No, that would be referring to Video cards. Specifically the Radeon HD 4870 that was released fairly recently. It's a mid-range single card that's been making some news lately for being a very good price/performance option compared to higher costing cards.
considering that lineageII doesn't make use of crossfire (unless you apply some pretty specific "hacks" to the driver to force crossfire which still isn't very affective).
The performance over a HD3870/2900/X1900 is only benficial at higher resolutions.
What's taken a pretty **** good leap in performance has been the FSAA applied,
8800 gt with 512 mb great card for l2
no use to pay more
with intel core 2 duo 2,83 and 4 gb ram raptor raid drives theres no problem to box 6 account having no lag .
Problem is Vista with aero glass manager ....
video card don't affect l2 performance much.
CPUs have notable influence.
RAM is next important. The more you have, the better l2 runs.
And to shorten black screens you need high-end fast hard disk. It's better if you have two identical and make RAID.
ps. yes, i'm going to buy 4870 for myself... and a 8x00 CPU.... currently thinking of 8500 model, but someone tells that i could overclock 8400 and get better performance. o.o
ps. yes, i'm going to buy 4870 for myself... and a 8x00 CPU.... currently thinking of 8500 model, but someone tells that i could overclock 8400 and get better performance. o.o
In regards to the CPU, I bought an E8400 about a month ago, and immediately overclocked it to 3.7GHz, perfectly stable, on aftermarket air cooling.
It's running like a champ, and if you're inclined toward liquid-cooling, you can do even better. In my opinion, your friend is right: the jump to an E8500 isn't worth the extra money.
(And to echo previous posts: 6MB cache FTW!)
On the original topic of video cards, I run an 8800GTS rev.2, and have been impressed with it since the day it was unboxed. That said, if I wasn't already running a card that's frankly kind of overkill for L2 anyway, the new 4870 would be VERY tempting.
It's performed amazingly well in benchmarks for a card in its price range, and I think it's an excellent value.
Go for it.
It'll definitely be able to handle L2 lag-free under all but the most strenuous settings. Just make sure your CPU, RAM, and hard drive(s) are on par, or you won't be taking advantage of the card's full capability.
EDIT: 4.2 GHz? The only consumer CPU I recall ever hitting that was the Pentium 4 range. If that's what you're running, then that's a lot of raw speed, but keep in mind that older processors execute a lot less efficiently, per clock cycle, than newer introductions.