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Half Life 2 machine specs

H

HurtMeP1nty007

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 7, 2004
Messages
505
Hello, for Christmas I have the luxury of being able to build a new system. I am looking to spend about 2 grand, can you suggest some specs that might help me out when playing half life 2... ex best vid card for hl2, ram, processor Intel or AMD ect
Again this rig is for gaming only!

any help would be appreciated.
 
There are about 30 other threads just like this in this section, Just look back starting with this page then go back 2-3 pages and find more.
 
HurtMeP1nty007 said:
Hello, for Christmas I have the luxury of being able to build a new system. I am looking to spend about 2 grand, can you suggest some specs that might help me out when playing half life 2... ex best vid card for hl2, ram, processor Intel or AMD ect
Again this rig is for gaming only!

any help would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Vid card: The best would be an X800XT-PE. It runs very nicely (1600x1200, 4xAA 8xAF) on my 6800GT though, so just get whatever brand you prefer. Tests have shown the difference between NV 6xxx and ATI Xxxx isn't very big in HL2. ATI's generally a bit quicker, but not enough to count out an NV card.
Ram: 1GB(+)
processor: I'd say AMD A64, preferably socket 939.
 
:-/ 2 Grand. An X800XT-PE would take up at least $600 dollars. Check the hardware guide on [H]'s front page.

-J.
 
I havent tried it online yet BUT My system runs it at 1600x1200, 6xAA 16XAF with everything turned all the way up, with no noticeable lag.
P4 3.0@3.2
2 gigs DDR (dual channel mode, 4x512 sticks)
ATI radeon X800Pro @stock speeds
Raptor 74 gig 10krpm HP
Asus P4P800-SE mb
Turtle beach Santa Cruz



If I were building a new system, just for gaming I would go
AMD A64 or P4 3.4 (oc it!)
2 gigs ram (trust me, 2gigs runs better than 1)
MB that supports dual channel mem
Raptor for main drive, the 74 gig is only $200 and its FAST FAST FAST Your load times are reduced by a huge margin,
300gig SATA storage drive
M.Audio sound card, the 7.1 one (revolution??)
Creative Gigaworks or Klipsch 5.1
Senheiser headphones, not wireless
Good comfy optical mouse
Desktop USB2.0 hub, at least 4 ports
 
You'll never even be able to find an X800XT PE in stock and if you did it would be WAY over MSRP.

Your best choice would be a 6800GT or an X800XT if you can find one for under $500.

Half-Life 2 is very CPU intensive so i would suggest something like a socket 939 90nm 3200+ or 3500+ and an nForce 3 Ultra chipset motherboard.
 
Definately get an ATI video card for Half-life 2. Half-life 2 was designed to run with ATI cards in mind. So ATI cards run faster in it.
 
Dan17 said:
Definately get an ATI video card for Half-life 2. Half-life 2 was designed to run with ATI cards in mind. So ATI cards run faster in it.
Click to expand...


Blah Blah Blah and more Blah. I run 70-100 fps on HL2 with all settings maxed 1600-1200 on my BFGtech GeForce 6800 GT OC 256mb. I think that's pretty acceptable.
 
Got this out of a magazine where they asked similar questions to the makers of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Farcry. Here's the HL2 part. I only included the related questions (left out ones pertaining to boosting framerates by changing in-game options, built-in benchmark functionality, and the possibility of a 64-bit verision of the game).

Please share you thoughts on the latest generation of graphics technology - NV40 - (GeForce 6800) and R420 (Radeon X800). Is one technology better than the other for Half-Life 2? By how much? Why?

The X800 is faster for Half-Life 2 by roughly 20 percent - the 6800 supports standard full precision, but it's more optimal with partial precision. The X800 is designed for full precision from the ground up.

Does Half-Life 2 Run better on video cards with 256MB of video memory versus 128MB of video memory?

If you want to run at super-high resolutions with FSAA cranked up, you'll likely want to have a 256MB card.

Assuming that the only difference betwen two systems is their graphics interface, will a PCI Express-based PC run Half-Life 2 faster than an AGP-based system?

Not likely.

How many unique render paths does Half-Life 2 have? Are there separate DirectX 7, DX 8, and DX 9 paths? Are there vendor-specific paths for NVIDIA and ATI? In what ways will the game look and/or perform differently with each of them, and which video cards run each path best?

The paths, and which video cards run them best:

  1. DirectX 7.0: RADEON 7200, GeForce2 MX, Geforce4 MX
  2. DirectX 8.0: GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce FX 5200
  3. DirectX 8.1: RADEON 8500, RADEON 9200, GeForce FX 5700, GeForce FX 5950
  4. DirectX 9.0: RADEON 9500 and up, RADEON X800, GeForce 6800

Many shaders are shared between the DX 8.0 and DX 8.1 paths. We take advantage of ps1.4 when it makes sense. We'll treat DX 8.1 as DX 8 from here on out.
We don't have any vendor-specific paths. We pursued a partial-precision DX 9.0 path for a while, but found that the hardware targeted to use that partial DX 9.0 path ran fairly well with the DX 8.0/DX 8.1 paths.
Our DX 9.0 path is standard full-precision at this point

What’s the minimum CPU spec for Half-Life 2, and more importantly, what’s the recommended CPU spec? Aove that recommended spec, to what degree are performance returns diminished?

Minimum is a 1.2GHz CPU, but no matter what video card you have, you’ll want the fastest processor as well, to achieve the optimum experience. Half-Life 2 pushes in just about every direction, so if you’ve got some new gear, we’ll leverage it.

How much RAM should we have in our system if we want to see Half-Life 2 running at its best?

512MB RAM is preferred, but having more certainly couldn’t hurt.

What’s the least amount of system RAM people should have if they want to have a good Half-Life 2 experience?

256MB RAM

Does Half-Life 2 use a host-based audio engine, or will gamers need high-end sound cards to take advantage of surround sound? If it is host-based, does the engine scale up from 2.1 speakers to 4.1 and beyond?

The audio is host-based. We support headphones, two speakers, four speakers, and 5.1. Playing with at least 5.1 makes a pretty dramatic difference in the experience. You can also play with no captions (dialogue and sound-effects) or subtitles (dialogue only) in many languages, along with dialogue in many languages.

Tying everything together, if you were to build three PCs for the purpose of playing Half-Life 2, which components would be best in a:

Low-End PC ($999 or less)
CPU: 2GHz or AMD equivalent
RAM: 512MB (1GB if you can afford it)
3D Card: ATI RADEON 9600 PRO 128MB*

Mid-Range PC ($1,449 or less)
CPU: 3GHz or AMD equivalent
RAM: 1GB

High-End PC (the sky’s the limit)
CPU: 3.6GHz or AMD Athlon 64 FX-53
RAM: 2GB
3D Card: ATI X800 XT 256MB*

* Valve didn’t provide any NVIDIA alternatives, but we recommend the following: Low-End PC – GeForce FX 5700 128MB; Mid-Range PC – GeForce FX 5900 128MB; High-End PC – GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB.
 
Gouda said:
Blah Blah Blah and more Blah. I run 70-100 fps on HL2 with all settings maxed 1600-1200 on my BFGtech GeForce 6800 GT OC 256mb. I think that's pretty acceptable.
Click to expand...

maaan.. I've never played any game in 1600x1200..
 
I ran it all high at 1280x960 all throughout the game..any higher rez is pointless imo.
 
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