PDA

View Full Version : The old State-of-the-Art


Terminat.
12-20-04, 02:11 PM
A few months back, I built a budget gaming pc (mainly for lan tournaments, since the old Dell Dimension with a dodgy network card and GeForce4 MX440 just couldn't handle it.)

I decided to build the pc out of components that, one year ago, would have been considered state-of-the-art:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (back when 512k cache was all the range)
512MB PC3200 DDR Memory
8x AGP PC-Chips Motherboard, supporting the (back then) ultra-fast ATA133 standard
Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm ATA133 Disk Drive (a year ago, ATA133 was considered very speedy)
Sapphire Radeon 9600SE 128MB (Okay, I know this 64-bit card wouldn't have ever been considered state-of-the-art, but it gives near-par performance to a GeForce4 Ti, which at one time was top-of-the-range. Plus DX9 was kind of a luxury last year.)
Samsung 8x DVD-RW/R (Single Layer) - Although not amazing now, compared to the dual-layer writers of today, a year ago this drive would have cost hundreds of pounds - I got it for only £40 from www.ebuyer.co.uk
Windows XP Home with SP2

I also bought a budget case and psu optimised for quietness, again from www.ebuyer.co.uk - the pc is now silent.

Even today, this pc happily runs C&C Generals, UT2004, Far Cry, Rome: Total War and others - all at 1152*1024 at max. settings (with the exception of Far Cry and Rome: Total War, which are run at high settings.)

PLOBBY
12-20-04, 02:15 PM
May i ask what the point of this post was?...no offense but i didnt catch it.

Terminat.
12-20-04, 02:18 PM
Oh, sorry.

I suppose it was just to inform everyone on how - despite the new tech of PCI-E, DDR2 and SATA - a semi-decent gaming pc can still be built for cheap, as this entire pc cost less than £400 - £350 without the OS. That's the price of a 6800 Ultra.