comp for Half-life/CS

[aznlurkerz]

i just wanted to know some good stats for a system, that is good enough to run Half-Life/CS for the lowest price... basically a comp for taking around for LANing..any suggestions?

**aznlurkerz

[vass0922]

I just have a PIII-650 and it runs just fine at 1024x768

I don't have a FPS count, but moves fine http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

It depends on how high quality you want the screen, top quality I would recommend a little more than that... overall you dont need a Ghz machine just to play CS.

I also play Max Payne on my machine just fine at 1024x768 (not all details are high http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif) so if it can handle max payne, CS is Definately not a problem lol

[Makaveli]

I had a AMD-K6 400 mghz about 2 years ago.. with only 48 megs of RAM. Half-Life ran "ok" but it ran good enough to play.. If that PC ran it, I would think it doesnt take much to get it running....

-MaK

[LostBok]

Pick up a LOW end Duron or Celeron, 600-800 should be PLENTY.... I set up a Celeron 400Mhz that was fine, but I doubt you can get those anymore...

128meg RAM is pretty much all you need.

No need for anything more than a SB128 PCI - its not like you're gonna be rigging up the 5.1 sound are you? Personally I only ever use headphones or SMALL speakers for LAN games.

HDD size to your descretion...

Graphics card: mine is running a Voodoo2, I know, a bit too old, but going up to dual Voodoo2 SLI soon! I'd recommend just putting a TnT or TnT Ultra in there... GeForceMX or Voodoo3 3000-3500 if you want, just depends on the screen you're gonna lug around with you, I normally use a 15" Dell Trinitron... and my old TnT and a P2-350Mhz ran Half-Life at 1024x768 fine as did a friend's Celeron 400Mhz with a Voodoo3 2000.... that's the beauty of Half-Life, not too much oomph needed. Although I'd recommend steering clear of the TnT2-M64's, TnT originals are almost better (from what I've seen, TnT,128meg,P2-350Mhz beat a TnT2m64,512,800Mhz on fps and playability at 1024x768) and a GeForce MX or MX400 would be absolutely ideal, although from what I've seen and heard the MX200's are closer to the performance of TnTM64's than anything else....

My LAN gmae machine is:
dual cpu P2-300Mhz
256meg ECC EDO
8meg Matrox MGA G200 PCI
12meg Voodoo 2 PCI (soon to be dual-SLI)
3-com 10/100 3C905TX
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI
9.1gig UW SCSI system drive
13.6gig UDMA33 Maxtor
24x NEC SCSI CDROM
8x LG UDMA33 DVD
Crystal Labs (SB16 compatible)

and my spare LAN game machien is being rebuilt, is going to be:

P233mmx
128meg SDRAM,
16meg Banshee (Voodoo2+2d),
SB128 PCI (if I can't find the header for the onboard AWE32 compatible),
3com 10/100TX PCI,
2gig UDMA
2.5gig UDMA
Creative LAbs 48x CDROM.

Even than P233 should be fine for Half-Life, I've seen it running "okay" on a P100, 64meg, 16meg Banshee, but I doubt either of these Pentium's would handle Unreal Tournament too well!

Enjoy!

[Jixor]

dont buy celeron for anything at all.... EVER

a P2 350 or 400 would be perfect for CS, you just have to make surey ou have a 32mb or more video card with opgengl support or you will get horrible fake lag from FPS around 20

make sure this comp has at least 128mb ram because its a very very big game

[ragtop]

The older slot 1 and PPGA Celerons were a little weak, but the flip chip Celerons are decent for a budget system. Seems like Celerons get a bad rap because all the crappy computers like e-machines, etc use Celerons with lousy integrated video systems (Intel 810's, etc.) If you use a Celeron with decent video card you get good performance.

I had Celeron 600 system - never played CS, but it ran UT, Heretic II, and NFS High Stakes fine with an ATI Rage Fury Pro card. That system benchmarked higher than my brother's PIII slot 1 system in all categories except memory performance.

You could run that thing all night and it barely got warm - not like the new TBirds that need massive coolers.

[LostBok]

Okay I need to be more clear here: when I said Celeron, I menat Celeron "A"....

The original Celerons sucked... the "newer" ones (from 300Mhz upwards) are mostly the "A" type.

The difference:
P2 had 512kb of L2 cache at half CPU speed.
Celeron had NO L2 cache at all... NOT good!
Celeron "A" had 128kb L2 cache AT CPU speed.

The result:
P2 - decent for games.
Celeron - okay for games, REALLY sucked elsewhere.
Celeron "A" - same performance as equivalent speed P2, supremely overclockable (300 to 450Mhz was standard), but multiplier locked http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

Celeron "A" apparently not was quick as Duron, however a decent upgrade in your old P2 system... add a reasonable Voodoo/TnT/GeForce and you've got a nice little games system (128meg RAM min, but 128meg dimms are dime-a-dozen at the mo. so go for more)...

[Jixor]

ok im not making myself clear here,
first off, all off you know that P2 was the best Intel product ever made and from then on it went down, a celery has 1/4 the L2 cache and the motherboard are 33% slower, you see adds in newspapers and stuff for cheap celery computers because they are made of crappy parts

i went to a custom build store and of all the celery motherboards they had, not 1 of them had an AGP slot (higher end vid card slot) because i got a crappy celery i had to settle with an ATI card because they are the only company that makes 32 vid cards for PCI slots

and you guys also know that AMD processors are way more efficient in terms of clock speed, 500 celery and 500 duron the duron will be way way faster and probably have an AGP slot on the motherboard and the AMD WILL COST LESS

dont feel the stick of Intel again like i did, buy AMD always (its faster AND cheaper, wow =])