Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Redrobes" data-source="post: 3586171" data-attributes="member: 40793">A few points to clear up. A larger PSU will use about the same amount of power as a smaller PSU because they deliver the amount of power required by the stuff connected to it. Like Bront says a larger one is likely to be more robust but all else being equal it would produce the same amount of heat. What matters is the PSU efficiency. I would agree that maybe the efficiency drops when a PSU is being run near to its limit but if you have say 300W of stuff to drive and an 85% efficient PSU then the input power into it would be 300 / 0.85 W. The rest (15%) is the heat generated by the PSU as a by product and must be vented along with all the other hot air. So a cool PSU is an efficient one regardless of max capable power. I agree with Bront that something quite beefy is required for dual core AMD + 8800 GPU but add efficiency into that mix too.Since you have said that you already have XP and are going with 2x1Gb then I would be tempted to run with that for a while. Only a few games and demos actually use DX10 right now. It depends on whether you want to run a particular game that is DX10 or not or can be bothered to do a full OS reinstall later.If you do go >3Gb or plan to, you have no choice but to go 64 bit. I dont know how good Vista 64bit is. I run XP x64 which is based on Win Server 2003 64. All I can say is that my drivers are rock solid and I run an nVidia card and I also have a Cannon printer connected to it. I know that HP scanners are all 64 bit and Intuos Wacom tablets are too. My old (ancient) laser jet does not have a 64 bit driver and I have some other old bits of kit that would not work either.In terms of speed. If you run with a core 2 duo then all of your x86 (32 bit) apps would be run in emulation mode so its bound o be slower. The AMD X64 CPUs have hardware units to run x86 legacy code in them so they run proportionally faster. The core 2 duo is the better chip no contest tho especially in terms of power and heat. EMT64T (64bit) code is always faster than x86 code no matter what 64 bit capable CPU you run on because it has an extended instruction set. For example all SSE instructions are included as standard in x64 whereas they are generally omitted in 32bit apps.Most software is still 32 bit. All MS code is dual 32 or 64 bit, all my apps are multicore and dual 32 / 64 bit stuff too so its not like there is nobody developing for it. SysInternals have a good range of system tools all in 64 bit which is worth picking up. Games however are generally not but I cant see that staying the case for too much longer. We are in a transition phase and its about 50:50 for who has 64 bit capable CPUs and losing 50% of your market obviously means that you either have to support both or just go with 32bit. Since the apps run slower in emulation then for games as one example the need for speed will prevail.I dont have an 8800 series GPU. From those people I talk to it seems like the mutts nuts tho and I want one. I would get the 640Mb edition as it would make a huge difference to me but thats me and im not typical. You would have to match the games requirements against your budget. The GTS has 6 multiprocessors, the 8500 and 8600 have 1 or 2 respectively. So yeah, big performance difference.</blockquote>

Verification