Dose AMD 64 make up for GPU

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> sometimes I have 2-4 hours breaks were I'm there and have
>no work to do so I want a game

Tretris and Solitaire can be addicting and don't tax your batteries that much 😀

>the only bad thing is that its only coupled with the
>geforce 4

Just a note, a "Geforce 4" isnt that bad really, if its a "real" one (ie a Ti4x00), not an MX. Its a direct 8 part, succesor to the Geforce 3 and even for most games today, still reasonable. I have a GF4 Ti4200 in my desktop, and its adequate for just about eveything @1024x768 save Far Cry. I'm even crossing my fingers it will run HL2 and Stalker reasonably well at medium/low quality settings, if not I'll finally dump it.

However, the Geforce 4 <b>MX</b> cards, and their notebook derivatives are really just slightly improved Geforce 2 MX chips. No DX8 (no shaders), just basic DX7 hardware T&L. Its better than a TNT2 or Voodoo2, but its really obsolete today. I would really, really not recommend buying anything new today that comes with such a videocard if gaming is your concern.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
Yes Dell has a good Lineup on Computer and Laptops. But They suck On Tech support. IT like 20 If you want to go here Press one. Deals before you get to tech support. 20 mins Later. And my friends computer It look like the hard drive was going bad. But I did random things to fix it and taking out the battery of a desktop. Fix it.

So For normal computer Users. Dell is Hell. I would never suggest them. For people who tweak and rebuilds your system. Dell is fine.
 
I went to the site for the GeForce 4 40 Go it says it fully DirectX 8,7,6, and 5 complient. Here is the rest of the spec's
GeForce4 440 Go Fill Rate: 880 million texels/sec.
GPU Core Clock: 220 MHz
Memory Clock: 220 MHz
Memory Bandwidth 6.4GB/sec.

I honestly don't know what the numbers mean in terms of what the GPU can do for games. But I just wanted to say it says its directX 8
 
> went to the site for the GeForce 4 40 Go it says it fully
>DirectX 8,7,6, and 5 complient.

That is quite misleading indeed. They are "compliant", the same way my GF4 is "DX9 compliant". That means I can run DX9, but none of the DX9 goodies are supported in hardware since a GF4 Ti is just a DX8 part.

The "Geforce4 4200 Go" is also a DX8 part (its basically a GF4 Ti4200), supporting shaders, and DX8 acceleration i hardware, but the other "Geforce4 Go" chips are all based on the Geforce MX engine, ie only DX7 hardware capable, obsolete crap.

Trust me on this one..

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
AFAIK, even Far Cry simply does not run on such videocards, and requires DX8 hardware.
Click to expand...
Actually, you're wrong. Far Cry <i>will</i> run on DX7 class Hardware - or at least the demo did. (I tried it on a duron 1.4 w/ a 32Mb Geforce DDR card, and it was actually playable! 😎 It would jerk around a bit, which I think was down to only 256Mb of RAM, but in between disk accesses it ran relatively smoothly (640x480, low details obviously) obviously it didn't look too great, but it did work.

You are right in that some games demand shader support though, and obviously these will soon become the norm, and I also suspect DoomIII will be one.

---
Epox 8RDA+ rev1.1 w/ Custom NB HS
XP1700+ @205x11 (~2.26Ghz), 1.575Vcore
2x256Mb Corsair PC3200LL 2-2-2-4
Sapphire 9800Pro 420/744
 
>Actually, you're wrong. Far Cry will run on DX7 class
>Hardware

Okay, so maybe Far Cry does. I remember reading in the UBI forum a videocard with hardware shaders would be required before the demo was launched, but maybe they changed their minds (there is still an awefull lot of GF4 MX cards out there). Can't be long before support for it is dropped though, so buying a new one now is still a _bad_ idea if gaming is your thing.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
I haven't recieved my new computer yet, I won't for like 3 weeks! but I downloaded the DEMO of Unreal 2004 yesterday just to give it a try. On lowered settings it runs a little choppy on this computer...1.2GHz Athon 32MB shared Video with 490RAM left over. I totally believe what everyone says, if the proformance I get out of my new computer isn't what I expect it's going right back and I'll just have to pay the shipping. But is it that most gamers have a higher standard? I see lots of bench marks for hardware with game frame rates like in the 50's and 60's so if its not that high do you consider it bad? I thought it was decent in the 30's and playable down to 20.... I know the games could be much better looking and smoother at higher rates, but sense this is a notebook I'm mostly happy if I can play. (without it being jerky) If I could play Unreal 04 on my new computer at the mid level graphics I'd be very happy! I'm just trying to understand what is ment when people say its not a good GPU or won't work.
 
> I see lots of bench marks for hardware with game frame
>rates like in the 50's and 60's so if its not that high do
>you consider it bad? I thought it was decent in the 30's
>and playable down to 20....

30 is playable allright, depending on the game, but thing is, these benchmarks show you average framerates, not *minimum*. So having on average 30 FPS, probably means you'll get 60+ on some places in the map, while framerate may drop below 10 during an intense fights with lots of action and explosions,.. so when you need the framerates most. 10 FPS is not good when you're engaging in close combat.


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
P4Man what you said makes sense, so I'll just have to see what happens when I play something.

I ended up getting the Compaq R3000z
AMD 64 3400+
512MB Ram
GeForce 4 440 GO 64MB dedicated
15.4inch WUXGA (1600 x 1200)
40GB Hard drive 4,200
wireless b/g
those are all the main specs for it...
I was close to going with the Pentium version of the computer to get the Radien 9600 mobile but I didn't like what I read about the P4 on battery life, I'd like to get 3-4 hours and I think from what I've read the AMD has better mobile power technology then a P4. If I'm wrong Compaq will let me return it for a full refund minus shipping. So when it comes I'll try out the Unreal 04 demo and if it runs good then I will keep it. If it can't run that game decently then I'll send it back and rethink this all over again. I don't expect to be able to play all the new games but Id like to play a few good FPS's
 
Man its too bad you couldnt stretch your budget a bit further. There you have one kick ass cpu and a nice high res widescreen display, but with a slow harddisk and antique graphics :|

I hope you are not going to regret this. On the bright side, you can always replace the harddisk (I would *really* recommend you do this once you have some spare cash), and play 2D games I guess :)

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
I did some searches looking for my GPU and found some bench marks for it kinda, it was off the techtv site. But the GeForce4 440 go with 64MB memory was running Quake 3 very well, i think it said at the 1024x768
it was still getting 131 FPS and 1280x1024
91.1 FPS I believe those were averages too...and that was with a computer with a 1.7P3 and 256RAM
 
well its unfortunate you didnt consider the emachines model since it had better graphics for a nto so bad price. its a very nice laptop in its segment.
 
the emachine is definitly something to consider, it has great spec's! I mean it when I say if this computer dosen't do what I expect its going back, if it dose I'll look at the eMachines M6809 more, I tried to find reviews on it and came up empty. Also from past experence with gateway I don't really like that company very much and they are the parent company or something right? I could be wrong about that part....just a side note what I posted above about quake 3 running good frame rates on the geforce4 dose that mean anything positive?
 
>.just a side note what I posted above about quake 3 running
>good frame rates on the geforce4 dose that mean anything
>positive?

Not really. Quake3 is an old game now, and really not taxing your hardware. Modern desktops get up to 500FPS on it, go figure. What's worse, is that I fear in spite of its name, the GF4 Go is based on the MX420, wich is even considerably slower than the MX440 (less than half the memory bandwith).

I can only advice you to do two things:

1) cancel the order if you still can (saves you the shipping cost), and get the eMachines or another laptop with a more powerfull videocard. I mean it. If you want to keep your budget low enough, get the cheapest A64 (or P4) you can find instead of the 3200+, it will not nearly make as much difference.

2) If you do decide to get it, download Far Cry and Splinter Cell demo, and run those at medium settings. Next year, you will not want to be playing Q3 games, but HL2, Doom3, Stalker, etc, all of which will most likely be even considerably more demanding than Far Cry or Splinter Cell. And there is just no way these are going to run acceptably on an MX IMHO.


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
well you can find plenty of reviews for the m6805 which is the same thing only slower cpu and smaller hard drive. also check out that anandtech link i posted, there are comments there about it.
 
Ok so I got my new computer Thursday...I really like it a lot. I have played Unreal 04 on it first at the lowest settings and moved my way up. I plays perfictly smooth on the highest graphics settings. I did it on 1024 X 768 then 1280 X 1024, 1280 X 800 and finaly at 1680 X 1050 it got kinda jerky, everything else was very smooth. Also I didn[t have the shadows on but I'll try that tonight....Anyway, if this new high end game can run at full speed online with the highest settings, why then could far cry even on a slightly lower setting still work well? If you guys play games for the looks total then it makes a little sense but 1024 X 768 is still very playable and not bad looking, I just got the impression here none of theses games would work and now I must say I have to doubt some of what I heard
 
Well, I'm not surprised UT2004 runs on it, its not that taxing on the videocard if you do not enable all the goodies, its more demanding of the CPU (and you have a very fast one).

However, I urge you try far cry (demo is a free download) and decide for yourselve. I also recommended splinter Cell, but I got the game last week, and it says in the readme:
1.1. System Requirements

Minimum:
Processor: Intel or AMD, 1 GHz
Operating
System: Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP
Memory: 128 MB RAM
Disk Space: 2.5 GB
<b>Graphics Card: DX8.1 compatible card,
GeForce 3 or higher ( GeForce 4 MX are GeForce4 Go are not supported)</b>
ATI Radeon 8500 or higher
Sound Card: DirectX 8.1 compatible
DirectX Version: 8.1b
Network: High-Speed Modem with 64 Kbits data transfer upload rate.
Click to expand...

So there you have it. I'm willing to take bets your machine won't run Far Cry on anything but lowest settings either, and it most likely won't run either Doom3 or HL2 at all. Wether you can live with that is up to you, but about the same ammount of money should have bought you a machine that was capable of running them :|

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
the thing thats bad about notebooks is taht you can only play games well at its native resolution. trying to size it down either chops off the sides or causes strange pixelization so if your system wont runa game at the laptops native res., then it can get tricky if it will look good at all. on most laptop its 1024x768 although ive seen some at 1600x1200 (widescreen models)
 
Ok so I finally got around to downloading FarCry and playing it, I liked it the grpahics are good and I really like the guns in the game. But I want to point out I played it, it works it runs smoothly....the screen was at 1024 X 768 and the settings were all on medium I think, I will mess with it more later and turn it up to see how far this computer can take it though. I didn't see anywhere in the specs about how the GeForce4 go couldn't run the game either.
 
amazing that setup would run far cry so well. My GF4 Ti will not run it acceptably fast on medium settings 1024x768, definately not once you get beyond the opening map/scene. But hey, so much the better I guess (though I'd rather believe the game automatically configured low detail). You may also want to compare online screenshots with what you see on your display to get an idea what hardware shaders can do to improve image quality, so what you're missing out on.

> I didn't see anywhere in the specs about how the GeForce4
>go couldn't run the game either.

I quoted that from the readme file included with splintercell. BTW, "not supported" doesnt necessarely mean it will not run at all, just they don't support it, it may give weird results, or plain not work.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 
Here is the game settings I used I wrote them down, I will turn it up later to see what happens, but this is how it was set to begin with....
Basic Options
Renderer Direct3D9
Resolution 1024 X 768 X 32
Anti Aliasing none
Rendering Mode Normal
Full Screen Enabled
Vertical Snyc Disabled
Advanced
Texture Quality Medium
Texture Filter Quality Medium
Partical Count Custom
Special Effects Quality Medium
Environment Quality Custom
Shadow Quality Medium
Water Quality Medium
Lighting Quality Medium

So I geuess thats all of them, I will mess with turning them up later. But at those settings it runs smoothly and I can enjoy playing it. It seems like fun, I wish it was an online demo, I really only get games to play online so I like to see how they are online first.
 
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