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Post your Specs

The Jackal

Zero Punctuation FTW
Windows XP Professional (far better than the vista or 7 crap IMO)
Asus m2n68-am motherboard
AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core 2.8Ghz x2 (overclocked to 5.7Ghz overall)
2Gb Kingston X RAM
XFX GeForce 9400GT 1GB
120GB Internal HDD 120GB External HDD
RealTek HD Audio

for a budget pc, it's fine for me, even with the low range graphics card i still get some pretty high settings :) i'm definitely going to need to upgrade next year to keep up, get another 2GB RAM and maybe a 2-series GTX, time to start saving :D
 

FrozenIpaq

Justin B / Supp. Editor
Enforcer Team
Core i7 920 @ 4.2 GHz
12 GB DDR3 RAM
eVGA nVidia GTX 295
1.6 TB of HDD space
RealTek HD Audio
Windows 7 Home Premium

Very nice, especially the OC of 4.2 GHz. Now all you need is a SSD to top off the system if you don't yet have one
 

FrozenIpaq

Justin B / Supp. Editor
Enforcer Team
SSDs aren't worth the money / performance yet. Maybe when I can get 1 TB SSD for the price of a platter-based I'll consider it.

i would have to disagree on that point, I believe they are worth the money versus performance gained (speed increase by 3 fold in most cases). If you compare them with similar enterprise drives (10k+ RPM) in Raid0 the cost-performance ratio is very close. Heck you can now even get a 40gb SSD (Kingston) for under 100 with performance rivaling that of Intel's mainstream drives, although you'll be restricted to mainly the OS and a few programs on it.
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
I agree with Frozen. Honestly.. an SSD was the most noticeable upgrade I made to my computer. They make little difference in gaming situations but as far as general desktop usage goes there is no comparison. I no longer have to wait five seconds for FF to start up, it always loads up instantaneously, even I'm archiving files in the background. Same with Photshop or any other heavy app, there is no delay whatsoever. Considering it will be at least a few years before prices reach the level of mechanical drives, I don't mind paying a premium.
 

LocutusEstBorg

Active Member
Once I convince myself that the chance of an SSD failing are lower than three simultaneous mechanical drive failures in a RAID6 array, I'll probably pony up the cash to make my Windows drive SSD.
 

FrozenIpaq

Justin B / Supp. Editor
Enforcer Team
And maybe a sound card is he has a decent speaker system.

I have a nice speaker system but no dedicated sound card yet, built-in sound seems to be doing the trick for me lately although I do want to get one in the near future
 

Dan

Contributor
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
Processor: AMD Athlon II X3
Memory: DDR2 4096 MB (2x2G) 800Mhz
HDD: 750 GB
Drive: DVDR+-RW+R9 BLACK SATA
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4350
Sound: Realtek ALC 888S HD audio 7.1

I know it's nowhere near as good as yours. I honestly don't need top of the range stuff as I don't get around to playing games as much as I used to.
 

Hardrive

Contributor
I have a nice speaker system but no dedicated sound card yet, built-in sound seems to be doing the trick for me lately although I do want to get one in the near future

I know that on my old computer, there was a noticeable difference between the onboard audio and a discrete sound card. I don't know if the same is true with modern motherboard audio, but it's certainly worth checking out. I don't have the sound system to be able to find the difference on though.
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
I have a nice speaker system but no dedicated sound card yet, built-in sound seems to be doing the trick for me lately although I do want to get one in the near future

I feel with modern motherboards there's no discernible difference in sound quality compared to a dedicated sound card. The only real reason to get a sound card these days is for EAX audio effects and extra inputs.
 

Transonic

New Member
I feel with modern motherboards there's no discernible difference in sound quality compared to a dedicated sound card. The only real reason to get a sound card these days is for EAX audio effects and extra inputs.

Everyone got pissed off at Creative when they killed the X-Fi support and purposely dumbed the Vista drivers down so that their new flagship product would look that much better. EAX is so useless these days.
 

LocutusEstBorg

Active Member
I feel with modern motherboards there's no discernible difference in sound quality compared to a dedicated sound card. The only real reason to get a sound card these days is for EAX audio effects and extra inputs.

I find it impossible to play any game without EAX. Even Counter-Strike 1.6 sounds awful without EAX.

And there is a massive difference between EAX 2.0 on a Creative card and EAX 2.0 on other cards. Basically all non-Creative cards support EAX 2.0. Back in the day I remeber what a mind blowing difference my Sound Blaster 5.1 made in CS1.6. The echoes and volume differences were amazing and gave a huge tactical advange in game to the point where people were calling me a wall hacker.

I don't know why games still use EAX and not EFX. If they did then there might be other companies making true hardware EFX /w OpenAL cards. EFX is a superset of EAX and anyone can implement it in hardware or even software on existing onboard solutions with a simple driver update. But EAX 5.0 /w OpenAL only Creative can do (or those who license it like Auzentech).

There are also software solutions like Rapture3D which implement the full EFX specification over OpenAL. The presents a virtual OpenAL interface to the game, and does all the EFX processing on the CPU via its drivers and pipes the output to each of the speakers via ordinary DirectSound. You need to setup the speaker configuration in Rapture3D. The game has no idea about your speaker configuration, just like what happens in true hardware cards where the card is supposed to take care of channel mapping.

Everyone got pissed off at Creative when they killed the X-Fi support and purposely dumbed the Vista drivers down so that their new flagship product would look that much better. EAX is so useless these days.

What are you talking about? X-Fi is still their flagship product. And the whole fiasco was a GOOD thing.

A card only needs to meet the following purposes to be ideal:
Provide a full OpenAL interface.
Implement EAX and EFX in hardware.
Hardware decode SPDIF passthrough and play it out the analog ports without the software's knowledge.
Perform 3D virtualization for Headphone output including EAX/EFX.

Every other feature of the cards is a gimmick and basically ruins sound quality. I hate DD Live and DTS connect. Why the fuck would you buy a card with a 148SNR and then enable realtime compression and play it over a digital output?!?
 

Transonic

New Member
I find it impossible to play any game without EAX. Even Counter-Strike 1.6 sounds awful without EAX.

And there is a massive difference between EAX 2.0 on a Creative card and EAX 2.0 on other cards. Basically all non-Creative cards support EAX 2.0. Back in the day I remeber what a mind blowing difference my Sound Blaster 5.1 made in CS1.6. The echoes and volume differences were amazing and gave a huge tactical advange in game to the point where people were calling me a wall hacker.

I don't know why games still use EAX and not EFX. If they did then there might be other companies making true hardware EFX /w OpenAL cards. EFX is a superset of EAX and anyone can implement it in hardware or even software on existing onboard solutions with a simple driver update. But EAX 5.0 /w OpenAL only Creative can do (or those who license it like Auzentech).

There are also software solutions like Rapture3D which implement the full EFX specification over OpenAL. The presents a virtual OpenAL interface to the game, and does all the EFX processing on the CPU via its drivers and pipes the output to each of the speakers via ordinary DirectSound. You need to setup the speaker configuration in Rapture3D. The game has no idea about your speaker configuration, just like what happens in true hardware cards where the card is supposed to take care of channel mapping.



What are you talking about? X-Fi is still their flagship product. And the whole fiasco was a GOOD thing.

A card only needs the following purposes to be ideal:
Provide a full OpenAL interface.
Implement EAX and EFX in hardware.
Hardware decode SPDIF passthrough and play it out the analog ports without the software's knowledge.
Perform 3D virtualization for Headphone output including EAX/EFX.

Every other feature of the cards is a gimmick and basically ruins sound quality. I hate DD Live and DTS connect. Why the fuck you buy a card with a 148SNR and then fucking enable realtime compression and play it over a digital output?!?

You're kidding, right? EFX is a gimmick feature. And they should have enabled all the features on the X-Fi Fatality. It's garbage what they did and I'll never buy another card from Creative. Integrated sound cards sound just as good. They even output over optical spdif. Waste of money to even think about buying one.
 

LocutusEstBorg

Active Member
You're kidding, right? EFX is a gimmick feature. And they should have enabled all the features on the X-Fi Fatality. It's garbage what they did and I'll never buy another card from Creative. Integrated sound cards sound just as good. They even output over optical spdif. Waste of money to even think about buying one.

What the hell are you talking about? EFX is basically open source EAX. Dirt2 uses EFX, which means you can get the full range of effects from an ordinary sound card if you have a software driver that implements EFX. Presently the Rapture3D driver (but any company can implement it directly for their card's through updated drivers, even for onboard audio, but at the cost of CPU cycles).

Obviously you've been so ignorant that you probably never even bothered to enable the EAX checkbox in the game options so you mindlessly bash it as if it doesn't do anything.

The only feature that has been disabled and renabled was the hardware SPDIF decoding. NOTHING else was ever disabled EVER. You're full of it and can't be made to understand. </arguement>
 

Transonic

New Member
What the hell are you talking about? EFX is basically open source EAX. Dirt2 uses EFX, which means you can get the full range of effects from an ordinary sound card if you have a software driver that implements EFX. Presently the Rapture3D driver (but any company can implement it directly for their card's through updated drivers, even for onboard audio, but at the cost of CPU cycles).

Obviously you've been so ignorant that you probably never even bothered to enable the EAX checkbox in the game options so you mindlessly bash it as if it doesn't do anything.

The only feature that has been disabled and renabled was the hardware SPDIF decoding. NOTHING else was ever disabled EVER. You're full of it and can't be made to understand. </arguement>

Calm your nerd rage down a bit. EAX and EFX do nothing. Even when I had an X-FI Fatality there was no difference in sound between it and normal 5.1 Surround. And I think it's YOU that do not understand because the whole argument was that they were not disabling features but with holding them from the official drivers. Custom drivers unlocked all the features and they sent c&d emails and letters out to the guy who was making them essentially killing Vista support for some of their older cards and permanently etching themselves in to the minds of gamers as a rip-off brand. And don't try to call me ignorant about technology, because that's a losing argument. As you can see by my specs I'm no amateur.
 
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