This a good gaming pc for running games at medium settings?

[jordan009]

My specs
cpu-Amd athlon 245 X2 2.9 Ghz
video card-radeon hd 5770
Ram-4 gigs Ocz gold edition
HD- Wd 500 gig cavier blue
Psu-500watt antec psu
case antec sonata 3

 

[jordan009]

h and the Ram is DDR3

 

[tecmo34]

Yes, your PC will handle most games at medium settings without issues.

One suggestion would be to switch/upgrade your hard drive to a Samsung Spinpoint F3 or Seagate 7200.12 500GB or 1TB drive. (Right now TigerDirect has a great deal on the Seagate 7200.12 1TB!!)

 

[Onus]

Depending on resolution (e.g. 1680x1050 or lower), that PC would play a lot of games on high settings, although your CPU will be a bottleneck. If you haven't already bought these parts, spending a few $$ more for an Athlon II X3 440 would probably help a lot.

 

[jordan009]

well is a X4 much better than X3?

 

[Userremoved]

No the X3s are disabled X4s.

 

[WR2]

The price difference between Athlon II X2 245 Regor 2.9GHz ($59) and Athlon II X3 435 Rana 2.9GHz ($71) is really quite small @ $12.
Unless you're under a lot of pressure on your budget its a pretty good bargain.

 

[Userremoved]

I dont think the CPU is the problem.

 

[jordan009]

yea well i already built it and am using only windows XP 32 bit and i lagg in empire total war so is it becuase of my cpu? and will a X3 make it run much faster?

 

[Userremoved]

Do you think all your RAM sticks are ruining? A lot of OCZ sticks seem to fail.

 

[WR2]

It looks like that RPG game doesn't run quite as well on AMD CPUs as it does on Intel CPUs.
It's looking like even the X3 440 would not help you anymore than your current CPU.
You can test turning down the graphics settings and see if that helps at all.
And test with the sound turned off to see what effect that has on performance.

Empire: Total War is primarily stressing the CPU according to a benchmark check
(click the chart to get the rest of the article and it's notes)

 

[Onus]

So then, if the CPU is the problem, what's the most cost-effective fix? I agree with WR2 on playing with the graphics settings to get more data on the problem. Are any other background tasks running that might be paused or terminated? That's one area where an extra core or two can make a notable difference.
As an example, the college where one of my nieces is a student requires them to use Cisco's Clean Access Agent and other security software; another's college has inflicted McAfee upon them.

 

[jordan009]

ah ic and yes all my Ram sticks are working perfecly

 

[jordan009]

so it should do well on most other games though?

 

[WR2]

Athlon X2 245 and HD 5770 is actually a good combination for a mid-range gaming system.
You've just picked a game that chews up CPUs. It chews up overclocked $1000 CPUs too.

 

[jordan009]

oh ic well thanks so dont get he X3 than? or would it not make any diffrence? or would a phenom X2 be ebtter?

 

[Onus]

Well, if you look at the gaming CPU chart at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-core-i5-phenom-ii,2620-7.html you can see that a three-tier jump over what you have isn't too expensive. As WR2 points out, the particular game is rough on any CPU, so improvement in that one may be meager (but I think noticeable), but you'll probably get improvement in other games too. In any case, unless your tests in specific games show otherwise, I'd expect your CPU to bottleneck your GPU, not the other way around.

 

[jordan009]

yea well ill just get the Athlon X 4 630 or 635 since my local pc shop (canada computers) has them for about $100

 

[Onus]

Sounds good.