suggestions for budget card for dual core Starcraft 2 rig?

I

indokyne

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Building a rig for a friend using some spare parts.

I hear that SC2 is CPU heavy so I don't know if this is gonna work. I also need a suggestion for a good "budget" vid card

CPU - Opty 175 dual core :/
4GB RAM

Budget is at or around $100

edit-oh yea 1920x1080 res :(
 
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gtx260 maybe? should be able to find one for around 100 these days I'd think. A guy I work with is running one on a quad core AMD system and says that it runs SC2 great.
 
dr.stevil said:
gtx260 maybe? should be able to find one for around 100 these days I'd think. A guy I work with is running one on a quad core AMD system and says that it runs SC2 great.
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well there is no comparison between a modern AMD quad and an Opty 175. a gtx260 would be laughably bottlenecked by an Opty 175 especially in a game like SC2.
 
dr.stevil said:
gtx260 maybe? should be able to find one for around 100 these days I'd think. A guy I work with is running one on a quad core AMD system and says that it runs SC2 great.
Click to expand...
thanks for the input but I agree with:
cannondale06 said:
well there is no comparison between a modern AMD quad and an Opty 175. a gtx260 would be laughably bottlenecked by an Opty 175 especially in a game like SC2.
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might be a little more card than I can take advantage of
 
SC2 is going to be bottlenecked by that CPU no matter what you get. If upgrading is a possibility I'd say get a gtx260 or a 4850/70. If not then a 9800gtx or 8800gts would do the trick.
 
cheapest entry level gaming card you can find, usually the gt240 ddr5. About $40 after rebate when on sale (which is often).
 
SC2 apparently scales down well with GPU. Techspot has both GPU and CPU scaling graphs:

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/

The CPU is going to be a major bottleneck (it's considerably slower than the Q6600 that's the bottom end on that graph). So they're looking at being limited to something below 30FPS by the CPU, regardless of what GPU they have. Probably closer to 15FPS ...

Given that, I really wouldn't suggest pairing it with anything above a GT240 or HD5670 (even HD5570 would be enough), all of which will do 30FPS minimum at 1920x1200 at medium settings according to the graphs.
 
they have had the 90 dollar 4870 deal running for a while now. that would work fine
 
The best that CPU can do without bottlenecking is a 9800GT (or a GT240), even a GTS250 would be bottlenecked severely. It may just be time to get an overhaul and work on upgrading the CPU/mobo/RAM first, then think about a new GPU.

You can upgrade your GPU, but it will do you no good, nor will you see any improvement in performance.

That dual core is 4-5 years old, so even OCing it won't help much.

If you want us to help you build a new system though, just ask. ;)
 
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