Being hooked on F1GP, Indycar and NASCAR I have reached the point where my
dear old 486DX50 with 8Meg RAM is just tooooooooo slow. I am looking at two
options on upgrading. The first is a P100 on a triton board with Synchronous
pipeline cache and 16 meg RAM and the second is a P120 on the same board but
with 8 meg RAM. I am obviousely upgrading with a view to running F1GP2,
Indycar 2 and NASCAR 2 with hopefully high frame rates. Which system would
give me highest frame rates and what amount of performance increase could I
expect if I bought EDO RAM. If anyone has any other view on machines for
these games then I am listening.
Vince.
[options upgrading a 2/50]
IMHO, always buy memory over CPU (up to a limit, of course, but in
my experience 16+ meg is frequently a massive improvement over 8,
especially with more Windows 95 games coming out), so I'd go for the
P100 (which is still a stormingly fast bit of kit).
A word of warning about EDO RAM; you won't see much performance gain
because the caches tend to get in the way. Some manufacturers are using
EDO RAM as an excuse for not providing any SRAM cache, but this is a
BIG MISTAKE - I've seen speed hits of the order of 50% as a result
(DX4/100, I think).
-- Gizmo
http://www.mal.com/~dgymer/
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Launchpad is an experimental internet BBS. The views of its users do not
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Wait!!! You can either choose, in November, the Creative Lab 3D Blaster
or the Diamond Edge. Both are 3D accelerators and will have Nascar. In that
case, the speed should be much better. From what I recall the Edge
version is 640x480x16bit color.
--
http://widget.ecn.purdue.edu/~fmah
EDO RAM increase the performance of a system by only 1%. But go for pipeline
burst cache, your overall system performance will increase by 10%. I also
think that more memory is better than a faster CPU (especially when you think
about a P100 or a P120). It'll prove to be a good choice when you'll play
those Windows 95 games next year!
Sylvain Vachon
