X3 Ray Tracer not working

[Doug Park]

The information on our website is somewhat stale.

i7 is misleading now. When these specs were first put up there was really only a very few choices for an i7 and they were all good. Today there are fast and slow choices for an i7 so you need to make sure you know what you are buying. Choose a fast i7.

Not all 1 GB video cards are created equal. Some 1 GB cards are slow as slugs so using the memory as the only qualification can lead you to making a poor buying decision. You want a fast video card with 1 GB or more of memory.

Under tips on buying a new computer the information on ray tracing should read that more cores is the most important factor. While memory and cpu speed are important they are secondary to number of cores.

The recommendation of sacrificing CPU speed for memory speed is dated. Today's multi-core CPUs have a much better memory to CPU speed ratio because of the need to get data to the cores quicker. This means that the recommendation of sacrificing CPU speed for faster memory is typically less of a consideration.

On the minimum system side the 2.4GHz recommendation is poor as there are 1.6 GHz systems that are much faster than 2.4GHz systems. This would probably better read 2.4GHz P4 or a dual core or better system.

I have a request in to update this information, but it hasn't been done yet. I will check on the progress of the request.