Guild Wars & Battlefield 2

Battlefield 2 is quite demanding of system performance. Still a great game that I can highly recommend... Heck I still go back to playing it quite often...

You'll need a P4 > 3.0Ghz / Athlon XP @ 2.2Ghz for an older system. Celerons and Semprons are not a good idea... AMD Athlon-64 or any Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad would be best.

It needs at least 2Gb RAM for Windows XP.
Any card > 7800GS / 1650 Pro will play the game (preferably a 512Mb card for best performance). A more modern card like the ATI 4670 (or better) would run it most smoothly I would reckon.

I remember trying to play it on a 9800 Pro (128Mb) it was a painful @1600x1200... My current PCIe X1950 Pro (512Mb) plays it well @1600x1200 with high GPU settings.

Bob

What about this card??

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

That is really old tech and just entry level. It is 12 pixel pipelines vs. 8 pixel pipelines of the 9800 Pro (the extra video RAM helps a lot of course). My flatmate uses one and it's OK for gaming at 1024x768.

Hows about: ATI 4650 (128-bit RAM interface) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127384

or (better)

ATI 4670 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127383

A 46xx card is a bit more expensive but worth it!! Don't forget you get better gaming performance and much better HD / x264 decoding offload vs. older GPUs (the X1650 won't support this) - future proofing, etc.

BTW do you have 2Gb or more of system RAM?? BF2 is a real memory hog!!

With BF2 the maps are very big so you can really benefit from installing the game on a fast harddisk
[ Samsung/Intel SSD, 10K / 15K rpm SAS/SCSI/SATA HDs or newer 7200 rpm SATA drives (Samsung Spinpoint F1, WD Caviar Black, Seagate 7200.10/11 series, etc.) ]

Bob

I have 4GB of Mem and going to get a 630GB Western Digital HDD

Sounds like you are good to go then!!

Bob

bf2 is still played ALOT check out the jolt.co.uk city maps server. In all my years of bf2'ing (since launch) its got the highest standard of play ive ever seen. Real bitter battles most rounds lol I played it for a year with a p4 3.0ghz and a vanilla geforce 6600, averaging 35fps at 1024x768. Put textures and Geometries on medium to avoid the worst of the HD thrashing bf2 so loves.

Well, my old Pentium D maxed out BF2 using a 7800 GTX...its not THAT demanding a game...

Yeh well my P4 (prescott) @ 3.6Ghz plus 7800 GS+ (512) could play it at decent FPS as well (until I retired that machine)...
An ATI X1650 Pro is like 150% rendering performance of a Radeon 9800 Pro and that is long way short of the performance of the 7800 GTX!! The game definitely demands a decent card (unless you plan to play it at 1024x768 @ lowered settings).

Hell the ATI 4670 card is a steal and will play the game very nicely. Job done...

Bob

I used to play BF2 with a X700 128mb and 1gig of system ram, Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz) on low settings with decent playability, now that I have a 4650 and 1.5gb of Ram and a better PSU I can play it on high settings with AA at 4, cant wait to get my other 2gb of ram in tomorrow