How well will my new computer run MTW2?

**beans_on_toast** · 12-28-2006, 15:39

Hello I have recently ordered a new PC, I was wondering if anyone has a similar system and could tell me how the total war games run on it.

Heres the spec:-

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
2048MB DDR II RAM
ATI 512MB X1600 Radeon
160 GB Hard Drive

Kind Regards
Beans on toast

**Mikeus Caesar** · 12-28-2006, 17:27

I'd say you have no problems running MTW2 with that thing.

Why are you even worrying? That thing is obviously godly. 2GB RAM!

**BlackAxe3001** · 12-28-2006, 20:38

It should run pretty dang good. The only thing that is probably holding you back, if at all is the x1600. It's a good mid range card though, don't get me wrong. I would say you should have no problems running with medium/high settings and some eye candy turned on. If you are having performance problems though, turn the shadows down, they seem to kill my framerate unless I have them on low.

**Husar** · 12-28-2006, 21:45

The X1600 is a real bottleneck there IMO, I have a 7950Gt and even that seems to be a bottleneck. Everything that doesn't require huge graphics power should run great though.

**sapi** · 12-30-2006, 05:40

If you're runnign at anything under 1080i a 7950gt shouldn't be a problem at all...

**Husar** · 12-30-2006, 15:17

Originally Posted by sapi

If you're runnign at anything under 1080i a 7950gt shouldn't be a problem at all...

Well, I suspect it may be my mainboard only supporting PCIe x4, but according to some article I once saw that makes only a difference of 6% compared to PCIe x16.

In Comparison to my old AGPx8 6600GT it's more than twice as fast anyway.

**BlackAxe3001** · 12-30-2006, 18:51

Here is a quote:

What are the performance implications of using PCIe Graphics?

High-speed PCIe graphics will have better performance than AGP will. The PCIe graphics cards will use the x16 PCIe slot. This translates into a bandwidth of 4 Gbps. This is already a twofold increase over AGP 8X. In this case, "x1" means that the slot has one PCIe lane, which will give it a bandwidth of 264 Mbps. This is equal to the bandwidth provided by AGP 1X and twice that of PCI (132 Mbps).

That is from here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device..._graphics.mspx

There is a chart that shows it better.(tried to but it on here and it didn't turn out right) You can do some googling or more indepth info, but that shows you the bandwidth of AGP and PCIe. Until just recently I don't think even AGP 8X was fully utilized. Those speeds are what they max out at. Your card may only max out at 2Gbps. I doubt it though. You will probably notice a huge increase in performance going to even a x8 PCIe.

EDIT: I know this is wikipedia link, but just because I can, here is a chart to see all of the different bandwidths of stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

**sapi** · 12-31-2006, 02:57

To expand on that, the only thing that actually stretched pcie was the original sli specification (splitting the x16 lane into two x8 lanes). What that meant was that high-end video cards (at the time) such as the 6800 series actually used up all the avaliable bandwidth and were throttled (that is, they only got the equivalent of agp each and that was slightly too little for cards of that power)

With the new pcie sli specification nothing even comes close.