Homebulit Systems State of the Union.

[SPARTAN-117]

In light of the recent launch of the 8800GTX and 8800GTS, I've taken it upon myself to ask a question few dare to, are any of us ready or willing to be automatically left behind at the end of January 07 when Vista and Direct-X 10 come out? By this I mean, are any of us who just built systems 3 months ago going to want to upgrade in the next 4 months? The reason I'm brining this up is beacause there ain't a whole lot of stuff coming out in 07 that's designed for what 90% of us on this forum have. Crysis is a very good example of this. A cutting edge game built for DX-10 and Vista. Another couple of examples are: HALO 2, the HAVOK FX game engine, and nVidia's Quantum Physics driver are the only one's I can think of at the moment.

So let's pose a real question to a real situation (when posting reply list current system specs):

How may of us can afford to buy/upgrade to a system that has:

1. Vista compatible and DirectX-10 compatible VGA

2. 4gb DDR2 memory (min.) or more for Vista since its giving each process in the background its own 4gb memory address (hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, look at how many processes you have running, and think about this)

3. 300gb+ HDD's to accommidate the file system in Vista (not really needed but really helps)

4. A dual-core or quad-core CPU to handle the massive thread count of Vista

These are just a few of the things about the future that seemed to jump out at me when I saw the 8800GTX's come out. I'm pretty sure others on this forum began to see the writing on the wall for their systems when the 8800's came out. Now even though I'm confident that I can get another 2yrs out of my system, I'm begining to wonder at what cost it will be in terms of software I can use (i.e. games).

Please let me know what you all think. This is probably one of the more important issues facing the Homebuilt System today than at any other time in history. I mean, how often is it that software not hardware makes a Homebuilt PC obsolete overnight, literally?

As for me, I hope that I don't have to upgrade until my hardware needs to be upgraded and not when I need new software. I'd be very mad to only get 7 months of usability out of my $2500 system before I need to upgrade.

Thank you all in advance for your posts, opinions, and system stats.

SPARTAN-117

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My System:

AMD 64 X2 3800+ OC'ed to 2.2 Ghz, BFG 7900 GTX 512 mb OC'ed, ASUS A8N-SLi Deluxe, 2 Gb Kingston Value RAM CAS Latency 2.5-3-3-6, Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 4, Westen Digital 74 Gb Ratop ADFD, 2x Western Digital 250 Gb Caviar SE, 3x Thermaltake Hardcano 14 HDD coolers, Thermaltake Blue Orb II CPU cooler, Zalman VF-Cu 900 Blue LED VGA cooler, Thermaltake Extreme Spirit Northbridge cooler, and a PC Power & Cooling 510w PSU.

 

[skyguy]

For people building new systems in the coming 6 months, DX10, etc may be a good idea. For those who have recently built systems, however, it depends on the specs. Any dual core rig with 2 gigs RAM will work with Vista/DX10 when it launches. Only thing to get would be a new vid card.

However, my suspicion is that alot of people will wait for the bugs to get worked out of Vista, for the 2nd-gen DX10 cards to come out and drop in price, and games that actually support DX10 to be released. This will take probably a year from now, and even then, it will take time for people to continue to migrate from DX9/WinXP.

Most people here are "enthusiasts".....and impatient ones at that LOL. But 98% of the population aren't enthusiasts. So the mainstream markets won't upgrade that fast....like I said, my guess is a good year for sure.

So, if people have built dual core rigs, then more RAM is easy, another hard drive is easy to add. Just need a DX10 card......and vid cards go out of style the fastest in any system anyways. So alot of people who recently built systems should be good to go. Just gotta be patient though

 

[SPARTAN-117]

I know LOL. Many of the people telling me that they want to learn how to use Vista before learing how to build PC's, I think they're crazy. I keep telling them to wait for Vista SP1 before learning it, because that's how the OS will probably function for the rest of its life (barring any major changes that come with SP2 rofl)

You're absolutly right about waiting for the 2nd gen DX-10 cards. This will give cooling solution people like Thermaltake and ZALMAN a chance to come out with aftermarket coolers for those beasts.

Its good to know that a new VGA is all we'll probably need in the near future, whew!!! 8)

 

[mustangman311]

I see what you're saying. I built this machine about a month ago, on a $400 budget. So I'm screwed. But yeah, one thing I see something wrong with is Vista's massive amount of memory-use. Come on, it's definitely possible to tweak it and tune it down a notch.

 

[enforcerfx]

Im pretty sure I can get all that stuff. Half from my job, the other half from my rich folks

 

[I]

Nobody's being left behind.

You have arbitrarily assumed you or someone else knows better than the unique user, what that unique user needs.

If they needed a 300GB HDD already, it has nothing to do with Vista. So they'll need a couple GB free space, hardly an issue. We know Vista runs fine on a 40GB HDD too, while 40GB is so old many will be failing from old age at this point.

If they (individual users) need 2GB memory, they'll already be running it. Vista memory requirements and actual footprint increase over XP /SP2 aren't much, the only people really effected are those who tried to squeak by with minimal memory on XP /SP2.

On the other hand, there is no amount of memory or HDD space nor video card that will make Vista run good. Good, when all the hardware around you has improved in performance, would have to mean the OS runs faster TOO, not just essentially usurping the benefits brought by the hardware. Larger memory footprint means not just more memory needed, it means more bandwidth required, it means Vista will run slower than XP no matter how much MS will try to throw out deceptive benchmarks (just as they did with XP, when it was quite obvious 9x and 2K ran faster on every system).

In short, if you are thinking anything in relation to Vista, you have it wrong. Vista is not a requirement against which a system is built, a system is built to run APPLICATIONS on an OS, not to run an OS alone. If all you were trying to do is run email, IE, etc, Vista is pointless as is the new system. If you are running games, they far exceed Vista's demands. Somewhere inbetween these two extremes lies most people's uses, and even then the average hardware on all but the cheapest low end systems already has them covered.

DirectX10 is the only significant issue, so you can see the toy that is aeroglass, before disabling it so you can get some work done. Edit: I really mean DX9, but if you have such an old video solution that it's not DX9 level yet and you were ok with using it, might as well wait and go DX10.

 

[akahuddy]

I have a four month old machine on XP PRO that runs like a dream. I'm in college so there's no way that anything gets upgraded besides video card for at least the next three years. I'm not about to shell out wads of cash for a new OS that costs more than the processor in my computer.