Latest ALDI offering

[BoeingBoy]

A revised ALDI offer from Medion with a 256mb graphic card upgrade is due out next Thursday. £499.99

Can anyone in the know tell me if this is going to be a good machine for Flight simming and gaming, or is the Nvidea 9600 an old card these days.

I am running an ATI 9700 128mb card on ALDI's machine of last year and am quite happy, but would like to upgrade the card to 256. Since I would be happy to spend a couple of hundred doing that I am wondering if going the whole hog and just buying the complete computer would be better.

Here is the spec:

Medion Computer from ALDI

[FunkyMunky]

As far as I am aware, the nvidia 6200 does not actually have 256mb of onboard memory; Instead it has 64mb of onboard "Turbocache" and uses the main system memory (up to 256mb) as a framebuffer. It's not that good a card anyways, and would only appear to offer similiar performance to the past generation of cards, but at a budget price.

The Aldi system looks a half decent buy otherwise, and if you throw a £60 Geforce 6600 256mb in there, it'll offer decent punch. A similiar AMD system could be built however, running cooler and quieter, for around £500. If I bought the Aldi system, I'd throw in new graphics because you wont see much of a performance boost with the Turbocache 6200's.

[Conan the Librarian]

If FS9 works well - stay with it. I have looked over the Aldi offering just a few hours ago. Not bad - but wait to see what Gatesy needs as a min platform. Wait for the next FS release before moving.

If you are running VFR scenery, whatever you run will be slow to load. Live with it for now.

Conan

[BoeingBoy]

Thanks, but I am happy with ALDI's machine of two issues ago. That has a Radeon 9700/128mb in it and runs FS9 at 40+fps without problem.

I was looking at the current one with a view to recommending it to a colleague for an upgrade from an old Win95 machine.

[Kestrel_909]

Interesting, from someone who has been thinking about buying new or building a gaming PC. I'm not serious enough (or rich enough) to go down the Alienware or Dell XPS route.

Funky,
What could I build for £500 ish using AMD 64bit and PCI Express technology, full works excluding monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers.

Thanks

Edit: A kick in the teeth, there are no Aldi stores in Wobble aka N.I.

[Daysleeper]

What could I build for £500 ish using AMD 64bit and PCI Express technology, full works excluding monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers.

I built a

AMD64 3000+ (£84)
Ax-8 mobo (£60)
1 Gb ram (£45)
PCI-E 6600GT (£70),
80GB SATA HDD (£34)
And a case, fans, copy of win xp etc.(£100)

Runs all the latest games (Battlefield 2 mainly at the moment) really smooth. First machine I ever built and I'm dead chuffed with it. I ordered all the bits off a UK internet shop.

I included a 17" TFT screen from LG (£134).

Well worth it.

[mazzy1026]

The one coming out next week is not as good as the previous one, hence the £500 difference. We got the one just before Christmas, but the noise of the fan was terrible, so we swapped it for the one that came out in January this year (or around then).

It is a fantastic machine, and I run FS9 on full whack without any problems at all, as well as scenery.

Cheers,

Maz