NEW HARDWARE!!!

This Grumpy Old Man bought a new rig yesterday, and he's soooo not grumpy today because it's awesome!!!

Here's something to measure the power of this rig:

On the old system: I double-click the M&G icon, then it takes ten minutes before I've opened a household. And at first, movement will be very stunted. Over the course of 5 minutes, it gets better, but even with the shortest view distance, it's never smooth!

On the new rig: I double-click the M&G icon, and it takes less than 2 minutes for me to actually be playing. And from the first moment, even with the longest view distance, everything moves as slick as an eel in a bucket of mucus.

And that's with my usual amount of CC (nearly 2 GB) included.

This rig is greased lightning!!

wow - that is a colossal improvement - tell us some specs

Operating system, RAM, CPU, Graphics - all that happy stuff

You want the thing to go comepletely naked? Ok, here come the filthy details!

Case: CoolerMaster Elite
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V LE (supports Smart Response Technology)
Chipset : Intel P67
Proc : Intel I7-2600 Quad core, 3400MHz
RAM : 4x Corsair Vengeance 4096MB DDR3-SDRAM, 1600 MHz (Max 4x 8192 MB)
HDD : 2000GB
SSD : 60GB
Graphics : 2x Sapphire Radeon HD6870, 1024 MB GDDR5
Other : 8x USB, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, CF/MMC/MMCmicro/RS-MMC/SD/SDHC/miniSD/microSD/microSDHC Card-reader, DVD-RW drive
Power : Corsair GS800, 850W
OS : W7 Home Premium

Windows reports a Windows Experience Index of 7.6 (on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9)

It set me back some € 1400, but it's so worth it! It blows holes in the load times. If this thing had wheels, it would tear the asphalt off of highways.

BodyShop, which is very hard for most people to get started, opens in less than a minute!
SimPE loads in less than a minute too, and whatever I click within the program, the results come up lightning fast.

It's lovely having a computer that does something when YOU want to do it, not when it decided to do it. Congratulations on your new baby.

BTW the only thing I understood about the stats was:
OS: W7 Home Premium

You chose to understand the one thing that I *loathe* about this whole thing

Although, I must agree, it *looks* smokin'!

Ooh! That's one smokin' hot rig! (But yeah, I'm no fan of Windows 7, either. Then again, at least it isn't Vista...) Congratulations.

is that really 16GB of RAM? Blimey. And dual graphics. Darn, that is fast.

Yea, Win7 - not my fave at all - but like Nix says - at least it is not Vista.

Thanks Nix It smokes indeed.

Yes, Lee, that's 16 GB of RAM. Originally it came with 8 GB, but that seemed rather insufficient to me

I've never used Vista, so I don't know from personal experience how bad it could be. But I must admit, whereas the general concensus is that ME was total crap, I preferred it over XP. So I'm probably rather weird.

You couldn't move an XP license from the old one? I would have installed the XP from the old machine onto the new one and put the 7 or a free distribution of Linux on the old machine. If it weren't for gaming, I would probably be inclined to switch permanently to Linux.

That wasn't so much the problem... the problem was my XP *disk* which had been damaged beyond recovery by some vandal! But then again: even if that disk had still been alive, this new monster came with W7 pre-installed. And W7 at least makes full use of all the hardware: the new graphics cards; the enormous amount of RAM; the huge HDD, they're now all properly used to full capacity, something XP would never have been able to accomplish.