Specs Question
 

I need your knowledge on something. For Christmas, I'll be getting a new computer for my nephew. He plays the game 'Guild Wars' quite a lot on this PC and I need to know if this new PC will be able to play Guild Wars.

Here are the PC specs:


Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 531 with HT technology (3.00GHz, 800MHz, 1MB cache)
Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
2024MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [2x512] Memory
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900
80GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache Integrated 2.0 Channel High Definition Audio

And the Guild Wars specs are:

# Windows XP/ 2000/ ME/ 98
# Intel Pentium III 1 GHz or equivalent
# 512 MB RAM
# CD-ROM Drive
# 3 GB Available HDD Space
# ATI Radeon 8500 or GeForce 3 series vide
# card with 64 MB of video memory
# 16-bit Sound Card

I know pretty much next to nothing on these things, so I would really appreciate your knowledge and offer me suggestions on these things. :)

Thanks for reading ~

IT should run, looking at the specs from the video card it should have a feature set equivalent to the required specs. However it may run slow as the video chip set is bottle necked by system ram as it shares that. Their might be some weird artifacts as the video subset uses tile based rendering (thinks of kyro chip set and its problems).

Would it run? Probably. Well? Not really. The Integrated Graphic Card is the part that would be keeping it down. Adding a Video Card would help.

I can really attest to this. Even if you invest in a lame GeForce 7300, it'll make a world of difference. Not having to share RAM with the system will be the biggest plus.

I remember way back in 2002, I played AvP 2 on a slow Athlon based PC with an 8MB nVidia Vanta (hardly relevant even then) and then on a much faster Celeron based PC. The Celeron had much worse performance until I stopped using the Intel extreme (what does the "extreme" stand for? Extremely shitty?) graphics. I would ballpark most integrated graphics solutions two or even three generations behind the current midrange graphics cards in terms of performance.

I was all for saying yes, but then I saw that you had an on-board graphics, this is gonna really decrease the possibility of you being able to play Guild Wars. AGP cards are cheap enough nowadays. Here's a link for you. This card looks okay and is definitely an improvement over the on-board.