Building a gaming system.. How will it run Crysis?

Question

I'm planning on building a system this summer under $800 (everything including monitor, etc) and I'm wondering how you guys think it will run Crysis when it comes out..

- MSI K9N4 motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ cpu
- 2GB DDR2 (PC2 5400) ram
- 500w power supply
- GeForce 7600gs 512mb pci-e x16 video card
- 160gb SATA hard drive

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Your video card will not be able to handle Direct X 10... Crysis is designed to be run in Direct X 10... only the 8 series GeForce cards are capable of running this... try an 8800 GTS for about $300... this will be your best bet... or you can wait for the 8600 GTS to come out which should be slightly cheaper and less powerful !!! oops, my bad... the 8600 GTS is already out !!!

Answer 2

That's a pretty good set up except for the video card. The 7600GS has very good performance vs price ratio that is why it is so popular. BUT its performance is not really awesome because of low clock rate (both core and memory). When it comes to gaming, HIGH CLOCK rate is the name of the game. Do not settle for anything less than ddr3. 256Mb ddr3 will beat 512Mb ddr2 ALL THE TIME. 512Mb is not always fully utilized in games.

Better get a 7600GT ddr3. You could also consider the NEW 8600GT DX10 card. It is priced almost the same as a 7600GT but has better performance and has Nvidia's PureVideo HD. It is also a FANTASTIC overclocker. More here:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/486/2/