Games.net

Posted at: 11/23/07 at 11:01 PM PST

We actually did plug in the graphics card, but at the last few moments of the competition they told us we had to take the PC downstairs and outside of the building. The unit dropped out of the box and made a rattle. We opend the PC and looked for the rattle; under the duress we forgot to plug in the video card power (we had to take out the card to check the other components since our build was so tight for space). The other team didn't install 64bit drivers, and never checked to see if the graphics card was operational. We had the card running before they told us to take it outside. The judges did their best to even the playing ground for running fps numbers and didn't solve their 64bit problem. I assume, had they fixed everything correctly, we would have had better numbers regardless. I would also contend their idea that raid0 was such a liability considering the fact that the life of two hard drives is the same as the life of one. They said the performance increase was slight compared to the risk, but we were looking for performance for the contest and not for the life of the computer. I would have chosen a faster hard drive if I had any idea that they were predjudice against raid0. Now, a year later, we know that hard drives are cheap and you can back-up with no problem. A raid1 would have been fine, but we were looking for any performance increase we could get. Which was probably why they chose XP64bit, but nobody was familiar with 64bit drivers and 64bit applications. Vista is ready to support 64bit, but at the time of this competition... Also, screw games for windows live and all of the Vista supported drivers. I would rather play older games that support ingame voip than buy Vista and pay for Live (I am saying this as an early adopter of 360 who already has and Xbox live subscription).