I recently bought a new PC a few days ago. Its a eMachine 2682 with a 2.6GHz Intel Celeron processor, 256mb of ram and 80 gig harddrive. Well on my other pc I loved to play Counter Strike online and it played the game really well, the graphics were good and fast. My other PC has a 750MHz AMD Duron processor. I have been reading alot about the Celeron and it says it really aint all that great with gaming. Would my AMD Duron perform better for games than the Celeron? Any suggestions anyone?

 

The real key is the video card. The celeron pc likely has a shared memory video. Give it a try and see how you like it. Worst case scenario, slap a new video card in the new pc and disable the shared video. Anytime you move the video processing away from the CPU and more to the video card hardware, you improve performance significantly. Hope this helps. PM me if you need more info.

 

learning2fly, I would pm you but I dont know how. You dont have a profile. Anyway my new pc has a Intel Extreme Graphics 845GV graphic card. Please kinda explain what you mean by shared memory, I kinda get what your saying but if you dont mind be more specific. (Its sharing more basic video pc functions more than like for extreme gaming?). If i do get a video card, it would probably be some kind of VooDoo card. So my processor is probably alright for gaming? Appreciate the reply!

 

In a shared memory scenario- this is how it works. If your machine has 256mb of memory- 32 or 64mb may have been allocated for the memory that the video card will need. thus leaving your system to run on the remainder (224 or 192) . You may not have shared memory, consult the owner's manual. (or look at the sytem status while the pc is running)

Additional memory is never a bad thing, you may want to upgrade to 512, memory is fairly cheap. But before I did anything, load the software, adjust the graphics to your liking and give it a try. My guess is that your new machine will run the game just as good if not better than the old machine. Amd is a good processor, but you can't discount the high number of cpu cycles that you have upgraded to (tripled). Worst case scenario, you have to buy a separate video card (look at the nvidia chipsets - fairly common)

In a lot of cases e-machines get a bad rap, for the price most e-machines are really a good deal. What tends to frustrate owners is that a number of components are considered to be "proprietary" or combined into the motherboard. Last year I purchased a 2ghz e-machine for my brother and he has had absolutely no problems.

Hope this helps.

 

Appreciate the info fellas, the only reason I bought a emachine is because im going to college and I dont have alot of money and the price was pretty good. My other PC was custom built (Which I rather build my own PC to my specifications) but I got lazy and just bought a brand name. Theres nothing wrong with the old one, so I think im just going to network them together. Peace

 

Make sure you go through that thing and remove all the crap they install from the factory. We just bought our kids a new 2Ghz Compaq and it would hardly run, more than 20 background programs running that weren't needed. Once I got all the pre-loaded crap out of there, it started to scream.

 

yea UBETRUN, thats one reason I rather have a custom built pc. But I have to say emachine did a good job not having alot of preloaded programs, well it does have a few but it doesnt slow it down not that I can really tell.

 

yes - you'll probably want to find a video card with as much memory as you can get for your budget. the process of 'memory paging' is what keeps your games fast...otherwise if your video runs out of ram, it will goto slower resources like standard ram and then finally your hard drive(slowest).
as for your processor, the celeron's arent that great of a processor. for standard use, fine, but for a hard core demand of something, athlon and pentium are the way to go. both have more processor cache(L1,L2,L3).
if you wanna get a new video card, try one of the new nvidia cards or radeon(nvidia with g-force 4 is great!)...and I'm assuming your card is currently an AGP?(acceleted graphics port).

would you happen to recall if your computer's chassis is a 'mini tower'? or if it's one of the smaller ones?

 

Yea I guess you could call it a mini tower, I think I should just leave the gaming to my custom built PC which can be easily upgraded and has a much larger tower. It ran Counter Strike with ease and no lagging at all, smooth graphics. It has a AMD Duron 750mhz. My new pc has the Intel Extreme graphics card. I think I should just see how the game runs on the new one first, I havent got it installed yet. I got to wait to download a 8 hr upgrade for it. Should I leave the gaming to the custom built and use the new pc to use for basic pc functions since im going to network them?

 

actually, both should work good for gaming over the network. i've done networked 3d gaming on machines that were slower than yours no problem and without lag....if you are gonna network more than 2 machines together, dont make the mistake of buying a hub...always get a 10/100 switch..it'll be worth it...you'll have lag on the hub, network collisions constantly..and the more pc's you add to the network the worse it gets.