Starcraft 2 on a Pentium 4

DarkBridge

Hello all,
My friends and I like to play SC2 in our college apartment. We have two computers that are very good at it, a laptop that is passable, and an old Pentium 4 sitting in my room that is currently serving as a nightstand.

We are considering upgrading the Pentium 4 so that it could be an extra SC2 machine, since more than three of us regularly enjoy this activity. Its specs are as follows:
Intel D865PERL motherboard
Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ processor
2.5 GB of RAM
An open AGP slot
Windows XP
400 Watt (I think) PSU

The upgrade we have in mind is a Radeon 4650 1GB AGP card, which would run us around $80.

Although this would be above SC2's requirements, I would like input from someone with experience on a platform similar (or close to) this before we actually dive in and drop $80 on not much bang for our buck.

Would this computer be able to run the game on low settings in 4v4 matches? I have few doubts concerning the video card; the processor is my main worry.

Deathwing

While I didn't play SC2 on it, I did have a P4 3.2 GHz system for a few years....my educated guess would be that it may run with everything on low, but it's going to be ugly and (depending what resolution you're running) probably more than a little choppy - the CPU is going to be a fairly significant bottleneck. Technically the minimum system requirements call for a PCI-E video card also, rather than AGP.

Honestly it's kinda hard to say you should spend $80 to upgrade a machine that old, but it's your budget and not mine

temps

It doesnt really matter what vid card you put in there.. the cpu is going to be the limiting factor.

I played sc2 beta on a p4 something on low settings 1v1 and its sluggish when food gets high/in battle i wouldn't think 4v4 would be playable after a minute in a game.

DarkBridge

I suppose we'll be looking for another venue for our gaming needs.
Thanks!

Hevach

My other computer has an Athlon 64 3800+ single core processor and an nVidia 8800someletters. So a bit better than your system but not hugely so. It will run Starcraft 2 campaign comfortably at minimum settings (in smaller missions you can even turn things up a little bit) except one case: Any of the defend for X minute missions, I had to turn the difficulty down to easy. When the big waves start coming on harder difficulties, things got clunky with too many units and effects on the screen.

The worst of them, the last mission in the Protoss mini campaign, even on minimum settings I had to anticipate the mothership's warp in and move units out of the arrival point. When it appeared the first time and put that AOE cloaking field on my army, the computer simply quit.