PC Specs

[Giancarlo]

games run much better with 1 gig ram.

No they don't. I noticed this after playing games on my dad's similiar machine with 1GB and playing games on my own. Not really much of a difference at all.

 

[DarkBlade1]

Haven't played Half Life 2 have you? LOL, it is a major ram hog. The more ram with that game, the better. I have 1GB right now, and it still moves to virtual memory to play smoothly.

The powersupply is plenty adequate for a 3400+ you guys. He doesn't have like 4 Hardrives or an x800pro/6800GT or anything either. The 5700 is a great card, I loved my old one. It was very overclockable, and didn't produce a lot of heat for how far I had it overclocked.

Overall, I give that system a 9.4 outta 10. The powersupply could maybe use an upgrade (although unessecary) and it should really have 1GB or 768MB ram. 3X256MB DDR1 chips scream! Try that config. The more you have the total ram seperated, the faster the PC.

EX- 1X1GB chip= fast
2X512MB chips= faster
4X256MB chips= screaming!

That is simply because the Ram can do more multitasking because all the data doesn't have to pile into one chip and come out of one chip, but rather go into 2 or 4 chips, and come back out of more chips. This is always a good idea when doing ram configs.

 

[alvino]

Yeah. Games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 use ram BIG time!

 

[Giancarlo]

Haven't played Half Life 2 have you? LOL, it is a major ram hog. The more ram with that game, the better. I have 1GB right now, and it still moves to virtual memory to play smoothly.

I played it yes. And I play Far Cry maxed out. I have no problem with the amount of ram I have. It moves very quickly, as fast as my dad's comparable machine that has the same everything as mine. I'm not an elitist, so I can't afford another 512MB of ram.

 

[God Forsaken]

Oh by the way what exactly is RAID for HDD??

 

[alvino]

I think it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives (Correct me if Im wrong). Its basically linking up separate drives to they can operate faster between each other.