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25 September 2007

PC Gaming bunnies...a little help? I've got a co-worker, whom I am fond of and would like to help, who is asking me questions about how to upgrade her computer for her husband's birthday. I'm not a gamer, so, there's more inside![More:]They currently have an HP Pavilion 530n. Through the magic of the internet, I've been able to suss out that this machine has 512MB of RAM, and an NVIDIA video card.

I'm thinking that doubling the RAM and buying a new, non-bleeding edge video card should get the fella back in business for another year or so, at which point they'll buy a whole new machine.

The problem is, I'm not gamer enough to have a clue as to what video card to recommend. I'm hoping maybe someone here might be able to help? I'm not enough of a gear head to want to read a bunch of reviews that talk about polygons and stuff, so I'm hoping to exploit you lot.

Here's hoping you're all cool with that.

P.S. Thanks
AFAIK Geforce 8800 GTX is top of the line, $500... this would be ridiculous and would dwarf every other component in the system, also requires a 400W PS...

An 8600 is $150ish and only requires a 300W Power Supply... it will run DX10 and Pixel Shader 3, which are the overarching technical specifications in most next generation game engines...

It's not going to be screaming, for example... I'd doubt if it would run Crysis (not yet released, only beta) at a solid 30FPS... but you should be able to play HL2, Doom3, and probably BioShock/Unreal Engine 3 games suitably...
posted by appidydafoo 25 September | 13:44
Note that a lot of the last few generations of graphics cards are PCI-Express cards, while the motherboard in that PC only seems to have an AGP 8x slot. So you'll have to take that into account.
posted by chrismear 25 September | 15:01
Thanks you two. That does give me something to go on!
posted by richat 25 September | 17:32
I'm so sick of the lunarnormative bullshit that goes on here. || At lunchtime

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