Metro 2033, Grand Theft Auto IV, Just Cause 2 kind of is.
The most demanding of the three you listed is BF3, but Frostbite 2 is actually incredibly well optimized.
Turns out a few months ago 2TB drives were $80, but there was a flood in Thailand. If you hold off a few months the prices might drop quite a bit.
I don’t think Arma 3 would run at all on the machine you’re suggesting. I have a machine on the higher end and can’t run Arma 2 very well.
With an i5-750, 8GB of RAM, and a 9800 GT I had to run ArmA 2 on medium, it took a 560 to max it out.
SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!
seriously. if you buy a computer (especially a gaming computer) for only 400$ you’ll be looking for a new one within 6 months because it can’t hanlde your games anymore.
that and i don’t know how it is in the rest of the world… but ever since the floods in asia the prices of HDD’s has tripled… so for 1Tb here it’s around 120€ or around 150$ at the moment… i know there are smaller HDD’s but thats almost half your budget… for only the HDD
Thanks for the info.
Also, don’t worry. I plan on using the PC until I can get a job and I get to college. So it’s temorary, it’s a helluva upgrade from this crap of a PC.
Dell Inspiron 518(I have the older one w/o the HDMI or medicore onboard gfx)
A Radeon 6570… at that point, you’re almost better off just looking for a motherboard that has integrated graphics.
A lot of economists are actually expecting that the hard drive market won’t stabilize again until 2013.
Yeah I guess I’m going to have to go with integrated gfx, I just really don’t like mini-motherboards, any suggestions. I’m pretty sure if I replace the card with an onboard one that has slots for future upgrades, that I can get a better PC for $300.
I bought my laptop for around $500 and it’s fantastic for…umm…browsing BMS forums…and umm…playing WoW on the lowest settings and getting 10fps…and that’s about it.
I would advise strongly against an internal graphics card. It’s what I have and that alone stops me playing 90% of games.
The rest of my specs would allow me to play anything up to and including Crysis. But the internal graphics card means that I struggle to play games from 1997.
So I wish you luck in your endeavor, but I really think you should try and persuade the person to save the cash and give it to you as a late Xmas gift.
wtf? send it back, now. this $300 PC has onboard gfx, and I can play WoW on almost Max with like 30fps (few drops in large crowded areas, and jumps to like 40fps in small areas.)
I can play lots of games, just not high-end ones like Like BF3 and stuff, but I can play Starcraft II, HL, almost any source game (not some recent ones like portal 2 or L4D2)
Laptops are more expensive than PCs for the same internals, you should know that.
/facepalm I accidentally over-read ‘laptop’ XD
just do a shitload of research and don’t buy new if you can get it used.
I did my first good build (intel E2160+8600GTS+2GB DDR2+ASUS P5KPL-CM) back in 2009 for less than 200$, because I stole the graphics card and HDD from BestBuy, bought the CPU and mobo for 69$ each, overclocked it to like 3Ghz and got the power supply from a friend who upgraded to a modular one(what a dumbass right?).
Now I have been gradually collecting better parts (went through 4 GPU’s, 3 CPU’s, 2 power boxes, 2 sets of ram and 3 mobo’s so far) and ended up with a much faster build than what I had in '09 with almost zero expenses (except for the radeon 6850)
I can play skyrim on 3 screens and nobody can tell me that I’ve spent too much on my PC.