Hey everyone, I will be buying a new computer sometime soon, probably Thursday. I dont play many games, but everyone i've talked to says i need a decent graphics card. I figured I could probably run CSS, because it's fairly old, if I am not mistaken.

Anyway, if you could do me a huge favour and just tell me which games out of the following list would run, and how high i would have to put the setting on a Intel GMA 4500MHD I would love you forever.

Ex. World of Warcraft - Would run - Low settings.

Ok, so here's the real list.

Counter-Strike: Source
Garry's Mod
The Sims 2
Half Life 2
World of Warcraft

I am aware it is not a laptop for gaming, but having a few would be nice, so if you could tell me, some info on those games, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Just search for the minimum requirements for each game...

You should also post the complete specs of that computer. I'm too lazy to check and will just make general comments

CSS is very lightweight and can run on about anything.
Half-Life 2 runs on the same Source engine, but I believe it can be a bit more GPU-intensive. The episodes, however, run on more recent versions of the Source engine (The Orange Box version) and use much more effects. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 has much higher requirements than Half-Life 2, for example. Latest version of Garry's mod probably uses the Orange Box version of the Source engine as well.

No idea about the other games. As I said, check their minimum/recommended requirements (google and wikipedia can tell you that), and compare with your own specs.

Thanks for your help, but I really dont know anything about computers, so looking up the minimums wouldn't really help me.

Can't you get a laptop that has nVIDIA or ATI graphics on it? Intel's graphics are worse than those two (though admittedly not too bad).

Well, if you still get the same laptop, you can use this website to determine if you run a few of those games you listed: http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

I would like a better laptop, but i have a fairly small budget, and that seems to be the best I can find. But I really dont have a clue.

You're not going to find a laptop that can play those games smoothly for under $1000.

You could find a desktop that can play games smoothly in the $500 range though, some of them could even play a few of the new games coming out.


Edit
I realized you're asking if the game will run. Yes, your games will run. You'll experience some or plenty of spikes in performance.

This isn't quite true. WalMart.com has plenty of laptops with a fairly high performance that would have no trouble running most any game for around $800.

it all depends on the ram and the graphics card. though, with a laptop, finding an appropriate graphics card will be tough. if you get a desktop, I suggest an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT for your graphics card. You can probably go one lower than that, but for the money its worth it. You can run any game with that card.

Indeed. A check of my system's power against the recommended requirements of all of those games indicated I more than passed in every area of every requirement for said games. I paid $650 for my laptop at Best Buy.

Yeah, you can get some pretty cheap laptops nowadays that should easily run some old Source games.

My laptop is aging quite a bit and was expensive a few years back and it's more of a office/work laptop, though it still runs HL2 perfectly (the episodes with anti-aliasing and whatnot are a different story though). But most laptops I see for $800 and under are about 2-3x more powerful than what I'm working with, so yeah.

CSS can run on practically anything these days within reason. If the parts were released in the last five years it should be fine; it's more a question of how high you want to put the graphics. I have everything maxed out on an 8600GT and still get 100+ FPS. Same goes for the Sims 2 and Half Life 2 (though as others have pointed out the episodes require more out of your computer due to additional lighting effects and other such improvements in the engine). I wouldn't worry about it myself; hell I ran HL2 on my old comp with integrated 64mb graphics, 256mb of ram and a 2.4ghz P4 when it came out.

If you want to play games on your laptop, make sure it has a dedicated graphics card, as opposed to an integrated one. A dedicated graphics card will have its own memory and thus is better suited for intensive applications like gaming, whereas integrated graphics take from your main RAM. The former tends to be more expensive, especially if you want something really portable. That said, the GMA 4500 should be able to run those Source engine games, but don't expect smooth performance at high settings. If I knew what kind of budget/size/brand preferences you had, I'd give a recommendation for a well-priced laptop with decent gaming performance. Right now, I'm looking at a Sony VAIO NW series model that has an ATI 4570 graphics card with 512MB dedicated vRAM. Only $850 :)

A great site to check out the performance of every notebook graphics card on the market is http://www.notebookcheck.net/.