My new mainframe

[Chacal]

I'm still installing apps like crazy. It's been a week and I haven't even tried one game yet.

[Wairudo Enjin]

Very nice Chacal!

But *6* gig? That's an odd amount.

[Chacal]

Yeah, that's 3 x 2 Gigs of triple-channel memory.
I have this MB.

I have 6 slots for RAM, and they go in 2 sets of three, and they don't make DDR3 RAM in more than 2 Gig, so it was either 6 Gig or 12. I figured 6 would be enough for some time.

[MAN-AT-ARMS]

I have the regular P6T. Didn't need all the extra junk on the Deluxe.

[Chacal]

So far so good.
I started with XP 64 but quickly discovered nothing works on that. Switched to Vista 64 and it works great. Contrary to popular belief, and as measured by some fairly fanatical enthusisats I know, Vista 64 is not measurably slower than XP 64.

I had hoped to be able to transfer some apps from my old PC, but that proved impossible or overly complex in most cases. I had to fish out the CDs and/or download again.

I'm now playing games at the highest quality in widescreen format and can see no performance problem. BF2 is actually playable now, not a slideshow. I found a trick for running BF42 in widescreen.

Games like Uru are stunningly beautiful.

I had to buy a new joystick, my old beloved MS Sidewinder won't work anymore as new computers don't come with a joystick port and Vista doesn't support it anyway. So I bought a Logitech Extreme 3D USB joystick.

My new specs:

MB: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 Motherboard - LGA1366, Intel X58, Triple Channel DDR3, 6.4GT/s QPI, SLI Ready, CrossFireX Ready, SATA, Hyperthreading
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 Processor BX80601920 - 2.66GHz, LGA 1366, 4.8GT/s QPI, 8MB L3 Cache, Quad-Core
RAM: Patriot Viper Tri Channel 6GB PC12800 DDR3 Memory - 1600MHz, 6144MB (3 x 2048)
HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, SATA-300
Case: Thermaltake Element S ATX Black Mid-T Case
PSU: Ultra X3 ULT40311 1000-Watt Power Supply
Video: 2 EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX + SSC Video Card - 512MB DDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV, HDCP

The thing has 9 fans and produces as much heat as a hair dryer.

[Wairudo Enjin]

I curious what you mean by 'nothing works on XP 64'.

I use XP 64 on my gaming rig and it works brilliantly.

Also, why does your task manager show 8 cpu boxes? Didn't you say it's a quad core?

[Chacal]

Quad core yes, I suppose it's hyper-threaded or something.
Lots of manufacturers never developped drivers for XP 64. Lots of install programs refuse to work on XP 64, when a new version is available it will often only work on Vista. Eventually I gave up but I don't regret it (yet), Vista 64 works OK for me.

[Wairudo Enjin]

Gotcha.

[CreepingCharlie]

Very nice Chacal!

[Chacal]

AFter banging my head on the desk for hours, I finally realised why my joystick stopped working in BF42: under Vista, your .con files (such as video.con, air.con, etc) are stored in your Documents folder, not in the game tree.