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Will my PC Run this? What CPU/GPU to get? What settings? System Specifications.

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Choosing between OCZ Gold and OCZ Platinum atm. The platinums are 60€ more expensive and if i aint gonna OC them i dont really think there is much difference? Both are 1600mhz but the platinums have a bit faster timings. Not much but faster and i think the platinums can be OC'ed more/better.

But this is my last headache. Finger on the order button. Please help. :)

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Choosing between OCZ Gold and OCZ Platinum atm. The platinums are 60€ more expensive and if i aint gonna OC them i dont really think there is much difference? Both are 1600mhz but the platinums have a bit faster timings. Not much but faster and i think the platinums can be OC'ed more/better.

But this is my last headache. Finger on the order button. Please help. :)

Go with the cheaper RAM (of the two).

RAM is one of the biggest scams going (especially where gaming is concerned). Generally speaking you might get an extra frame or 2 but that could just as easily be down to variance within the system.

Save your cash :)

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Thanks man. Greatly appreciated. This will let me get another WD Black.

Next month however its time for SSD's i think. :) Im thinking 32GB SSD for OS, 80GB SSD for ARMA and some programs, 80GB 7200RPM (my old) for pagefile, and a WD Black 500GB for storage.

After seeing videos of how fast SSD is i cant skip buying it anymore. Thaught of 2xWD black + my old 80GB for pagefile, but hmm... I know that will be good as well, but the load times on those SSD's are insane. The comparison videos of SSD and HDD starting at the same time and loading up windows plus programs is very interesting. Must be good for ARMA.

Might even start out with the dual Blacks and later towards fall (when real gaming time kicks in) go with the SSD's. Intel's X25's looks pretty decent and i found 80GB version for 200€ wich is the maximum limit for what i'll spend on a SSD. Im sure they will be standard soon enough and cheap(er). :)

Ordering the Gold's. Thanks mate.

Edited by Alex72

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Thanks man. Greatly apprecaited. This will let me get another WD Black.

Next month however its time for SSD's i think. :) Im thinking 32GB SSD for OS, 80GB SSD for ARMA and some programs, 80GB 7200RPM (my old) for pagefile, and a WD Black 500GB for storage.

After seeing videos of how fast SSD is i cant skip buying it anymore. Thaught of 2xWD black + my old 80GB for pagefile, but hmm... I know that will be good as well, but the load times on those SSD's are insane. The comparison videos of SSD and HDD starting at the same time and loading up windows plus programs is very interesting. Must be good for ARMA.

Might even start out with the dual Blacks and later towards fall (when real gaming time kicks in) go with the SSD's. Intel's X25's looks pretty decent and i found 80GB version for 200€ wich is the maximum limit for what i'll spend on a SSD. Im sure they will be standard soon enough and cheap(er). :)

Ordering the Gold's. Thanks mate.

Intel SSD's wont come down in price any time soon and I can't stress enough that they are not going to do anything more than speed up load times compared to RAID0 (and not by much in my experience, certainly not worth the price difference).

I know it probably seems that I am a little hard on SSDs but it's only from the point of view of gaming. They are great for other things but they really don't do a lot for gaming.

Bottom line, if you are buying one as an overall system upgrade, it's a good investment. If you are buying one because you believe it will run A2 better, you're probably better off buying a 2TB RAID0 setup as it will be way cheaper, offer very good speed and way more space :)

JM2C

Edited by BangTail

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Dude you shouldn't have any issues, if so it's because you're running the game on that IDE drive.

My second rig runs the game perfectly, maxed out (No AA, everything else maxed) never below 60fps and always very much higher, not the PC in my sig, my second rig, specs: It's an HP Elite with a 850w Psu and 4890 Psu

AMD Phenom II 925 2.8Ghz 2MB L2, 6MB L3(This Cpu isn't too much quicker than your Intel Quad)

AMD 785 Chipset

8GB DDR3 Dual Channel Ram

XFX Radeon HD 4890 (Much more powerful than a GTX 260 tho...)

1TB good hard drive, but nothing crazy like RAID or SSD.

I mention my second 925 rig because it more closely resembles about the performance of your rig, except for your HDD issues and a weaker Gpu, and slightly weaker Cpu.

You should be able to run the game perfectly, because this rig I mention runs it absolutely perfect, incredible really. Graphics entirely maxed accept I don't use antialiasing on this rig in Arma 2. Anyways I spend most of my time on my main rig in my sig.

Windows 7 Pro 64bit seemed to help, and of course keeping the HDD healthy. Your Gpu is enough for the game, so is your Cpu, anyone that says otherwise, well, I very much disagree. If you're having issues, it's your HDD or drivers, most likely that fugly HDD. Do you have enough space to install Arma2 onto your better drive, with your OS? If so, I'd try that, and then you'll know, you'll see a difference or you won't. But your specs should run medium perfectly regardless. Hell I played on medium with playable frame rate on an Athlon64 X2 6400+ 3.2Ghz dual core/4GB 800mhz/4890....

Alright, thanks. My OS drive has not enough space left, and I have an internal SATA hard drive that I put in an external case, but I honestly don't feel like taking it all out and trying to put it in to test. It's kind of obvious there's no other thing that could cause a problem.

So I'll buy a new HD, a new heatsink fan, and then I should be generally fine, with a good HD and an overclocked CPU - IF, for whatever reason, I still lag behind then, I can always swap my 260 for a 4890, they cost about the same.

Thanks to everyone that helped!

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Alright, thanks. My OS drive has not enough space left, and I have an internal SATA hard drive that I put in an external case, but I honestly don't feel like taking it all out and trying to put it in to test. It's kind of obvious there's no other thing that could cause a problem.

So I'll buy a new HD, a new heatsink fan, and then I should be generally fine, with a good HD and an overclocked CPU - IF, for whatever reason, I still lag behind then, I can always swap my 260 for a 4890, they cost about the same.

Thanks to everyone that helped!

JFYI, you need to have at least 20% free space on the OS drive otherwise you may find that overall performance is affected.

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Ok BangMan. :) I just saw a video where they loaded crysis and it loaded in like 70% faster than conventional HDD. But i dont know how it works in the game ofcourse and im sure you know more. ;)

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Ok BangMan. :) I just saw a video where they loaded crysis and it loaded in like 70% faster than conventional HDD. But i dont know how it works in the game ofcourse and im sure you know more. ;)

Yup load times are quite a bit faster against a single conventional HDD. Then again, some of those tests are using Green HDDs vs SSDs and that's not a fair comparison. It would help to know what they are comparing to give you an objective assessment.

Against RAID0 (using fast HDDs), there will be much less of a difference.

Edited by BangTail

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Yup load times are quite a bit faster against a single conventional HDD. Then again, some of those tests are using Green HDDs vs SSDs and that's not a fair comparison. It would help to know what they are comparing to give you an objective assessment.

Against RAID0 (using fast HDDs), there will be much less of a difference.

An intel 40GB SSD is about 100 euro's. Just big enough for your OS, the pagefile, office and arma2. Then you can use an old harddisk as storage or use a cheaper big "green" (that means slow spinning) harddisk, also nice for silent systems.

If you also play other games a big 7200rpm disk or even a raid is probably the way to go, since every modern game seems to take 8 GB or much more.

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JFYI, you need to have at least 20% free space on the OS drive otherwise you may find that overall performance is affected.

Technically I have at least 25% free. My OS drive however is only 40 GB, and about 12 GB are free. If I need to I can probably pull some more space out of it, but I don't know, I think it's alright...

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Technically I have at least 25% free. My OS drive however is only 40 GB, and about 12 GB are free. If I need to I can probably pull some more space out of it, but I don't know, I think it's alright...

Generally, the less free space, the lower the performance :(

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Well I just punched it up to 14 GB. I can always disable the pagefile to get 4 more GB.

But come on, it can't be that bad. I mean now it seems like everything that could possibly go wrong with my computer in terms of ArmA 2 performance optimization did. lol.

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Well I just punched it up to 14 GB. I can always disable the pagefile to get 4 more GB.

But come on, it can't be that bad. I mean now it seems like everything that could possibly go wrong with my computer in terms of ArmA 2 performance optimization did. lol.

Disabling the pagefile will make things worse.

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That's true, that's why it's not disabled now obviously :p

But still, how bad could it be? Why does ArmA 2 need to stream itself to nearly every hard drive? Is this going to seriously affect my performance?

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If you have 4 GB of ram the pagefile wont be used for arma 2, only for background applications that have claimed a piece of virtual memory.

You can remove the pagefile if you have so little running you dont need it, but then it wont even be used so you wont get any more performance by removing it.

Removing it if you do need it will cause a crash.

Removing it in windows 7 / vista wont do anything since it is instantly created again when the system thinks it's a good idea.

Now that we're talking about pagefiles and harddisks maybe you could take a look at this topic arma 2 I/O analysis althoug it's more an I analysis as arma 2 doesn't O so much to the harddisk.:rolleyes:

Edited by Leon86

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Yeah nevermind the pagefile, I'm not going to disable it.

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Hello All,

I have the following rig -

Asus M4A785TD-V Evo AMD 785G

G.Skill RipJaw 4GB DDR3

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 965 Black Edition @3.9Ghz

Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus

2 x 160gb Seagate in RAID 0

And the GPU is a 8800GTX which ive had a long time, I feel like i should be getting better results than i am.

Will the GPU be holding me back?

Thanks

Simon

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I would say the gpu and the hard drives are both bottlenecks in your system.

Edited by Mosh
stuff

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I also still use my 8800gtx, sure, upgrading it would allow for some more eyecandy I think, but I dont care much for that.

2x a 7200rpm disk should be fast enough, even if they are only 160GB. I don't have hd problems with my 500GB 7200rpm disk and your raid should be faster.

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So how is it I'm using a WD Caviar Green 7,200rpm SCSI drive and I have absolutely no issues at all? I have every setting in the game maxed, I've only just started using AA. Running at the res in my Sig.

I realize how the game engine works, I just don't understand why so many people seem to have issues with their drives, when mine, nothing special at all, gives me no issues. Regardless of my specs, the HDD is certainly the bottleneck I would think, yet I have no problems of any kind, ever.

Are my high end specs somehow negating issues I would see if I were on weak hardware?

Why don't I have these issue so many seem to have, and it certainly seems very important to many of you. ....in all honesty, the game runs with absolute perfection, unreal framerates, no stutters, ever, and I don't see foliage or buildings or anything loading late or blurry/fugly and then getting nice and sharp, not when on the move, not when zooming, just your typical LOD as you move around, and it's virtually unnoticeable, just like any other game I play....

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So how is it I'm using a WD Caviar Green 7,200rpm SCSI drive and I have absolutely no issues at all? I have every setting in the game maxed, I've only just started using AA. Running at the res in my Sig.

I realize how the game engine works, I just don't understand why so many people seem to have issues with their drives, when mine, nothing special at all, gives me no issues. Regardless of my specs, the HDD is certainly the bottleneck I would think, yet I have no problems of any kind, ever.

Are my high end specs somehow negating issues I would see if I were on weak hardware?

Why don't I have these issue so many seem to have, and it certainly seems very important to many of you. ....in all honesty, the game runs with absolute perfection, unreal framerates, no stutters, ever, and I don't see foliage or buildings or anything loading late or blurry/fugly and then getting nice and sharp, not when on the move, not when zooming, just your typical LOD as you move around, and it's virtually unnoticeable, just like any other game I play....

It's subjective. I might see your idea of smooth and find it slow.

As long as YOU are happy, who cares what anyone else thinks :)

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Guys, I just bought this hard drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

What do you think? I was talking to my more experienced techie friends so they confirmed it and out of all options there were this was pretty much the best. There was another 1 TB one but I didn't want to spend 100 dollars on it, I'm on a tight-ish budget.

This seemed like my best option. Everyone's telling me it's good, so I wonder what you guys think as well.

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Guys, I just bought this hard drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

What do you think? I was talking to my more experienced techie friends so they confirmed it and out of all options there were this was pretty much the best. There was another 1 TB one but I didn't want to spend 100 dollars on it, I'm on a tight-ish budget.

This seemed like my best option. Everyone's telling me it's good, so I wonder what you guys think as well.

WD Blacks are the only thing I use by way of HDDs :)

They are fast and reliable.

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I only look at price/GB when looking at 7200rpm disks. I never see any significant performance difference in benchmarks. Reliability is worth something but I make backups of the little important data I have anyway as no harddrive is completely bulletproof. It's also very hard to find proper statistics of reliability of harddrives and manufacturers.

edit: and even benchmarks you do find are often not very relevant if you dont run a file server. Things like NQC are nice but most people dont use it as nearly all motherboard manufacturers have the sata controller set to IDE mode by default. I just enabled AHCI on my motherboard, the only reason I did that was so I could install Snow Leopard on my pc more easily.

(to enable ahci you first have to enable the driver in the windows register, otherwise windows wont boot, it's just one value, google it, then put the sata controller in AHCI in the bios, now all your sate drives are hot-swappable, yay useless features!:yay:)

Edited by Leon86

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Never had any issues with WD Black HDDs in the past, as far as I can remember they are fast and reliable, as Mr BangTail said.

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