Question Can a AMD athlon II X4 640 run games from the early to mid 2000s

[giga1023]

Basically all I want to do is play games from the early to mid 2000s, games like

Doom 3
F.E.A.R
Unreal Tournament 3
Far Cry 1
etc.

I wanted to know if a AMD Athlon II X4 640 could work because all I have is a motherboard with a max TDP of 95w
and it's a socket AM2+ motherboard

 

[COLGeek]

Yes. What OS are you intending to run? What are the specs for the rest of the system?

 

[giga1023]

Yes. What OS are you intending to run? What are the specs for the rest of the system?

I'm interested in using Windows xp
The GPU I want to get is a GeForce 9800 gt
3gb ddr2 ram
With a Nvidia nforce chipset

 

[COLGeek]

Should be okay, overall. Just remember that XP is no longer secure.

 

[giga1023]

Should be okay, overall. Just remember that XP is no longer secure.

Okay, thanks

 

[mdd1963]

As I was playing FEAR on an single core Athlon 64/3500+ back in 2005/2006, I'd say YES.....

 

[giga1023]

Can my system play games from the mid 2000s like:
UT2004
F.E.A.R
Doom 3
Etc.

With these specs:
AMD Athlon II X2 dual-core 2.8GHZ
3GB DDR2
AMD Radeon HD 6450
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

 

[hftvhftv]

That PC should be able to handle those games with no problems. The HD 6450 you have might have been offered in multiple memory versions, hopefully it has GDDR5 not DDR3.

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

Yup, none of those should be a problem at all. I was running all of them on my Athlon x2 4400+ with a Radeon 2600XT and 2GB RAM... even Crysis! You shouldn't have a problem.

 

[giga1023]

That PC should be able to handle those games with no problems. The HD 6450 you have might have been offered in multiple memory versions, hopefully it has GDDR5 not DDR3.

Well the cheapest one I could find has ddr3

 

[mitch074]

The 640 can run anything up to the mid 2010 without too much trouble. It is also a good chip to overclock. I ran far cry 3 and Bioshock infinite on a 655-like 620 without problems. Of course you would get better performance with a Sandy bridge i5, but this is definitely playable. As for the OS, if you're looking to build yourself a retro gaming build, do not go past 4gb of RAM - XP cannot handle more. Mind your BIOS too.

 

[giga1023]

Can a AMD Athlon 170u play older games when paired with a AMD Radeon HD 6450. The AMD Athlon 170u is clocked at 2.00Ghz with only one core.
The AMD Radeon has 1gb of gddr3 vram.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Sure it can, just depends on what games you want to run.
Nothing new is going to work, but some games from the early 2000s will likely run.

 

[rgd1101]

and what older games? game from the 1990s?

 

[giga1023]

the games I would like to play are unreal tournament 2004 or quake 3 arena or games around that time period

 

[cryoburner]

An older system I have has a single-core Athlon 64 with roughly similar performance to that model. It can run older games, but by "older" we're mostly talking about games from around 10+ years ago, at least when it comes to titles that were moderately demanding for their time. Games like Quake 3 Arena and UT2K4 would likely run rather well on that hardware, at least as long as you are not trying to push high resolutions. If you have a couple gigabytes of system RAM, titles like Left 4 Dead 2 would likely be playable at 720p as well, so long as you don't mind occasional performance dips when there are a lot of enemies on-screen. For things like 2D indie titles, you could even run a lot of newer stuff, as those games tend to be less demanding.

That system of mine has a graphics card that's about twice as fast as that one, but it tends to be limited more by CPU performance. Do you own any of this hardware already, or are you looking to buy or upgrade it? It's probably not worth spending too much on hardware that old.

 

[mdd1963]

UT2004 and Quake 3 (from late '99!) were all pre-multicore-CPU, and you should have no issues if using a CPU that was made during/before those games' heydays...

 

[giga1023]

Well I was going to upgrade the CPU to a AMD Athlon II X2 dual-core CPU clocked a 2.8Ghz but I don't know if I should upgrade the CPU first or the gpu

 

[cryoburner]

Are you in the US, or elsewhere? If so, I'm seeing really cheap prices for pre-owned Athlon II X2s on ebay, starting under $10 shipped. That would likely give the system a nice boost in performance for a low price. You would just want to make sure the processor is supported by your motherboard.

A graphics card upgrade would likely cost more, but wouldn't necessarily have to be very expensive for something faster, again if you are buying used. You would want to make sure that your power supply offered enough wattage to handle the card though.

 

[giga1023]

I am in the U.S. and yeah I have seen the price of those cpu's they are pretty cheap but I don't get a lot of money since I'm just a kid but I can't buy the CPU and the GPU at the same time so I don't really know what i should get first

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Cpu first. An upgrade from a single core will benefit day to day tasks.
Are you gonna use xp for your os?

 

[giga1023]

I already installed Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows XP is very tricky to run off a USB flash drive

 

[Karadjgne]

That cpu was introduced in March of 2010. So it's capable of playing any game of that Era or older, some will play ok, some may be worse, depending on the game. Some slightly newer games upto @ 2012-2013 might be playable at minimum settings, but they'll be very limited cpu type games.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

True. I have had better luck using a cd to install it.
Yea the 2nd core will really help out general usage.

 

[giga1023]

Ok thanks you guys are the best