Hi, having read a number of posts regarding NASCAR, it has come to my attention that
many people are running theses latest games on Pentium spec machines. Having not had
a P.C. since my old 25Mhz 386DX ( Indy500 ran really well, Formula 1 Grand Prix was
excellent too ), I am wondering about the specs anyone would recommend for a top of
the range games machine / ( machine for my university course ). In particular:
1. Pentium 90Mhz seems like a reasonable minimum to be future proof. However, I have
read some posts regarding 100Mhz machines - I haven't read much about these machines
in the U.K. but do they offer significant speed advantages? What about chip
upgradability and the speeds at which the Pentium range work with the motherboard?
2. 16 MB of RAM seems like a reasonable amount of memory
3. Graphics card. I don't really know much about these, but I understand they can
really affect the overall speed of the machine. PCI local bus seems to be a standard,
but what about different cards. For me, games speed comes before Windows / Chicago
speed etc..
4. Sound card. The last one I had was a SoundBlaster 1.5. A really good card in its
time, but the chip for digitised effects was slow - really showed up on games like
X-Wing. Heard a SoundBlaster AWE-32 at the recent FES show - sounded brilliant on
games that supported it. Does anyone know if it supports stereo for games like
NASCAR? Is there another card that will suffice - particularly want stereo option.
5. CD-ROM. Cheap double-speed models abound. Is there any need for quad speed, even
if prices fall dramatically?
Hopefully, I'll get around to getting a machine towards the beginning of next year.
However, I am not sure how much chip prices are due to drop + competition from other
chip manufacturers - can't hold off from buying forever, though I suppose!
Thanks,
Fraser.
