HP XT983 Upgrade

[Steve Crosby]

My kids are driving me nuts, want to play Far-Cry. Only have PCI on the board, no AGP so bought the best PCI card CompUSA had (ATI Radeon 9250) and ungraded the SDRAM to 256 to make an attempt. It runs, but reeeaaaallll sloooowww!!! Sound lags bad. It does look like a fun game though. Got me interested now! These are the specs on the PC
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=bph06794&locale=en_US
Need advice on a motherboard and VGA card. Want to try to use as many of my existing parts as possibly, like CPU, HD, RAM if possible (have access to alot more cheap). Thanks in advance, Steve.

 

[beanman101283]

Well, you'll need at least 512MB of RAM, a full gig if you can swing it. Corsair, Crucial, and Kingston are all good brands.

You're gonna need a new CPU, preferably an Athlon 64 3200 or higher. This means finding a Socket 754 or 939 motherboard like the Asus A8V-E Deluxe. With a new motherboard you'll need to reinstall Windows, which may require you to pick up a new copy. Make sure you match the socket type of the CPU to the motherboard.

For your hard drive, i'd say it's big enough.

And finally, for your graphics card, I would go with a GeForce 6600GT AGP.

Sorry, but that HP is woefully inadequate for Far Cry. It is a fun game tho.

 

[Major_A]

Here are the recommended requirements to give you an idea.

Recommended:

* Supported OS: Windows 98SE/2000/XP (only)
* Processor: AMD Athlon 2400-3000+ or Pentium 4 2-3 GHz
* RAM: 512-1024 MB
* Video Card: 128 MB GeForce 4 128 MB to GeForce FX 5950; ATI Radeon 9500-9800 XT
* Sound Card: Sound Blaster® Audigy® series
* DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0b (included on disc)
* CD-ROM: 8x-16x DVD or 32x CD-ROM
* Hard Drive Space: 4 GB
* Multiplayer: Broadband with 64 Kbps upstream to play (512 Kbps upstream to host 8 players)

NVIDIA® nForce™ or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby® Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio