article: gaming hardware

[bRaNDo]

after reading all of this, you left out one MAJOR part of whatan improve your gameplay: the sound.



EAX keeps you on your toes. It does, really, help.

[-OptiKaL-]

Tom's Hardware is the crappiest, most biased hardware site. DO NOT read them. Don't even pay attention to anything on there. Go to www.sharkyextreme.com www.anandtech.com www.amdmb.com www.hardocp.com there you go. BTW the Radeon 8500 is pretty good.

[-OptiKaL-]

Edited by [user="1896"] @ [time="1012697306"]

|Caledor| wrote..

Luftwaffle, could you do a part 2 of this article, covering things like mouse, keyboard, speakers and monitor ? Is using a LCD monitor good for games? Speakers vs. headphones, wireless keyboards, optical mice, the list seems endless.

I don't like LCD monitors, I have a 17" Sony CRT and my parents have a 15" LCD MAG and although surfing the internet/text looks better, games and anything moving fast looks like shite. It's the common blurry effect that comes from moving things on LCDs. Who knows, maybe more expensive LCDs don't have this problem.



<edit>Oh yeah, get a good optical mouse, ball mice are a thing of the past and my previous experiences with them were horrible. All 3 computers in our house have optical mice. Good 4.1 surround is the best for CS and EAX/A3D enabled games, such as the z560s and Klipsch ProMedia 4.1's. It really helps you track an nme.</edit>

[SinaC]

I just got a

AMD XP 1500+

512 DDR RAM

GeForce 2 MX 400

and its so nice =D my old computer was crap... 15 fps as soon as I saw an enemy. Now I get a solid 99 FPS even with custom models. It was cheap too, a little over $1000. I'm planning to upgrade to a GeForce 3 pretty soon. (aka: as soon as I get the money)

[Thor]

Pentium 4 r0x the athlon.... athlon may have better performance in some cases (and t3h P4 (Northwood S-478) viceversa), however, the Northwood is much more stable. What you wrote about the data loss etc. of bad ramm's can be the same with ahtlon cpu's. this is common knowledge.



don't make me spank you billy!

[Flankterfrazier]

It seems that everyone is buying a Geforce 2 MX . Because its cheap.

But most of the people think its better than a Geforce 2 GTS , which is pure crap. I urge MX owners to stop your bullshit and look at the GTS , Ti and even the PRO not to mention the Ultra , before bragging about your cheap shit card.

[ShadowMaster]

Yep, Radeon 8500 kicks some serious GeForce 3 butt =)



True it was limited in preformance by drivers at one stage, but even then it matched the GeForce 3 Ti500



As for CPU's my 800 tbird still packs a punch, even my good old Voodoo 5 5500 runs CS1.3 (and 1.4) at 60-70fps using WickedGL.

Radeon owns thou.



Have a spare Tbird 1.4 lying around waiting for mobo and DDR ram, after that i dont plan to upgrade until AMD comes out with their thoroughbred or barton.

[.:':.RAC.:':. Ivan-IV]

No CS will run smooth unless you're running at 100fps.... j/k. I have a GeForce2 Ti and I can tweak it with the GeForce Tweak utility. Right now I am running 100fps. Before I was runnning 60 but I had mass textures. Make sure that you don'rt go breaking your GeForce with that Tweak utility though. I used to run CS off of a 450mhz.... I though it was smooth, until I got this comp. 1.3ghz Athlon, 256mb DDR and the GeForce 2 Ti. You may think you ahve a smooth computer, but you will want a faster computer. For most of us, the only thing holding us back from being really good is our computer. So maybe you can put it some money and through away the POS Celeron! and get something good. Yeah, Celeron is trash.... Anything under 600 mhz has a 66mhz fsb... With only 8k of L1 cache and 128k of L2. It's not a very good gaming processor. My advice to you is to either get an Athlon XP or wait for the new AMD to come out. It will own all Intel!

[KhAoS]

Hey does anyone know anything about the new Nvidia Nforce motherboards? It comes with integrated dolby 5.1 sound and GeForce 2 Video card onboard. What version of the GeForce 2 is it running?



oh btw my current computer needs to be taken outside and shot...

500Mhz Celeron

32MB Radeon SDR

192MB RAM

[KGarcia]

its runs an onboard geforce 2 mx

[Nyjumpman23]

I recently built my new computer...and geting backin the groove of cs..tell me wuh u think



P4 1.7gig

640 RD ram- might upgrade to 1 gig of ram

Geforce3 ti200 w/ s-vid out

sound blaster audigy platinumw/live drive

100(one 60 and 40 gig) gig hard drive..might upgrade to having another 80 gig HD



And to tell u peoples who feel that RADEON 8500 kicks Gefoce3 ti500's ass..it ain't try...the Geforce3 ti500 beat out the ATI 8500 with EASE...tests show..and it was proven...

[TechFreaK]

This is a forum about the best CS system isn't it? For anyone saying that their old computer works fine, stay outta this.



I built this recently:



Athlon Xp 1900+

VIA KT-266A chipset (Asus)

512 DDR (no need for more cuz good Hard Drives)

Geforce3 (although Geforce 2Ti's 64MB are good enough)

SB Audigy X-Gamer (very bad CPU utilization on winXP)

RAID array of two 40GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM ata 100

400 Watt 5.1 THX surround speakers

running on winXP ( unfortunately )

T1 connection (got transfer rate up to 16MB/sec)



My CS runs at 99-100 fps and it rarely lowers to 70 something with lot's of HE's and Smokes, and ping of 8-12.



An important issue here is refresh rate. Some ppl got great cards but crappy monitor that won't support 60+ refresh rate at 1024x768 @16 bit. So guess wut, your fps is stuck below 60. Remember the equation: Hz(refresh rate) = FPS. So check to see if you can boost up your refresh rate. You can test by switching your desktop resolution to the same as your CS playing resolution and see under "adapter" that how high it allows you.



There are also third party programs that tweaks it higher than what window allows, but becareful, you can ruin your monitor. I had CS running at 120 fps once by tweaking refresh rate but I was a bit scared to keep it. Oh yeah you have to open up your config.cfg file and set Max_fps higher than the default of 72 (i think, heck just put it to 200). They say that human eye can't tell difference between 30 FPS to higher FPS. That was during the Quake2 days, and it was so wrong!! Obviously 30 FPS looks different from 60 FPS. Trust me guys, FPS is everything. Your cross-hair's aim recovers the rate it is suppose to only at 72+ FPS.



Oh yeah WinXP can do weird things to your CS. Refresh rate problems, network problems, and bad for Audigy cards (most can be solved with right driver updates). Despite the claims by nVidia that new Xp driver for GeForce series can boost performace up 50%, i found it way better on winME or below.



Not sure about refresh rate on LCD's but it's probably around the same as CRT's.



Playing CS on higher resolution can be good. Your mouse move by the minimum of 1 pixel, so let's say you're trying to micro aim at a guy's head on 640x480, half of the guy's head is one pixel, the other half is another pixel. So as you try to micro aim it is likely that if you shoot at either of the pixels, the shot would still miss cauz you can't center your aim on his head. At higher resolution the same guy's head is made of 16+ pixels, now you can just aim at any of the center 4 pixels and pretty much get a guaranteed head shot, and with a smaller cross hair at hi-res, it's even easier, but make sure you got a 19inch monitor.



Sorry about the long post. I'd be happy if someone actually finish reading. Oh well hope this helps.

[wpc.best]

Hes right about pricewatch. But i like the way you guy are making this cs-nation better i dont like to search all the links to find info and stuff. I like the new cs-nation. Good job ppl



The Last Hope

[RoadRunneR]

Talk about upgrading, my take is if you have money to burn you might as well let someone else build a top of the line comp for you. I bought one through Alienware and it came straight up at $2 G's. I have a AMD 2000+ Processor with geForce3 vid card, 512 Ram, 80Gig 7200 RPM hard drive with an awesome cable connection. Poeple just don't comprehend what's it like to play on one of these! I use a Logitech Optical mouse and I love it. Also Sound Blaster Audigy and Win XP, along with kickarse speakers. I can hear people coming from 8 miles away when I crank them up. AWP's going off rattles my glass patio doors in my house. And my neighbors get really mad :) Life is good right now, and my old comp(900 AMD) runs a dedicated server right next to me as I have them routed very nicely. Oh, 100 fps without any lag at all even with smoke grenades or running through water on Aztec. I love this game!