Just Insatlled ut2004 Demo...........

[Benfica]

how much will this increase this my system's efficience, what are the prices and what affect's it... only loading times or just everything. is it hardware-dependant?
i have a (in holland) mid-range system:
AMD 64 X2 4600+
2Gigs standard ram
ATI X1300 256MB
320GB standard HD (checking manufacturer etc. now)
no raid card and XP

You really don't need to buy new hardware, your disk will do just fine You have tons of RAM that can cache a lot of stuff

Often I'm one of the first guys to join a new 32p ONS map. I also have 2GB of RAM, ValueRAM with lame timings and a 1.86 C2D oc'ed to 3GHz. All I had to do is what I said, and avoid UT2004\cache fragmentation. Otherwise the disk could really be the bottleneck.

Sure, crazy high end stuff, could make me load even 2 or 3 second faster, but then with UE3 file access is not synchronous with the CPU (I believe that's what Epic means about streaming). It is processing some data while the disk is reading ahead. And servers wait for players to join.

[Skill]

my 2k4 folder is 20 gig now lol

i feel for you

[Ice-Child]

also UT3 may easily be larger than 8 gig.

Would almost have to be. A 2 million poly model itself can easily run 30-40 meg alone. So figure each model at say 500k polys, your looking at the high poly versions being over 1 gig, easily. I'm thinking UT3 will be in the 12 gig or so range. Thats a rough guesstimate, so don't hold me to it.

[HoNkIfYoUrHiGh]

I Highly recommend using xp for unreal tourny 3. Vista is brand new, Xp has already had most of the bugs worked out. Vista, is basicly Beta.