PC for Playing Fable 3 when it comes out

Martynt74

Martynt74

Martynt74

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My girlfriends son wants a new pc as his laptop (read as my old laptop) isn't the best for playing games.

She was looking at getting him a HP G5210 pre built one which is about £380 without a monitor but looking at it i'm not sure how it would run games. Heres the spec anyway

Processor AMD Athlon™ II X3 440 Processor
- 3.0 GHz

Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit

RAM - 3 GB
- DDR3

Graphics card NVIDIA® GeForce® 6150 SE
- up to 1407 MB total available graphics memory

Hard drive 500 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA

Do you think it would be ok? To play games? He's happy playing his PS3 through a composite connection instead of the HDMI so i don't think quality would be too important!

I don't mind building something as i already have a 1tb hard drive i could use. Do you think i'd be able to do much better? As i know a Windows 7 license would be about £70 on its own
 
The GeForce 6150 SE isn't going to be an enjoyable experience for playing games. I had one temporarily a few years ago, it struggled to keep a stable 20FPS in Doom 3 (2004 game) on 640x480, low quality, shadows off.

There's a small benchmark of a few old games with the 6150SE here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/11931/9 - I haven't seen the recommended specs, but to be honest the chance of it playing Fable 3 even on lowest quality is slim.
 
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As stated above, that machine would not be good for playing games. Even modern integrated graphics are not suitable for playing modern games at an acceptable level (eg console quality), so several generation old integrated graphics simply will not cut it.

Assuming that your budget is ~£380 here is a spec for components that should play most modern games rather well, HDD is not included as you mentioned that you have a 1TB you can use.

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Including your free delivery this should be a bit over £380.
 
Budget was originall about £350 but i think i've convinced her that won't work. The aboce spec looks brilliant, hopefully i can convince her its more worthwhile doing it this way.

I do have a license for Windows XP would there be much gained/lost with getting Windows 7 as obviously that would free up about £70
 
Is that a retail license of XP? If so, I would probably stick with that instead of spending £78 on windows 7, especially considering your budget.

The downsides of sticking with XP are that you can only address a maximum of 4GB of memory (including graphics memory) and it doesn't support DX10 or 11. However, for playingthe vast majority of games this doesn't matter - and it certainly won't for fable 3. If you can confirm that you have retail XP (or a similar version that will work) I'd be be happy to do another spec without the OS and the same budget as before.
 
Yeah, its a retail copy.

I was thinking because he was going to think about getting a tv aswell i could suggest using the extra money to go towards a better tv as the above spec would still do just fine
 
Ah, great stuff.

I changed the CPU, motherboard and graphics card. The CPU is now a quad core, and the graphics is MUCH faster.

This time I calculated the total including the free delivery you would get:

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Thats a nice build right there, will play any game easily. Glad your going with building it rather than getting that pre built one, 6150 is absolutely horrible.
 
Yeah i was always keen on building it but the mrs rolled her eyes after i suggested it after the fiasco i had building my own amp!

Out of interest what kind of perfomance hit would i get if i was to look towards a smaller form factor such as a micro atx?
 
Oh i thought the PSU would be fairly standard sized still.

I've not really looked but i think something smaller might be something i should try and factor in
 
Usually it is, (ATX size) but it depends on the case - some do not use standard size PSUs or come with a PSU bundled with the case.

Also, most decent gamer-orientated micro-ATX cases will cost a fair bit more than the Coolermaster Elite 370 midi-tower, so your budget for other components will be reduced.
 
Things like the Silverstone SG series of cases and the Lian Li micro ATX cases - these are micro-ATX (and some mini-ITX) cases that work well with gaming systems. However, when you are working with a total budget of ~£400 I strongly suggest you compromise on case size and go for a midi-tower like the above coolermaster. A larger case is usually cheaper, keeps the components cooler, allows for easier installation/maintainence, has more scope to upgrade and is easier to reduce the noise.
 
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