Medieval II: total war

hey guys,

im just getting back into pc gameing from a 4 years break( mainly my old e-machines rig cant run just many games out now) so i saved up $1000 and got a new rig, its specs are

its a dell

Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E6600 (4MB L2 Cache,2.4GHz,1066 FSB)
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 2 DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
256MB nVidia Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeMusic (D) Sound Card

anyways the games i was playing way back when were Age of Empires 2, Diablo 2, and Shogun: total war, and Shogun total war was the most ive ever had playing a game. I was wondering how medieval II: total war compared to it, and if it was worth buying, also could my new rig run it on its max graphics settings if i buy it? oh yeah..would i be able to run oblivion as well? ive heard alot of good things about that game.

Thanks guys (i know.... im a noob to about these things..)

Yup for $1000 you sure as hell got one shitty system there, you should have saved some on the CPU and case or where ever all that money went and just put it in to more memory and a better graphics card…

Anyway you will be able to play these games at the bare minimal in graphics settings although Medieval 2 will barely run at that since you only have 1GB or memory, the game normally uses more than that on my system on it’s own.

If you got this from a big mega store I can understand but if you got this PC from a small retailer with the aim of gaming in mind then you should take it back and slap there faces with the back of your opened fist.

ill prolly upgrade the graphic card(dont graphics cards outdate quick?) in like 8 months for my b-day when i can get a geforce 8800 GTS for arounds $325, but im mainly interested in strategy games, is medieval II: total war as fun as shogun: total war was? how do the games compare?

thank guys,

PS: any pc suggestions would be nice

Just buy an x1900xt which are relatively cheap. That'll help no end. As it is you won't be playing many games on that pc unless you're fond of pacman or something.

And whilst I haven't played MTW2 it is an evolution of Rome TW which is pretty much the same as shogun but with fancy additions. You don't get cool samurai tho

EDIT: You could buy MTW 1 which will run on you machine come to think of it. That's very similar to shogun but obviously set in Europe and the scale is much bigger map wise.

im prolly not gonna play any high graphic games(half life 2, oblivion, F.E.A.R, ect.) so how would the 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 Pro do inplace of the Geforce 7300LE, in this case would it be a ok improvement?
is the card solid?

I've got an x1800xt and I reckon it's a great card and it should be cheap as chips now.

BTW if you want info on GFX cards this very site has an interactive GFX chart where you can rate cards against each other. You will note that both the card u have and the card u suggested sit happily at the bottom.

For reference you generally want a card that can do 30+ frames per second anything less and you will notice slowdown.

good choice. It will play that game on max definately

Yeah, thats a good choice. The system is fine apart from that, even with 1gb of RAM you will still get good fps on most games. Plus, you can always stick another gig in when you feel like.