Wednesday, November 28, 2007

So I finally bit the bullet...

Compliments of my stupid sense of humor, I had to make the previous post. I wanted to do it the day of, but I forgot before I took the tower apart to post it, and then I was too busy bitching about my new card.

Yes, bitching about it. It was the only video card I could find quickly enough to satisfy my desire to keep playing, and it was at the same place I got my new PSU from. It's a nVidia 6800 clone, made by a company I've never heard of before. I think it's 256MB of ram is shared, it behaves that way. I lag hard whenever there's a lot of visual information (IE if anyone fires off a weapon skill or if I go into a larger area with a lot of movement in the environment). Coming from my ATI Radeon 9800, this is a painful drop in performance. I've had to lower my resolution to tolerate the performance issues.

On the plus side, Christmas is coming early for me. My wife has conceded to get me a new gaming rig. I've opted for a notebook over a new desktop, only because she has me on a bit of a budget for the unit. Not that I care, the notebook will be loaded. This will be my new notebook.

Yes, it's a Dell. I've said before on my linkshell, I work there. I know I could go elsewhere for a notebook, but to be honest, I know what's going inside this one. I also know what kind of support to expect from my own company. And it doesn't hurt that I get a discount.

I won't go into huge details, for fear that this will seem like an advertisement for Dell Computers if I do, but I've had the opportunity to play on one of these here at work. It's fast, bloody gorgeous, and reasonably priced. Alienware comes in a little cheaper for their similar unit, but this one comes factory over-clocked. Besides, the difference is literally only a couple hundred dollars. And I am almost certain that it boils down to the warranty offers I'm choosing.

Regardless, I like the system, I want the system, I will have the system. And once I get it, expect me to praise (or bemoan) its performance.

Oh, and I will not be getting Vista. PlayOnline and Vista still do not play nice. My step-daughter, known on the game as Anyka, is having a world of issues on her computer at the moment. About two weeks or so back, for no apparent reason, it started to deliver static-like shocks to her, and freezing when it did so. Since it, too, is from Dell (a 9400, back when we really didn't have a true gaming notebook), she contacted them and they wanted to exchange the unit for safety issues.

Her new machine arrived with Vista. And promptly caused poor framerates, and refused to recognize any expansions.

So I contacted my company and, without using any internal/job-centric influence (ie I acted like a customer and didn't try to ply them with "I work for you guys, do the following"), got them to replace the unit, again, with an XP-compatible unit.

Don't get me wrong, Vista is actually a really decent OS, better than XP for a lot of stuff. I also like that it prevents lazy mixed code being put in games and software, which ultimately causes instability. But for gaming, it's not so hot yet, it needs more tweaks so we can gain more performance.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's the machine I wanted when I bought mine, but Dell didn't sell one with a keypad. ;P I ended up with a nice Clevo instead. =D