NOTE: I AM NOT LOOKING TO BUILD THE ULTIMATE GAMING PC. I ALREADY HAVE A QUAD CORE @ 3.0 GHZ, GTX 580 AND 8 GB OF RAM. SEE BELOW!

Hey folks,

So I want to build a PC that serves as:

1) My go-to machine to play Halo PC/CE without a hitch. I want to finally be able to use Hardware Acceleration and EAX for sound. I want the active camo (and other effects) to work properly without any workarounds whatsoever. And I want to play in 4:3!

2) A rig to test custom maps. For example, it's kind of hard to test for framerate drops in a map when Halo is always running at 120 fps no matter what...

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I had a look at the recommended specs, but they're quite vague. I went to the popular tweakguides.com write-up, and after some reading it looks like the writer is using a Pentium4 2.66Ghz with a Radeon 9800 Pro and 1 GB of RAM. After some more research, it seems the best soundcard for the job would be a Creative Audigy 2 ZS SB0350.

I'm also considering getting a CRT monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024, any ideas?

Remember, I'm not building a machine that can destroy Halo, I want to build a machine that can run it as intended.


Does anyone have Halo experience with the components mentioned above? Problems? Gripes? Praise?

Thanks in advance :)

the only problem with your other rig is that it has an nvidia card.

and why go with a crt when you can use a standard lcd display that supports vga input and a higher resolution?
Edited by killzone64 on Mar 18, 2013 at 05:55 PM

what's so bad about nvidia cards?

Active cammo, that's what.

Don't know if it's still like this, but nvidea cards don't display active camo correctly.

I don't think I could say what exactly would be needed for proper Halo gameplay, but my AMD 6300 (3.5GHz) with Radeon HD 7870 and 8 gigs of ram works very well.
Edited by Invader Veex on Mar 18, 2013 at 06:21 PM

no, it displays it quite nicely

E: I'm using a GTX 650M
Edited by SilentJacket on Mar 18, 2013 at 06:15 PM

I call that an advantage.

not if you're the owner of said nvidia card.

well I have...

asus m3a78t motherborrd compatable with 3xcrossfire

if I had ati cards I could use 3 moniters but n sted

I have NVidia 560 ti overclocked at 900 MHz witch I love!

displays halo ce in 1920x1080 on my 47 inch lg 3d tv perfectly.

using open sause =)

8 gigs of ram.

AMD 64x phantom cpu at 2.30 ghx per core.

I have no problums displaying anything.

halo runs higher than max settings.
Edited by jackrabbit on Mar 18, 2013 at 06:45 PM

I'd avoid crossfire, if not just to limit things that can go wrong

without the distortion effect, I would imagine it would be much harder if not equally as difficult to spot someone with camo.

Refresh rate and colours. I like my high refresh rates, and with an LCD screen, the higher the refresh rate, the higher the price tag (to my understanding, at least). I could be wrong, I haven't looked into the monitor yet, as it's not top priority. I'm wondering most about the sound card, video card and RAM.



Also, the white flash that happens when you pick up health. As well as god-knows how many other super-subtle effects that will play games with my OCD :D



Do you have OS installed? Because with OS I have no problems. When I launch Halo PC to play classic campaign, however, I have to use DXTweaker to trick my computer into thinking it's something else for the effects to show up. Or maybe with the 6-series mobile line they changed something that no longer makes this necessary... I'm curious, though! If you have Halo PC installed, could you boot it up and check if the camo effect is there? :D


Guys I'm seeing a lot of high-end, recent specs being posted here. Remember, I want to make an OLD SCHOOL build!

Is there anyone that's still around from 2006? The gearbox Tech Talk section was a goldmine, but it's long gone by now (to the best of my knowledge, anyway...).

I just want good-enough specs to play the game on high, with no overkill. So far it's looking like a Pentium 4 @ 2.66 Ghz, a Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 GB RAM and a Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS. Does anyone have experience with this build? Or at least with some of the components mentioned above?

If you want a cheep Halo machine, get a used comp
Edited by SilentJacket on Mar 18, 2013 at 07:15 PM

I have what i'd call the perfect build for this.

2GB RAM, ATI x1000 pro, 3.00GHZ intel pentium 4 processor, 200 GB SATA HDD.

I don't experience frame rate drops often, unless there is TONS of action on a very crowded map. Lumorias gave me about 25 FPS or so during the big battles.

Foundry gives me 60 FPS consistently at 800 x 600 (which I prefer) and 25 FPS or so at 1280 x 1024
Edited by Jesse on Mar 18, 2013 at 07:25 PM

Jesse has appropriate ram and CPU, although his graphics are a tad underpowered IMO. thats a nice CHEAP build too.

Nice. That's more or less what I'm going for. I want the game to slow down when it gets heavy, I want the rig to be at the crossing point between quality and performance, when the settings are maxed (except resolution, I'm with Jesse on this one). I need to be able to notice slowdowns for when I'm testing.

I'm guessing an x1000 pro is more powerful than a 9800 pro?

Also, has anyone here gotten EAX working properly? A friend of mine showed me the difference when he had it functioning correctly, and it was incredible. It just sounded so fantastic compared to the default, non-hardware-accelerated sound settings. Problem is, that PC is long gone and the guy probably wouldn't have been able to tell me the specs even if it was right in front of him.

My PC tells me hard ware acceleration is on. I believe EAX works also, but too many sounds at once cause the sound to not play a few. Say I were to fire my magnum when a few grenades go off, I probably wouldn't hear every other shot of the magnum.

Just curious, what happens if you do not use this tweak; what does halo look like when you start it up normally?

Curious to know, maybe someone can take pictures to compare differences since I've never experienced these sort of things before in halo.

you know, I'm surprised Dennis hasn't locked this thread yet...

I had an old computer with 2 gigs of ram, an FX5700ultra(This was for Splinter Cell, not Halo), and an Athlon x2 dual core.

It was built to play Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow with perfect shadows, but needed DXtweaker to play halo with camouflage(because the FX cards were NVIDIA). But DXtweaker was set up in a certain way so that you weren't sacrificing the ability to chat just to have working camo<

Maybe aim for this setup, but substitute the Geforce FX with an ATI card?


Also, you can get 30FPS with an FX5200 if you disable AF :)
Edited by OrangeJuice on Mar 18, 2013 at 10:55 PM

I've been using my nvidia GTX 260 core 216 for a few years now. Though I'm gonna upgrade soon.

The game had issues with active cammo and a few other things, but that all went away when i installed open sauce.

OS fixes most compatibility issues with nvidia video cards.

Do you have a dedicated sound card? Or integrated?

Also, from my understanding, EAX doesn't increase the number of sounds played, it just gives a more atmospheric effect. There's another setting (sound variety, I believe) that decides how many sounds play at once.

When I turn on hardware acceleration (I have an ASUS Xonar DX sound card), I get the same problem. Sounds skip out/glitch out a lot. However, with hardware acceleration off, the voices in the campaign play at all different levels, and the shield warning sound plays ever so faintly...

Works fine with my integrated Realtek sound (without hardware acceleration, of course).

I hope this Creative card will do the trick...

I recently built a computer with a monitor for $1200 AU. So if you change your mind for playing other games or using open sauce, this is the build I am using.

HD7950 3gb oc - probably could downgrade to 7850 which would bring it down to about $100 cheaper
thermaltake level 10gts- could downgrade to a cooler master or thermaltake v4
asus Xonar DG sound card
8GB G.Skill ddr3 ram - downgrade to 4gb if you wish
FX-8120 processor (no hate lol)
thermaltake 750 watt bronze psu - could downgrade if downgrading other parts
Asus pce-n15 wireless card - optional
Asus VS228H 21.5 inch led backlight monitor - sweet monitor imo

This is sweet for open sauce but is still overkill, and you should probably downgrade if you are ONLY running halo. Can run bf3 ultra 57-60 fps

I have a 1TB hardrive but yeah, you should downgrade to 100 or something on a budget, although 1TB only cost me $73 for a seagate barracuda.

Would cost: 1246.44 USD.

lol cheap for me buying from the U.S since the Australian dollars so high.
Edited by Cheddars on Mar 19, 2013 at 03:13 AM
Edited by Cheddars on Mar 19, 2013 at 03:15 AM

Active Camo is fine on my Gefore GTX 680. Although I had OS installed from day 1 so I don't know if that has anything to do with it.


I had one of them before I bought a 680. It was a really good overclocker, I'd still have it if I didn't have horrible experiences with AMD drivers.
Edited by Dark Neon on Mar 19, 2013 at 03:21 AM

*sigh* I already have a gaming pc...

Has anyone here had any success with EAX sound? I'd really like a second opinion before I settle on that one. I've had bad experiences with pretty much every sound card I've ever had (integrated and dedicated).

Quad core is pointless. Halo by default can't utilise all cores.


I didn't realise they still sold those pos. A decent 1920x1080 LCD with an ATI card doesn't cost you much these days unless you're ridiculously strapped for cash.


1280x1024 doesn't fit to 4:3 so your picture is going to be distorted slightly.

Quad core is not pointless. If the OP was using his gaming PC for Halo, he wouldn't have posted this thread.
A few games can utilise quad cores fairly well(Skyrim if you mod it, BF3 I believe natively uses quad cores and a few UE3 games use quad cores well I believe)
Most dev applications also utilise quad cores very well. Additionally, a quad core makes copying or moving files and opening files much less of a chore.

I actually researched what a quad core's useful for before I bought one :P (Mostly for my future development endeavours)

It can also benefit any games even if they don't actually utilise the cores. Most PC gamers have antiviruses installed on their systems I believe. A quad-core speeds scans up by a few gb/h. :P
(That's a good argument for SSDs though of course. Anyone who believes they are useless are also far too narrow-minded)


Anyway, I don't understand why you'd want a 4:3 monitor, stunt_man. Halo natively scales everything fairly well. The only issue is the FOV but that can be solved by Sky's the Limit, HAC or OS.
And if you've got a Realtek chipset in your PC(either a sound card or on the mb), you can use 3DSoundBack to get EAX(hopefully. It's a 'beta' so you can't be certain that it will work on all configs)
Link(bottom of Windows section)

And for testing purposes, you could just gather some beta testers. That's what they're for.
There is no ideal configuration for Halo so it's always best to gather a group of beta testers with different configurations when testing your maps.

Oh and by the way, you can use Vsync to limit your fps to 60. :P

E: However, if you really do want to test your maps yourself for framerate drops, I guess I'd recommend the 9800 GT or the 9500 GT. The 9800's still the most popular graphics card around I believe. However, going a few steps down would ensure that you include even more users in your testing range while still making sure that all cards from the chipset including the 9800(I think they're both built from the same chipset, but then this is Nvidia here I guess) are entirely compatible.

It'd be pretty pointless getting an entire new PC. Just get a new graphics card and either replace your 580 with it while testing or set up an SLI configuration and disable the 580 when testing. (If my memory serves me well, the Nvidia Control Panel lets you do this)

If you want to go even further and your mb allows for 3-way SLI/Crossfire, you could add in an ATI card such as the 5870, which I think is one of the popular cards for Halo players. (You'll have to check though as I'm not sure if it's possible to swap between Nvidia and ATI on the fly. I've never tried :/)
(I also don't think it's possible to swap cards on the fly on any Windows version up to Windows 8. Windows 8 however offers a great new driver feature which allows you to swap GPUs without reinstalling drivers)

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Edited by Jaz on Mar 19, 2013 at 09:21 AM

The HUD doesn't scale. And OS's HUD scaling works around 1/4 times, and when it does work the HUD elements are no longer in the corners. As for 3DSoundBack, I don't have Realtek sound... I'm building this rig anyway, and I'm going to need a sound card, so I may as well get one that natively supports it instead of dealing with emulation software.



What you say is true. However I'm still going to build this rig, and if I can test for performance issues myself instead of waiting on testers' conflicting schedules and the works, ill check myself for FPS drops. Much less time-consuming.



True, if your monitor runs at 60Hz ;) I have a 3D capable display so its native refresh rate is 120Hz.

This is irrelevant, though, since capping frame rate at 60 doesn't make FPS drops any more noticeable. All your doing is setting the max to 60, much like Vsync is capping mine at 120. It's impossible to test for frame rate drops with specs that can run circles around the game :D This is the same reason I'm not getting a 9800 GT or one of the recent ATI cards you mentioned: I'm not emulating here, I'm doing it all at the hardware level. I am not strapped for cash, otherwise I wouldn't be undertaking such a seemingly silly project :o



That's the idea. Except it's got to be with an ATI card. But yeah, I figure that by going a few steps down, there's more certainty that performance won't be an issue on more popular setups. Also, after this project is complete ill have both an NVIDIA and ATI set up at my disposal :D



Didn't realize! Thanks for the heads up. Looks like ill be going for 1152x864.



I'm not trying to make it look better. If I were I'd just run OS or another alternative. I'm trying to make it look as close as possible to the way it was intended to look. Rolling back the drivers on an NVIDIA GTX 580 wouldn't make a lick of difference because 1) Halo PC was designed for ATI cards, which is why certain effects don't display correctly on NVIDIA cards, and 2) Rolling back drivers doesn't roll back the years. My card came out no more than two years ago (not sure, actually), which is still ~4-5 years after Halo PC came out. Rolling back my drivers probably wouldn't even drop the FPS.

And horizontal tearing is the product of the frame rate rising above your monitors refresh rate. It is not driver-related.



The point is to avoid workarounds for graphical and audio glitches, even OS or HAC. I've looked into Creative Alchemy, but in any case I will have to get a sound card that supports it, because I have an ASUS card. So if I'm going to be buying a new card anyway, I may as well just get a card that supports EAX 3.0 at the hardware level.

And please don't worry for me.

PS: For the people posting their specs and trying to tell me to build a modern gaming PC, your posts are off-topic. Just sayin'.

Specs so far:

-ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
-Creative Audigy 2 ZS
-Pentium 4 @ 2.66 GHz
-1 GB of RAM

This seems to be about as close to the (extremely vague) recommended specs as I can get. So, importantly: has anyone had issues with these components in the past? I'm also open to suggestions for a motherboard, case and RAM (1 GB only!). Though they're all inter-related (case depends on mobo, as does RAM), if anyone used to have a rig that resembled this one, shoot me some suggestions!

yup, Creative sound card of any kind, word on the street is: EAX was proprietary, and Creative did it best.

Ram should be 2 or more sticks of either DDR 400, or DDR2 600 or so, that way you don't bottleneck your videocard

yup, lol, 2.6 GHz is right on the recommended speeds

Are you trying to make a computer that will help you optimize for compatibility? Or do you just want to play halo with hardware from its generation? because it took a while before halo PC had decent hardware to run it.


Technically, all you would need is one of those PCI 8400GSes and a creative sound card with alchemy, paired with any new hardware
Edited by OrangeJuice on Mar 20, 2013 at 02:42 AM

I guess I want to play Halo on hardware from its generation, on the hardware it was designed for (the PC port, anyway). I've been looking on kijji for similar builds and I'm going to follow up on some potential purchases tomorrow.

But why...

If you were investing in building a PC, why would you go for the bare minimum?

because people like you dont read OP.

this video card will suit you well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NUG1HYCJZU

Again, I say why?

Why would you really want to do this?