its next to the newest model graphics card... itll run everything from this year fine, you may have to turn the resolution to a tad below the best, but it'll run stuff fine
at 1024x768 that system should run this years games full detail at a very good speed, although I would say that using integrated sound is a bit of a waste. Games like Doom3 and half-life2 will require a dedicated soundcard to get the best out of them, and picking up an audigy2 would be really worth it for the positional effects. A nice set of surround speakers would also be pretty cool.
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Nods as good as a wink to a blind bat.
kjg, that's where you are wrong my friend . Intergrated sound cards are actually pretty decent nowadays, back 5 years, yeah, they were poo, now, they are good, they are bling-bling, no point in getting a £100 audigy2.
Well I would disagree with you optimus
I had a P4 board from gigabyte possibly similar to the one above and although it claimed 5channel sound onboard the quality was poor and so was the performance. It also included very few of the features that most games are adopting such as EAX3 and its derivatives. Doom3's creators are saying that the audio is just as important for the experince as the visuals and with onboard you are not going to get that. Added to this there would be a performance boost in not using the onboard.
Granted you could argue that the audigy2 is expensive but for £100 you could get a hercules fortissimo3 and a set of 6.1speakers and they would be well worth the investment.
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Nods as good as a wink to a blind bat.
Scarecrow, what size is your monitor? Why not rachet up that rez to 1280x1024?
Re: soundcards
Onboard sound still isnt as good as a dedicated card. Even the nForce 2 stuff gets showed up by Audigy's. Here's my major complaint with them. They(onboards) eat your proc cycles, resulting in fps losses of up to 5%.
I disagree on the sound issue as well... Soundstorm onboard audio is decent, but anything else is night and day difference when compared to cards like Audigy/Audigy2.
On soundcards, I think Creative stinks. I'de go with nForce2 before an Audigy but other than that you'll have to pry my Santa Cruz from my cold dead fingers.
well, onboard sound is a nice thing to start with, because most of the time you are spending your money on a better vid card/proc/more ram/bigger hdd/etc... but yes, an upgrade to a dedicated card is always a nice thing to have after u save from buying that original computer
. Intergrated sound cards are actually pretty decent nowadays, back 5 years, yeah, they were poo, now, they are good, they are bling-bling, no point in getting a £100 audigy2.
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