Compaq Presario Media Center Desktop PC (SR1830NX)

[Gollum17]

hey all, my first post here, YAY FOR ME . well, ive been looking at alot of pcs lately, trying to find the best specs i can for my money, when i stumbled along this deal at circuit city. http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/productDetail.do?oid=147184&cm_keycode=85

heres what you get for 539 bucks
200 gb hard drive
1 gb ram DDR SDRAM
amd athlon 64, 3500+ processor (about 2.2ghz)
integrated ATI Radeon® Xpress 200 graphics with up to 256MB of shared video memory

my first question is will this pc be able to run new games like Half-Life 2, Middle-earth 2, Guild Wars, etc. on high quality video settings, without getting all laggy n messed up n slow n crap n stinkage n i hate that? also, if it can do that, how long do u expect it will be able to handle the new games that are coming out? 2 years down the road? 3?

second question i have is about the video card, ati radeon Xpress 200, i dont know that much about it, is it any good?

thanks for any info u could give me id be most appreciative

 

[Gollum17]

could someone PLZ respond?

 

[TREMBER]

hey i boght a emachines with simial specs and bought a 7600gs and i can play games no prob.my mom also has the same comp exeot ati chipset and it could handle HL2 on low settings

 

[Jorsoft]

Hello. Lucky for you, I work at Circuit City and I do sell these model quite often. It's very good for the money and it is very popular. The only bottleneck to this system is going to be the graphics card, the x200. It's integrated so it takes away from your system ram and it is a fairly low end card, but good as far as integrated goes. It'll run the games you've listed but not very well. You'll want to purchase a higher end graphics card to get the most out of your system. I'd recommend at least a Geforce 6600 or Radeon x600, the higher end the better. the psu of this model is 300 watts (I think) so most agp cards should be okay.

 

[talldude123]

Upgrade the video card, and everything should be fine. Also, disable the chipset once you get the card to unlock the 256MB of video RAM to your system.