Enough PC for multitabling?

[Stealthy]

Cross-posted from C/T post: Tips for multitabling in SS/NL Holdem.

I am ordering a new PC from Dell on Saturday as mine is rubbish. I have an 1800 megahertz AMD Athlon XP processor. 512MB of memory with an 80 gig HD which never gets even half full. I am also lumbered with a monitor that offers a wopping 1280 X 1024 resolution. This means that I multitable 4 tables with tons of overlap as on the 1280 X 1024 setting the picture is so bad I can barely read it, so I actually use a resolution of 1152 X 864! Overlap is an understatement!

Also the PC really drags when I have 12 Party tables open (I keep a lot open cause I junp around tables a lot), PT and GameTime running. It takes ages to import the hands and lags a lot when doing so. Party closed down some graphics automatically this week cause of low memory! This has become so bad this week as it gets worse the longer I am online and after 2 hours of Poker the game becomes unplayable if I try to keep PT running! Very -EV.

So to my question is this new PC enough to allow great mutitabling with no lag?

I am now buying an Intel® Pentium® D Processor 820 with DualCore Technology (2.80GHz,800MHz fsb,2x1MB cache) which I assume will be a big improvement processor wise.

Question 1 - my memory will be 1024MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz (2x512). Is this enough or do I need 2048MB. I know bigger memory is better but do I need it?

Question 2 - I am buying the Dell 20" UltraSharp™ Wide Aspect Flat Panel with Height Adj Stand (2007WFP) with 1680 X 1050 resolution. 2007WFP How many Party tables will fit with no overlaps on a monitor with these specs? I want to be able to eventually move up to maybe 9 tables with 3 banks of 3 on one screen. I know I will have to resize the tables for this but is it doable without overlap?

Question 3 - I am just using the Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 that come with the machine. Am I right to assume that if I am just playing poker I will not need any better as the good monitor is the important thing.

I am tring to keep the whole thing under £1,000 which is $1,850. Things are more expensive in UK than US generally so don't link to other non-UK deals as I just need to know that my money is well invested on the above specs.

[Wake up CALL]

The lag isn't being caused by your multi-tabling, it is PT and GT causing your troubles. As far as if your new one will cure your problem, it is likely to improve but hard to tell by how much.

[Stealthy]

[ QUOTE ]
The lag isn't being caused by your multi-tabling, it is PT and GT causing your troubles. As far as if your new one will cure your problem, it is likely to improve but hard to tell by how much.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep I know it is PT and GameTime which are heavy on the memory juice. Don't know enough about DualCore to know if this will help a lot or not.

[Dennisa]

I think to run your monitor you will need a pci express graphics cards. Look for something with DVI outputs. It will also have memory on board as the Intel will use system memory for the video.

1024MB should be ok for now. In a year or two you will probably want to go to 2-4GB

[kyleb]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The lag isn't being caused by your multi-tabling, it is PT and GT causing your troubles. As far as if your new one will cure your problem, it is likely to improve but hard to tell by how much.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep I know it is PT and GameTime which are heavy on the memory juice. Don't know enough about DualCore to know if this will help a lot or not.

[/ QUOTE ]

Multiple processors don't help PT run any faster, because PT isn't multithreaded. PT is actually programmed pretty terribly, but they don't seem to want to change it since everyone uses it anyway.

Dualcore processors will speed up the database processing if you use Postgres since it is multithreaded, however. You won't see much improvement, but the bottleneck is probably the speed of your hard drive. Get a WD Raptor 10k SATA drive.

[Stealthy]

The Hard Drive I have down to buy is 250GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache. Good enough?

[kyleb]

You should get a Raptor 10k drive. Failing that, a 7200 RPM 16 MB drive.

[Blixx]

[ QUOTE ]

Question 1 - my memory will be 1024MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz (2x512). Is this enough or do I need 2048MB. I know bigger memory is better but do I need it?

Question 3 - I am just using the Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 that come with the machine. Am I right to assume that if I am just playing poker I will not need any better as the good monitor is the important thing.


[/ QUOTE ]

What operating system and motherboard will it come with?

Concerning the ram if the MB has 4 ram slots then 2x512MB should be fine for now, if it only has 2 slots get 1x1024MB or consider springing for 2x1024MB dual channel. If you're using WinXP or older there isn't any performance gain going over 2GB of ram. I haven't tried Vista but I'd imagine you'd want 2GB to run it smoothly.

The integrated graphics card should be OK if you're just playing poker, consider upgrading if it isn't DVI though.

The slowdown your getting is from PT/GT+ and it'll be hard to improve its performance much with your stated budget.

[jkpoker]

make sure the HD is a sata 3.0g 7200rpm if not the faster raptors

I would suggest the full 2g ram since it most likely will be running on vista also which likes to use up lots of that.

[CORed]

I'm not sure multi-threading would help PT much. Because it's a database program, the limiting factor is probably disk I/O. I doubt it's putting much load on the processor even with multiple tables running. The best way to speed it up is a fast disk and lots of memory (memory will be used for disk caching. Processors are so fast now that the processor is hardly ever the limiting factor any more.