Single Core CPU Question

Quite an old system you got there. IMO, you could still play a decent fps in low settings.

yeah thats pretty much minimum spec

I think your system would play the games but not with everything turned up.

It depends on your OS and your RAM is lacking becasue it is not even in dual channel mode.

As stated by wathman, if you have some money to sapre, buy some cheap dual channel RAM, 2x1G or even better 2x2G RAM for your board, but don't spent more than $35 - $55 on that system.

games under XP should be able allocate up to 2GB of RAM, won't make a huge impact over the 1.5GB he already has, but it will help a little. I just recommended to max it out because it's so cheap to upgrade DDR2 RAM

Some people like to run things until they die... my dad is like that. If he wants to start with a fresh build, I'd say that's a good idea too.

A 2.0Ghz P4 means Northwood or Willamette with no hyperthreading, and no SSE3. That right there tells me those games won't fly on that machine. My aged P4 machine plays NFS: Prostreet at the lowest settings for all visuals and 1024 with barely playable frame rates (the newest game I play, simply because I need a new system to play anything newer). I know your GPU kills mine, but I think that your CPU is going to kill any playability with newer games (just an opinion)

Anyways would it help if I got a 2.4GHz P4 and overclocked it to around 2.7GHz?

So I shouldn't get the 9600GSO? Would it get cheaper when the DX11 cards come out?

Is guess your right, I'm think about it. Thanks all!

I remember that speed. I even had 2.4ghz and 533. loooong time runner, and still so I presume. It could possibly run forever.
I liked it enough to also go prescott, HT 3.4ghz, 3gb ram, dual channel memory..and two drives twinned. Classic and still new... even the agp still goes where I want with the ati 2600 pro. (I simply encode my own mpeg2)..the prescott is now at 22000 hours, and I am here with it. they are a good machine even today, right now.


EDIT: I do not know if you were informed, but windows xp basic or vista basic is a pile of crap with the prescott. it treats it like a little cpu. I installed vista premium full clean install and met a whole new world. The ram use is quibble talk, just get more.
wn2k pro is also a great one.