can i play this...

heres a copy of what my machine is running...

AMD athlon XP 2500+
1.83 ghz
512 mb of ram
Gainward Geforce FX 5700 Ultra/880 tv-DVI (256mb)
56x rom drive
twin 80Gb hard drives

all i want to know is if i can run half-life 2 and doom 3 at a very good speed.. or if theres any kind of programs i can download to speed up the machine for these games..

 

Half life 2 you should be able to play the game on medium. im not sure about doom 3 though, maybe not as good.

 

You should find both games quite playable (25+ FPS), on medium detail.
I run DooM 3 with the following specs:

AMD athlon XP 2500+ @ 1.80 ghz
512 mb of ram
Radeon 9800pro (128mb)
80Gb hard drive with 8mb buffer

There are guides for some excellent tweaking on the config file as well. That should
boost performance by a few FPS. Look to this site:
http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/doom3/index.shtml

Also, you have an nVidia based graphic card, and DooM 3 is heavily optimized for
nVidia cards. Therefore, your DooM3 experience should be quite smooth at medium
quality.

Halflife 2 is a different story though. Contrarily to DooM 3, it is heavily optimized for
ATI based graphic cards. I haven't played it yet, but I've heard that at best, it has
some critical glitches that severely handicap performance. There will be a patch
addressing those issues soon enough though. You might still be compelled to play in
low quality mode though, which isn't so bad since the graphics engine is spectacular
even on low.

Finally, there are some general tricks for getting your computer running at optimal
performance. I don't know how technical you are; if you want a detailed list of my
methods, let me know. At least, get the newest drivers for your graphic card and
motherboard. Defrag your hard drive, and close all other programs and useless services
before you play either game.

Hope this helps.

 

A list would be helpfull.. after i posted this last night i did find a way to tweak Doom 3 to run really fast an smoothly.. just unzip all the .pak files into the base folder and it runs maybe 5x faster on my machine...but like you said im sorta tech. im just starting this OC stuff so im still new to it but a list would help me alot

 

Yup you should be able to.

 

Sorry about the delay. Ya know how Christmas gets hectic, eh. Anyways, here is
what I do to get my system running optimally. I'll assume that you have Windows XP.

First of all, I like to partition my hard drive so that windows is on its own partition, and everything else is on another. You can do this with the windows XP installer. This is easier to do after a fresh format and OS install. You can also try Partition Magic, a powerful partitioning tool. However, it isn't free. I recommed the format and fresh install; it cleans the system of all the garbage holding it down. It's a good idea to defragment your hard drive regularly as well. Windows XP has lots of fancy visuals that you don't really need. I like to set my scheme to the classic style
you can change this by right-clicking on desktop and moving to thhe appearance tab.
Also, the fancy GUI is costly on the RAM; you should set windows for best performance by right-clicking on "my Computer"->properties->advanced-> performance(settings button) and choose "adjust for best performance". then, click on the advanced tab, and set both radio buttons to "programs". Once you've got your partitions, it's a good idea to NOT place the windows swap file on same drive as that on which windows resides. In the same window where you chose preference on programs over services, click on the change button for vrtual memory, and move the page file to a drive other than the one on which Windows resides.

Another thing that hogs RAM are the services that windows runs. you really don't need all of them. Consult guides to see what each services does, and decide whether you need it or not. http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm is a good place to start. Another thing that slows down the system are programs running in teh background. Go to start menu->run and type "msconfig" without the quotes. Click on teh startup tab, and uncheck everything (unless you REALLY need certain programs running)

Drivers key to good gameplay. Make sure you have the latest motherboard and graphic card drivers. Obtain thm from the manufacturor's site. Tweaking motherboard settings sometimes help, but the recent motherboards are well set up. if you have an old motherboard, read up on what settings compromise performance. In general, disable able palette snooping, and bios caching/shadowing. Also, make sure the AGP overture is set to your graphics card memory size, or a maximum of 128 megs.

Overclocking is a great way for squeezing more frames out of your PC, but I won't talk about it because it is dangerous if attempted by the inexperienced. If you really want to overclock, let me know. You should start by reading forums and guides dedicated to the topic.

finally, you should kill the explorer service before you start the game. push ctrl+alt+delete and kill the explorer service and free up 20 megs of ram or more. the windows UI will vanish, but notice that you can still run programs by going to file
->new task in teh task manager. use that to launch games. when you are done, go to file->new task and type "explorer" without the quotes and the UI will re-appear.

Phew what a long post. I hope this helps. if you have any questions let me know.