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Help me mildly pimp out my PC
Mr_Grinch
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Howdy. I'm not a big pc gamer by any means (I haven't played a PC game properly in what must be over three or four years) but my fianceé is now living with me and she loves her Sims, Rollercoaster tycoons and what not.
Whilst there's no min spec for Sims 3 as of yet, I imagine it'll be similar to what most modern games demand nowadays... and I have no idea what that is. My current set up is:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64, 3200 (1.99Ghz)
Mem: 2gb Ram
Plenty of storage space
Video Card: A god-awful Nvidia Geforce 7100 GS that I found for £15 and figured it'd be mildly better than onboard. It is. Mildly.
The rest is bog standard and on-board and I'm not sure what else you'd need anyway!
So, I just up'd the ram today to 2gb from 1gb (I've been doing a fair bit of image and video editing on this machine recently and it seems to have helped) and I'm pretty sure I'll need to update the graphics card next. So any suggestions on a half decent PCI-E graphics card that's not going to set me back a fortune but will do me for some lite game playing?
And would I be wise to upgrade the motherboard/cpu? Or will that cope with modern-ish games on medium/low settings?
Cheers folks.
(I've just realised this might have been better suited in the technology forum. Sorry!)
Whilst there's no min spec for Sims 3 as of yet, I imagine it'll be similar to what most modern games demand nowadays... and I have no idea what that is. My current set up is:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64, 3200 (1.99Ghz)
Mem: 2gb Ram
Plenty of storage space
Video Card: A god-awful Nvidia Geforce 7100 GS that I found for £15 and figured it'd be mildly better than onboard. It is. Mildly.
The rest is bog standard and on-board and I'm not sure what else you'd need anyway!
So, I just up'd the ram today to 2gb from 1gb (I've been doing a fair bit of image and video editing on this machine recently and it seems to have helped) and I'm pretty sure I'll need to update the graphics card next. So any suggestions on a half decent PCI-E graphics card that's not going to set me back a fortune but will do me for some lite game playing?
And would I be wise to upgrade the motherboard/cpu? Or will that cope with modern-ish games on medium/low settings?
Cheers folks.
(I've just realised this might have been better suited in the technology forum. Sorry!)
Mr_Grinch on
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Posts
Awesome, I'll bung them on the side of the case. They'll make it go faster!
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
You can get a 9600GT from Newegg for about a hundred bucks after the mail-in rebate.
I'm running one and while I probably could have spent the money to get something a little beefier I don't regret buying it, it's been able to handle everything I've thrown at it so far, Crysis included.
It would be best to find out if he had a PCI-E slot first. And getting a card like that would be a little overkill considering he's got a single core processor.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
But yeah, you're right, might be overkill.
(edit: Or maybe you could balance it out, get a new mobo/cpu and an 8800 or something. I don't know what the Sims would draw more cycles from, as an example, IIRC HL2 uses more CPU than GPU so that older machines can play it half-decently o_O)
Anyways, look at the Radeon 3850's if you want something powerful that's not totally out of budget. I bought mine back in January for less than 200 bucks. Can't imagine they're more than 150 now.
To quote the Crysis Warhead guys though you could build this machine to run Crysis on medium/high as an example for about $650 (US):
Get a dual core processor. Preferably a MINIMUM of an AMD Athlon 64 4400+ X2. Usually I'd say switch to Intel, but that's overkill - again, no Crysis any time soon.
Second, go for an 8800GT. It's a little more powerful than a 9600GT, around the same price, and will provide more longevity. It was a high-end card about 3 months ago. So relatively, it's still an excellent card, considering it's price dropped down by over $100 in less than 2 months.
Also, make sure your RAM is DDR2 PC6400. Any thing less on a Vista system is... meh.
I could probably hustle up some 'wacka-wacka' porn style musics for the facilitation of the pimping
Up to now it's looking likely I'm going to have to go for new graphics card + new motherboard and processor.
I may leave it till closer to when Sims 3 comes out which is the main reason my fianceé wants to upgrade (it'll be great for me still though, I do a fair bit of encoding and what-not on this machine).
Cheers for the help folks.
Pabh: Sexy music would help.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Indeed. I have a 3850 in my Athlon 64X2 5000+ with 2GB RAM on Vista 64-bit, I've had no trouble playing anything on it (Crysis and CoD4 are probably the two most graphically stressful games I've played on it).
Some of the ATi 3000 series <- Note there's a 3870 for cheaper than the 3850. I got the Sapphire 3850 when I built my PC.
The 8800GT <- If you're willing to spend a little more the 8800GT is a better card than the 3850, it's a closer call with the 3870, but I'm not sure you'll see huge benefits given you have a single core processor.
My verdict, get that cheap 3870, I wish it were there when I bought my 3850
edit - Bah, I just read your reply Mr Grinch. A full upgrade would probably be the best idea. However, the Sims games have never been very demanding.
Although, I expect there'll be about 30 more expansions before Sims 3 is released so we'll all have computers implanted into our brains by then or somejunk.