Absolute Idioit!

[Varlesh]

H,
thought I'd try and get some wisdom from the revered Tom's Hardware community.
I'm hopefully after some advice on a system that I've come across on e-bay. You'll have to excuse my complete and utter ignorance concerning anything computer related-apart from,of course, the on switch.
I'm very restricted financially so I was wondering whether this was a capable build to play Guild Wars 2.
I can see a graphic card upgrade is necessary; but apart from that will it run the game at very high settings or am I missing something glaringly obvious.
Thanks in advance, it will be much appreciated.

Here we go:


HP XW8200 Workstation/Tower PC:

TWIN (2x) Intel Xeon 3.6Ghz - 64-Bit - Hyper-Threaded

8 GB RAM - DDR2 ECC RAM

1TB SATA2 Hard Drive

On-Board SATA RAID Controller - Raid 0 & 1

Brand New XFX ATI HD5450 1GB GDDR3 Gaming Graphics Card
- (2GB with Hyper-Memory!!)

Brand New DVD-RW Optical Drive

Genuine Windows 7 Professional (64-Bit)

 

[Saga Lout]

Hello and welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums.

Being an absolute idiot myself when it comes to games, I Googled for "Guild Wars 2 system requirements" and found this http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/guild-wars-2-pc-minimum-system-requirements-check-run-it/ which I hope you will find useful.

 

[Varlesh]

Hi,
thanks for the quick reply.
Interesting article with some good advice.
Cheers...

 

[amuffin]

Hell no.

 

[Varlesh]

Hell no...(?)
Meaning...
Don't buy it, I presume.

 

[amuffin]

Meaning a 5450 won't run it.

 

[Saga Lout]

Meaning a 5450 won't run it.

OK so I'm still coming at this with no gaming knowledge but surely the figures speak for themselves! The site to which I linked says a graphics card with 2546Mb of dedicated memory and Varlesh says his has 1Gb. Are you sure you aren't letting a personal dislike of that card cloud your usually good judgement?

 

[amuffin]

The HD 5450 is the lowest line card of the HD5XXX series. You can pick one up for around $15-30 at almost every store, it's one of the best cards for HTPC purposes.

On the left:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-5000.aspx
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5450-overview/Pages/hd-5450-overview.aspx

I've actually owned 2 of these.

 

[hang-the-9]

That is not a "gaming" video card, it's ranked 475th here http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php which is in the low end range.

A "gaming" card should be around 100 or better. The Radeon 6670 is really the lowest end gaming card you want for .. ah.. well, gaming.

The cards in the link above are ranked around the 200 on the PassMark chart.

 

[Saga Lout]

Sounds to me as though there's a case to be made for the game developers to be more realistic with the specifications they publish on their packaging.

People could be buying games because their PC steps up to that mark, only to find they have to spend a packet to make the game run properly.

 

[amuffin]

They have a minimum, which will run the game just BARELY at the lowest settings...then they have "recommended" which is a decent, but reasonable requirement.

 

[don250r]

did i miss something??

OK so I'm still coming at this with no gaming knowledge but surely the figures speak for themselves! The site to which I linked says a graphics card with 2546Mb of dedicated memory and Varlesh says his has 1Gb. Are you sure you aren't letting a personal dislike of that card cloud your usually good judgement?

2546Mb = 2.546 Gb, he says it has 1 Gb
in other words it does NOT meet minimum requirements

EDIT: OOPS i see that it only requires 256Mb video ram, sorry

 

[Saga Lout]

Don't worry about the confusion, don250r - I still don't understand why they publish a minimum figure when it's clear that the game can't work on that spec.

Thanks goodness I don't have the time or inclination to get into gaming but I did have this same problem with a flight simulator.

 

[ThatsMyNameDude]

Your build runs games quite well and handles video encoding extremely well. Although, I highly recommend you upgrading to either a 5870 or higher, a 6850 or higher a 7770 or higher. For nvidia, a gtx 460, a gtx 550ti, and a gtx 650ti OR HIGHER.
your 5450 aint gunna run nothing. By the way, I am quite curious about what motherboard your xeons are running on. Could you be so kind to tell me?

 

[ThatsMyNameDude]

Oh. And i highly highly recommend you upgrading to a ddr3 kit. they are very cheap. I recommend the gtx 550ti or a 6850. I wouldnt recommend the previous generation.

 

[Varlesh]

Oh. And i highly highly recommend you upgrading to a ddr3 kit. they are very cheap. I recommend the gtx 550ti or a 6850. I wouldnt recommend the previous generation.

Hi,
finally got some cash together and with the money I have at hand; picked this:

CPU: 1066 - NEW! AMD FX 9370 Black Edition
CPU Cooler: 3015 - Xigmatek Loki SDS963
Operating System: 11014 - Microsoft® Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Motherboard: 4192 - NEW! Gigabyte 970-DS3P
RAM: 5054 - NEW! 8GB Corsair 1866mhz Vengeance (2x4GB)
Hard Drive: 6044 - NEW! Samsung 120GB 840 SSD S-ATAIII 6.0Gb/s
Additional Storage: XXXR0 - RAID 0 Array (Improved Performance)
Additional Storage: XXXR1 - RAID 1 Array (Improved Reliability)
Optical Drive: 7003 - 22x DVD±RW DL S-ATA
2nd optical drive: 7011 - 4x Blu-Ray ROM S-ATA
Graphics card: 8103 - NEW! NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB
Sound card: 10012 - Asus Xonar DGX PCI-E 5.1
Case: 17070 - NEW! Xigmatek Asgard 382 Window
PSU: 18047 - NEW! 650W Corsair VS
The price is just over £1000 and I was once again wondering if I've made the right choice for the budget I am on...
Are any of the parts particularly poor choices or can I finally lay this conundrum to rest?
Thank you for any replies, in advance

 

[hang-the-9]

This is in US dollars but I think you can do a bit better in cost/performance with the CPU. An i5 CPU will be better for games and about $100 cheaper. Look at some of the systems here http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1757445/bestconfigs-budget-intel-based-gaming.html

 

[Varlesh]

This is in US dollars but I think you can do a bit better in cost/performance with the CPU. An i5 CPU will be better for games and about $100 cheaper. Look at some of the systems here http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1757445/bestconfigs-budget-intel-based-gaming.html

Thanks for the link; I'll have a look and have a chew over the options.
Much appreciated
By the way to totally confuse the matter which of these builds would you suggest?
My ignorance knows no depths when it comes to mixing various components.
Thanks again!

 

[hang-the-9]

A lot of them are very similar, but without going though them all, for about $1,000 US, this one is good

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1oIAG

There are many very equal parts you can select, the top 2 that are less flexible is the CPU and Video Card, the power supply, case, even RAM has a lot of personal preference involved as there are 3-4-5 manufacturers that are equally good.

 

[Varlesh]

A lot of them are very similar, but without going though them all, for about $1,000 US, this one is good

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1oIAG

There are many very equal parts you can select, the top 2 that are less flexible is the CPU and Video Card, the power supply, case, even RAM has a lot of personal preference involved as there are 3-4-5 manufacturers that are equally good.

Cheers...thanks for your time and patience. Much appreciated!