Upgrading to Play certain games (Fallout 3, etc,)

[JamesCG]

Alright, for Christmas I got a "New" PC, my brother did as well. Though, I wouldn't really call it "New". It cost $20 more than my brother's, and it has a slower processor, came with 1 Gb of ram (Upgraded to 2 now), and a crappy integrated card (Upgraded to a slightly less crappy ATI Card. Only slightly, though), and Vista premium. What did I get out of having a less powerful but more expensive PC than my brother's? A 1-inch bigger monitor.

I bought fallout 3 off of steam, and it defaulted the quality to medium, which I thought was really nice, because I get to play the game on something higher than low! One problem was, however, is that it runs at about 15 FPS on medium, and that's borderline unplayable.

So, I need some relatively Cheap but effective upgrades to run it on Medium - High. Any ideas?

System:
Intel(R) Pentium (R) Dual CPU E2140 @ 1.60 Ghz.
2046 MB RAM.
ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT

PS: Sorry of it's in the wrong board, but I thought that since I'm asking on upgrades to play a game, I thought it might go in the gaming discussion board.

 

[Nimbus]

From the 3 specs you have given us (You need to give much more), I can safely say that you need to upgrade everything. Seriously. My 2 year old computer is lightyears ahead of that, in every way. Basically, from what I can tell, your RAM, processor, and GFX card are all way below average.

 

[JamesCG]

Sorry about that, I'll edit the original in a bit.

 

[Theo Samaritan]

If it is an E2 series you may be able to stick an E8 or E9 in there no problem, maybe even quad cores. ram is fine, graphics card is fine. from what I see its the CPU that is the bottleneck.

 

[Clashero]

Agreed with Samaritan. The bottleneck is probably due to a lack of throughput speed on your processor (in other words, your video card works great, but the processor can't process all the information it's giving it. Think of the video card as a waitress and the processor as the chef, and the RAM as how many orders they can memorize. Your waitress works extremely fast, but your chef can't cook fast enough.)

 

[megapenguinx]

I'm sorry to say but that CPU is abysmal.

From the 3 specs you have given us (You need to give much more), I can safely say that you need to upgrade everything. Seriously. My 2 year old computer is lightyears ahead of that, in every way. Basically, from what I can tell, your RAM, processor, and GFX card are all way below average.

He's right, everything except maybe the monitor would have to be upgraded several levels.

 

[akmarksman]

One suggestion I have is a program like nHancer..(which is designed for nvidia video cards) but ATi has one for their cards..I don't know what it's called..and looking on graphics card forums to see which tweaks to do for games..some games you can ramp up the detail level and some you have to crank way down in order to not lag the game.

I'd look for a faster dual or quad core processor..it's dependent on what motherboard you have as well..

If you are running Vista(and especially Vista Home Premium x64) upgrading the RAM to the maximum that your motherboard supports is great. Playing Flight Simulator X on x64 Vista using 2GB of RAM was laggy..bumping up the RAM to 4GB really helped..i cant wait until I can afford to bump it up to 8GB..