Cool - I’ll do that this evening. Thanks for you help everyone.
Regarding video card criteria, this was accurate for me in terms of what to expect from varying levels of video performance.
(my HD4870 being roughly analogous to the reviewed 6770. Comparing older high-end cards to newer mid-range ones is kind of an arcane art, though.)
It’s a Compaq CQ5320Y.
Woof. 250 watts. You’re not going to be adding anything to that.
So you have an open PCIe card, but you PSU is bad. So you’ll need a new PSU and a new video card.
So looking through Palooka’s first post again, specifically at prices, I thought of something. What would happen if I built that computer, but instead of a blank hard drive, I just dropped in the hard drive from my current computer? Would it totally freak out?
Assuming it’s a SATA drive, or if not, your new motherboard supports IDE, you should be fine.
You’ll have to re-install windows though.
Technically, it’s possible that your current windows installation will work on the new hardware, but I wouldn’t risk the niggling issues that are likely to come up. There’s nothing more frustrating than having issues and NOT knowing if it’s because you didn’t do a fresh install or because some piece of hardware is not working correctly.
Cool. I can just clone my 500GB drive to my 1.5TB, install the 500GB, reinstall windows, and install the 1.5TB as a secondary drive (my current set up).
I can also use my RAM, right? But if I want to double it to 6GB, I have to get not only the same size, but the same model?
I remember reading a behind-the-scenes article about the graphic artists who work on WoW. They have standing orders from on high to keep the hardware requirements for the game low. Their main challenge is finding ways to make the game visually compelling even though they can’t make it look more realistic. That’s why WoW has such an outlandish look. It’s probably for the best; I remember folks complaining about Age of Conan and how everyone’s characters look so similar.
The prefer setup is to use the same exact model. Barring that, match the size, speed and timings.
Personally I would just go ahead and buy a whole 8 gig 1600 mhz RAM kit and call it a day. It’s not very expensive and it’s one less place for potential issues.
Technically you CAN combine different RAM modules, but, again, it’s not recommended.
In a professional context, I’d advise him to give it a shot if he’s on Windows 7 or Vista, and just do a repair pass from the install disc. I’ve had it work so far 100% of the time.
Isn’t there a free demo for D3 that you could just install and test out? I’d expect that the best benchmark for a game would be the game itself.
It’s Blizzard, their goal is to sell D3 to a gazillion people, not just the ones with top of the line computers. So yeah, D3 is not on the cutting edge of graphic quality.
Thoughts on this rig? This website says the graphics are a little low, but will run it.
Check out this review, as well : Tom’s Hardware Diablo 3 benchmarks.. The card in that PC will perform similarly to the 6450, albeit slightly better. This means you’d be looking at about 30 FPS average; completely playable .
That average is for low settings, high textures only, though.
This doesn’t preclude them from building a more scalable engine, however.
Some dynamic lighting and shadowing, built in SSAO and higher resolution textures as options, wouldn’t have hurt performance for lower end systems.
Kinth - got an opinion on that refurb computer I linked? I know you know this stuff backwards and forwards.
Munch, I hope you don’t mind me piggy-backing onto your thread a little bit, but while you have the PC experts gathered in one place, I was hoping someone could tell me whether this laptop would play D3. Obviously, it’s got most of the bases covered, but heck if I know where all these integrated-graphics cards rank in the grand scheme of things. Thanks!
You might consider just trying this tool here; It’s a little applet that you run and it compares what it finds about your PC against what the game maker says their game requires/recommends.