Doom 3 System Specs

[Malum Archon]

Planning on buying a new system soon, found a pretty good deal online, 1800 for a 1.2 ghz AMD thunderbird, 512 ram, 64 gefore2 ultra, 80 gig hd, 72x cd-rom drive, etc. Anyone know how well a game like Doom 3 will probably run on a system like that and if I should wait for something better closer to time Doom 3 comes out. Anyone know a online site that has a better price?

[deadnail]

Yeah, if you know the exact components you want and you're not afraid of assembling your own system you could get that for probably about $500 thru http://www.pricewatch.com, although I cannot condone paying 'top dollar' for ANY video card. The NV20 will be coming out soon and that will really drop the prices of the GeForce 2 cards.

Spring & Fall are when all the new technologies come out in the video card market. If you can wait until fall you can probably get a NV20 at a reasonable price.

BTW, $200 for a video card is NOT a reasonable price. :)

[Malum Archon]

Thanks for the response, that video card is actually 409 extra of that, I'd rather wait for Nvida's new card, plus, by then for the same price I can get a faster processor and maybe any new processors AMD comes out with. I've heard some so/so things about the Pentium 4's, and that Athlons are still better for gaming.

[Guest KikassAssassin]

Yeah, I'm sure that'll be plenty of processing power to run Doom 3 fine. Last I heard, the target system for Doom is a 700MHz with 128MB ram. The only problem is the video card. A GeForce 2 should be *fast* enough to run Doom3 ok, but there are a lot of special effects/features John Carmack is programming into the engine that no cards available today can support.

Of course, it's going to be a bit of time yet until Doom 3 comes out, so you might go for a GeForce 2 card now (or maybe a GeForce2MX, since it'd be cheaper so you wouldn't be as reluctant to replace it once something better comes along), then upgrade once you know what Doom 3's going to need.

As for the Pentium 4, yeah, I haven't heard much good about it. The only thing it really has over the Athlon is the *capability* to go to higher MHz, but it's not there yet. Right now I'd say the Athlon Thunderbird is the way to go - I've seen benchmarks where it actually beats the P4 clock for clock, and it costs a helluva lot less.

[Dima]

Yeah, I agree, wait for NV 20!
The rest of the system seems ok to run DOOM at an exellent speed (with NV 20 of course)