Get a Thinkpad T400.

Quote from amp88 :

My old graphics card started acting up, RMA'd it to eBuyer and got a £250 credit note. Bought an XFX 4890 as a replacement and still had enough left over for a 1.5TB WD and eSata enclosure.

WTF I have an original Sapphire Radeon 4870 512 MB, and it has better fillrates than the newer, "more powerful", 4890???

Quote from zapz :

[GT]Skunk used very poor judgment voting to ban someone based on the fact that they had a similar user name to a wrecker. That IMHO is totally BS and they guy needs to learn how admin if he is to be given any kind of powers from AA.

Unfortunately for all of us, server admins are free to run their servers how they see fit. If they wanna ban you, they have every right to do so. I'm not defending their actions in any way, I'm just saying it's their server, they can ban anybody for any reason, and they don't have to account for it. I know, it sucks. But hey, at least they're not all that bad. If that happens, just find another server to race on. Or try to argue with them. But not on this forum, it never works out here.

What do I think? Ok, if you really wanna know!

I think Athlon X2 is wayyy past it's time, get a quad core instead (Phenom II at least).

I think 2GB of DDR2 ram is not enough, try 4GB of DDR3 ram.

And I think 9600GT is a very old video card and will not be able to play any games released next year (get a Radeon 5770 instead, or better).

Well you wanted to know what I thought, there you have it. This would be a system I would've bought 2 years ago. This year you can get much better hardware though, and I suggest you get something better.

Jason, it seems you're having problems with just about every video card out there. I think there's a bigger problem here than just the video cards themselves. Perhaps your RAM is causing crashes, or maybe even your motherboard. (I'm betting it's the motherboard though). Is there any way to test the card in another computer? I'm saying this because a brand new card is very unlikely to malfunction the way you describe. And having 2 brand new cards malfunction is close to impossible (4890 and now 295).

Last edited by shiny_red_cobra, Sat 12 Dec 2009, 04:20.

omg put those away...they need a lot more work!

LOL not your current CPU, he was asking about the new one you want to get! Are you sure it will work in your computer? Extremes usually don't work in all computers, usually a laptop that comes with an extreme can handle them, but not normal ones.

Just a little warning on the ability to "unlock" to a quad core: The reason they lock it is because those other cores failed some of AMD's QA tests (meaning they are manufacturing defects), so don't be surprised if they cause Windows or games to crash. They aren't locked out just so AMD can sell you dual-core processors, they are locked out because if you use them then you might run into problems. It varies from CPU to CPU though, some of them may work well, and some of them may not work at all. Just a heads up. It would be cool to try unlocking them and see what happens though.

What video card does it have? I'm thinking the video card is the main reason it's slow, not so much the CPU.

The poll was fixed, obviously!

Anyway, eBay is really your only option. Mobile CPUs are not usually sold in retail stores. I don't think it's such a bad price, $390, it is an extreme after all, so you should be able to overclock it if your BIOS supports that ability. If your BIOS doesn't support overclocking, then you're better off getting a T9600, it's basically the non-extreme version, but with the same clock speed and cache (I have one of these myself actually), and it will be somewhat cheaper.

Last edited by shiny_red_cobra, Fri 4 Dec 2009, 23:13.

Umm...if you found one already, why do you need our help finding one?

Umm no. When you post in a thread like he did and don't really offer anything useful to it, just trying to undermine something, then I consider that to be very childish, and I'm gonna point it out. Thanks.

The FSB was 333 MHz kid, actual clock speed is 2.25 GHz.

Pretty much any new components are able to run LFS smoothly. If you want a higher end system, you will need the following: a quad-core CPU (Intel Core i5 or AMD Phenom II X4 is sufficient), and a good video card (an ATI Radeon 5800 series card, in fact even the 4800s are still very good and are dirt cheap nowadays). Other than that, a decent ASUS motherboard will do, and some amount of DDR3 RAM. The amount is up to you, anything around 4GB should do fine for pretty much anything.

That's pretty much what I would get if I was to buy a new computer.

Any upgrade you make will not give you a significant boost to fps. I highly recommend you save your money and buy a completely new system. I've wasted too much money on upgrades which didn't improve my system too much, so I've learned not to upgrade old systems.

That said, if you're really bent on upgrading, the only thing you can really upgrade is the video card. The CPU is almost maxed out on that motherboard (I believe the highest Socket A CPU available is the Athlon XP 3200, so not a significant upgrade there). The only thing worth upgrading is your video card. The ONLY AGP video cards worth getting are Radeon 3850 AGP or Radeon 4670 AGP, and luckily they're very cheap these days. I say upgrade your video card if you have the money to spare. You should notice an improvement (not a big one, but the game should be smoother overall). Btw whether the video card fits in your system depends on the size of your case, not the motherboard, so make sure there's space in your case to fit it.

It's account ban, why do you think you need an account to race online?

lol phlos isn't even on the list...arox you're too young to be making such a thread!

The 4870 is dirt cheap these days, pick one of those up. Stay away from the 4350, it's not a gaming card.

Actually most PhysX users can't take advantage of it cause there's very few games which actually use it. And I don't think Nvidia is paying off developers to not use DX10.1, developers don't use it because Nvidia cards don't support it. They can't make a game which will run on only ATI cards, that would substantially limit their revenues. And it wouldn't be worth it to make two versions, as DX10.1 is a just a small update to DX10 which includes a few new instructions.

Worked fine for me on Windows XP. Installed, ran it, did a few laps, then uninstalled it. Everything went without a hitch.

I like the idea of an installer, but are you devs planning to eliminate the zip files altogether?

Really really old issue. Though it's hard to call it an issue, it does help you when driving.

Just delete your dds folder then. (for noobs, don't do it lol)

I'm sure Nvidia will be in a hurry to release their new cards, which may result in weaker cards if they rush the process. But I'm sure we'll be hearing about their products sometime before the holiday season. If not, then they are in trouble, as the ATI 5000 series cards are very good, and with the release of the dual-gpu Radeon 5970 only a week or two away Nvidia will be hard pressed to release something to compete with ATI.

Well you can't really blame the game for being demanding, it's one of the least demanding games out there. It's just that your laptop was not meant to be used for gaming (you can tell by the video card, all Intel video cards are garbage, and not meant to be used for gaming).

Oh yea, I wanted to say that too but forgot - your laptop will never come close to the performance of a desktop computer. That would be your best bet, to get a desktop with a good video card, and you'll easily get 100 fps in LFS on a consistent basis.