Building my own PC

[Tim Schrock]

Jay,
I just (1 1/2 months ago) had a new computer built for me. My engine includes the new Intel socket T chip, two 80GB hard-drives in RAID 0, and the PCI Express video card. I haven't run any benchmarks on it, but I can say that I've had a few problems running Chief across my two monitors. I don't know what you're looking for as far as screen real-estate goes. I'm using two 17" flat panel LCDs.

I've just pulled in an "expert" on the job to figure this out and he says that my system should be able to handle what I want it to do. However, he did say that Windows is notorious for hot being able to handle OpenGL (which is the 3D language Chief uses) on dual monitor systems. However, Windows XP was supposed to fix some of that problem.

As far as video card brands go, he said that 3-4 years ago the nVidia chipset was more stable in the OpenGL environment, but my experience is that the ATI Radeon card I'm using right now is much more stable than the original nVidia card first installed in the system.

Hope that makes sense for you. And good luck!