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Our computers are stone-age. It’s true, and it sucks.

When we moved to Indiana, all our computers somehow managed to die on the trip. I don’t know if it was vibrations, static in the air, change in temperature, or the shock of them not being turned off for years then suddenly spending two weeks shut off – but the only machine I still have that works is my SGI Indigo2.

So we bought these machines, because we needed PCs. Unfortunately, we bought them at an awkward time – they were the last of the machines that used DDR RAM, the last of the machines using AGP ports for graphics cards, and a bunch of other limiting factors.

We bought graphics cards for them, but over time they died. I managed to pick up a cheap GeForce4 TI on eBay – which is a fantastic card for it’s age, but the 512MB RAM in our machines was seriously limiting. I used a modified w1rex config for TF2 to keep the frame rates up – at the expense of it looking terrible. The tiles and textures on the walls and everything just looked plain awful.

So a while back we noticed that DDR RAM was finally at a reasonable rate on newegg, so we picked up a 2x1GB pack. The manuals for our motherboards said that the RAM had to be in matched pairs, but I knew that to be a lie so we each ended up with 1.5GB.

Everything I want to play runs really well, except that the GeForce4TI doesn’t have DX9 support. Which sucks, because I can’t run Windows 7 (which otherwise runs fantastic on this PC) and I can’t run Left4Dead or any of the other newer games.

Who wants to buy me an AGP DX9 graphics card or Christmas? ;D

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.