Building a new system. <help me>

[XT]

Hi all.


Right now the best machine in my house, my main machine is a paltry 333 mhz AMD K6- 2 Overclocked to 380mhz. The only saving grace is the Geforce 2 Video card and 256 megs of ram.


I dont have alot of cash to spend, nor am I what you would consider a gamer. I play and enjoy Need for speed 3 which runs fantastic on this system and a few other games, most which run fine on this machine. Most of what it and a new machine would be used for is applications , hardly any photoshop, mostly just things like office and surfing the web, mp3's


The problem comes down to this, I just recieved Return to castle wolfenstein from my wife for fathers day. I had been playing the demo and became hooked. I had to run it at almost the bottom of the line settings to even get it to play. I really like this game and along with wanting to play it the way it was meant to be, I really REALLY need a new system. As i said, I am unemployed and money is very tight, but i found this at a local shop. Do you think this would play wolf nicely and be a good all around computer for what i need it to do and the ocassional game? For now I would move all my cards and drives to this system.

AMD Duron 1.0GHz Processor, 192K Cache, Soket A, PGA-462, 200MHz FSB

ECS K7S5A 500-1.5GHZ UATA/100 ATX Motherboard

E-Case ATX Mid Tower Case, 300Watt, 8 Drive Bays

With My Geforce 2 PCI, Old 10 Gig HDD, 256 meg PC 100 ram, 56k Modem ISA, SMC 10/100 NIC PCI and SB PCI 64 would this be good enough?? I didnt see the board but i need a isa slot for my modem, or im going to have to get a pci one.


Sorry the post was so long! Thanks for any help

EDIT the above 3 things, MB, CPU, case will cost about $150 with tax, which is what i can afford.

[RamonGTP]

It should be able to run the game pretty well... I'm not sure how well the GF2 PCI cards are, but one one of my machines (Athlon Tbird 1gig, and a GF2MX400 AGP card) RTCF runs just fine using 1024x768 resolution... Any higher though, and it has some slow-down.

-Ramon

[EndobioticChaos]

Well, just a bit of info about that motherboard. From what I've been hearing about users concerning stability, it's kind of a hit-or-miss deal. Most users have good experiences with it. If it works right from the start, it'll generally keep working great, but some of them are just plain flakey. Other than that, Newegg says it's got an onboard nic, so you wouldn't need yours... which is good, because it does not have an ISA slot, so perhaps you could sell your modem and nic for enough $$ to buy a PCI modem.

Also, I doubt your graphics card would be as much of a bottle-neck in this case as the RAM - I'm assuming you're planning to use the RAM you've already got, which is likely just PC66 or PC100. If I'm correct, I'd suggest if you can at all afford it to buy 256MB of PC2100 DDR, even if it has to be cheap stuff rather than Crucial. Even with the faster RAM, your system would be borderline to run Wolf the way it
"was meant to be."

But regardless, that'll definitely be a huge performance increase over what you've got now, and that's a great price on that stuff. I think you'd be fairly well pleased with it.

[XT]

thanks gents. as for "the way it was meant to be" i dont run my games over 800x 600 resolution, so im assuming I'd be fine. I'd Just like to move through the game without feeling like the hallways are filled with water and and im swimming through them.. laggy as hell.

I'm glad the board has a NIC, I can give the wife my old one then. As for the modem, i found one i bought a year ago, PCI 56k but never used, so im set there. Endo, I'll use the ram I have now for now, but will probally get that 256 meg ddr you suggested next month.

Thanks

[EndobioticChaos]

Sounds good!

Good luck!

[jerrygarcia]

I run 2 K7S5A's and have had no problems. I also play RTCW on a GF2 MX 200 64mb AGP card with no problems. It looks better on my GF3 Ti 500. If you can afford 256 mb of Crucial PC2100 DDR, it would be well worth it. It's $39.49 with coupon right now from Crucial;


http://www.crucial.com/store/listpar...7S5A&submit=Go

I'd say go for it, you won't be sorry. You can later upgrade to a XP processor.

:cool

Try Medal of Honor also.

[RamonGTP]

Oh yeah, I forgot about the RAM... definatly get some DDR as soon as you can afford to... It will make a pretty big difference. As far as that board... I'm using one in my Athlon TB 1.33Ghz box and I have not had any problems with it.

-Ramon