NWN 2... I just hate requirements creep

I see the NWN2 spec is at least 2Gigs CPU speed, Spent an hour or two (oh, alright maybe three) looking at how to upgrade my CPU. I'm aware of ESSD precautions, even have an ESSD mat & wrist strap - never attempted a CPU replacment however - ZIF sockets seem to make it quite straight forward. Anyone entered the realms of replacing their CPU with one from the same stable i.e. Duron to Athlon Socket 462, just with a few more hertz gallopping away ?

Will your OS autodetect the fact you've a faster CPU or is it necessary to go through the whole install OS from scratch naus ?

All I'm missing is the conductive paste (apparatently you use a drop the size of a grain of rice....)


Regards,

Just enough paste for a VERY thin layer, yes.

I don't THINK you have to reinstall with a new CPU, but I've never switched CPU alone. If you switch the motherboard you often have to reinstall to stop weird crashes and errors. With just the CPU, I THINK you'll be ok.

It's a shame about NWN2 because it's not actually a particularly impressive game technically. It's fun ( albeit spectacularly repetitive ) and it's big, but it doesn't do anything technically which warrants the high specs. In fact, graphically it rarely looks much better than NWN1. Just in the in-engine cut scenes really. In order to stop the camera going doolally, you have to zoom out quite a bit and at that distance it doesn't look so special.

Thanks for that Gabriel, I played NWN1 when I'd a bit more time on my hands... my game times been on the slide of late and your post got me thinking of not bothring with NWN2 and sticking with the plethora of games I haven't played already.

Your post reinforces the problem of the potentially dodgy/annoying camera angles I've heard of elsewhere. I wonder if Bioware are aware of this potentially patchable glitch ?

has the scripting engine improved?

that was the biggest complaint about the first one

The camera angles are annoying for the fist ten maybe twenty minutes. But then you are suddenly used to it. I mean I agreed with all the complants, until I realise it was just a "learning to use the Camera" curve that I was on. Its no where near as anoying as the camera in some of the tomb raider games.
Dont get me wrong, it is a pain in the behind when you click on the door to open it, then click on the doorway to enter and it closes the door. And sometimes you do have to change camera mode to be able to see yourself, but it is not anywhere near as bad as it seems when you first start.

I just got both baulders gates with the expansions, and for the spec its wants I cannot beleve how not much better nwn is.

And definatly be a user of Magic, cos you can rest all the time, so you like, never runout of spells

Yes - I replaced my Duron 900 with an Athlon XP 1900+ that I picked up for $AU45.00 off eBay.

The OS (in my case at the time, WinXP) detects it fine. The only minor hitch I had was forgetting to check the jumper on the motherboard that had it set for the older slower processor, and the BIOS settings that meant the new processor was running at an uber-safe slower-than-default setting. Once I'd remembered to check (and change) those, it was all systems go.

And man, that was a sweet sweet moment.

You may or may not need to change anything - just remember to check. And yes, you only need a 'grain of rice'-sized portion of thermo paste.

The camera angles doesn't seem like so much of an issue if it is just the case that it is a learning curve, looks like I'll keep my copy of NWN2 for the distant day when I purchase a MOBO with some serious girth on the FSB front.

More invest on the hardware front has led to the following conclusions:

a MOBO with an FSB of 133 / 266Mhz is NO good for a Chip with FSB settings of 166 / 333 Mhz. 133 / 266 MHz chips are a dying breed.....

How your OS handles your upgrade will depend on many factors. If it is only a moderate increase in speed there "should" be no hitches...

aHem...

Notice the " marks.

First: is your MOBO able to handle the CPU?

Second: That SHORT grain of rice sized bit is only to even out the imperfections in the polished heat side... I rub that little bit on the polished side and then wipe on the heatsink sideswirling gentley.

I have seen artic silver used like BAD EPOXY on servers where people should know better.

I would keep myu OS Install disk handy in case you need to change bits of the OS to adapt to the new chip.

Oh, and, look into upgrading your memory is you have less than 512mb...

Looking at your mobo... maybe a BAREBONES CHIP AND MOBO package??? look around.

Cheers Rook,

your tip on the heat transfer resin sounds like a good one... call me 'chicken' but I've so much installed on my main computer - and being an AMD 1800 (1.6GHz) with a 128MBytes graphics card and about 600MBytes of RAM I didn't think it was a slouch - just goes to show I code & compile more than excercise the 3D capability these days.

I've been led to believe my MOBO would happily run a 2600+ Athlon with a 133MHz FSB rating without any major hassle - they are like rocking horse droppings though.

Hmmm, a barebones chip and MOBO package sounds appealing but shelling out so much dosh just to run one game doesnae sit well with me.

My wifes got a whizz bang 2GHz toshiba laptop -- with a gig of RAM -- that might run NWN -- not so sure how it fares on the 3D front though. Failing that I might upgrade my MOBO + main chip for christmas Next year --

Merry Christmas,

I had NWN2 installed for about 10 mins. What really distracted me was the fact that it need the crappy Net2.0 engine installed on my pc. Coding was never easy, but I thought these guys had experience to do better.

Now the CE is burried somewhere in my shelf.

There was a time when gaming made fun, games looked great and ran fast on high-end pcs and only had some bugs. But this was a long time ago... in a galaxy far far away.

I must be the only one here then who,

1) Liked NWN2
2) Didnt have a single crash from the start to the end.

I must admit that ziggy had already made me download .Net 2.0, which I was loath to do, but BLIDE was worth it, so I didnt know that NWN2 needed it, but surly its only the toolset that needs it?
And my PC isnt that good, about the only thing on it that is topdraw is the power supply.

I eagerly anticipate trying NWN2, but santa doesn't come till the 25th.... 5 days to find out whether it'll run or stuutter....

Yes. The crashes often happen because of a "pure virtual call" in msvcrt. Well done Obsidian, you useless cretinous morons.

Don't hold your breath. One of my mates has a 2 month old Alienware that set him back at least £5000, and even that chokes on it at times. Needless to say every other game runs like hot shit on this system.

thanx for that flame, I'll hang fire on upgrading my cpu to save the tears ....

I mean it runs fine most of the time (when nothing's happening), but it gets choppy once in a while in intense situations.

I suppose a few of these issues may have been addressed in some of the recent patches. I wouldn't know because I havn't been around his place in a while. Judging from forum posts and what not, everyone exept the D&D-o-philes seem pretty happy about the 1.3 patch.