Kevin's Watch

just recveived my Compaq Presario Laptop yesterday, after much searching and researching I opted for the Pentium4 w/HT (3.2 GHz).
As the good Sheriff said , lots of good RAm is just as important, maybe more so, to get lightning speed out of a comp. I dug a little deeper in debt and upgraded to 1 Gb when I had mine built.
(along with an extra battery cause I know the 17" screen is going to eat a lot of juice).

This sucker weighs in @ 9+ lbs and is as much of a desktop than a portable.

The main thing I think someone needs to look at when buying a new computer is what they will need in two years and buy as close to that as the piggy bank will afford.

If possible at least get a good motherboard that can be upgraded with better processor,or RAM. that way you can still build up .

I debated over the AMD, Pentium question also and thought the 64+ had more potential for the future. but would take too long for software developers to feed such a small market.

AMD's 64-bit processors can still crunch through 32-bit programs with ease. In fact one of the line's selling points is that it can run 64- and 32-bit programs simultaneously, so it isn't an either/or situation.

I've been really impressed with my AMD-64 so far but I was never able to get the old Star Wars games to play, even with technical support from LucasArts, so now I'm thinking of setting my old computer back up just for those games.

Sounds like a plan, dlb. You must really like those SW games.

Nav wrote: One thing I've heard about the 2800+ is that it's easy to strangle its potential with an inadequate video card. I'm certain that my creaky Radeon 9000 isn't up to the job, so I'll replace that too. I'm thinking about the GeForce FX 5700 as it's about the right price, but ultimately I'm unsure if it will make a good partner for the 2800+ or not. Does anyone know if it would, or if there's a different card I should be looking at?

I've seen benchmarks with an FX 5700/XP 2700+ pairing, which is close enough. The 5700 is an okay card, but it languished in the bottom third of the cards tested, not much better than an ATI Radeon 9600. if you're set on acquiring a 5700, try to get the faster-clocked Ultra version if it's still available. It provides a decent boost in performance over the non-Ultra card.

However, none of the 5700 cards appear to bring out the full potential of the XP 2700+, because there is a big jump in framerates once the 2700+ is paired with a Geforce FX 5800 and faster cards. If the 5700 is already holding back the XP 2700+, then it will be a worse bottleneck for an XP 2800+. Unfortunately, I don't know if the 5800 series is still around or if Nvidia has discontinued it, because I don't see it for sale at my local computer stores.

You could spend a little more and get a card in the FX 5900 series, but at that point you just might want to save up even more and purchase a card in the 6600 series--Nvidia's "mid-range" line. It appears to be an excellent value, as it has 80-90% of the performance of Nvidia's top-end 6800 cards for roughly half the price. I'm fairly sure that a 6600 will more than adequately keep pace with an XP 2800+.