tech advice - please help!

[mechanicalhand]

hello,

i have just bought a new comp,

Dell inspiron 531
AMD® Live Technology - Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium
Dell™ 19" Silver Wide Flat Panel
2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024]
320GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst™ cache
256MB NVIIDA® GeForce® 8300GS Turbocache graphics card
16x DVD +/- RW Drive
Integrated 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio

and was wondering if and/or how well half life 2 will run on this system, cant really afford to upgrade things like the graphics card at the mo. will it be enough for me enjoy the game at a 'reasonable' quality? thanks.

Mec Hand. x

 

[Rapstah]

Most of it will run it fine. The graphics card, though... I've never heard of the 8300 series.

 

[mechanicalhand]

its a OEM?? i think, and pretty new, the closest one to it you can buy is the 8400GS, but they seem to be the poor cousins of real gaming cards, hence my worry. all this misleading turbo cache nonsense just confuses the issue and i cant seem to find any real explanation of specs outside of wiki and even then its none too clear, at least to me lol

cheers,

Mec Hand x

 

[mechanicalhand]

these are the specs for the 8300GS card, what do they mean in terms of playability?? ..im such a noob lol..

Memory: 512MB Turbocache (128MB GDDR2 SDRAM on board, 334MB shared system memory)

Controller speed:540MHz

on board memory speed:400MHz

on board memory data width: 64-bit

# of Vertex Shaders:8 Unified Stream Processors

# of Pixel Shaders:8 Unified Stream Processors

Maximum Resolution:1920x1200

any help would be great, its all greek to me..

cheers,

Mec Hand

 

[Hooker]

these are the specs for the 8300GS card, what do they mean in terms of playability?? ..im such a noob lol..

Memory: 512MB Turbocache (128MB GDDR2 SDRAM on board, 334MB shared system memory)

Controller speed:540MHz

on board memory speed:400MHz

on board memory data width: 64-bit

# of Vertex Shaders:8 Unified Stream Processors

# of Pixel Shaders:8 Unified Stream Processors

Maximum Resolution:1920x1200

any help would be great, its all greek to me..

cheers,

Mec Hand

It'll certainly be able to play the game, but "reasonable" quality to me isn't the same to you. 128 GDDR2 isn't all that great. Typically, what you would look for in a card is GDDR3 with at least a 256 frame buffer. It wouldn't make any sense to go into the mechanics of it now. Just to let you know, you would have a much, much better experience with a different card. I would, yet again, recommend a 7600GT. You won't be able to play DX10 games, but with your current card, I wouldn't count on playing DX10 well anyway. This is why it's so important to research video cards before you buy a system. I know everyone doesn't have time to do that, but it is the way to go for sure. The 7600 GT is a quick card that will play HALFLIFE 2 very well, along with oodles of other games, without having to upgrade case or power supply. It's well worth your investment.

 

[mechanicalhand]

kool thanks, i hear you on the graphics card front, it was only cos of dells limited choice that im stuck with that option, not havin the extra 50 to get the 8600. in a perfect world i would have built my own stack etc etc, but time and need outweighed that option, the machine is gonna mostly be used for boring stuff like writing essays, but as long as i can taste hlflf2 ill be happy, can always upgrade later, lol recently my game of choice has been mario on the n64, so as long as i have gameplay i can sacrifice quality.. at least for the time being.

cheers,

Mec Hand x