New PC Performance

Recently my 5-year-old “gaming rig” died on me. There was no forewarning – I wake up the next day, turned it on… and nothing happened. So, off I went scanning Sim Lim pricelists on Hardwarezone, and realised that a typical PC costs about $800.

Since I’m only going to get some components and re-use other existing stuff like DVD and Harddisks, my costs should be lower. And it was. Essentially I got what can be considered today as a “budget system”, since the graphics chip is embedded on the motherboard. The graphics chip, an ATI Radeon HD3200, actually has better specs than my nVidia 7600GT.

Remembering Crysis as one of the games that really stressed my older PC, I loaded it up again on the new PC and tested it.

On starting it, Crysis auto-detected the settings to be MEDIUM. This is as opposed to LOW settings on the older “gaming-grade” rig. I did a video capture of the session below:

While the game isn’t “screamingly fast”, it’s still playable. In fact, just about as playable as on my 5 year old PC. Considering that it is a “budget system”, this is impressive performance indeed!

The funny thing is, on some games, it “feels” laggy on the new PC compared to the old one. On other games, the games play smoother. Since I’m new to the ATI range of graphics card, I haven’t learnt the finer points of tweaking the Catalyst drivers yet, so perhaps I can fix the “lagginess” like I did in the nvidia range.