Dan's new PC and general pc upgrading joy.

[totallyradroach]

So I never got into PC gaming. But I've been dabbling with a few PC games and I'm now going to take the plunge. My new PC is going to a huge improvement over my old one and I'm really excited to see how the new one will perform.
I'm going from...
A Athlon 64 3800+ , 512 MB, ATI Radeon HD 2400(which I overpayed for by 100 bucks because Radioshack is the devil),
To....
A Intel I5 750 quad core, 4gb ram, Ati Radeon 5870, and a Cooler Master HAF 932 case.
It's going to be a massive improvement over what I've had so what is the biggest jump in PC upgrading have any of you had? what's the worst experience in PC gaming have you had?(like trying to play far cry 2 on the former system and not getting 20 FPS on the lowest settings)

Also if Dan reads this thread what was your old PC? And now that you have a good PC will you play more multiplatform games on it?

[botwin]

My first 2 comps were dells with onboard graphics cards that could barely handle counter-strike at 20fps, my comp now is badass but I have to say above everything else the biggest upgrade ever to my comp was switching from a 17" CRT that I used for 3 straight comps to the 22" LCD, if you don't already have a nice monitor I'd highly recommend it, made games look 10 times better.

[icu]

That's awesome. I'm a die hard PC gamer and I see more and more of my brethren and sistren fall to the siren call of the next next gen consoles.

Sounds like you are going to be more than alright and please give Far Cry 2 another go - it's tons of fun with a gun.

I've built my last two rigs from scratch and they've worked out well. I still feel it's the only way to get the bang for your buck. If you can do without the support (and who has support anymore?) it can be good, but what I would do is find sites like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware and look at their gaming PCs and get the same hardware from Newegg ergo the stuff works together.

Biggest jump is still the day I bought my first 3D card a 3DFX Voodoo3 ... THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!!! It was glorious.

[ojimaru]

My biggest jump was going from a 486 to a Pentium 133Mhz.

Ironically I've lost my love in PC gaming after graduating and getting a job, when the inverse should be closer to the truth. I guess I saw the relative ease of buying one next-gen console and not need to spend more to play newer games. That and after being burned by DRMs from different developers one too many times.

I still miss the times when I'd get excited at the mention of new processor technology or how awesome the next GPU would be. Then I'd save up months of pocket money for the upcoming PC fair/convention just to spend it all for some nifty upgrades. Sigh.

[totallyradroach]

being burned by DRMs from different developers one too many times.


This was my biggest problem as well. It's a sad state when the copy you download from thepiratebay is less likely to install malware then the actual legal copy of the game, and it's safe to say that 99.9% of purchases will be through steam.

[ltkerr0r]

Ironically I've lost my love in PC gaming after graduating and getting a job, when the inverse should be closer to the truth. I guess I saw the relative ease of buying one next-gen console and not need to spend more to play newer games. That and after being burned by DRMs from different developers one too many times.
Also a lot of PC games these days are just console ports so the controls suck unless you hook up a controller to your PC.

[totallyradroach]

Also a lot of PC games these days are just console ports so the controls suck unless you hook up a controller to your PC.
I would say that depends more on the type of game. 1st person shooters like TF2 or call of duty 4 benefit from the pin point accuracy of a mouse. A game like Assassins Creed or GTA4 really needs a couple of analog sticks. In either event I have a wireless 360 receiver for my pc so I can use my xbox 360 controller.

[cashbailey]

I have an Intel i7, overclocked to 3.8GHZ. A GeForce GTX 295 video card, 6 GIG of RAM and a terrabyte of storage.

But none of this seems to make much difference because I have to run that load of bottle-necking garbage Vista 64bit as my OS. And as such relatively simple games like CoD4 often crash and reset my machine, even though my specs should fly through it easily.

I mean, it handles CRYSIS at full settings like a piece of cake. Why should it reject any random level of CoD4?

I hope to Christ that Windows 7 rectifies all of Vista's atrocious mistakes.

[totallyradroach]

I hope to Christ that Windows 7 rectifies all of Vista's atrocious mistakes.

The windows 7 beta ran better for me then vista. I'll never have vista running on my machine.

[satori]

has Dan mentioned whether he's going to change the location of his PC? As I understand it, so far he's had his PC sitting beside his TV and this makes it really hard to game on for anything other than maybe MMOs and adventures game.