I reccomend a Phenom II X3 720 BE and an Asus M4A78T-E, great value and will allow you to play anything with options to upgrade in the future. As for Infitel, the i7 965 is the best home CPU on the market (but costs £800-£900 minimum) however the 920 has a clear competitor in the X4 955 BE. The difference for me is that AMD systems don't charge you extra for a bloated motherboard, in the UK you're paying a minnimum of £100 more on an Intel motherboard and in my opinion that's just unacceptable.

The whore i7 maybe a tempting mistress, however the fees for her place of residence are far to high to justify the pleasures she offers!

I could not run LoTRO at highest quality video settings,  and had to turn the settings down.  My PC randomly rebooted.  I turned down the video quality and the problem was solved.

LoTRO's official help advised that Vista32 systems in combination with graphics cards that had over 512Mb memory were having these problems. Apparently there is some problem with how 32 bit Vista manages memory. I would go with 64 bit Vista unless you have older software that will not run on 64 bit vista.

At the time I had this problem, Microsoft's official site advised that you cannot upgrade directly  from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Vista and you have to buy 64 bit Vista. 

Originally posted by thorwood

I could not run LoTRO at highest quality video settings,  and had to turn the settings down.  My PC randomly rebooted.  I turned down the video quality and the problem was solved.

LoTRO's official help advised that Vista32 systems in combination with graphics cards that had over 512Mb memory were having these problems. Apparently there is some problem with how 32 bit Vista manages memory. I would go with 64 bit Vista unless you have older software that will not run on 64 bit vista.

At the time I had this problem, Microsoft's official site advised that you cannot upgrade directly  from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Vista and you have to buy 64 bit Vista. 

 

Get Windows 7 RC 64 bit for free, not sure how it'll work with LotRO but it's free to try and is working well for me ATM.

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Originally posted by thorwood
At the time I had this problem, Microsoft's official site advised that you cannot upgrade directly  from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Vista and you have to buy 64 bit Vista. 
 

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I don't know if it was different at the time, but currently Microsoft says any Vista 32 key will work with Vista 64 as well you just need the disc to install it. They provide a Vista 64 DVD for ~$10 for shipping and such if you can't find someone with a disc you can use: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/1033/ordermedia/default.mspx

Their site does say you can't upgrade from 32bit to 64bit Vista but they mean you have to do a clean install, not that you can't procure and use Vista64 if you own Vista32.

I did experience the same problem you had in LoTRO, didn't they fix that issue in either SP1 or some other hotfix though?

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Originally posted by drag9999

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Originally posted by noquarter

Heh we have an old machine sitting around with a 6600gt in it that runs lotro and doesn't even have to be at the lowest settings, that game engine can scale surprisingly far. :)

You don't necessarily need the raptor in drags build though - hard to sell me on fast HD's when working on a budget, but it is nice if you want it. You could put 20 bucks more into the high capacity drive though for a 640gb or so.

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For daily use Raptors are better performance than a 2-disk RAID0 setup and since this system wasn't really budget, thought I'd throw that in. I guess you could, but that was the first HD I found that was quite cheap, didn't really research much.

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Oh yea, I'm over RAID0, the Raptor is clearly more useful for normal usage than a RAID0 - just saying the performance you get from $80 of HD only during disk access isn't that solid of an investment to me over investing $80 more into the video or cpu (especially video) since those are constant performance boosters.

Originally posted by noquarter

 

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Originally posted by thorwood
At the time I had this problem, Microsoft's official site advised that you cannot upgrade directly  from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Vista and you have to buy 64 bit Vista. 
 

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I don't know if it was different at the time, but currently Microsoft says any Vista 32 key will work with Vista 64 as well you just need the disc to install it. They provide a Vista 64 DVD for ~$10 for shipping and such if you can't find someone with a disc you can use: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/1033/ordermedia/default.mspx

Their site does say you can't upgrade from 32bit to 64bit Vista but they mean you have to do a clean install, not that you can't procure and use Vista64 if you own Vista32.

I did experience the same problem you had in LoTRO, didn't they fix that issue in either SP1 or some other hotfix though?

It looks like Microsoft have changed the purchase cost.  When I looked,  if you had the OEM 32 Vista (the 32 bit Vista license for Vista installed on new computers), you had to pay full price to switch to the 64 bit version.
 

I might be wrong, but a clean install means wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch?  That is fairly daunting, particularly for online games that have to be download, and even if you have disks for an online game, they are usually so out of date that the amount of patching required is the same as downloading and patching the full game.  For a lot of games, just backing up the game files may not be enough to get the game to run on clean system.

The other installation alternative was to install xp and update to Vista 64 bit.

The fix was not in SP1 as that is really old.  Might have been a hotfix later.  My graphic settings were reduced to a lower quality setting not long after the release of Moria and I have never tried the highest setting since.

For me, I am hoping that Windows 7 will install over Vista 32 without having to do a clean install.

Don't get a AMD x 3, they are made for servers , stick to a AMD Phenom II x 4 BE.

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Originally posted by thorwood

I might be wrong, but a clean install means wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch?  That is fairly daunting, particularly for online games that have to be download, and even if you have disks for an online game, they are usually so out of date that the amount of patching required is the same as downloading and patching the full game.  For a lot of games, just backing up the game files may not be enough to get the game to run on clean system.
The other installation alternative was to install xp and update to Vista 64 bit.
The fix was not in SP1 as that is really old.  Might have been a hotfix later.  My graphic settings were reduced to a lower quality setting not long after the release of Moria and I have never tried the highest setting since.
For me, I am hoping that Windows 7 will install over Vista 32 without having to do a clean install.

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Clean install can just be an install over top of another copy of Windows without reformatting. I often do reformat my OS partition on a clean install anyway just to clean up but it's not necessary.

Here is the hotfix I was talking about: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105 it was apparently included in SP1 as well but you should check to make sure it is installed.

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Originally posted by solareus
Don't get a AMD x 3, they are made for servers , stick to a AMD Phenom II x 4 BE.

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I don't find this to be true at all, if you look at any benchmarks the x3 scores the same as the equal clocked x4 because even multi-core optimized games can't take advantage of 4 cores over 3.