New Computer, Suggestions?

[Dezeral]

Also, is it a bad idea to buy 2 different cards? I.e. a 8800gs 384MB, and a 9800 512MB, or should I stick with them both the same.

Also, from reading the Intel vs AMD post, it would seem Intel is the way to go. I run 2 monitors, different sizes, 1 LCD, 1 of the old nasties. Along with that, I should be going for Vista over XP correct? Esp since I plan on going with a dual core? 64 Bit Vista right? As far as processors, should I be looking at quad or dual core? I would like to buy high-mid range in quality. Dual core has been out for a little while, but quad is quite new, so I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the subject.

I read some where there was a restriction on ram, if you were useing vista or XP, I forget which though. Do you know the story behind that? Id like to run 4gigs of DDR2 ram

Ok I've high lighted some things that I know the answer too. As far as the 384 vs 512 get the 512 more gfx memory never hurts, unless its a money issue.

Now for the other one, i found out either is good just choose which ever one you want, I personally choose AMD and I've only been using them for a year or so. And about the 64 bit, it really doesn't improve games, as 99% (I think there may be 1 or 2 coming out in the spring that are 64 bit but I could be wrong) are written in 32-bit format. 64 bit is more a business OS, as you run servers, etc. off them.

And the restriction on ram is in XP, regardless of the version that you have, it'll only recognize 3.25 gigs AT THE MOST. Mine currently only recognizes 3gigs of my 4 gigs. Its kind of hard to explain, its there, but XP just ignores it. So every time I run stuff that looks at my system, like CPU-Z or DXDIAG it says I have 4 gigs but only say 2.5 available(thats just running XP and what ever diag program. unless of course you're running WoW or what ever game at the same time haha) Vista from what I read(I personally don't use it because I hate UAC and lack of good driver support although its getting better.), doesn't get REALLY good unless you add 8 gigs of ram. So you basically have to order a server mother board to actually get the full effect of 64 bit vista.

Sorry Trowa, but most of this information is inaccurate.

In the Pentium 4 generation of computers where Intel decided that higher and higher clock speeds were the way to achieve performance superiority, AMD came along and said uh-huh. We're going to do more work per cycle and beat the pants of of your 3ghz heaters. So after the early generation K6 or K7 processors, but before Intel's Core2Duo, AMD was the way to go. Now however, Intel's design just smokes AMD. The Core2Duo processors run rings around AMD's best processors. If you buy any of the Athlon/Phenom AMD processors, you won't face the problems of the early AMD K4,5,6 processors that would sometimes just not be able to run certain applications, but if you're after performance, then for right now, the Intel is superior.

64bit OS are an evolution from 32bit OS. Just like the 32bit OS was an evolution from the 16bit OS. Usually the first applications to take advantage of a newer OS are applications that have outgrown the capabilities of the old OS. Naturally, high end business applications are some of the first to migrate to a newer OS. Most businesses are still using 32bit OS. 64bit is still pretty relegated to very specific applications. I do agree that 64bit is mostly for businesses though.

All 32bit OS (whether it is XP or Vista) have a limitation of 4gig of available RAM. This is because of the way memory is addressed by the OS. You can visualize this by thinking of a huge grid (kid of like tic-tac-toe only much much larger). If you number the grid down the top and down the left hand side, you'll get a set of coordinates or addresses. Using 32 bits worth of information to number your grid, you get a maximum of 4 gigabytes of addresses. There is a certain amount of lost space due to overhead as well and a certain amount of space that is used for addressing the hardware components in your computer. XP did a fairly good job of leaving a fair amount of the system memory available for applications. Vista on the other hand reserves more of your system memory for the OS to use. There is a thread here on the forum somewhere that has a link to an article on Tom's Hardware. This goes into a lot more detail on how this works.

You can utilize more than 4gb of memory with the 64bit version of Windows XP. My brother has an 8gb XP64 rig that he plays LoTRO on. He read the article on Tom's Hardware and played around with his settings. With 8gb of real memory, he was able to completely disable the Windows paging file. The first time he zones, there is a bit of a delay as all of the new area is loaded into memory (no more than you would notice on any good performing system). But, after that, the next time he zones into that same area, its almost instantaneous.

A 64bit processor is required if you want to run a 64bit OS. The way a 64bit processor processes 32bit code is by using a translator or emulator. In a lot of cases, the user will not notice the additional overhead created by having to translate or emulate 32bit execution on a 64bit system. But gaming is to the computing world as racing is to the automotive world. Games and gamers want all of the available horsepower of their computer to be used to make the game run fast which translates to frames per second (FPS). Any overhead is bad. Now if the game you are playing isn't on the bleeding edge (think Crysis), then you will probably not have to worry too much about the additional overhead of translating/emulating 32bit code on a 64bit computer. WoW falls into this older game category.

So, just to recap, if you're going to need more than 4gigs of memory, then you need a 64bit OS which will require a 64bit processor (I can't think of a modern processor today that is not a 64bit processor). Each instance of WoW that you want to run will need between 300mb and 500mb on average. So you can quickly do the math and see that if you want to run 4 or more instances of WoW, you're going to be hitting the wall on that 4gb memory limit. You can run more than 4 instances of WoW using XP32 or Vista32, but you may see some performance issues as most people are aware of.