I DID IT

Oh well... I did it! No, really! I went out to a computer store and bought a new machine. I since I like to do graphics programming, I bought a 8800 GTX... 650EUR only for a graphic card.

The complete setup:

Intel(r) C2D E6400
Asus P5B Deluxe Wifi Edition
Geforce 8800 GTX
1 gig DDR2-pc800
HD : 80 gb (for OS) + 250gb (for Data/Development/Games)
550W Power Supply
XP Home SP2

Here's a picture:



I spent the saturday afternoon assembling and setting up the machine. After installing XP and some Antivir Soft + Firefox, I downloaded the latest drivers from NVidia and installed them.

Then came the first test: I installed Battlefield 2142, the patches etc and played the game with all settings put to the max. Screen resolution was 1600x1200 with 6xAA.

"renderer.drawFps 1" into the console and... 80-90 during the entire game. WOW. I previously had tested a similar setup on a Ati 1950XTX Master/Slave (yes, two boards) and had half of the FPS.

Unfortunately I didn't have the time yet to install any development environment and I will not have the time until tomorrow evening.

I spent some time searching through the NVidia website to find any demos for this card (since there weren't any on the gfx card CD) but there weren't any on their website. Either they have hidden them quite well, or they didn't put any since the newest demos seem to be from 2005.

Have fun