56k Yay or nay?!!

[Ciller]

I'm from Australia and when i play FFA etc i tend to look for games that are in Australia(AusGamer etc). However if i play on servers say from US, i only try to get into dueling game where there is only 2 people on the screen at the same time. This was i hardly get much lag.

[NerfYoda]

Originally posted by FatboyTim

I use an external modem too. They are 'hardware' driven rather than the 'software' driven (internal) winmodems. I found that the intenal modem that was bundled with my PC gave me great download speeds when using the 'net, but an utterly awful ping when gaming! (About twice as high as the external modem I use instead.)

 

Just wanted to add a little. If you've got an older system that supports it most ISA internal modems are still hardware based. The reason software driven modems are bad is because instead of hardware chips soldered onto the modem taking care of the whole modulator/demodulator thing it's using your CPU cycles to do it.. which of course translates to lag, bad FPS, etc. Heh if I remember right the old PowerMacs came with a modem called a GeoPort which was *just* the jack.. EVERYTHING else was handled by the CPU. And people wondered why they would get disconnected while trying to surf while defragging your hard drive or whatever.

 

There are other factors that will go into a modem users ping time.. phone line quality & your ISP's backbone connection/utilization. Your phone line in general you cant do too much about unless youre having voice or fax problems, but your ISP you can always change.