Last year myself and my mate decided to give Rift: Planes of Telara a try and found out the hard way that an All-In-One PC with Integrated graphics is forced to run the game on Low Quality Render.. -Shudders- Needless to say, my mate stopped playing the game, because experiencing a graphical marvel in paper mache mode just wasn't cutting it.. After a nice long year of WoW we have decided to move back to the realms of Telara for a while, but before out adventure can continue, my mate is going to need a rig that can run the game on Ultra..
We both live apart, she is in the states, while I live in Canada.. This makes shopping together impossible. Although I could probably build a beautiful Frankenstein's monster out of the best and cheapest parts out there, but knowing that she has little experience in building a computer, we have both agreed that such is not an option, or at least the last way she wants to do it.. She has said that her budget would be 1200$ as where I believe that she can probably find a more than adequate rig for around 500-650$
My own machine (ASUStek P5Q Pro Turbo, Intel2 Q8200, 8.00 DDR2, Nvidia Geforce 560 Ti) while not state of the art seems to run the game just fine on High and Ultra settings with only a slight frame dip here and there. It cost me around 550$ all together, I have had it since 2010 and have slowly been upgrading it. I was wondering, realistically, where we might find a gaming machine that could do what she wants at a reasonable price. At the moment I have asked her to check out Best Buy and Staples, but I have a feeling that those machines will barely be able to run Half-Life 2 and WoW on Ultra, let alone Rift. (I could be wrong ?) If anyone feels like tossing out their opinions and ideas it would be of great help to us. She hopes to be playing Rift by Mid-July, if not sooner, (hopefully sooner)
My thanks to anyone to takes the time to read this.