Building pc for Half Life 2, what else do I need???

Hi all,

I am sure this has appeared in forums a million times over the months but I am
in the process of building myself a new pc for the first time cause I wanna play all the new games that are coming out this year


The following is what I have so far:

Case: Q-Tec Midi Tower ATX TL-MD, Silvertransparent. (has 3 fans inside)
PSU: Q-Tec 400 Watt Dual Fan Gold
Mobo: Asus P4C800
Memory: TwinMos PC3200 512mb Dual DDR
Sound: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (from current pc, might get Audigy 2)

The following is what I will be ordering soon:

CPU: Pentium 4 3.2ghz 800 mhz
Graphics: Undecided (waiting for prices to come down)

I have decent 5.1 Altec Lansing speakers already.
And I will be using the monitor, keyboard etc from this pc

So is there anything else I need????

Thanks for your help guys!!

Um, you'll need HL2. Heh, probably won't see that till the fall so if you waited, you could save some $ as the prices drop on HW, especially for the video card. You could probably get a good price on a 9800pro or Xt by then.

If you wanted to save more money you could get a 2.4c or 2.8c and OC it. I have a 2.4c 800fsb running on a asus p4c800-e deluxe @ 3.2. The bios makes it really easy to OC. I think the option was like oc it 10, 20 or 30%. I'm running stock cooling and my temps are about 90-95 @ 30%.

Also I think the 3200 ram might slow you down. Get the fastest that you can afford, at least 3500 if not 4400

and yes i would get an audigy2 if you have any $ left. Then get a logitech mx510 gaming mouse (do they have best buys in Ireland?) and u will be teh 0wnZ0r, well, at least you'll have a nice rig.

I think it will be best to get a gig of ram. Reason why is because some games are starting to use that much nowadays. BF1942, Planetside, SWG, Simciity 4 all benefit from 1 gig of ram. Or, you can do this. Get 4 gigs of ram, create a ramdisk with HL 2 on it, and you got yourself a very fast machine. j/k

Besides that, all is good. You might also want to consdier a A64. They are faster in gaming then a P4 and usually cost the same. But, if you want to do stuff like encoding, compressing and so on, the P4 is the better choice.

As for the video card, I'm doing the same thing. Patience is a virtue.

isn't it kinda pointless to build a pc around a game that has already been pushed back a year? i'd wait til the game gets a solid release date before building a comp around a game.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the speed of the ram more important than the amount? I'm running 2x256 3500lvl2 mushkin and bf42 runs smooths as silk along with all of my other games with all the bells and whistles turned on at 10x7

As for upgrading for a game that isn't out yet and won't be out for many moons, well, there are a lot of other good games supposedly comming out soon like UT2k4, BF:V, Soldner, Farcry and hopefully Doom 3 will all be out soon. These are some of the reasons I just upgraded from my 1600xp. Plus all of your old games will look like new when u get that new vid card in there.

umm, it has not been delayed a year, closer to 5 months so far, although itll probably be a year when all's said and done...

I think that the most important thing you need is patience. You can overnight it from newegg right now for pretty cheap. j/k

But seriously, I would wait for a 939 A64 setup, which should start showing up at the end of this month. Wait till september (which is probably when hl2 will be released, but who knows) and by waiting till september, you might have some solid revisions of socket 939 mobos. Also, ddrII and pci-express and the new vid cards from ati and nvidia might be released. But who knows when for sure. I still believe that the best thing right now is patience.

yea just wait until the game has come out.
everything you want now will be cheaper later rather than sooner.

why get a gig of ram, games don't need more than atlist 256, but it's good to have 500 mg ram just to have everytin perfect. but a gig is too much for a game. except if your interested in video editing which requires alot of ram

actually, it isnt. try running the ut2k4 beta(if anyone wants to blow the whistle on me, look on planetunreal, its legal, not a leak) with 256 megs of ram then going back and running it with a gig. i bet there would be a ~20 fps difference.

Asteras said:

why get a gig of ram, games don't need more than atlist 256, but it's good to have 500 mg ram just to have everytin perfect. but a gig is too much for a game. except if your interested in video editing which requires alot of ram

Click to expand...

you must not play any semi modern games.

for bf/dc 1GB is needed. 256mb barely runs XP alone let alone a graphically intense game. i wouldn't even bother with a comp with less then 512mb and personally won't ever build another comp with less then a GB.


try playing planetside with 256mb and when you quit 5 minutes in due to lag you'll know why 1gb is recommended.