Skyscraper wrote:

When it comes to the Nforce3 socket 754 DFI Lanparty board I agree (Bad caps on 100% of the non recapped boards) and also the RDX200 socket 939 board seems to be a gamble but the Nforce4 socket 939 boards with solid caps seem to work fine more often than not. When dead its mostly because a failed BIOS flash. They often seem dead though as there are different BIOS versions for different memory and they do not always post with the "wrong" memory modules.

For those who want a hassle free socket 939 experience I would recommend Asus...

I found ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (only DDR, not DDR2 😒 If 939, then with DDR2) but for 45€, and good CPU with SSE3 is nowhere, Athlon64 3500+ SSE2 only is fastest i cand find local.

eFatal2ty wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

When it comes to the Nforce3 socket 754 DFI Lanparty board I agree (Bad caps on 100% of the non recapped boards) and also the RDX200 socket 939 board seems to be a gamble but the Nforce4 socket 939 boards with solid caps seem to work fine more often than not. When dead its mostly because a failed BIOS flash. They often seem dead though as there are different BIOS versions for different memory and they do not always post with the "wrong" memory modules.

For those who want a hassle free socket 939 experience I would recommend Asus...

I found ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (only DDR, not DDR2 😒 If 939, then with DDR2) but for 45€, and good CPU with SSE3 is nowhere, Athlon64 3500+ SSE2 only is fastest i cand find local.

Venice and San Diego are the Single Cores with SSE3 and also all dual cores.
No S939 board or CPU use DDR2, they all use dual channel DDR. The newer AM2 platform use DDR2.

The Intel 865PE is a safer bet if you want a hassle free ~2003 - 2004 system but I would avoid the MSI board as the voltage regulators could burn with the Prescott 3.2. My MSI 875P NEO board did just that. If the seller has used the board with the CPU without any issues and they are sold in a bundle then its perhaps worth to take the chanse.

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium is a great board but not worth £45.
A boxed Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe is however worth at least that much.

How about this auction if you live in the UK.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-A8N-SLI-Deluxe … =item20f3a25bae

This bundle is worth ~£50, Its one of the best socket 939 boards with one of the fastest CPUs. Note that the CPU is from the future (mid 2005) but the motherboard chipset (Nforce4-SLI) is from 2004.
Its not AGP and its defently alot faster than the 865PE system but this is close to what I use for 2003 - 2006 XP gaming.

The video card to buy for a system like this is the Geforce 7900 GTX.
Or you could go the crazy overkill route and buy these two 7900 GX2
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-TWO-Nvidia-GeForc … =item234829bcc2

old Quad SLI - No, thanks.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/200 … rce_7900_gx2/13 -check "final thoughts" in FEAR it has got even less fps, than with 2 cards only.

Its the same in most games 😀

Two 7900 GX2 in Quad SLI mode only beats two 7900 GTX running SLI in some games at 1600*1200 with full AA and AF.
Its total overkill and the overhead eats away alot of the performance. And that is when it even works. It is very cool though.

If you're going QuadSLI GX2s (this is well beyond 2003-2004 btw, but if we're talking about FEAR and whatsit that's fine) I would not go with the 7900; get the 7950s instead. They're physically smaller, quieter, etc and offer otherwise the same performance/features. Their primary selling point (and the primary selling point for QSLI in general) imho is SLI-AA. That means you can enable up to 32x MSAA, which a single 7900GTX (or other card) cannot do. Overall performance in my own minimal testing confirms that it isn't really "worth it" for raw FPS though - 7900GS SLI configuration scores similar in benchmarks, but it doesn't have the same AA capabilities and probably wouldn't stand-up to extremely high resolutions. Maybe with a substantially faster CPU, like a modern i5, it would scale up better but I'm not sure. I don't have a more modern SLI board to test that with.

Motherboard wise, A8N-SLI is a fine choice for Socket 939. Like Skyscraper said - no DDR2 for Socket 939; have to have AM2. One advantage if you decide to go with AM2 is that the CPUs tend to be cheaper/more abundant. People want crazy money for higher-spec 939 chips. 🤣

philscomputerlab wrote:

Smooth sailing? No way. FEAR struggles on a GeForce 7.

Note that I come from the expectation of all details and high resolution with 60+ FPS so keep that in mind. For me a 8800GTX / 8800GT is what's required for these games.

Strange. I used to have mini-LAN parties with a couple friends and we'd play FEAR in multiplayer and this unofficial coop mode and can't remember it running slow or anything (though I always used the not-so-high resolutions as my screens at the time were like 17in at the most). This was using a 6800 and a 7600GS, both AGP.
FX 5900 was terrible though 😁

Resolution is a huge factor. Going from 1024 x 768 to 1920 x 1200 means 3x the pixels so performance ends up a third 😀

I happened to treat myself to a 19" LCD screen around that time and in forums everyone recommended me a 6600 GT but I was disappointed, it simply didn't have the power for 1280 x 1024 gaming so I had to get the 7800 GT nothing else was available at that time.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Resolution is a huge factor. Going from 1024 x 768 to 1920 x 1200 means 3x the pixels so performance ends up a third 😀

I just wanted to point out, this is not true of all games or in all situations. There are many cases where increasing the resolution has little-to-no impact on overall performance, especially if the game is heavily CPU limited. A very good example of this is Morrowind. Many RTS games also exhibit this behavior.

As far as FEAR, I played it at something like 1024x768 or 1152x864 on a 7900GS with minimal complaints when it was new, but that was certainly not with full-max-ultra settings. I think when we're talking about retro gaming we should better characterize what kinds of gameplay settings we expect, and I think this thread is a good example of why: a high end computer in 2004 would certainly struggle with "high end" games from 2004 and later. However if the goal is to recreate the system from 2004, that's part of the experience. By contrast, if the goal is to pick games from 2004 (and potentially later), and run them completely maxed out, parts selection should focus on newer/later hardware, say from 2008.

Personally I don't mind having some settings reduced, but generally I'd rather have everything cranked all the way up since I have the benefit of hindsight when building a "new" old computer these days. Also, the pricing is generally not too different for various levels of performance. This is, for example, why I have a GeForce FX for my DX7/8 machine, and a GeForce 2 for my pre-DX7 machine. In both cases I can reasonably expect to run with max or nearly max settings at fairly high resolutions and with AA, but both machines are a few years ahead of the games they're actually playing (to the point that my GF2-equipped machine is actually contemporaneous for many of the games the FX is running). However despite the fairly significant performance gap between the two, the newer/faster of them was not significantly more expensive to put together.

I found really good article: http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/evga/ … gtco/index.html

obobskivich wrote:

I just wanted to point out, this is not true of all games or in all situations. There are many cases where increasing the resolution has little-to-no impact on overall performance, especially if the game is heavily CPU limited. A very good example of this is Morrowind. Many RTS games also exhibit this behavior.

Fair enough, but I think you know what I meant 🤣

CPU limitation isn't a factor for me as I use my Time Machine approach and use a Socket 1155 motherboard with a Core i5 😀

For F.E.A.R. I recommend a 8800 GT / 9800 GT or 9600 GT. I'm playing it on a 7800 GT at 1600 x 1200 and it's fine most of the time but we aren't console gamers, PC Master Race thank you very much, so it has to be 60 or 75 fps (my 27" Samsung overclocks to 75 Hz) constant with V-sync.

I'd agree with GeForce 8/9 for FEAR and similarly demanding/later games. The performance improvement wrt shaders and whatnot is substantial. But GeForce 7 is not incapable of a lot of DX9 games, especially if you don't need very high resolutions (like 1600x1200). No need for "Pc master race" nonsense imho.

Different views I guess. I refuse to play an almost 10 year old game with anything less than all settings maxed and constant 60 fps. I mean with hardware is so cheap and available why would you play it on a GeForce 7 if you can play it on a GeForce 8 or 9? Sorry but this just doesn't make sense to me 🤣

philscomputerlab wrote:

Different views I guess. I refuse to play an almost 10 year old game with anything less than all settings maxed and constant 60 fps. I mean with hardware is so cheap and available why would you play it on a GeForce 7 if you can play it on a GeForce 8 or 9? Sorry but this just doesn't make sense to me 🤣

I don't think our views are really so different, if you go back to my previous posts. 😀

I think I will look into what performace in Fear you can expect with different video cards.
I would think that a Geforce 7900 GTX or ATI X1950XTX should handle it pretty well and if not maybe the 7950 GX2 will 😀

I will report my findings.

MATRIX Loading...

missing resources: ABIT IC7-G, 2x 7200rpmn 250GB SATA HDD for RAID0, MS WinXP Pro Original
Delivery? next week 😊 FANs are LED Green 1200rpmn each

ABIT IC7-G is a great motherboard.
This will be a nice 2003/2004 system.

Very nice looking. What's the final specifications for the build?

Here is video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7eT---Xfs If i find somewhere next pair of Corsair PC3500 it will have 4GB of RAM

Nice video.

I can report that the Radeon X1950XTX got 114 FPS in FEAR at 1280*960 with all settings maxed.
Perhaps it would not handle 1600*1200 but anything below is fine.

I do actually have a Geforce 7600 GT (PCI-E) so I will test it later. Im pretty sure it will handle FEAR decently but perhaps not with all settings maxed out.

I can Overclock. But i dont want to play 2006+ games like TDU, Call of Juarez, Crysis... on it..