Company of Heroes

High-End System

We chose the meaty £2500 Dell XPS 700 (the behemoth of our labs) to test as our high end system. Check out our Dell XPS 700 review to find out the full details.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (10x267 - 2670MHz); nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition BTX mobo; 2 x 1GB DDR2 memory (operating in dual channel at 667MHz with 5-5-5-16 timings); NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX (operating at 650/1600MHz); 2x Western Digital 2500JS 250GB SATA 3Gbps hard drives in RAID 0; Creative X-Fi Extreme Music; Windows XP Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c/

This game runs nicely on the Dell XPS, although we weren't able to max everything out on a single card whilst achieving a satisfactory frame rate. Once we popped in a second card we started to seriously crank everything up and the game really started to shine. This is only made possibly with the latest CoH patch, which resolves a lot of the SLI issues with the game. The game ran at around the 22 fps mark when under severe stress, which made for more than a comfortable experience.

Although the game scales quite a lot, I wouldn't recommend playing it on anything below 1280x1024. At the lowest end of the scale the game looks completely rank. If that's all your computer can manage then I'd advise playing this game on someone's more endowed PC.

Highest Graphical Quality

The difference between the highest graphical quality and the middle isn't huge. Everything looks that bit sharper and the game certainly feels slightly more immersive. To push the graphics up a notch to the highest level though, takes a hefty whack on the hardware side of things. Unless you're running the beefiest of PC's, something like the Dell XPS 700, then chances are your game won't look like the above.

Medium Graphical Quality

Between the medium and low end graphical quality you can see the difference is massive. As I've said above I wouldn't consider playing this game anywhere below the medium settings. The drop in graphical niceties is blatantly obvious. At the lowest setting I think the game almost starts to look a bit like one of the original Total War games, Shogun maybe?

Lowest Graphical Quality