Where have I been? Civ4?

[Barley]

Will be interesting to hear how your multiplaying exploits go.. I can see Civ4 could cost me £1000 as im getting round to thinking I need a new PC (this one's done me proud for 8 years though).

Was specing out a machine on Dell.co.uk the other day, price came out at £2800 lol, that was 3.6mhz with 20" flatscreen, 2x 256mb graphics cards, 1024mb, 500gb HDD, lots of other toys like top spec speakers etc.

I hardly think its worth spending so much though given you can get a PC with good specs for £800... I do like to have nice things and certainly still apreciate the toys on my current PC like good speakers & 19" monitor (CRT lol), was the Rolls Royce of PC's when I bought it.

[Barley]

Always makes me wonder why it costs you twice as much for a PC that got about 10-20% performance improvement from a reasonable model.

PS. Sorry to go off topic.

[Peter Triggs]

When I used to live in Oxford, a guy from the University's computor department told me never to buy whatever is currently top of the line stuff. You pay a real premium for it and it will in all probability be out of date in a matter of months anyway.

[Barley]

Yes agree, when I bought my P3 600, it was £1800 (whole package), the options at the time were P3 500, P3 550 & P3 600, I think the 550 was about £250 less and the 500 £450 less...

I dont think it would of made a whole heap of difference if I was sitting here one P3 500 or P3 600 now?

I guess thats the same with the 3.2, 3.4, 3.6 & 3.8 on the market now... imagine the CPU cost difference between 3.2 & 3.8 is about £500.

I do go for quality monitor and speakers as they tend to be one off's... HDD arnt to expensive and better to wait to upgrade RAM, guess an extra 1024mb would cost £500? now, in two years that'll prob be well under £200.

Thing is most of the current systems are well overpowered for anything they'd ever concievably need to run, the problem is it doesnt encourage developers to write smart code.

Its amazing to think you can get a desktop PC for £500 with more power than the the biggest mainframes had maybe 10 years ago. I remember using a Commodore Amiga, 1mb Ram, 4mhz CPU and that ran Civ1 pretty well, compare that to the specs of the latest incarnation posted above...

[John-SJ]

Also, a 20% increase in CPU speed does not equate to a 20% increase in in computing speed in the vast majority of cases. The reason is that there are a number of bottlenecks in the computer apart from processor speed, so the actual increase for most practical purposes is less than 10%. So, don't hesitate to buy a few speed ratings lower than the top of the line, in the end the differece is not going to be that significant.

[John-SJ]

Heh! Barley,
I remember my first Civ1 machine, an early PC. If I scrolled the map far enough that it had to fully repaint it, it took several seconds, and you could watch the individual tiles as they were painted, seemingly at random. And back then I was amazed at the graphics! Wow!