A cable modem will do nothing to lower packetloss. What it will do is decrease ping time, which can lessen the impact of packetloss problems. The only way to (hopefully) lessen packetloss problems is to try a different ISP (which, subscribing to a cable modem service, you will accomplish). The main problem with cable modems, however, is that as more people in your area subscribe to cable modem service, your connection quality will decrease. This is also true for dial up service, but to a far lesser extent since they are low connection speed to begin with. As I will explain in a moment, this is not as a real big problem. DSL, supposedly, does not have this downfall.

There were recent reports that the @Home service was experiencing all kinds of problems, including bad connections to the EQ servers. Not being a cable modem subscriber, I do not know how true these reports are.

The final thing to consider is that EQ is designed to work with clients using standard dial-up service. Dial-up customers are in the vast majority so Sony/Verant, of course, are going to cater to them primarily. What this means is a higher connection speed to the EQ servers will not gain you an unrealistic advantage since the EQ servers are not designed to take full advantage of high speed connections. What you will gain is a more reliable connection (no hang-ups) and better ping (which, as mentioned above, can help lessen the impact of high packetloss). It will, of course, be a faster connection to the EQ servers, just not as big a difference in speed as you would see surfing the web.

As for the Voodoo3 card, I don't really know for sure. Connection speed is the bottleneck, so anything Voodoo2/TNT or better will be fine. Voodoo3 will probably be better than VooDoo2 (in EQ), but probably not as big a difference as going from Voodoo1 to Voodoo2. I run a VooDoo Banshee and I work fine.

The rest of your system kicks, so I wouldn't worry about it much.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: blizzard15@...
[mailto:blizzard15@...]
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 12:37 PM
To: everquest@onelist.com
Subject: [EverQuest] Voodoo3 2000, System, Cable Modem

From: blizzard15@...

I am building a new computer and I was wondering if any of you have had any
experience with the Voodoo3 2000. Does it give good enough performance to
warrant buying it? Also would the following system give good performance on
EverQuest?

Celeron 433
128 MB PC100 SDRAM
Diamond Monster MX300
Abit BX6 Rev2
Maxtor 10.2GB 5400 RPM
Diamond SupraExress 56K Internal ISA

Also I've been seeing that the Cable Modems aren't that good for EQ, but I
was wondering how bad are they? Will they get at least better performance
than a 56K? Answers to any of these questions would be very appreciated.

-Blizzard

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