I finally put my hands on it. Kinda nice, though they assembled some parts that were not what I asked.
The processor is a AMD Athlon 1.7 Ghz. I expected a Pentium 4 1.6, but this will do better. 512 Ram, 32 being used by the onboard video set. It’s a SiS chipset, which basically means it’s cheap ****, but the amount of Ram I put it to use way more than compensates it. It also came with CD-RW (using Nero) and all the basic stuff (USB & Lan entries & all that). The only things that put me down is that it came with a 20 Gb HD, but it should have been 40 Gb, and it didn’t come with a modem. I’m posting from my old computer.
I put both computers in a LAN connection. However, the old comp is running Win98, which kinda messes things up. The new one, on WinXP 2000 Professional, is very networking friendly, but the old computer simply won’t show up in the networking area - even if I try accessing it from itself.
I checked the video capacities of this new thing. I ran UT in 640x480, 16-bit color, and all the goodies turned on. 9 bots and I in tight rooms filling the screen with flashes, decals and all that and the videoboard stood its ground without missing even a single frame. I don’t know how to measure frame rate in UT, but I set min desired rate to 40 and the game didn’t turn off any special display effect even in the heaviest scene. Then I wen’t for some Black & White. It ran with all goodies turned on, and only lagged slightly when rain fell over a big portion of the first island as I moved through the rain. I can only say it’s pretty good, and I’ll even give more RAM to the video when I go playing heavier games.
One thing that caught my attention… This new machine heats up really fast, and will be a little hot even when doing nothing. My old computer, with a smaller cooler, wouldn’t get as hot as the new one even after doing a lot of heavy exercising. However, the new one will fall to room temperature really fast (played with it for 5 hours, making it really really hot, then turned off, and it was cool in 5-10 minutes).
