is this a good rig?

squarehead94 · 5 Feb 2012 at 23:33

hey all, sadly the rig i was looking at went, the i5 750 rig sold, but anyways, ive been offered a dell studio 540 for an amazing price of £100. it comes with a 250gb sata hard drive, 6gb of ddr2 pc2 6400 ram, pny geforce gts 250 graphics card, and a core 2 quad q8200 processor. im just wondering, will this play the latest games very well? i play fifa 12, gta 4 (will be playing GTA:5 when it is released) and diablo 3 when that comes out, but thats about my limit really, do you think this will do the job well? also the board in this can take up to a q9650, so if i every needed a slight upgrade i could. i think its good for the money, but do you think itll handle what i do? im not a hardcore gamer, so im not too worried about having the highest FPS rates, just as long as theres no major lag, and high settings would be nice.
thanks guys, ste

Cleeecooo · 5 Feb 2012 at 23:39

The CPU is ok for games. Not great, but will do.

What res are you playing at?

The GPU and almost certainly PSU will need to be upgraded.

squarehead94 · 6 Feb 2012 at 00:10

Cleeecooo said:
The CPU is ok for games. Not great, but will do.

What res are you playing at?

The GPU and almost certainly PSU will need to be upgraded.

probs 1280 x 720, or 1600 x 900. i have a 700w psu i could put in, i never checked what the stock was, but i have a psu, and why the gpu? i thought that was a decent card? ohwell, it will get upgraded eventually

cheers
ste

Cleeecooo · 6 Feb 2012 at 00:17

I'm pretty certain the GTS250 is crap. Not sure how well it'll do at that res though.

trickynickyuk · 6 Feb 2012 at 00:23

i would upgrade you GFX if you want to play GTA 4/5 as they use a lot of GPU the rest looks ok

spain · 6 Feb 2012 at 07:50

As above upgrade the GPU at some point, and not a bad spec for the money.

aproctor · 6 Feb 2012 at 08:08

For £100 it's fine but don't expect to run GTA 5.

cmndr_andi · 6 Feb 2012 at 08:10

For that kind of money you are getting a pretty nice box there.

The only issue is that the quad core CPU is clocked pretty low (2.33GHz), so in games that don't make good use of quad cores then it will have some performance issues and being a dell system there is no option for overclocking to increase CPU clockspeed. As you say, you could pop in a new and faster quad core CPU to fix this issue - but these Q9000 series CPUs are still pretty expensive (~£100).

The GTS 250 card is pretty OK, it is on the same level as a 9800GTX+, 8800GTX or HD 4850. So it will get you going in most modern games, but certainly don't expect to turn the settings much past "low".

Also, GTS 250 is a 150W card - if the system works fine with this card at full load then it is a good bet that the graphics card could be upgraded to a HD 6850 (£100 card) and keep the same PSU - as this card only uses 127W at full load and has a single 6pin PCIE power connection.