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IGN Gear have thrown up their Half-Life 2 Optimization Guide! Here's a snip.

Half-Life 2 finally looks like it's just around the corner. In anticipation of its release, gamers everywhere are pre-loading the game via Steam and clearing off hard drive space. But is the rest of your PC ready for Valve's next masterpiece?

That's where we come in. If you've got a few hundred bucks and are planning on upgrading your system, good for you. But what we're going to focus on here is getting the most out of the system you already have. The same tips will apply of course to brand-new systems as well, of course, so even if you plunk down $4 grand on a new gaming rig the day the game is released, you'll want to check this out.

Now, we're not going to cover overclocking per-se, but some of the settings you tweak will qualify as that; for example, your memory timings if you get overly aggressive. We're going to try and avoid talking about anything that would fry your system, but some of these adjustments may make it unstable. In such cases, we'll make definite note of it. Of course, changing anything to some setting way out of whack will do that, so be careful.

And while we're on the subject, we take no responsibility for any problems or system failures as a result of changing anything in this guide. Again, you should be perfectly fine; we're just covering our collective asses here.

And as always, before you make a ton of changes to your system, back up important files

http://gear.ign.com/articles/554/554744p2.html

Source: W2S

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