NationStates Jolt Archive

Yep I'm back for me questions and I still haven't upgraded my/bought a new computer yet!

I have a few more queries:

1. My computer has two hard drives, C (with windows installed) and E. If I were to take the E drive out and put it in a new computer, would everything I installed onto the E drive still work? Because I'm aware that many programs need windows registry to work. Also would they still work as well on vista (xp current)?

2. How much of a difference is there between Intel core 2 duo, and an Q6600 CORE 2 QUAD? Is it worth getting a quad?

3. Whats more important when choosing a graphics card, the model or the memory?

There may be more to come, but if anyone who knows enough about computers to answer these questions good, it would be much appreciated.

1. My computer has two hard drives, C (with windows installed) and E. If I were to take the E drive out and put it in a new computer, would everything I installed onto the E drive still work? Because I'm aware that many programs need windows registry to work.

No, and for exactly the reason you indicated: some programs write essential info in the windows registry, which will not be copied over. Those programs will need to be reinstalled.

Also would they still work as well on vista (xp current)?
Vista is somewhat picky about the software it likes to run; so some programs may have problems - even if you do reinstall them.

2 and 3 I will leave to people that actually use their pc for serious gaming ;)

No, and for exactly the reason you indicated: some programs write essential info in the windows registry, which will not be copied over. Those programs will need to be reinstalled.


Aww shit. Most of my programs (i.e. games) are downloaded or with a lost cd.

Yep I'm back for me questions and I still haven't upgraded my/bought a new computer yet!

I have a few more queries:

1. My computer has two hard drives, C (with windows installed) and E. If I were to take the E drive out and put it in a new computer, would everything I installed onto the E drive still work? Because I'm aware that many programs need windows registry to work. Also would they still work as well on vista (xp current)?

2. How much of a difference is there between Intel core 2 duo, and an Q6600 CORE 2 QUAD? Is it worth getting a quad?

3. Whats more important when choosing a graphics card, the model or the memory?

There may be more to come, but if anyone who knows enough about computers to answer these questions good, it would be much appreciated.

1) 99% of all programs for windows need to be installed with the OS you intend to use them on running. This means that data such as saved games, pictures, documents, and other such materials will work, but the programs themselves will need to be reinstalled. Most programs that work on XP will also work on Vista (but not necessarily the other way around). Simply install your programs on the new Vista PC. You may need to check to see if compatibility mode needs to be enabled however to make some programs run properly.

2) Unless you are an extremely hard core gamer or work extensively with video editing, you don't need the quad core. It actually will use more electricity but you may not see better results. For the average person who will store/touch up photos, play a few games, watch movies, but not try to process large chunks of data at a time, the Core 2 Duo works fine (and is what I use).

3) Model is nice and every brand name has it's own reputation, but the memory is more important. The bigger the memory, the faster and smoother the graphics. I have an ATI Radeon X1600 with 128 MB of VRAM, and I think I would have been fine with 64, even in this day and age. Then again, I have a 17" widescreen monitor, if you have a bigger one, you may like the 128 MB. If you have less, you may not need it all. However, if you do a lot of video and photo work, you'll appreciate having more video memory.


And for those of you out there wondering what computer I have, it's an Intel iMac.


EDIT: Vista is a memory hog, so the more video memory you have and the more system memory you have, the better you'll be. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 128MB for Vista Home Premium (which is what you probably have).

2) Unless you are an extremely hard core gamer or work extensively with video editing, you don't need the quad core. It actually will use more electricity but you may not see better results. For the average person who will store/touch up photos, play a few games, watch movies, but not try to process large chunks of data at a time, the Core 2 Duo works fine (and is what I use).


Well I plan on playing the very latest games, at optimal performance.


3) Model is nice and every brand name has it's own reputation, but the memory is more important. The bigger the memory, the faster and smoother the graphics. I have an ATI Radeon X1600 with 128 MB of VRAM, and I think I would have been fine with 64, even in this day and age. Then again, I have a 17" widescreen monitor, if you have a bigger one, you may like the 128 MB. If you have less, you may not need it all. However, if you do a lot of video and photo work, you'll appreciate having more video memory.


Same as above, and also what I meant by model was how recent the model was. I often see in game specs that they require you to have the equivalent of NVIDIA geforce 9800 or later or something like that (for example).



EDIT: Vista is a memory hog, so the more video memory you have and the more system memory you have, the better you'll be. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 128MB for Vista Home Premium (which is what you probably have).

Yeah I already have 256 mb but its not very new which does actually affect you I think. I'm planning to get a 512mb graphics card.

Well I plan on playing the very latest games, at optimal performance.

Then you might see an improvement with the quad core. It would be nice to know what the speed of these processors is though.

Same as above, and also what I meant by model was how recent the model was. I often see in game specs that they require you to have the equivalent of NVIDIA geforce 9800 or later or something like that (for example).

Ah, that explains things better. Newer cards are going to work better. It's a fact.


Yeah I already have 256 mb but its not very new which does actually affect you I think. I'm planning to get a 512mb graphics card.

Now you're talking! :D

Then you might see an improvement with the quad core. It would be nice to know what the speed of these processors is though.


Well look at this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Q6600-CORE-2-QUAD-CORE-2GB-DDR2-ATI-512MB-FULL-HD-1080p_W0QQitemZ200156044138QQihZ010QQcategoryZ179QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
(i'm not buying this computer btw)

They claim the speed is 9,600 MHz, but i'm a bit suspicious, I think they are getting the speed of it and multiplying it by 4 because it says quad, but that may not be valid.

Well I plan on playing the very latest games, at optimal performance.

AFAIK you'll be far better with a dual core. By the time you may even begin to need a quad core there will be better, and probably cheaper options available.

Well look at this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Q6600-CORE-2-QUAD-CORE-2GB-DDR2-ATI-512MB-FULL-HD-1080p_W0QQitemZ200156044138QQihZ010QQcategoryZ179QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
(i'm not buying this computer btw)

They claim the speed is 9,600 MHz, but i'm a bit suspicious, I think they are getting the speed of it and multiplying it by 4 because it says quad, but that may not be valid.

I agree. They must have quadrupled it. A 2.4 GHz processor sounds a lot more likely. I guess it all comes up to how much are you willing to spend. If you want to spend money to get a processor that is technically faster, you can, but the Core 2 Duo will probably preform just as well. I can run pretty much whatever I want and as much of it as I want on my iMac and I don't have any speed issues unless I'm crunching HUGE amounts of data, so I think you'd be fine with the Core 2 Duo.

Ok well regarding graphics cards, I know that the very very very latest ones can be extremely expensive, where the ones which are only a few months old can be considerably cheaper. So in saving money I want to not spend too much on a graphics card. My question is: how old roughly does a graphics card have to be before the performance is affected?

Ok well regarding graphics cards, I know that the very very very latest ones can be extremely expensive, where the ones which are only a few months old can be considerably cheaper. So in saving money I want to not spend too much on a graphics card. My question is: how old roughly does a graphics card have to be before the performance is affected?

That I cannot tell you. I have a seven year old Dell that I used up until recently. It had about 32MB of VRAM and ran XP like a hot knife through butter. Ironically though, it's was the video card that needs to be replaced to fix the computer. My point still stands though that it can vary greatly. Some cards will last for years and work wonderfully, others will die in a month. To run something like Bioshock though, you'd want something fairly recent though.

1. If you find all the stuff a program has put in the registry and export it you get a file you can use to import it on another computer and the program will work. You must put the program's folder in exactly the same location as it was on the old computer (in this case just give the drive the same letter as it used to have). You'll also have to add any shortcuts you want in the menu or desktop manually.

Some programs will work without exporting any registry stuff at all while some need a lot of stuff that it has spread out all over the registry so trying to do this can be a painful headache with some programs. Also, I've never tried this from XP to Vista, only from XP to XP.

2. It varies a lot depending on how good the game in question is at taking advantage of multiple cores. In best case quad core will theoretically have quad speed. In worst case it will have the same speed as a single core at the same frequency but will at least maintain that speed even if the other cores are doing something intense in the background.

3. Model number determines how fast the graphics card is and what kinds of eye candy it can support. Memory determines how many and how detailed textures a game can load into it. Whichever is the weakest link determines if you will have to turn down detail level of textures etc or other effects like anti aliasing first when the card starts to fall behind.

Oh yeah, one more question:

How easy is it to bring a bring a computer (not a laptop) to a university to use on campus? Is it worth it?

Oh yeah, one more question:

How easy is it to bring a bring a computer (not a laptop) to a university to use on campus? Is it worth it?Impossible in any practical manner.

One has been answered, so I will ignore it.

2. It depends on the game, and what you do when you game. If the game doesn't take advantage of multiple cores, the two extra cores are not going to help the game any. More developers are writing multithreaded games, so it will probably be worth it if this computer is supposed to last more than a year or so. If you expect to have a new PC before this, you will have to research the games you play to see if they can take advantage of a multi-core processor. However, if you, like me like to leave allot of shit running in the background, the extra cores be useful regardless. By lots of shit running in the background, I do not mean leave your music player open, with Firefox on NSG and a Word document open. I mean you are compiling something in the background or want to be able to have you antivirus run without killing your PC. Either way, it depends on your situation.

3. That depends too. Comparing two cards on memory is similar to comparing to PC's on memory. It is only a general case that the higher memory card will be better. A card with smaller memory could be faster if it ran the memory at higher speeds and had many more shaders, etc. Either way, you are looking at ATI and NVIDIA's latest cards. The older series do not support DX10 and allot of new games are going to need that (sooner or later). Again, if you plan to have this PC for any length of time, you may want to hold out until NVIDIA and ATI release their next generation of cards. For whatever reason, MS released a new minor version of DX10 that breaks compatibility with every card on the market. The new generation will be released sometime Q1 2008. In terms of brands, NVIDIA will probably release sooner and have better raw performance, while ATI will offer a better bang for the buck ratio.

Not sure about #1 as I'm not too familiar with working with more than 1 physical drives. But there are some programs that can be run right out of the drive perfectly, others may work but with some quirks, and some may not work at all. All depends on whether or not something important (ie: registry entries) was left on the other disk.

#2: C2D saves on heat production and electricity consumption. For pure gaming, I find C2D beats the Quad in everything except for games supporting multiple threads, from reading various processor benchmarks on gaming and video editing (+ etc). Expect that to change in the future as more games include multiple thread support. For multitasking, the Quad is a good deal. My own PC has a Q6600 and it is simply kick ass for multitasking. MSN open, about 24 tabs of Firefox open, WMP that I forgot I have left open, and I can play any game perfectly.

#3: Be sure to get the most up to date model of graphics card, especially one that supports the new DX 10.1. Many graphics cards (mine included) were left out in the dark when 10.1 came out. Many cards that supported 10.0 could not support 10.1. For card memory, you'll need a larger amount (512+) if you plan on playing the latest games on maximum quality.

And a side note, if you choose a Q6600 and a powerful graphics card (especially if you plan on using dual vid cards), make sure that the PC's power supply is good enough for your system. With a good quality power supply, about 500W is good for a single graphics card, you definitely need more if you plan on dual.

Impossible in any practical manner.

Why's that?

2. It depends on the game, and what you do when you game. If the game doesn't take advantage of multiple cores, the two extra cores are not going to help the game any. More developers are writing multithreaded games, so it will probably be worth it if this computer is supposed to last more than a year or so. If you expect to have a new PC before this, you will have to research the games you play to see if they can take advantage of a multi-core processor. However, if you, like me like to leave allot of shit running in the background, the extra cores be useful regardless. By lots of shit running in the background, I do not mean leave your music player open, with Firefox on NSG and a Word document open. I mean you are compiling something in the background or want to be able to have you antivirus run without killing your PC. Either way, it depends on your situation.


Well i'm definately not planning on doing any compiling or other heavy resource using tasks whilst playing games. What games do take advantage of the quad, and does it make much of a difference?


3. That depends too. Comparing two cards on memory is similar to comparing to PC's on memory. It is only a general case that the higher memory card will be better. A card with smaller memory could be faster if it ran the memory at higher speeds and had many more shaders, etc. Either way, you are looking at ATI and NVIDIA's latest cards. The older series do not support DX10 and allot of new games are going to need that (sooner or later). Again, if you plan to have this PC for any length of time, you may want to hold out until NVIDIA and ATI release their next generation of cards. For whatever reason, MS released a new minor version of DX10 that breaks compatibility with every card on the market. The new generation will be released sometime Q1 2008. In terms of brands, NVIDIA will probably release sooner and have better raw performance, while ATI will offer a better bang for the buck ratio.

Every card? No way around this? No patch?

Right... If you want to play the latest games at maxed out settings, you'll want a C2D running around 2.4 ghz, a minimum of 2 gigs of ram, as long as your're using XP. XP can't handle more than 3 gigs, but if you're running Vista, push in 4 gigs while you're at it. As for graphics card, look no further than the nVidia 8800 GTX or similiar. You'll be able to run anything you want on such a setup and if you're willing to spend a few extra bucks for that last bit of preformance, get a Solid State Disc as a primary drive, or a Western Digital Raptor which is a very fast HDD aswell. Note that this setup will be quite costly though.

Right... If you want to play the latest games at maxed out settings, you'll want a C2D running around 2.4 ghz, a minimum of 2 gigs of ram, as long as your're using XP. XP can't handle more than 3 gigs, but if you're running Vista, push in 4 gigs while you're at it. As for graphics card, look no further than the nVidia 8800 GTX or similiar. You'll be able to run anything you want on such a setup and if you're willing to spend a few extra bucks for that last bit of preformance, get a Solid State Disc as a primary drive, or a Western Digital Raptor which is a very fast HDD aswell. Note that this setup will be quite costly though.

The bold is alraedy a minumum for me. Does 4 gigs really make a difference, even with vista?

The bold is alraedy a minumum for me. Does 4 gigs really make a difference, even with vista?
If your hard drive is working hard with a swap file while you are editing a huge image, compiling a program or doing something else that should be cached in memory then performance suffers greatly and you either need more memory or correct cache settings that use the memory you do have. But if everything that should be cached can be cached in your current memory then it'd be useless to get more memory.

I'm not sure how much memory gaming on Vista needs or how good Vista is at using free memory (that would otherwise just sit there and be useless) to cache files from the hard drive. Someone else will have to clarify those things.

Why's that?The things are generally 50+ pounds with all the needed peripherals. How do you easily move all that about? Desktops are designed to sit in one spot all day and never move. If you want something you can take with you to university and use while you are chilling between classes (or just really bored in a class), get a laptop too.

Well i'm definately not planning on doing any compiling or other heavy resource using tasks whilst playing games. What games do take advantage of the quad, and does it make much of a difference?
It does if the game takes advantage of it. I do not know which games do or not as I do not game much (I'll eat/sleep/breath Oblivion for about one weekend a month, but that is it).
Every card? No way around this? No patch?
No way around. Microsoft chose to make it that way. The cards lack features that DX10.1 must have.

The bold is alraedy a minumum for me. Does 4 gigs really make a difference, even with vista?
When Vista exceeds the minimum requirements it is faster than XP. The extra memory means that more crap can be stored in memory instead of reading it from a disk every time. Given that memory is about 1000 or so times faster than a hard disk, it can help performance.

>4GiB won't be terribly useful until MS drops the x86 architecture. The game itself will only be able to use 4GiB as it will be compiled for the x86. I don't think it will be long until games are pushing that, but I doubt they would produce x64 binaries and loose out on the market that is still using x86.

Impossible in any practical manner.

Not impossible but rather inadvisable. I take a desktop to uni, but it involves several boxes of stuff to do so, all of which are heavy, and then you have to add books/clothes/etc. And I'd suggest you probably won't be playing many games while at uni, if the uni even allows network gaming then maybe, but you'll have more fun spending time with others. The only computer things you'll really need are for essays, email and facebook, and a laptop is perfect for that. So my advice would be to stall building a new desktop until after uni, this is what I'm doing.

Not impossible but rather inadvisable. I take a desktop to uni, but it involves several boxes of stuff to do so, all of which are heavy, and then you have to add books/clothes/etc. And I'd suggest you probably won't be playing many games while at uni, if the uni even allows network gaming then maybe, but you'll have more fun spending time with others. The only computer things you'll really need are for essays, email and facebook, and a laptop is perfect for that. So my advice would be to stall building a new desktop until after uni, this is what I'm doing.Oooooohhhhhh, I misunderstood. For whatever reason, student housing never entered my mind when he said 'on campus.' All you would have to do is get on whatever bus you take to get around and bring your PC on with you.

Oooooohhhhhh, I misunderstood. For whatever reason, student housing never entered my mind when he said 'on campus.' All you would have to do is get on whatever bus you take to get around and bring your PC on with you.

Oh I wouldn't suggest moving it around at all, I just use pen and paper in lectures and things, my desktop sits in my room.

To the OP: you could use ghosting software to make an image of the E drive, then reimage it when it's in the new PC.

Oh I wouldn't suggest moving it around at all, I just use pen and paper in lectures and things, my desktop sits in my room.
I mostly use my laptop in lectures. I can type way faster than I can write so I end up with more readable and more complete notes. If I need to include a diagram, I will draw it by hand and reference it with my notes.