about my vid...

[Fingolfin]

I got 1700+ with high res bench, and with following general specs

2,5ghz
512mb ddr
radeon 9200

can I get much higher with a new vid card, or doesnt it matter very much. Im still in doubt of buying a newer vid card (9600, 9800 is too expesive atm for me). Should I buy the 9600? Im getting ff xi in september/october (release date for EU) so theres some time to save money.

[Netrus]

yea ull get a higher score..i got 2000 something with my 9800pro all the other specs r like yours....odd tho some of these ppl i see on here get a high ass score and doesnt seem like there comp could get one that high...but yea it would improve ur score most definately

[Fingolfin]

okay, ill get a job then god i HATE work haha. But its true some people are definetly bragging about there scores and lie about em, dunno why but I suppose they build there pc's themselves and are darn proud of em? :spin:

[JncoDragon]

I think the best thing you could do is upgrade your video card. I had a score of 4384 on the high quality benchmark with the following setup:

Athlon XP 2500+ (1.833GHz; Barton core)
1GB OCZ PC3200 DDR RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB

There are a lot of contributing factors to why some people get higher scores than others with certain machines. A lot of it has to do with the motherboard, the type of memory (especially the timings on the memory), hard drive (cache size; access times), sound card, and how much is running in the background. The sound card has a lot to do with it because some sound cards use the CPU to do the majority of the processing thus lowering benchmark scores. If you go with an Audigy line (I have the Audigy 2 ZS), they have an independent processor that relieves some of the stress on the CPU. It might not be that some people are lying, but they might have put more time into choosing their parts to squeeze out the best performance. I know that is what I do when I build my machines. :-)

~JncoDragon