Well I finished setting up the new machines today, and even as I type this, the network should have finished installing software on them and is shutting them down.
I took one of the machines out for a bit of a test to see what it could do, but before I comment on that, lets look at the specs.
- i5-2400 processor
- 4GB RAM
- Windows XP 32bit
- 512MB GPU (can’t remember the model right now except it was a radeon)
The machines are in a slimline case and look OK for a HP. I loaded up most of the games that were too slow for my old machines; warsow, world of padman, etc. I set the graphics options to max and had a look at the frames per second – rock solid on 75+FPS, which means they should be fast enough for anything we want to do.
One thing though, the desktops are only reporting 3GB, why is that and what can we do about it?
Well, it could be that part of the RAM is used by the OS, so while there is 4GB or RAM onboard, 1 GB (possible less) is being allocated to the main operating software, and the rest of it (3GB) is used for all the other programs.
Hopefully these new computers mean we can actually play some FPS’s that arent from 2004…
Its not all about games Cameron. Yes we use 32bit Windows which puts a maximum size of 4GB on the machine but then windows grabs a chunk for its own use.