I'm not much into 1st person shooter games, but my ATI graphics card took a dump so I bought a BFG Nvidia GDDR3 card and thought what the hell!--I'll buy a newer game Bought Halflife 2. I had --according to the specifications-- plenty of system for the game...512 mb RDram 2.6 ghz processor, 256 mb overclocked video card(newcard--old one was 128)---etc....
Installed new card and new game only to be frustrated with the glitchiness of certain "high-demand" scenes---the game would hang up for split seconds--and be kindof "jerkey"---
I ran dxdiag and noticed my SBLive card did not support hardware acceleration--so I bought a new sound card and of course a set of 7.1 speakers to replace my 4.1 speakers. While I was asking the salesman at Frys some Bios and hardware questions, an Uber-IT-Geek piped in with his helpful and enlightening advise---YOU NEED MORE RAM!---game specs blatantly low-ball what is needed---the pci busses can't dump the memory fast enough-----
That's when I discovered what RDRam ment---hard to find and $$$!
Oh, it's a more reliable and faster ram--but intel abandoned the technology because it was too costly to compete with the AMDs.
Found my pc1066 non-ecc ram at memory giant(Great service and delivery time---I reccomend them)---just under $500 for two 512s--while I was at it I also upgraded my wife's laptop to a gig of DDR1 ram for $50 and also my son's ddr2 ram to a gig for $80...
I digress----
now I have 1.536 gig of ram running at 533mgz per channel on 48 channels(RAMBUS) A 256 mb GDDR3 overclocked nvidia graphics card and the creative audiology 2zs gamer sound card----the supid game still froze on occasion
I should also note that these freezes only occured in the highest resolution and the highest graphics setting---but WTF---I had more than enough to handle the game.
I spent a good week and a half dicking around with uninstalling/re-installing drivers...playing with the registry---getting blue screen boot ups restoring system restore points etc
I got to the point where I decided to do what I should have done from the beginning--I reinstalled my O/S and voila----runs smooth as silk---no pauses, no glitches whatsoever
Too bad it cost me over $800 and 2 weeks time to finally get it right---on the bright side--I learned alot more about computers' hardware and software than I ever intended
Just one question?--Does this make me a "Gamer"---cause I'm not a "gamer"---I swear