thefixer opened this issue on Jul 15, 2007 · 46 posts
keenart posted Sun, 15 July 2007 at 4:42 PM
Well, although frustrating, I would wait a little longer and see if e-On is going to put out a newer patch, give them another month to fix the problem, before you invest in a new system.
Debbie hit on something that could be of concern, and that is the sharing of system memory by the video card. Almost all cards now share the system memory, even though they have onboard memory. Microsoft on the other hand, writes drivers for those cards that do not use this shared video with system memory. So what do they know that they are not telling us? Could this be an additional source of our troubles? So maybe it is worth trying the Microsoft drivers as apposed to the Video Cards drivers??? They only support OpenGL 1.0, MS’s version is 1.1.
Boards with 4 gigs and above seem to function without problems or relatively few problems. Still 32 bit can use up to 3.2 gigs of memory, so Vue should be slow but not crashy, unless they still haven’t figured out how to manage memory threaded allocations. And, there is nothing you can do about that, except wait on e-On to make the right move. You can read about this and Compilers and all of that stuff at Intel.
In addition, it depends on the board you like, because I have seen cheap boards function as well as high end boards. I like Tyan, but they are out of my price range now, so went with ECS, and was amazed how stable this board was, and at $99, %40 off I am happy.
Basically you want a board with the latest in ACPI, if you ever want to upgrade to Vista.
ASUS is the popular board right now, and almost all of the major companies are using them as OEM.
An E6600 Duo Core 1066 mhz if you can handle the price.
DDR II at half the speed of the CPU is acceptable 533 or 667 mhz, or 800 if you can afford it. I bought two sticks in pares of 667 for $79.00 recently.
A video card 7800 should be good enough to work with this system, or an 8800 if you want to run DX 10 3D games. Remember the driver issues NVidia is trying to resolve.
Before you do that you might also check the thread out about the new NVidia drivers. They have new betas for XP, and 2000 as well, and they might solve some of the problems you are having, although they do use shared memory. You can always uninstall them if not.