NVidia GeForce 9600GT 512MB DDR3, nVidia Forceware 285.62 Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or AMD Phenom X3 8750 Tri-Core Our system only garnered a 4813 3DMark Vantage score with a 3894 GPU score and 16444 CPU score at Performance. Athlon X2 5000+ performance is slower with Athlon II X2 250 – the cheapest AMD dual-core you can buy today while the GeForce 9600GT is somewhere in the GeForce GT 440 DDR5 and AMD Radeon 5670/6570 performance.

Today, as technology keeps on advancing, the system we used can now be considered a budget, low-end gaming system. And the graphics card, the GeForce 9600GT, was considered best-value mid-range graphics card – but that was 2008. What the publishers do is that they pair a low-end video card with a high-end processor and with a higher amount of RAM to assess how it will perform, but none of these represents a “true” budget gaming setup.įor the first game in our series article and probably for our succeeding games, we used a 2008 mid-range gaming system – the time when dual-core processors and 2GB RAM rules the market – a perfect mid-range setup at that time. The problem is that the budget or the older gaming systems were being left out and disregarded. When using links on our site to make a purchase, we may earn an affiliate commission.Īlmost every game that has been released, especially games that are graphically amazing or introduced new technologies, came along with the question, “ Can you run it?” And then technology and gaming websites published performance analysis of the game and the used hardware to answer this question.

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