Onboard video for light gaming

[dpearson]

I'm building a system for a friend who doesn't need a powerful video card. The only gaming he plans on doing is Civilization 4 and Heroes of Might and Magic 5.

Would the Intel GMA X4500 be enough to play these games? It's the onboard video chipset for the Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L

Also, he's considering getting a SSD. Any suggestions? All he plans on doing with this system is light gaming, word processing, playing music, and light internet. He also wants to upgrade to Windows 7 when it's released.

Specs:

Intel Pentium E5200 2.5ghz
Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L
Corsair 4GB DDR2 800
Cooler Master RS-460-PSAR-J3 460 Watts

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...intel-x4500-good-games

Nvidia or ATI onboard gpu's are much better suited to games than Intel ones. This 3650 is more powerful than any IGP, comes with 512mb vram, and costs $25 AR. http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814131084

 

[yh125d]

SSD is very much overkill for his uses. Money would be much better spent on a dedicated GPU. A cheap one like a 4670 should be able to max out those games

 

[Piuc2020]

I would get a dedicated video card, sure he only plays HoMM IV and Civ 4 right now but what if great games in the same genre are released further down the line that are much more demanding or maybe even sequels to those games.

Buy something that's relatively futureproof, like a 9600GT (don't know what it's called now in the new nomenclature) or something like that.

 

[dpearson]

Thanks everyone!

I'm going to buy that Radeon 3650 and since my friend would prefer as little noise as possible, I'm going to take the stock fan off and replace it with an Artic Cooling Accelero VGA Cooler http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16835186017

That card should be more than enough to run his games.

 

[SlowSpyder]

HOMM5 rocks.

I actually installed it on an HP NC6000 laptop with a mobile Radeon 9600 with 32MB of 64 bit vram to see how it would run... on the lowest settings, 800x600 it was playable, though not very smooth at times, though that is much easier to put up with on a turn based stradegy game vs. a first person shooter or the like. I would assume that a Radeon 3650 will be able to just about max that game out assuming he's not running a crazy demanding resolution monitor.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

You might as well step up to this then even though I really don't think that 3650 will create much noise at all. http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814161274 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814500072

 

[s44]

Accelero = best GPU investment ever

 

[brblx]

Originally posted by: WaitingForNehalem
You might as well step up to this then even though I really don't think that 3650 will create much noise at all. http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814161274 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814500072

these would both be a worthy upgrade from the 3650. strongly recommended unless he really won't play anything other than civ4, really. havn't played homm5 but the 3650 could struggle a little since it is more recent and gpu intensive.

edit- didn't see the accelero comment. i'd DEFINATELY buy one of those higher performing passive cards rather than spend more getting a passive cooler for a measly 3650.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

I wouldn't trust passive cooling for mid-range cards.

 

[Qbah]

So I zoomed out and tilted the screen a bit on my HD4870 at 1920x1200 and max AA and FPS went from 45-ish (which is also a bit strange imo... 45 on a HD4870? ) to like sub-10 (actually I had FRAPS running). Either there's something wrong with ATi drivers for this game or I really don't know. That was under Vista. That HD3650 should do a lower res with medium settings and no AA fine. But maxing the game? No way.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Qbah
So I zoomed out and tilted the screen a bit on my HD4870 at 1920x1200 and max AA

You ran out of memory.