I love your statement about what's an adequate system to run games and that it makes the presumption that any chip under one gigahertz is not adequate for games. Adequate Means being sufficient for a specific task, or barely sufficient and satisfactory. That's right my fellow people of the forums YOU TRULY DO NOT NEED THE FASTEST,COOLEST, and MOST EXPENSIVE PARTS TO BUILD A COMPUTER SYSTEM TO PLAY GAMES! Please Now Read This!
MY NEPHEW'S COMPUTER
Hewlett packard xe783
With
Made For HP Asus motherboard
Celeron 700mhz processor
320 Megs of pc-100 ram
32x Packard Bell Cd-rom from 1998
3.5" floppy
PNY Geforce FX 5200 PCI Video Card
10/100 mbps pci ethernet adapter
Built in 56k fax modem
Built in crystal audio sound card
30 gb maxtor 5400 r.p.m hard drive
Sony 15" trinitron multiscan monitor from 1999(used)
2-usb 1.1 ports
Thrustmaster digital gamepad
Micro Innovations Wireless Mouse and Keyboard Combo
With this System He plays medal of honor aa spearhead online and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory at acceptable frame rates with little or almost no lag, and usually it's very smooth, granted with no eye candy but it still looks ok and runs descent.
He also plays Splinter Cell, Quake 3, The Matrix, Civilization 3, Ghost Recon, Unreal 2 and other games in non-online play. He could probably run just about any game I have and play it pretty smoothly. The real big difference in performance was the Geforce FX video card. I had first purchased a radeon 7500 pci video card and abruptly returned it upon the installation of the first game i tried on his system. That's when for his birthday i proceeeded to buy him the geforce fx 5200 pci video card with 128mb ddr ram. After doing this i was very very pleased with the overall boost in performance on his windows mellenium operated system. Quake 3 arena timedemo 1 actually hit over 60 frames per second with 4x AA and 4x AF, at 800x600 resoloution with all the quake 3 graphics settings all the way up. Now for a 4 year old computer to do that, that's Good Stuff, or Adequate as they would SAY!
Now I am not proclaiming that the computer is the best or will even best 40 percent of the systems currently owned throughout the world, but it is adequate for gaming as proven and also did make one very seemingly unimpressionable 12 year old forget about his gamecube and step into the much more rich computer gaming world. For me it also makes me happy because i had to shovel snow and save money to buy my first 286 computer that i ever bought for 500 dollars, that barely ran the first civilization game from sid meir(hope thats how you spell it) that ever came out. Now those were the days.
REMEMBER EVERYTHING IS TRASH EXCEPT COMPUTER PARTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!GO RED SOX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!KILL THE BLUE JAYS!!!!!!!
My Rigs