Mahesh's New Computer

Hey people, welcome to the place where I brag about my newest gaming machine. This baby can run games like I can jack off. Well, almost. Flop your tongues out and git ready to drool.

Intel Celeron 400Mhz processor with 128KB L2 on-chip cache at full speed
Abit BX6 R2 440BX motherboard with 4 DIMMs for maximum of 1GB RAM
128MB PC-100 SDRAM
6.4 GB Seagate Hard Disk Drive
32 MB Riva TNT2 M64 AGP Graphics Accelarator
17" Mitsubishi 1772ie monitor with 1024*768 @ 85Hz
40X Sony CD-ROM Drive
Sound Blaster Live! value soundcard with EAX 2.0, digital out, 32 DirectSound3D audio streams, 1024 MIDI voices
120 Watt speakers
1.44 MB Panasonic Floppy Disk Drive
ATX Midi Tower case
PS/2 Keyboard
Microsoft Intellimouse PS/2
Windows 98 Second Edition
Half-Life

So thats it. I'am not paticularly happy with the speed of the processor and the graphics card (but, hey, it runs Half-Life real smooth at 1024*768), but I plan to upgrade to a PIII 500 and a Voodoo 3 3000 soon as possible. 3dfx rules, Man! (GeForce? Pah!)
Also the CD-ROM Drive sucks, not to mention the tinny speakers. The drive's supposed to be a 40X but benchmarking has proved it to run at 22X. Fuck!
Thinking of installing a DVD ROM drive if possible.
The Hard Disk ain't nothing special either.

Okay on to the good stuff.

The motherboard is awesome; supposed to be the fastest BX board out there, better even than the Asus P3BF according to www.tomshardware.com running gaming benchmarks. Yes!

The amount of RAM is way enough to run any mega-ass game out there.

The 17" Mitsubishi beaut rocks with crystal clear images with a dot pitch of .26 mm and excellent refresh rate of 85Hz at my preferred resolution of 1024*768.

The sound emanating from my SB Live! is truly amazing. As I write this I am listening to Bon Jovi's These days CD with the Live! environment setting on Concert Hall, and its simply stunning even on my shitty speakers. Plus this card has a digital out for connection to digital speakers or a Dolby Digital Amplifier. So better speakers will mean crystal clear audio reproduction. Also it supports 32 simultaeneous DirectSound3D audio streams; which means a max of 32 sounds at the same time with DirectSound3D enabled.

The MS Intellimouse. Once you get used to the wheel there's no going back. Plus it's great for weapon selection in First-Person Shooters like Half Life and Unreal. Awesome!

Benchmarking

Having run 3DMark 99 lite to gauge the performance of the machine (at 800X600 @ 16 bit) I get a score of around 2022 3D marks, which is inferior to my last system (though that did have Voodoo2 SLI'ed, same CPU, and 64MB RAM, but a real shitty motherboard) which scored at around 2400 3D Marks.

Quake2 Timedemo1 runs at 31 Frames per second at 1024*768 with all options enabled or maxed, including max performance sound.
On my earlier system it ran at 55-60FPS.

This is probably due to the low-end TNT2 which cannot possibly come close to Two 12MB Voodoo2s. The solution- A Voodoo 3 3000. Yes, baby, come to mama!

Advice for buying a new computer:
Always spend a bit more and buy a good monitor, as you will be staring at it all the time. A bad monitor will ruin your eyes.