed by exploding glass

Fucking hate the glare most of all. It burns! It burns!

He he, i found out the hard way that CRT's explode!

*considers giving Derf his old title back

I was trying to break a TV that i found with a huge concrete slab. didn't work. Threw a small brick at it, it blew up. Fun. That's how i found out a smaller object is better for breaking windows.

Also - once the pyrex dish in the microwave fell out and broke on the floor. I was at the other end of the kitchen, some 10 feet away. A piece of it flew across the room and stuck in my leg.
Good call on the change of the topic title thing... yeah. SOrry, just had to share this useless information.

lol.

Smaller yes, but of equal or greated weight.

Speaking of CRT's and LCD's. To me LCD pic quality sucks. I mean Everything looks better on my Big Sony than on my cousins 19" Samsungs TFT. Maybe in two or three years i might consider a LCD, even then i would probably go for plasma or something.

It got delievered Wednesday. YAY!

So appropriately, i took the ENTIRE Thursday off and nominated it play-day.

I whored around for about 12 hours on that thing and playing RTW using huge army size and details up to medium. Thursday was a 1337 day.

Friday (today) i dedicated to finishing off my assignement (which i have done so).

All is good with the new PC. What surprised me, was that the machine outputs hardly any noise at all, even when playing hour-after-hour of RTW. Its a very cleverly designed case.

The GPU, alas, is what i expected it to be, that is, not much. But i knew this was going to be the case thanks to BJ's link to the 3D benchmarks. Perhaphs a GPU upgrade will be in order later this year. Who knows.

However, there were 2 bad things about my Dell Experience.

1) i used my credit card first time round to order the machine, little did i know that my bank refused the payment. I assumed everything was OK because a) Dell didnt phone me. b) My online Dell account was telling me that my "computer is being built".

2) So i give the paying responsibilities to my mother for now. She also gets things muddled and ends up ordering 2 of the damn things. So 8 boxes arrive on Wednesday (much to my pleasant yet confusing surprise) only to find that there were 2 lots of things. Im arranging for them to refund 1 computer and for them to come and pick it up. Im not spending £50 postage on their error.

How do inknow if my computer is compatible with either single or dual slot PCI-E graphics cards?

Do you have PCI-Express onboard? If you do, you can use PCI-E cards.

The second party depends on the motherboard architecture. You'll have to read up on your board and see if it supports dual channel PCI-E.