So I’m not at all a gamer, but I just bought Fallout 3 because it’s been getting such great reviews, and it’s set near where I live. After a few bumps in the road getting it installed, I started it up, pressed Play and got an error message that my system does not have hardware T&L, which is, apparently, required. The system requirements don’t mention it :rolleyes:
I have a Dell desktop that is not new (4 years old?) with an integrated video card. I gather that hardware T&L (transformation and lighting) is a feature on video cards to do certain rendering in hardware for speed advantages over software.
But how can I tell if a given video card includes it? Someone posted a link to a couple of video cards they recommended but the specs don’t mention T&L. Don’t want to make the same mistake twice.
Any recent graphics card will have support for hardware transform and lighting. In fact, onboard graphics are pretty much the only way it’s possible to not have hardware T&L support, unless you have a card from the '90s or something. The minimum system requirements for Fallout 3 do specify a DX9 compatible card, either NVIDIA 6800 or better, or ATI X850 or better, which would exclude integrated video chipsets.
So, if you’re looking to upgrade your graphics, anything on the consumer market today will have T&L support, and anything higher than the minimum in Fallout 3’s specs should be able to play the game marginally well. You should probably go a bit above the minimum requirements, though, since there are a lot of good cards out there that will substantially surpass that while still being pretty cheap. I could give you some recommendations if you’re interested; how much are you willing to spend?
Your options will also be influenced by compatibility with your current motherboard. Do you know if your board has a PCI-express slot?
Give us the model of your Dell, that should give us enough info to see what your upgrade options are. As Stealth Potato (that name rocks) mentions, you can get a very nice card that can play the game with most of the bells and whistles for under $100.
The computer is a Dell Dimension 2400. I looked up my purchase, it was 5 years ago. This might be the signal that it’s time for me to do my part for economic stimulus and buy a new computer
There are three expansion slots, all used (fax/modem, FireWire port, video capture/TV tuner). Don’t know if it’s PCI Express.
The machine runs at 2.2 GHz, which is technically lower than the Fallout minimum.
The Dell Dimension 2400 only has PCI ports, which limits you to video cards that won’t be able to run modern games anyways. I would recommend a new computer; one that can play current games well can be had for fairly cheap, especially if you are willing to build it yourself/have geeky friend put it together. Or buy an OEM machine, and stick a decent video card in it. Don’t get your video card from Dell or HP or the like, since they really overcharge for them. For example, Dell charges $100 to upgrade their current Inspiron 530 machines to a Radeon 3650; meanwhile, you can get a Radeon 4670, which is about twice as fast, for $80 on Newegg.
Yeah, the big box manufacturers like Dell and HP overcharge for everything. With a little careful selection, if you buy all the parts from Newegg and put it together yourself, you can get a machine with some pretty solid gaming capabilities for around $500 to $600 that could easily cost twice that much to buy from Dell. And it only gets worse the higher you go - if you buy a high-end gaming PC from Dell, you can easily be throwing away $1500 on the convenience of not having to assemble it yourself.
(Of course, there are other considerations, like the convenience of having the whole machine under warranty with one large company, though I’ve heard enough Dell support horror stories to wonder if that’s really much of a benefit. :p)
You tell them which parts you want in the machine, and they put it together for you and mail it to you. For oddly reasonable prices all around.
Kind of funny how they charge you an extra 20 bucks to do a decent job with the internal wires (no seriously, they say this explicitly right there on the website) but still, all in all, they offer a great deal if you’d prefer not to assemble the thing yourself.
If you think you can build it yourself Tom’s hardware is just released their different PC builds last week. They have a nice gaming machine build for less than $500.
I’ll mull this over. I’ve done just about every kind of upgrade except CPU, and never a build from scratch. I would feel pretty comfortable assembling my own machine but would freak out the first time something went wrong that I didn’t know how to fix. I have had good luck with my Dell though have not been real happy with their customer support. They’re not very well trained or experienced. I got the feeling they just looked up keywords from my question in a knowledgebase, and puked out a stock answer that really didn’t apply to my situation.
(I have a Gateway laptop and have had somewhat better experience with them. Best support I ever got was for an IBM Aptiva. Oddly enough the only machine I never had to contact customer support for at all is an eMachines I bought for my kids almost 7 years ago, which I just replaced when it wouldn’t power up.)
I have to disagree a bit with this. In the $500-$600 range Dell is often cheaper. Based entirely on the fact that they can get Windows and Office so much cheaper in their mass purchase status. Even if you go OEM, you are looking at $300 spent on software before you buy any parts. It can go back and forth, but if you scour every thing you belong(company, insurance etc.) for good discount codes, you can get some far better deals then if you home-build.
If you are building a “surf the web” light duty PC, I would agree. But the additional cost of their gaming capable hardware often times more than makes up the difference.
Which is why I bought the retail version of vista and office (student). This way I don’t have to worry about it being tied down to particular hardware and it’s available to me should I upgrade the whole thing.
It does depend. I’m just saying don’t dismiss them out of hand. Right before Christmas last year, I got a pretty sweet deal for $450 after discounts from Dell. I was looking at $750 to build the same thing. It wasn’t the shiniest new components, and I guess they were trying to dump stock on some builds, but it was sweet for me.
It’s always worth a price check at those budget levels.
Edited for one more thing though. If you do look at a Dell, and price out one with integrated video thinking you’ll get your own card later, you probably need to price in a new power supply, Dell is notorious for putting a ps without much extra juice.
It’s specially a good idea if you plan on upgrading the whole shebang. If you need a printer a monitor and peripherals, it might indeed be worthwhile to get a system from dell/gateway/alienware, etc and just purchase a video card through an online wholesaler (like newegg).
Well, yeah, it’s hard to beat the prices of the lower-end Dells, mostly because of the bundled software. I guess it’s closer to parity in that range than it was the last time I checked, but it’s still the case that if you spend just a bit more at Newegg, you can get something far better than what you can get from Dell for that price.
To give an example: currently on Dell’s website, you can get one of their “Studio Desktops” starting at $549. It features:
Core 2 Duo E7200
2GB DDR2-800
500GB hard disk
Integrated video
Windows Vista Home Premium
If we look around on Newegg, we can put together something like this:
Total price: $517, or $487 if you count the mail-in rebate on the 8600GT.
So that’s a fair bit cheaper right there, and it’s already much better than the Dell in the graphics department. The real difference, though, kicks in when you want to upgrade things a little more. Suppose you wanted 4GB of RAM and a faster CPU?
Just adding a video card to the Dell (an ATI HD 3650) adds another $100 to the price, and it’s not even as good as the 8600GT. Upgrading the RAM with another 2GB adds $75 (a complete rip-off; a whole 4GB of DDR2-800 costs less than that), and upgrading to a quad-core Q8200 adds $150. So, now we’re sitting at a total cost of about $875 for the Dell.
So the total cost on Newegg is $572 after a $30 rebate, vs. $875 for the Dell, which is still not quite as good. So, I guess I was exaggerating when I said “twice that much,” but the differences are still substantial. And if you increase your Newegg budget a bit further, and the price of a comparable Dell machine balloons even higher.
We’re getting well beyond the OP but I appreciate the help. Just as a datapoint, I priced out a Dell XPS 420. Here are the specs, note that I added a couple of options including a fax/modem (I send faxes frequently) and fancy speakers (although I suspect Bose tends to be overpriced). It rang up to $1129, free shipping. I like the abundance of expansion slots and lots of USB ports.
Intel® Core™2 Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs
640GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write
Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT 256MB
Bose Companion 3 Series II Multimedia Speaker System
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
Ethernet
PCI: 3 Slots
PCIe x1: 1 Slot
PCIe x16 (Graphics): 1 Slot
PCIe x8: 1 Slot
USB: 2 front, 6 back, 2 internal
An HP Pavilion advertised by Circuit City is $900 with similar specs but without some of the bells & whistles.
Here’s one from CyberPower; why would it have *two *video cards? I added fax/modem for just a few bucks. Sounds like a great deal in comparison. $707 *before *rebates:
CASE: ($20 off Mail-in Rebate) NEW! Apevia X-Jupiter Jr. 420 Watts Case (G Type Metallic Gray Color with Side-Window)
CPU: (Quad-Core)Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz 1066FSB 8MB L2 Cache 64-bit
MOTHERBOARD: ($20 off Mail-in Rebate) MSI P7N SLI-FI 750i SLI Chipset LGA775 Supports LGA775 FSB1333 DDR2/800 Mainboard w/GbLAN, USB2.0, &7.1Audio
MEMORY: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard)2GB (2x1GB) PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory (Corsair or Major Brand)
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT 512MB 16X PCI Express (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)
VIDEO CARD 2:confused:: NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT 512MB 16X PCI Express (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)
HARD DRIVE: Single Hard Drive (500GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD)
Data Hard Drive: NONE
Optical Drive: (Special Price) LG 20X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
SOUND: 3D WAVE ON-BOARD 5.1 SOUND CARD
The specs also default to a subwoofer speaker set but they are not listed in the summary.
Regarding the two video card thing, these days, high end systems sometimes have two high end cards. For Nvidia cards, this is called “SLI”, and it does improve performance considerably. (Though not actually doubling it as one might have hoped.)
For a 9400, I see no good reason to get two cards. (For the same price as two 9400s I’m sure you could get one 9800 which would perform better than the 2 9400s.) For the setup you listed, I’d drop the second 9400.
That makes up for the additional $100 or so you need to spend on an operating system.
Q8200 - $189
4GB 800MHz - $50
640GB SATA HD - kill this and go wth the terrabyte drive - 1TB SATA HD - $119
Dual Drives? Why do you need two optical drives?: Single DVD burner - $25
Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT 256MB - This card blows - Nvidia GTX 260 $240
56K PCI Data Fax Modem - $6
EVGA 750i SLI mobo - $160
PSU 750 watt - $70
Comes out to $855. Minus the case and the speakers though. However the PC above is a gaming machine. Which the dell is definitely not. It’s not bleeding edge, but it’s mid high end and will play any modern game at full quality graphics and at high definition resolutions.
And I priced this off the cuff as it were. If you dig around you can find similar spec’ed hardware at lower prices or offering discounts with bundles/rebates. Also, you can save a lot of cash by going with an older Nvidia Chipset mobo, and maybe going for the 9800 gt instead of the newer 260 video card. That will save oyu a lot more, and still you’d end up with a machine that completely outclasses the dell.
The 
