Hmm... Well well, I'm pretty sure you could need another 512MB RAM to place in your slot. 2.5 GHz, I'm not so sure that its any need to buy a new CPU...

But I'm pretty sure you need to get a new GCard, how much money for a upgrading of your PC do you have?

I tend to save a lot, so I've built up £290 ($511) to use for this kind of thing, which I'm guessing should get me somewhere at least. I dunno.

Here's a very helping thread regarding system items, scroll down to post #2 for the Graphic card details.

Well I did some research finally regarding whether I can play Oblivion on my PC. My plans for getting the 7800gtx video cards are dashed since I only have an AGP interface. I don't plan on buying a new computer anytime soon. So here is my dilemma which I hope someone here can help me decide.

Option A: Buy a Geforce 6600... Still appears to be a decent card with 8 pixel pipes for about $120. I don't think I need to make any other changes to my computer with this option.

Option B: Buy a Geforce 6800GT or Ultra for about $280-$300. Seems to be much more powerful with 16 pipes and higher clock speeds. My concern here though is I checked with Dell and my comp only has a 250W power supply and the 6800 recommends at least a 350W.

I am not too worried about the price difference of the cards, but I dont want to sink another $100 into a better power supply too. Will the 6800 even run in a 250W environment? and if so, how much of a performance hit will there be?

I would be grateful for any help here...

I had that EXACT same dilemma once upon a time. My power supply in me dell went bad once so I called to get another one and they said the only kinds they had were the 250W variety, which wouldn't run what I was upgrading to. So I bought a new Motherboard, Power Supply, Memroy, Processor, and case.

Anyway, the guys at compUSA (never go there, they are terrible) said that only a dell Power supply will fit in a dell case. I'm not so sure about that. I once took my dell PS and put it into a Compaq case and it fit fine.

So... with all that said, I would choose option 'B' because the 6800 Ultra has 16 pipelines (as you've already mentioned) and it has support for Pixel Shader 3.0. My Radeon x800 pro has 12 pipelines and only supports PS2.0. Buy yourself a new power supply too because it will probably benefit you in the long run if you ever want to upgrade more. Make sure it will fit in your dell case though, I'm not 100% sure it will but I think it should fit. Running the card on anythgin less could potentially compromise your entire system, I added a DVD Burner to my dell and that's what did my PS in.

Rosewill makes good inexpensive power supplies. All of these power supplies are under $35 USD.

A little late news, but not here Because some time ago I finished building my computer. Been sometime since I've looked up this thread - but did some last adjustments and that was that first of all I bought another case, a Lian Li. I got my oncles old 17" LCD for free and I bought 2 GB insted of 1...

Guess you would like some pic's too aye?



And here we got the old thing... Thrown atop on my drawing table Bought a green fan too for the case so it would look a little exotic.

Thanks Sir Radont... I hadnt found any power supplies that would work that were a decent price like those in my intial searches.... Guess its time to open my Dell and get the dimensions of the Power supply and see if one will fit.

Thanks Again... I think I will go with the 6800 then

GeForce 7900 is soon to come out, and this means video cards will get cheaper. i, for one, am waiting. meanwhile, is there any chance i'll be able to get oblivion started on a PCX5300? the rest of my pc will have no problems, i suspect:
cpu: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (939)
mobo:k8 Triniton (nForce4 SLI)
ram: 1024MB DDR400

gf7800gtx enough?

Alright well to start with let me add that I repair/upgrade/build/network computers for a living (alright I'm only 17, but still I earn enough for it to be considered a living). I am speculating my computer will be able to run it on med/normal settings, with a few extra things on high (such as view distance). Anyway, on witht the specs.

2.66 gHz p4 (overclocked safely to 3.1 ghz)
1gb (2x512) cosair memory with those dandy little heat spacer things
6600gt 128mb (pretty much the best price/performance ratio of any card)
and lastly a turtle beach: montego sound card sending Dolby Digital strait to my solid logitec z-680 5.1 system (nuthing like 505 watts rms to get the juices flowing)

Also I thought I might add that those of you thinking about skimping out and not getting a sound card WILL suffer some substantial performace loss because your using your processor to process the sound (basically) insted of a dedicated sound card. And if you are in need of one, go with Turtle Beach, you get the same sound quailty as sound blaster stuff at about 1/7 of the price for a comparable card.

Just my thoughts

(yes if I had to get a new processor I prob would go AMD so no bashing )

nice overall specs. and about bashing of the two titans (AMD&Intel): most games run better on Athlons while most office/media apps run better on pentium (sempron&celeron are not an option from my pov). what i just said strictly referes to the models still in production.
i'm in the 12th grade. right now, i don't have time for games: exam coming up. this explains the AMD and [bonk] video card.

wonder what pc i'll carry in my pocket 10 years from now? will i have to worry about it getting fat? (organic!)

I have a ATI 256mb 9800XT
2.8 intel cpu
1gb ram

I think the card will actually handle, (I read a dev post and he actually said that was the card he had working on the game)
Ram is fine, might get some more just to be greedy.
I am probally going to get a new cpu probally 3.4

I havn't seen anybody else mention ATI though, I thought they where better than geforce?

Does anybody know why exactly amd are thought of being better than intel for gaming?

Can anybody recommend a good mother board, cause I might just build a whole system for Oblivion and let the wife have the old box (she is a guild wars fanatic)

I am not much of a hardware person really... but I read alot! I think mostly people are talking about Geforce over ATI because of Shader Model 3.0.. Most of the Geforce 6000 series on up use it... while ATI use 2.0 right now, though a new card is coming out or is already out that uses it.

What I have read of AMD and intel is just differences in their error handling.. Intel uses a very long assembly line which allows for higher clock speeds.. but if there is an exception during the processing it has to dump all the work on the line and start over. AMD has a shorter assembly line so if something needs dumped less time has been spent on it overall. Hence, less clock cycles are wasted. Games tend to have lots of exceptions because of all the constant input from devices. I am sure someone could explain it better... but thats my best

Edit : btw... I just ordered my 6800GT and a new 400W power supply. Can't wait for them to get here *bounce*

This post has been edited by Neela: Dec 13 2005, 06:26 PM

Well... my goodies arrived 51 hours after I ordered them online... Newegg has really really fast shipping! I finally got to install them tonight after work... and after what I thought was going to be a problem with it not finding the card... I reseated it and now everything works great! Ran the 3dmark03 program again to see what improvement I have done.

Old 3dmark03 score with 5200 FX - 1109 benchmarks
New 3dmark03 score with 6800GT - 10812 benchmarks

Tomorrow I will install something and test this out but its 3am now and I am going to bed.

Thanks again Sir Radont for convincing me to go this route! Hopefully I will be all set now for Oblivion.

I just built my computer over the summer, on a tight budget... I hope I can play Oblivion on it I really do.

CPU- AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.21 GHz)
RAM- 1.5 GB
Hardrive- 80 GB
Video Card- GeForce FX5500 256MB
Sound Card- SoundBlaster 24-bit

I'm going to show my age a little with this one... (37)
(and I'm not trying to thread-jack, just can't resist posting this)

Anyone remember back-in-the-day when you could use a special boot-disk that loaded just the bare minimum needed to play a game?

It'd be nice if Oblivion for the PC would make use of that old trick.

Not everyone would know off-hand how to boot from a DVD (since I doubt it's very many people's default setting) but it wouldn't be all that hard, either.

If one could bypass most of the OS bloat, a lot more machines could run Oblivion without choking.

It's too bad that Microsoft didn't offer "bare-bones-no-frills" as an option next to "safe-mode"

You can do that, to a certain extent. It is possible to set up different boot profiles; I have two: normal and gaming. A special menu at system startup allows you to choose which profile you use to boot. The gaming profile disables services that won't be missed and removes most of the visual effects from the gui. I had to do this to get Morrowind to run nicely on my computer (I'll definitely be building a new one for Oblivion). It definitely made a big difference, most obviously in FPS.

Also... about a week before Oblivion is released I plan to do a clean re-install of the OS. MS actually recommends doing this one a year anyway just to get the registry squeaky clean. This will help your performance as well.

Would that make me lose anything?

Reinstalling doesn't necessarily mean reformatting. It would be simple to resize the current partition and install the new OS on another partition.

While we're dealing with partitions, anyways, something that others have taken to doing in order to make the transition easier is install the operating system on one partition, and, POSIX-style -- but obviously for entirely different reasons -- install all programs in a seperate partition. This allows them to completely erase the OS partition while keeping the data that should be persistent intact.

Of course, the simpler, although perhaps more radical, solution that I suggest is to just keep any non-trivial data off the Windows machine -- that way, you could wipe out the entire hard disk without much loss, and install games, &c. as you need them. This has the pleasant side-effect of making security a negligible thing.

Very good tips here! I am only sad that I can´t do all that building, reinstalling, rebooting stuff, even though I really do need to have it done on at least 4 of the family´s comps......So I guess I´ll have to get in touch with the nice young man who built 2 of them and see if he can help me hot them up....

The one I´m using right now is a pretty powerful lappy, and I really hope Oblivion will function on it......I´ve been told to upgrade my graphics card.....