I have a shitty computer as of now....but...i want to know what kinda hardrive i need and all that junk to make it fast...i will be playing alot of games...like joint ops and such.. i want NO lag..but i dont want to pay an arm and a leg...like i heard about a 120gb harddrive for like 100 bucks or somthing like that...well i need ot know what video card and all that so please help me thanks
This is for all you smart guys......
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The hard drive is not really that important - so long as it is 80 gig plus you should be fine.
If you want no lag, well, that isnt going to happen, but for smooth online play you are going to need a cable connection of at least 576 kbps up, 256 kbps down.
If you do have an old PC, chances are you will have to replace everything pretty much... as modern components will be bottle necked if you add them to older parts.
Really, I would say you need something along the lines of an Athlon 3000+ processor, with 512 MB RAM at 3200 speed, and Radeon 3D card of 9600 or above, with a motherboard capable of using them.
That is, if you want to play the newest games. This is basically the system I have, and I am finding I am needing to upgrade it now (thinking of doubling the RAM and getting a new 3D card), but then it depends on how resource grabbing the games you want to play are.
The hard drive is not really that important - so long as it is 80 gig plus you should be fine.
If you want no lag, well, that isnt going to happen, but for smooth online play you are going to need a cable connection of at least 576 kbps up, 256 kbps down.
If you do have an old PC, chances are you will have to replace everything pretty much... as modern components will be bottle necked if you add them to older parts.
Really, I would say you need something along the lines of an Athlon 3000+ processor, with 512 MB RAM at 3200 speed, and Radeon 3D card of 9600 or above, with a motherboard capable of using them.
That is, if you want to play the newest games. This is basically the system I have, and I am finding I am needing to upgrade it now (thinking of doubling the RAM and getting a new 3D card), but then it depends on how resource grabbing the games you want to play are.
Yeah, on the alternate end, you can get a bundle from www.trigerdirect.com for around 250 bucks thats got your motherboard and processer all in one. A p4 or high end celeron will give you decent performance. What mainly causes lag during online play are two things.
1) being the amount of RAM you have and the speed of it. Have someone look at your computer and see how much ram you can add to it and what type. I always reccomend 1gb of ram for damn near anything.
2) As yimmy said, you need at least a tier 1 DSL connection to have a decently smooth play.
1) being the amount of RAM you have and the speed of it. Have someone look at your computer and see how much ram you can add to it and what type. I always reccomend 1gb of ram for damn near anything.
2) As yimmy said, you need at least a tier 1 DSL connection to have a decently smooth play.
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I dont see anything about your hard drive...how big is it?
If you are going to game, you need the most cutting edge thing you can find. High end graphics card (with a lot of on board memory on the card), fast processor (we're up to 4Ghz now, well last I heard.), as much RAM as your board can hold (XP seems to like as much RAM as you can throw at it.). I suggest you invest in a SCSI hard drive....seek speeds are a lot faster than an IDE, and your game, should it need to go to the hard drive, wont blip as bad.
If you are going to game, you need the most cutting edge thing you can find. High end graphics card (with a lot of on board memory on the card), fast processor (we're up to 4Ghz now, well last I heard.), as much RAM as your board can hold (XP seems to like as much RAM as you can throw at it.). I suggest you invest in a SCSI hard drive....seek speeds are a lot faster than an IDE, and your game, should it need to go to the hard drive, wont blip as bad.
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Having had a job at a certain... evil retail store that builds and sells machines (As well as every other imaginable electronic product), I can saftely say that your current rig needs RAM.
Joint Ops would fly a lot better if you upgraded that. Problem being, upgrading SDRAM would cost about the same as getting a Motherboard and CPU.
CPU's can easily be overclocked right out the box with no "harm." You can buy a P4 2.4 800FSB and OC it to 3+GHZ no sweat. The same could be said fro the AMD 2500+, which overclocks right out of the box to 3200+
Motherboards are more a personal preference, as some people swear by ABIT only, or ASUS only, some people are DFI fiends. You get what you pay for in a motherboard.
RAM you also get what you pay for. Get DDR that is going to run on your bus speed, do not bottleneck yourself getting cheaper slower ram. I perfer Corsair XMS, Hyper X is good as well. Get 1GB, (2 512mb sticks) and run them in dual channel mode. Getting a pair of XMS won't cost as much as you think.
Hard drive speed isn't really as important as you think. Nor is size. I perfer to run extremely fast, small drives, either SATA or SCSI. Right now I have 2 40GB Raptor SATA drives.
Video card is also important. That all depends if your going AGP or PCI express, so that would depend on motherboard choice.
People are divided between nVidia and ATI, I've had shitty cards from both, and good cards from both.
Bottom line- You need more RAM, lots of it.
Joint Ops would fly a lot better if you upgraded that. Problem being, upgrading SDRAM would cost about the same as getting a Motherboard and CPU.
CPU's can easily be overclocked right out the box with no "harm." You can buy a P4 2.4 800FSB and OC it to 3+GHZ no sweat. The same could be said fro the AMD 2500+, which overclocks right out of the box to 3200+
Motherboards are more a personal preference, as some people swear by ABIT only, or ASUS only, some people are DFI fiends. You get what you pay for in a motherboard.
RAM you also get what you pay for. Get DDR that is going to run on your bus speed, do not bottleneck yourself getting cheaper slower ram. I perfer Corsair XMS, Hyper X is good as well. Get 1GB, (2 512mb sticks) and run them in dual channel mode. Getting a pair of XMS won't cost as much as you think.
Hard drive speed isn't really as important as you think. Nor is size. I perfer to run extremely fast, small drives, either SATA or SCSI. Right now I have 2 40GB Raptor SATA drives.
Video card is also important. That all depends if your going AGP or PCI express, so that would depend on motherboard choice.
People are divided between nVidia and ATI, I've had shitty cards from both, and good cards from both.
Bottom line- You need more RAM, lots of it.
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