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Starcraft II Work Computer Upgrade
Akilae729
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I just bought SCII. However, I don't have a computer at home that can run it.
BUT! I'm a grad student and running a lab so I spend the majority of my time at my desk.
I have SCII installed and running on my office computer, however, everything is at the lowest settings and I get the feeling like this is going to bog down horribly once I get more units on the sceen.
I haven't done any PC gaming in about 5 years so I'm pretty clueless on what hardware is currently out there.
My goal for this upgrade is to play SCII at reasonable settings for as little money as possible and I assume I can do this with a graphics card swap.
Current Computer
Dell Inspiron 530
Core 2 Duo @2.2 GHz
4Gb Ram
128mb GeForce 8300 GS
What card should I buy?
BUT! I'm a grad student and running a lab so I spend the majority of my time at my desk.
I have SCII installed and running on my office computer, however, everything is at the lowest settings and I get the feeling like this is going to bog down horribly once I get more units on the sceen.
I haven't done any PC gaming in about 5 years so I'm pretty clueless on what hardware is currently out there.
My goal for this upgrade is to play SCII at reasonable settings for as little money as possible and I assume I can do this with a graphics card swap.
Current Computer
Dell Inspiron 530
Core 2 Duo @2.2 GHz
4Gb Ram
128mb GeForce 8300 GS
What card should I buy?
Akilae729 on
0
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128 MB PCIe NVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 GT or ATI Radeon® 9800 PRO video card or better
There are cheap ATIs in the $70-120 range that are fine.
Edit: That will basicly future-proof you for years to come. I'm running a 280 on very high settngs with AA on, and I only lag in massive 3v3/4v4 battles.
You might have to be careful with the additional power connectors required. Dell tend to not be overly generous on their PSUs so I'd err on the side of caution and get something that can draw all it's power of the PCIe port or think about buying a new PSU to go along with the card. I think something like a 5670 would probably be best if you don't want to upgrade anything else. It's cheap, yet a ton better than an 8300 but you'll want to have a close look at the PSU and see what it says on the side and what spare connectors it has.
(Last time I upgraded a video card it was for CoD2 and Wolfenstein ET)
There are reviews of people with 5670s running off stock Dell CPUs so that is promising.
If you're just looking for a $50 card then something like a 4650 should still be a big improvement over your current card. But the more you pay, the better you get.
I don't actually have SC2 though so I don't have a great feel for how well it's optimised, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work well on most systems. (8300 is not a reasonable system
The fact that it runs on this computer at all means that it is EXTRA forgiving.
Not sure how it compares to the other cards listed or your current card, but I'm running SC2 on full settings off of an 8800 GTS, which is only one step up (and dx10) from the 8600 GT, from what I remember.
8800 is quite a leap from the 8600 though. But DoW2 ran fine on my 8600M GT
Dell power supplies tend to have limited connections, if the computer came with a cheap graphics card, it's doubtful that it has the pci-e power plug on it. You might not have many molex connections either to use the molex-pci-e adapters.