New computer for the game.

[M. Sarsfield]

That 350W power supply won't run that set-up. You need something at or above 450W and the bigger supplies aren't that expensive anymore.

[jas39]

thanks for the correction! I didn't see that. How can you tell if the PSU will run it or not?

[M. Sarsfield]

I think the mobo manufacturer's website should be able to give you a minimum recommended wattage. They take into account everything being hooked up to the power supply.

Newegg.com has a lot of good specs and customers write-ups that warn you to buy a certain wattage for that application.

Some of the other guys on here recommended a 600W supply and I think you'd be good with one that large. I think the one that I put in my machine in August is 630W. I built it for SHIV and I'm pretty happy with it.

Not all brands are the same, though, and more expensive doesn't mean that it's better than the cheap one. I like shopping at NewEgg, because people will tell you if a product is good or a piece of crap. I've had a lot of success with Rosewill and Cooler Master supplies.

Finally, get one with at least two fans built into it and keep tabs on noise level when buying anything with cooling fans.

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by MorganThePirate

My budget is around $2,500 more or less; I can build it; I did that with the actual computer. However, I am not a computer geek. Thank you very much for your input and ideas.....

For $2,500 you can afford to open the throttles pretty wide open. Torps' post pretty well lays out a great path to go and leaves you $1000 mad money to buy a big flat screen monitor and that Saitek Eclipse II red backlight keyboard so you can night stalk with your home lights out. That was the best $35 I've spent on my computer so far.

I would change Torps' list to upgrade that power supply to 850 watts. If you get crazy and want to build an SLI system later you'll have the ponies to get the job done.

You can build just about the ultimate SH4 computer with your budget.

[Wilcke]

As RR points out, save some money for a nice big fat LCD!

[clayp]

Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme @3.24
Asus Motherboard P5BDELUXEWIFI
OCZ 2Gig 15-5-5-5 memory kit DDR2 OCZ2N1066SR2GK 2 x 2 gig kits
(4 gigs total)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra BFGE88768UE
Western Digital 160gig sata II 16mb
Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer SB0730VP
Cooler master CM Stacker 830 Silver
OCZ Gamer extreme PS 1010wat OCZ1010GXSSLI
Samsung Optical (DVD/CDRW)
Windows XP Pro 32bit SP2

STAY AWAY FROM VISTA!!!!!!...And you dont need 64bit..Contry to what is posted driver support for any flavor of Vista is terrible.Go with Win XP 32...

[Spike88]

Tiger direct is selling Refurbished gateways for 699.
It has a :
2.44ghz Quad Core
2gb Ram
500gb HDD
8600(forget which) 512mb Nvidia card
Integrated sound card

Only thing is its Vista, but you can easily change that.

[tedhealy]

I really don't understand the hate for vista. I upgraded last month and have vista 64 and I've had zero problems. It's stable, fast (with a good comp), looks good, and runs everything I had on my previous xp machine.

If you have old stuff, I could see how vista would cause problems with drivers, but with a new computer and recent 'stuff', vista shouldn't pose a problem.

Plus SH4 runs just fine with vista 64 , just set it to run as administrator.

For a little under $1000, I got this just 2 months ago.

asus p5k-e mobo
Quad q6600
4 gig of mushkin ddr2 800 ram
evga 8800gt sc
550 watt corsair psu
60 gig sata 10,000rpm drive
freezer 7 heatsink
vista 64 ultimate

I added that to parts from previous builds

ati 650 tuner
200 gig sata 7200rpm drive
dvd burner
p180 case
widescreen lcd

and I couldn't be happier.

For 2500, you could go hog wild, specially if you already have a good case, monitor, and a hard drive and/or dvd drive.

About 200 to 300 for a cpu
about 100- 175 for a motherboard
get at least 2 gigs of ram
spend about 300 on a video card
aftermarket heatsink if you plan on overclocking
sata hard drive depends on your requirements for space, I generally go with a small but fast (10,000 rpm)drive for the operating system, then a large but slower drive for data
dvd burner for 30
quality power supply 50 to 150

then add a case, monitor, peripherals and you are set.

If you aren't building your own, get at least :
a dual core cpu, 2 gigs of ram, 8800gt video card or comparable, and 20 inch widescreen lcd.

[Rockin Robbins]

I have purchased two EVGA 7600GT cards, originally with the intent of making an SLI system, succeeding in running SH4 for about a month before....

Backstory: somewhere in the bowels of the Asian continent, a scheming employee of a semiconductor company which manufactured a nice proportion of the world's supply of electrolytic capacitors quietly stole the plans for his corporation's product, along with the formula for the electrolyte (that's the big secret of the whole process). For big humongous bucks he provided that to a new startup company with the intent of blowing his original company out of the water with cheaper prices.

Unfortunately, his company had taken the step of protecting themselves, and the stolen electrolyte formula was lacking a critical ingredient. Without ingredient X, the capacitor would perform perfectly for a period of months. Then chemical changes in the electrolyte would cause the electrolytic capacitor to.....explode. But no one knew that until millions of the cheap little buggers were sold to all manner of graphics card, motherboard, television, radio, fill in the blank, manufacturers.

So my two EVGA 7600GT graphics boards were cute little time bombs. On November 9, my first one detonated, wiping out my SLI masterpiece just as I was beginning testing to see what advantages SLI actually delivered in SH4:

Five of six in the photo are toast. I contacted EVGA and they immediately made good on their lifetime warranty, sending me a new card, while I ran my remaining card alone. The day before I received the replacement card I heard an explosion inside my computer case that sounded like a whip cracking in hell!

The card continued to work, but when I put the replacement card in I noticed that one electrolytic cap was burst open. Playing it safe, I now again ran on one card only and RMA'd my second 7600GT.

This afternoon I received the replacement. It was in an unmarked white box this time and somehow it felt too heavy. Hold it, the cooling fan's heat sink looks different, what's this? 7900GS! I love these guys!!!!!!!!!!

So there goes my intended SLI system again, but the 7900GS should perform even better than the SLI'd 7600GTs could anyway.

For icing on the cake my processor upgrade, Opteron 175 came in at the same time. I think I'll get some frame rates in screenshots, take the thing apart and do the same thing to see what I have here. Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe!

[Rockin Robbins]

The monster went into surgery tonight for the first stage of the conversion. Out came the mondo slow Athlon 64 3700+. Someone mentioned that a machine may be either processor-bound or graphics card-bound. How do you know? Well, by pure dumb luck I'm in a position to find out.

Configuration before: Motherboard, Asus A8N32-SLI DeLuxe. Processor, Athlon 64 3700+. Memory 2 gig go fast OCZ. Graphics, EVGA 7600GT. No overclocking on anything. This is no state of the art machine. It runs SH4 fine, wide freakin' open. 1152 x 864 millions of colors (that's Mac talk in case you want to pause to be impressed. I thought not) . External camera, looking at the sub, 19 fps. Not too shabby and very playable. Wouldn't want to see half that though, it would be nasty!

I switched for that beautiful Opteron 175, no other changes. Outside view looking at the sub is now a solid 30/31 fps! So, was this computer graphics or processor bound? I'd say we have a solid case of choking on the processor there! What's that mean for any SLI tests I might have been able to make? I most likely would have said SLI didn't gain me much because my processor couldn't handle one graphics card, much less two!

Results: Athlon 64 3700+ to Opteron 175 = 58% improvement in frame rate with the same 7600GT graphics card.

Ouch. There goes a lot of seemingly rock hard conclusions about relative performance under SLI. Looks like a good processor might be necessary to see big improvements.

I'm going away now to tear my computer apart again and install the 7900GS. Nothing can beat what I just did..........can it?

[Rockin Robbins]

It's disaster time. Let's take a look at original configuration

EVGA 6500GT and Athlon 64 3700+ 19 FPS. Nice and playable but we always want better so...

Opteron 175 plus 7600GT 29-32 fps. Much better!!! 58% improvement with the new processor. Can't wait to see the 7900 GS strut her stuff!!!!!!!!! (is that insipid enough?)

Yup, you guessed it, one frame per second increase and funky stripes everywhere. This is a disaster! Any ideas? Rubini? Help?............ check out this sky:

How do you explain that? Interior views look OK. Everything else looks good: text, photos, movies, etc. I can't explain it. Any ideas?

[Bathrone]

I would avoid the G31 and get a P35 chipset motherboard assuming you wont be running multiple graphics cards. Its a better chipset with better configurability.

FSX is notorious for demanding high power. Especially with FSAA and AF running on the graphics at higher resolutions you'll need all the power you can get.

The thing about computers is alot of people think they are experts, but really its the minority a few people know the x86 architecture and computing science in real detail. There is two points that are plain wrong in this thread:

1. You dont need 64bit OS for 4GB of RAM. Well actually you do. The 32 bit MS XP kernel cannot access more than 2gig of allocated memory to a single process and as well, it cannot address the whole 4GB memory space. 4GB reqyuires a 64bit operating system to properly take advantage of that amount of RAM.

2. Vista x64 is to be avoided. The driver support for XP 64 is bad. Vista x64 has excellent driver support. Whats more, the windows driver model for Vista has changed from XP and XP 64 was always a fringe product to begin within - these factors will only widen the gap between Vista x64 and XP 64 when it comes to IHVs coming out with driver releases. Many IHVs are no longer supporting XP 64bit drivers at all.

Most of what you see about Vista "negatives" is from people who do not have a rational qualified argument. It's partly MS's fault by breeding a generation of users with poor security habits from not running least priveledged user accounts all the time and then blaming UAC for changing their bad habits. They'd die if they tried to deal with BSD, Linux and Solaris let me tell you. There is no perfect operating system but for the desktop role that Vista is designed for, there is many, many reasons why it's better than XP.

I would highly recommend going for quad core. While some games you use will be single threaded, the middleware layers such as DX10 and the sound layer are multi-threaded. The whole operating system consists of multi threaded processes and for this reason even single threaded games will benefit from being run on a multi core CPU. The price of the Q6600 is sufficiently low not to make it a big leap and the great benefit about this chip is that it overclocks very well on relatively simple air cooling such as thermalright ultra 120 extreme and a scythe 120mm fan. It also helps prevents stuttering where the game process is interrupted by another process on the kernel in a single cpu situation.

[scrag]

No signiifcant issues - had to update with specific drivers (expected this though) support MUCH better this time for OS switch than when XP came out (that was a nightmare). So far the only graphics glitch I ran into was some weird stuff with the Sun in SHIII otherwise I am running an X38 P4 system with 2 gigs of memory and a 8800 GTS card. I guess your decision on buying a Motherbaord today is based on whether you are going to use SLI or not. I am not that hardcore so I knoew one card was a enough and went with the latest updated MoBo ASUS Maximus with Dominator memory. Vista is a memory pig though and I have gotten the second set of 2 gig for the system - yet to be installed. So far I have loaded older games like Star Trek Orion Pirates, Homeworld, AvP II, bunch of Tank, plane sims as well as SHIII/IV - no issues. Graphics rock so much I went out and got a Samsung LCD display for wide screen.

[Torps]

in my previous post, the only thing I would recommend and stress is wait till the 9800gtx comes out.

Just rememeber $550 will buy you a 8800 or wait 14 days and buy a 9800 for $550.Remember the 9800 will be twice as fast as the 8800.

My mobo does not support pci-e x16 V2, just v1 so guess what I have to do, grrrr.