I built a PC for the family a few years back using some old spare parts really... spec is as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (yes that's a single-core)
1GB (2x512MB) Corsair PC3200 (2-3-2-5, pretty decent stuff)
Maxtor Diamondmax 200GB SATA HDD
Abit AX8 (Unheard of, VIA K8T800 NB)
PowerColor ATI Radeon X850XT-PE (it was the best... at the time... for a few weeks)
Windows XP Professional w/ SP 2

And this is what Unreal Tournament 3 looks like. Don't worry, you don't need to adjust your monitor, and no the quality has definitely not been lost during compression:



Awful frame rate, running on medium detail apparently... well, my girlfriends system looks better than this on the low detail so umm...

Time to put an upgrade past the family.

Cheap Core 2 and an 8800GT/3850?

Probably a Q6600 and a 3870.

Heh, I was going to say that but thought that may be a tad expensive.

I'm trying to rethink the upgrade.

I know that the family won't agree to an upgrade. They would rather just use a laptop as a main computer. I've already given a laptop to my mother so she doesn't really care too much about the desktop.

Basically, if I want it to be better so that it can keep up on LAN games - CS:S and TF2 for example, I need to foot the bill... playing online on the same server as my bro used to be insane amounts of fun - we would be up until the early hours of the morning playing BF2 for example. I miss those times. Anyway, I need to foot the bill.

I can't really do it before my holiday... I mean I could get a really good dual core processor with 2GB of RAM and a 3870 and a new motherboard for a few hundred squids, but I want to save as much as possible just to make sure that I have enough for the holiday.

I could build 2 identical systems side-by-side after the holiday, but that's going to be quite expensive considering the ambition I have for my next system, which of course the spec is of an undisclosable nature... as I don't actually know what it's going to be yet. I have a memory problem you see... (?)

Or I could just go with the aforementioned spec before buying my new PC. Hmm, now that I say that, it's probably definitely the best decision, maybe. So I'll probably go with that I think.

Yeah why not... Hmm... I mean I could do it now. I've just got a couple of hundred extra squids in to the bank this month compared to usual... or maybe I should wait until next month, I might have a considerable amount more overtime racked up by then... Hmm...

*Continues to think out loud*

I'll keep you updated.

Youre concerned about a 50fps drame rate?!

I get 25 max out of TMU

That PC is fine as it is, Id love to have somthing as good as that! xD

The thing is that's 50fsp in UT with no action, and a relatively confined space. The frame rate probably gets a lot worse, right? Also, as he said, it looks a bit poor.

The graphics card is 3 generations out of date and it runs a single core, plus 1GB RAM is pushing it nowadays. For a machine largely used for gaming, an upgrade would be well worth it, and he would see a lot of difference.