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R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 11:58 pm
by Jumoschwanz
After I upgraded to the 9800, I set up a rig for my father with it a few years back so he could play with IL2. He finally burned it out, so I was going to give him my old Gf3 Ti500, but then I decided that I did not want to downgrade his experience and I put the Radeon 9800 I also had lying around in his rig for a replacement. Now I am still running the old x850xt.

How much money has IL2 made me spend over the years? Quite a bit at one time, but as the sim got older, and the equipment it could be run on got older, I simply stopped spending money on new equipment. I still fly on an AGP, 32-bit Nforce2 rig, and it does just fine.

I did however, find a really nice HP tower at a garage sale this weekend that is only about three years old.

The MB is bad, but for $50 It had a light-scribe pata DVD burner, a 500gb sata drive, 2gigs of DDR2 ram, the case and a 1GB Nvidia PciExpress 9400gt card. It also had a 500w Antec power supply in it, plus I got the original good PS to boot! The cpu is a AMD X2 5200 dual core. So I ordered a new Asus board for it for $70 from NewEgg, so I will have a new rig for $120 that should run the sim well as it is, and that I can seriously upgrade if I ever have to. I also got all the restore disks for the rig and other software it came with.

For another $25 I got the wide-screed lcd monitor for it, which measures 18" diagonal, which I can probably sell and make a lot of my money back. I could have gotten a really cool printer that was original to it, but I just do not need another printer!

The sale was by a military couple that had to re-locate a few thousand miles away so they were dumping everything.

So suddenly, I am going to be back to the future, as far as computer hardware goes anyway. I really love my old rig, but sometimes you just cannot pass up a deal.

A friend of mine is still running my first IL2 rig, a gigabyte kt133a MB with a GF2ultra card and 768mb of sdram. It still runs IL246 well for him, though at low res with not much eye candy.

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 7:47 am
by TX-Thunderbolt
Sell the monitor and the 9400GT card and you're almost at a break-even. Put a decent GTS250 or something equivalent (like your 9800) and you've scored a sweet "FREE" semi-new pc.

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 10:43 am
by ruggbutt
No need to buy all those toys, slap a 5700 in it and you're good to go. New gear doesn't make you better.

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 12:07 am
by Jumoschwanz
ruggbutt wrote:No need to buy all those toys, slap a 5700 in it and you're good to go. New gear doesn't make you better.

Because I can't get any better can I? :)

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 12:25 am
by Jumoschwanz
TX-Thunderbolt wrote:Sell the monitor and the 9400GT card and you're almost at a break-even. Put a decent GTS250 or something equivalent (like your 9800) and you've scored a sweet "FREE" semi-new pc.

I ended up putting a Saphire/ATI 4870 1GB in it. I am sure by the time I am done the only things left from the garage sale will be the DVD and the Hard drive. That is ok though. I have put the $25 monitor to work for use in fixing computer towers for other people. The other parts are so new, that they will be used somewhere sometime for someone's rig.

The 4870 is great though. For the first time I can fly over cities and not have my frame rates drop down to .5 or 1fps! Wow, it must be twice as powerful as my x850xt agp card in my old rig.

This card is cheaper than the top cards, but it has 90+% of their performance. I looked it up on Tomshardware and read things before I bought. In a magazine article I read two of these cards in crossfire beat any single card available.

It has been years since I bought the A7n8x deluxe that I regularly use for flying this sim. It has done a great job, only falling flat over cities and in the face of aircraft carrier AAA. The aircraft carrier AAA I think would probably tax even the best rigs today.

Years ago I put like 80 Whirbelwind's on an airfield and spent time trying to bomb them before they either shot me down or froze my screen and crashed me. I wonder how a newer rig would handle this. Maybe a quad-core Phenom and two 4870s on crossfire would keep up?

It is fun to try crazy things with this sim. The new motherboard I bought IS crossfire capable, and also will take the AM3 processors, so I am sure over time I will beef up my new rig and try some more crazy stunts.

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 1:04 am
by ruggbutt
Jumoschwanz wrote: Because I can't get any better can I? :)
Quite possibly true. But you are getting stupider.

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 1:23 am
by rsm
ruggbutt wrote:
Jumoschwanz wrote: Because I can't get any better can I? :)
Quite possibly true. But you are getting stupider.

:lol:

that just made my day, thank you

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 12:07 pm
by Jumoschwanz
Oops, this forum got too close to the Pilot's Lounge, it caught a case of Ruggbutt........poor thing.

Re: R.I.P. Radeon 9700 I bought to run IL2 finally gives up...

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 12:22 pm
by Daiichidoku
get the "dragon" setup to go with your 4870

i did...phenomx4 955 BE, asus M4A79T Deluxe

VERY pleased, awesome package for the $$$