New PC fears....

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Okay, the day before I left to my mom's house for the holiday break (all political correctness people observe how abstained from the word "christmas") my dad did the impossible, the unthinkable--he got me a computer (not an expensive one mind you). I didnt have much time to screw around on It and here at my mom's I purchased Neverwinter Nights and have been playing nonstop, and my brother purchased Knights of the Old Republic. Now, my woe is, will my comp be able to handle Neverwinter Nights, if so then Knights of the old republic? Here are the specs:

Dell Dimension B110 Series

Intel Celeron D Processor 325 (2.53 GHz) and 256k cashe, JH15191 (How does this processor rate against a Pentium III or IV? It has the same GHz...)

512 MB DDR SDRAM at 400 MHz (looks decent enough)

80 GB hard drive space (oh yeah!)

Integrated intel 3D AGP Graphics card (this is what bothers me... I looked it up on the Dell website and I dunno if it can handle NWN, it should because it supports DirectX 9 and says its made for 3d graphics, the card can support HDTV which IMO says a lot, but you tell me if it can support NWN )

48X CD-RW Drive

Am I missing anything?

I bought NWN Diamond which I hear is on a DVD disc, but I think the CD-RW drive can handle that as on the box it says the computer can play and burn DVD's.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

The processor is roughly around 1.8ghz pentium4 - it will run NWN and KotOR.

The card specifications don't say much - but it still should be able to handle both NWN and KotOR.

 

How sure are you out of 10?

 

I know everything checks out except the video. I have less of a system but with a 64 mb video card and it runs fine on my PC. I would think that it should handle it, if anything your graphics may be a bit choppy/stuttery. Most of the graphic accelerators will do a decent job, how many MB is your graphics card?

 

Intel performs worse than AMD and Celeron is the worst of them all, so 1.5-1.8 GHz is pretty accurate value of its real performance. You should have about 1 gig of RAM, but guess 512 megs is still decend enough for a few years.

In overall, it probably won't be able to deal with it at full graphics, but medium/low should be fine. It depends of the developers and your videocard.

 

Your system should be able to run NWN. I recommend running the game in low setting to get the best frame rates. If you run it higher you may run into some glitches.

NWN is not a brand new game so most budget or low end PCs can run this game with a proper 32MB+ video card. In fact the computer I previously owned which has lower specs than yours could run this game with a 32MB video card.

 

From what little I can tell about these things, my PC is worse than yours and I manage to be able to play NWN OK.

 

*wipes brow*

All right, thanks for dispelling my fears guys

*celebrates*

 

This will be Intel Extreme graphics - which are integrated on the motherboard - theres no actual graphics card here. I'm not sure what the performance will be like - but you might be able to run it on its lowest setting - but don't expect to much.

My advice would be to try to get hold of 3d mark 2001 see what bench mark you get - this will give you some idea of what it is capable of - I'd guess about 3000-4000 marks would mean NVN would run comfortably. Check this article too

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/15/are_intel/

Your still better off trying to get your hands on a cheap AGP card if you can and have a slot on the mobo.

 

My old system was a lot weaker than this one and was able to run NWN at max graphics just fine.

 

chances are that your old system had an nvidia card in it - the NWN 3D engine was written by a bunch of guys who I believe also had a hand in writing nvidia drivers, so they knew a lot of extra tricks to use for those cards
modern ATI cards apparently don't have any problems with NWN, but some of the older cards did experience performance issues bad enough to make the game almost unplayable

 

You could own an Athlon FX57 with 4 gig of RAM, and still not be able to run NVN at an acceptable level if you are using an integrated graphics solution.

 

Well, NWN works absolutely fine, except that I had to change the graphics quality to fast so that it didn't lag. It also runs KOTOR fine, although at installation it said I didn't meet the minimum requirements because my vid card doesn't have OpenGL support. Nevertheless, my little bro insists on playing it and it runs fine, except for lag when entering a new area. Tell me, is not having Open GL support going to eventually fry my vid card from running KOTOR? If so, tell my bro to stop playing it!!

Oh yeah, funny story. So I got back from vegas, popped in my NWN Diamond disc and..... Didn't work. Don't have a DVD drive So i had to wait ONE WHOLE FREAKING WEEK until I could buy NWN Platinum (it doesn't have witches wake or kingmaker! noooooo) so that I could play. ON buying a DVD drive, I own a dell, so does that mean I can only buy a Dell DVD drive? They are 90+ dollars, but I can get a non-dell one for around 40 bucks at best buy.

EDIT:
Also, I "borrowed" (hehe) a NVIDIA 64 mb graphics card from my friend to put in one of the pc slots, but when I went to install the drivers it said it was not compatable with windows XP and not to install it, so I didn't. While it was in and my monitor was plugged into it I didn't have a start bar on the main screen!! Where can I get a 64 mb graphics card that will slake my video game lust that is compatable with windows XP for a decent price?

 

Yeah...people often don't look at the box to see that it's actually a DVD and not a standard CDROM...my dad tried to watch a DVD in his CDROM drive about a year ago...so you're not totally alone.

You don't want a 64MB video card...especially one that has a PCI interface!
The lowest you sould be going is ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB. That a good card by the way, old, but still good.

 

The 64mb card probably has a driver problem - just plug it in, and then check the nvidia site for compatible drivers.

And no, your current card is not going to fry due to opengl games.