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Originally Posted by Misanthropy
don't quote me on this, but wouldn't you be better off using your onboard graphics processor? Depends on your motherboard I suppose
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Onboard GFX is usually fucking rank for any type of 3D gaming, regardless of the chip, motherboards are overcrowded as it is, onboard LAN, sound, RAID etc are a bonus because the big manufacturers always use standard LAN chips that XP can easily detect and won't need drivers, the AC97 soundchip is rather tasty and gives good 5.1 (though i think some boards still use ESS Audiodrives and they are shyte) and lastly onboard RAID is not stifled by your PCI bus speeds giving you a tasty hard disk experience, but GFX i would always say is a no, i wouldn't even get a motherboard with onboard GFX as it tends to fuck up, and any time you reset the CMOS due to an overclock gone wrong you will have to remember to switch the onboard off again via your BIOS or it will mince up XP :/
Basically having something onboard will give you an extra pci slot you don't have to fill with shit, and just about all onboard systems will run off 1 chip, whereas your GFX will have a processor, sub-processors, FPU's, memory chips and a fuckload of small-but-powerful capacitors that will warm up your motherboard intensely.
If you don't use something on a regular basis, disable it via the BIOS, I haven't had anything that used Parallel ports or COM ports since I had an external modem and a parallel scanner about 3 years ago, so i deactivated them, frees up resources in windows and i imagine takes strain off the processor and memory by not having them active. I've even just disabled my floppy controller and the 2 slaves on my IDE cables due to losing my floppy and 2nd hard drive to another computer. Switch off anything you don't use, you will gain a fraction of resources back. If you never used a certain bedroom, you wouldn't have the central heating in that room on would ya?
Fuck me, that was a ramble :P
sorry