Posts tagged hd2600 pro

PC Fair is around the corner, 7th to 9th December 2007 to be exact. I know I already got a new rig set some 11 months ago, but that rig is at home and I’m using a 3 years old computer here at my place. Hence the need to crack my head for some upgrades to let it live through another few years of computing age.

This 3 year old computer sports:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.5GHz processor
• Intel D865PERL board
• 1.5GB Kingston PC 3200 DDR Ram (2×256mb and 1×1GB)
• Asus V9520 Magic-T (Nvidia FX5200)
• 80GB Maxtor hard disk
• 8.4GB Fujitsu hard disk (I know it’s damn old, but it has no bad sector after these 7 years)
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value sound card
• Phillips 107S5 17″ CRT monitor (Flat screen)
• Altec Lansing ACS295 2.1 speaker set (Ancient, but still crystal clear)
• Lite-on CD-RW drive
• Lite-on DVD-ROM drive

Back then while I was initially using Windows Vista on this computer, the O/S consumes alot of memory and I’d smoothen it with an additional 1GB of RAM. With it, basic document editing, surfing, leisure non graphic demanding games are playable on this rig set (I manage to run Heroes V on very low settings).

However, you get to feel the sluggishness when you start up graphic card demanding softwares, Photoshop renders slow, RPG and RTS games after Year 2006 are unplayable on decent video quality, partially due to Windows Vista itself is also pretty GPU demanding.

The reason I did not fall back to Windows XP is that, we will all move on to Windows Vista in due time, just a matter of time. Instead of holding back on old softwares, I might as well spend some bucks and get my rig usable for say, another 2 years? 3 years?

I did not resort to use other operating system like Ubuntu, gOS because it just don’t work in my environment of living here at all. Running Ubuntu and gOS will simply render my computer without a proper wireless network connectivity which I need it for internet access. Besides this, friends of mine will not somehow adapt to Ubuntu or other Linux Distros as it’s complicated for them.

So I came up with the most important thing to get for this PC Fair, Asus or Sapphire ATi X2600 Pro graphic card. This is the only card which I saw supporting AGP slot, and there’s been some saying that Geforce 8 simply doesn’t work on AGP slot. ATi X2600 Pro supports the latest Shader 4.0 of Direct X 10, and will eventually be able to support up to Direct X 10.1

My thinking is that, there’s no point in getting something supporting up to Direct X 9 right now since you’re expecting to use it for the next 2 to 3 years at least. With Windows Vista going de facto standard in few years more, it would be a right choice to get a card supporting Direct X 10 at least.

Guess I’ll only need to change my graphic card as changing the rest of the components will cost as much as getting a new computer, therefore rendering the objective of upgrading a computer.