Quick gaming question

[SomethinAmazinn]

I recently bought a new PC and I'm wondering what kind of hardware I'd need to be able to play games with a 24+ constant framerate.
Currently the only games I've tried were far cry 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 but due to the low framerate, this rendered the games unplayable.

I am currently running:
Windows 7 64bit
AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 620 Processor 2.6 GHz
6.00 GB installed memory
NVIDIA GeForce 9100
(yes I know I'm not computer literate, did I miss anything?)

What would I need to be able to play games at a constant 24+ framerate on low settings? on high settings? 60+ fPS?
Thanks in advance

 

[stormy13]

SomethinAmazinn, welcome to the forums.

Either someone had a fire sale on that particular model of HP or this is your twin brother,

http://www.sevenforums.com/graphic-cards/89753-bad-performance-gets-bood-off-stage.html

Anyway same advice as there, you want to game on it you're going to need a video card and a new power supply.

 

[SomethinAmazinn]

Haha it appears so dosent it?
Well I didn't see any reconmendations on there. Have any recomendations on what kind of video card to get?
Preferably something to run medium - high settings, but won't make my bank account feeeze?
Here's probably a stupid question, but if I do buy a new video card, and keep the integrated one, will they both work together, or will one completely take over? Or will I have to remove the integrated one?

 

[Fumz]

Here's a look at what video cards are doing in Bad Company 2; pick your resolution: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 GPU Performance In-depth - TechSpot

Keep in mind that this was done with a 3.7GHz i7. Games like 3 things: cores, clock speed and cache. That your Athlon lacks L3 cache means that your fps isn't going to be quite the same as similar chips that have it, and don't go buying a card thinking you're going to get the same results as shown here... but you can still get a pretty good idea of what card(s) you'll want to be looking at.

Btw, 24 fps is unplayable for any first person shooter. Set your sights higher, much higher. Typically, you'd like your game to stay above 60 fps for the best experience... but between 40-60 is more than good enough.

 

[stormy13]

You can't remove integrated video, at best it gets disabled.

will they both work together

That comes down to whether the chipset/bios of the motherboard supports that sort of thing, and is only realy useful when supported for running more than 2 displays. On ATI based motherboards when paired with an ATI video card the feature is called SurroundView and is enabled in the bios (and can also be used for Crossfire between the onboard a very select number of discrete cards). Nvidia had a couple of different variations on this; Hybrid SLi, HybridPower, and again depends on support between the motherboard and video card.

Preferably something to run medium - high settings, but won't make my bank account feeeze?

That we can do, but need to know what kind of budget you have. Don't forget that to get to those medium to high settings you're also going to need a new power supply.

 

[SomethinAmazinn]

Thanks for the fast replys.
I'm looking to spend around $50-$200 in total I can go more, but I'd like to stay somewhere around this price range.

 

[Fumz]

What resolution is your monitor?

 

[SomethinAmazinn]

1600x900 (it's set at the highest)

 

[Fumz]

I guess it all depends on how close to that $200.00 price point you want to stick?

You've got a couple options (to still maintain great performance):

Going off the charts for Bad Company I linked, at ~ 200.00 there's the GTX 260 http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5690059&CatId=3775 however, for a few dollars more, you can get the better GTX 275 BFG BFGEGTX275896OCE GeForce GTX 275 OverClocked Video Card - 896MB, PCI Express 2.0 x16, SLI Ready, (dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV, HDMI (w/ Adapter) at TigerDirect.com. The 275 delivers a bit more fps, and it's really not that much more, but they're both still DX10 cards... know that.

If you want DX11, then for ~ $150.00 there's the HD 5770, which a lot of guys say runs Bad Company great, even at 1920x1080; albeit, on medium settings. For about the same price as the GTX 275 you can get the HD 5830, which is DX11... and it performs about as good as the 275: XFX Radeon HD 5830 Review (page 6) - X-bit labs.

XFX HD583XZNFV Radeon HD 5830 Video Card - 1GB DDR5, PCI-Express 2.0, CrossFireX Ready, Dual DVI, Display Port, HDMI, FREE Alien vs. Predator Game at TigerDirect.com

Again though, you've got to keep in mind that all of these benchmarks I'm showing you were done with an insanely fast cpu, with much more cpu strength than you've got, so you can't expect to see the same results unless you turn down settings.

Bad Company is poorly optimized, exceptionally so, so you might want to research overclocking your cpu a bit. Not much, but you'll see significant improvements pushing it up to 3GHz, which is a relatively mild overclock.

edit

links fixed...

 

[SomethinAmazinn]

Thanks I appreciate it. This really helped.
Just out of curiosity, overclocking my cpu to something like 3.0GHz, what will be the longevity ramifications from that? lifespan of the CPU?

 

[Fumz]

That depends on how much voltage you need to apply? If you're able to OC, with stability, to 3GHz without having to apply extra voltage, and you're also able to keep temperatures the same with an after market cooler, then the cpu should last you as long as it would if ran it at stock.

If you need to apply a small bump in volts, then the life span of the cpu will decrease. However, there's no set in stone rule as to how much less it will live. Extra voltage increases electromigration... basically the transistors wear down... but that's going to happen whether you overclock or not.

If done properly and with care, the life of the cpu is going to last longer than you intend to use it, in most cases. If it's your plan to still be using this chip 10 years from today, then you may want to stay stock. Most guys don't keep chips 10 years.

This is really something that you need to bone up on first though before you jump in. Read everything you can find for the next month. Know everything there is to know about each piece of hardware you own, so you'll have a good idea of what to shoot for and expect before you jump in. That will benefit you tremendously in the long run.