eric1992 wrote:

San Andreas

You'll probably want to bump that video card up to a Geforce6/Radeon9700 at least for that one. Those global shadows were expensive.

i'd google the recommended specs for the games you want to play and then go from there.

but if your budget is huge I would get a 775 based board and cpu (core2duo/quad) with a decent pci-e graphics card that has like 512 mb so that you can max out all resolution, quality and effect settings.

I made a P4 machine recently for a similar application, bought a P4 3.2ghz/1gb/ECS 648fx motherboard for $50aud (came with a 9200se) and I shoved in my mate's 6800 GT (agp) and upgraded the disk to a new WD green 120GB SSD. it's good for games up until 2005 i'd say.

it's all up to what level you want it to perform at and also your wallet. good luck.

If you are interested in saving money, then I would not recommend a geforce 4 or a geforce 3 unless you can find a good deal. You can find deals occasionally, but I rarely see one of those cards for less than 50$, and often models like the Geforce 3 500 Ti and Geforce 4400 or 4600 are listed for over a hundred dollars. You can find tons of PCIE graphics cards for 20$ that will run all of those games just as well.

Some games from that era do have issues with multi core CPU, or even CPUs with hyperthreading. I think a P4 is a good fit. Something else to consider would be a sempron 145 with AM2+ board, or an athlon 64. For my XP build I got a G470 celeron for socket 1155.

I made a PC with a Phenom X3, 4GB RAM and a 8800GT. Should do the trick for XP gaming.

If you want sata onboard you should probably just do a 775 or 939 or am2+ build and slap on a 7950gt or similar and be set for games up to 2007ish.

If you're looking to be time period correct.. My ideal 2003 build would house the mighty athlon 64 3200+ paired with a Radeon 9800 pro... Scale it down a bit if you want to avoid high collector prices.

For me AGP is the Win9x/WinXP crossover period. good at doing both but far from perfect for either.

WinXP really likes PCIe, that way you can max out the driver settings like AA, AF, etc. Recently played GTA SA on a GF 590 and it looks really nice indeed

See my sig for the XP specs. So far it's ran everything in the time frame of 2001-2006 pretty smoothly except for Crysis (2007?) of course!