Will my rig play Diablo 3, and what video card should I purchase?

cmonstergt

Distinguished
Nov 8, 2011
5
0
18,510
Okay, so this is the first post I've put up. Before you laugh at my computer set up, realize that I won this in a raffle at my work for $5, and acquired some spare parts that were laying around (I work in the IT department).

It is an Optiplex 745 Mini-Tower.

It is a Core 2 Duo 2.13 Ghz machine with a Corsair 650W power supply and 7GB of DDR2 Ram, 1TB hard drive and Windows 7.

A link to it: http://www.dell.com/us/dfb/p/optiplex-745/pd

I don't currently have a video card, as I was waiting for the official min requirements for Diablo 3 to come out, to see if the rest of my machine qualifies before spending any money.

My first question is, will this computer run Diablo 3 with an appropriate video card?

Secondly, if it will run the game, then what would an appropriate video card for it be? I obviously don't need to buy a big badass card, if the bottleneck is in the CPU.

The system requirements for Diablo 3 are located here:
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-system-requirements

Minimum:

Intel Pentium® D 2.8 GHz or AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 4400+
NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800 GT or ATI Radeon™ X1950 Pro or better

Recommended:

Intel® Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 5600+ 2.8 GHz
NVIDIA® GeForce® 260 or ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 or better

It looks like I'm just under the 2.4 recommended with 2.13, so it seems like the CPU would work, but I'm not sure how low the D 2.8 Ghz Pentium is to compare.

As for the video card (if the first requirement is met), what should I get? There is space for 1 PCIe x 16 graphics card in the machine. The monitor I have is here:

http://216.52.208.185/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009266

The max resolution is 1920 x 1080. I'd like to play at that res, but solid framerate is a priority. I don't mind buying a nicer video card to achieve that res, but I don't want to waste time or money and buy one and it rocks, but the CPU can't keep up with it.

Any and most information would be helpful!

Thanks in Advance,

Joshua