p c world p/bell offer.good??

T4i

Just be careful with packard bell. They tend to use cheap/nasty parts and hide it.

What PSU is included? What RAM? What HDD (7,200RPM or 5,400RPM with 2/8MB Cache?)

If you dont play games you could build a right system for cheap. With the possibilities of upgrading the graphics later incase gaming becomes an issue.

T4i

wolfman wrote:

It's when you play games (Battlefield 2 is a good example) where you'll maybe want 1.5gb+ of RAM.

I had my 1st virtual memory error because of BF2. I had my VM disabled thinking it gives better IO performance. But i've read a very good guide to VM this weekend, now running 200MB min / 300mb Max.

catford

I think i'd better talk this out with her indoors ! maybe it would be better to get a system with sep graphics card---???

boogiemaster

Computers with onboard graphics cannot play powerful games like battlefield 2.
You need a medium quality graphics card to play the game.
Virtual memory error is because you don’t have enough ram to play the game! It uses your hard drive as memory.

Good quality games like battlefield 2 need at least one gig of ram to play.
If you have 512 meg or ram your operating system will use so much, battlefield 2 will want a bigger chunk and start to use your hard drive as virtual memory when your 512 runs out.

With XP your computer can only run 4 gigs of memory! With the new XP64? It can use your hard drive for virtual memory of up to 16 gigs.

My old system plays battlefield 2, it has a geforce fx5200 graphics card a 2.6 Athlon and one gig of ram.

Quote from game spy

But the biggest complaint that we have with the game is the steep hardware requirements. You'll need a beefy video card: the minimum is a GeForce FX 5700 or a Radeon 8500. If you don't have the proper card, or the proper driver, the game dumps you unceremoniously to desktop without as much as an error message. We've got machines here at GameSpy with GeForce Ti 4600s that are capable of running Half-Life 2 or DOOM 3 with solid framerates, but Battlefield 2 won't even run on these systems. It seems that a huge audience could find themselves shut out of this game, which is a shame; if you've been looking for a good excuse
to pick up a new video card, this might be it.

My computer ran the game with the Fx5200 graphics card and played ok with no slow downs.
Also I had the games networked and it never slowed down, would recommend getting a slightly better card than mine.

I have a good system to play battlefield 2 and my specs are way over what’s needed.

Athlon 64 3800+ 939
4 gig of ram
8 x 250 gig Sata hard drives
2 x 300 gig Seagate barracuda 300 gig drives
Liteon 52 32 52 Cd Rw drive
Pioneer 109 Dvd rw drive
Hyper Type R 480 watt power supply
Coolermaster Hyper 48 Cpu cooler
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe Pci 939
Radeon X600 Graphics card

So I’m ok for a few years yet :-)

wolfman

T4i wrote:

I had my 1st virtual memory error because of BF2. I had my VM disabled thinking it gives better IO performance. But i've read a very good guide to VM this weekend, now running 200MB min / 300mb Max.

Me too actually. I did have the virtually memory disabled so that Windows is forced to use the ram and so it shuts down faster. It was fine for games like Half Life 2 and Doom3, but when playing in a 64 player map in Battlefield 2 it threw an error. I now have virtual memory set at 512mb. Although it's only needed for Battlefield 2, I may just be greedy and purchase another 512mb or 1gb of ram, so I can turn it off again.

T4i

wolfman wrote:

I may just be greedy and purchase another 512mb or 1gb of ram, so I can turn it off again.

Have you seen this wolfman? http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Its the best one i've read so far.....theres a tool you can download that monitors page-file usage.

Alex_Nichol wrote:

How big should the page file be?



There is a great deal of myth surrounding this question. Two big fallacies are:

• The file should be a fixed size so that it does not get fragmented, with minimum and maximum set the same
• The file should be 2.5 times the size of RAM (or some other multiple)

ooooooo

BF2 does run on 51MB RAM as I've been forced to do this myself last weekend, it does take forever though to load. One of my 512MB modules went down so I ordered a new one and RMA'd the old one