All my daughter wanted for her birthday, 2 months ago, was for us to pre-order Sims 3 for her.
It arrived a week or so ago. We told her we’d install it when the school year was over (essentially today, tho there are a few more days of seat-warming).
Had some struggles with a failed DVD-ROM drive and having to borrow one, but eventually got that sorted out and eagerly tried to launch the game.
Only to be greeted with a snide dialogue box that says our graphics card ain’t good enough for Sims. :smack::smack::smack:
I downloaded an updated driver in the vain hope that would help and was unsurprised when it didn’t.
OK - so the current graphics driver appears to be one of the ones that’s on the motherboard, and a fairly old one at that (Intel GMA - Wikipedia) - it’s an Intel Extreme Graphics chip.
Per the game package (and this was plainly there on the Amazon page as well… sigh… I verified we had the OS that would work but didn’t even THINK of looking at the graphics requirements):
Any hope of adding something to this computer to let it run the game? Would we have to get busy with a soldering iron and a magnifying glass? (not gonna happen).
Oh, and yeah - I do feel like an idiot for not verifying the graphics requirement before making the promise. I’m not a gamer, and it didn’t even occur to me that the chipset was an issue. :smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
You’ll probably have to buy a discrete graphics solution to get the best performance with newer games. Even if Sims 3 does seem to support the newest models of integrated graphics circuits I can’t really see it running too well on those. The good news is that these days there are more low-priced graphics cards with good performance than I can remember there ever being before, so at least the recession has brought some benefits.
Do you know whether your computer has an AGP or PCI-Express interface, by the way? If it’s AGP you’ll probably want to get the best available card since that format is quickly going obsolete and you’re unlikely to be able to upgrade it at a later stage, and if it’s PCI-Express you’ll find a wider variety of choices and generally at a better price.
So for AGP it might be best to get an ATI Radeon HD 3850 to ensure future compatibility, and for PCI-Express I’d say the ATI Radeon HD 4770 looks very good for the price. The market price, just about $100, is about the same for both cards even though the 4770 has significantly better performance, but I guess the market for AGP cards is very small these days so the return of investment is probably substantially smaller on those. And to be fair, Nvidia also make some pretty spiffy cards in the high-end segment, but the mid-price market is dominated by ATI right now.
Thanks!! Been doing some digging. It’s a Lenovo NetVista, about 5 years old. I found a PDF of the product manual that it has a spot for a graphics card: “One accelerated graphics port (AGP) expansion slot (supports low-profile adapters only)”.
Wandering around Amazon, it looks like the Radeon 3850 is available from Amazon for 67.50 or more - odd that it seems to be packaged under several different brand names? such as PowerColor, Diamond Viper, MSI? What’s with that? I did a search on “ATI Radeon HD 3850” to get that. The descriptions don’t explicitly say low profile (as the Nvidia does below) but they look to be the same size.
Another one that might do is the Nvidia Geforce 7300GS, which is about 44 dollars. That seems to require a set of brackets for about 7 dollars extra (would any card require that?).
Our monitor is a small (by today’s standards - 15 inch) Sony LCD that supports both VGA and DVI (we have VGA feeding it now of course). Presumably we’d need the DVI cable in addition to the card? or can these work with VGA?
Those are different cards all using the same chipset. Think of the chipset as the motor and the card as the chassis. IMHO, as long as the chipset and memory are identical, it won’t matter which specific card you pick. The main differences will be stuff that’s likely secondary or meaningless to you - TV-out capability, support for multiple displays, that sort of thing.
The low profile adapter warning is something else you need to keep in mind. The card you have needs to have a low profile or it won’t fit inside your case.
There are DVI-to-VGA adapters and generally one is included with cards that have no native VGA port, so that should not be a problem. The brand names are different card manufacturers, but they all follow the same reference specifications so graphics performance is mostly within 5-10% of eachother for the same model, even with factory overclocks.
I was not aware that you have a thin client and to be honest I’m actually not sure what the best upgrade is for that system, but I can not recommend the Nvidia Geforce 7300GS at any rate. It’s an old budget card that will almost inevitably be outpaced by new software releases if it hasn’t already been, so your money can certainly be better spent elsewhere. Here’s a list that compares the different card models between ATI and Nvidia, and I think for an upgrade to be worth the trouble you’d probably want to end up at the upper half at least.
Also, it may be good to post your processor (and RAM, your specs in general may be good). The Sims 3 is a pretty intensive game since it essentially has to calculate the actions of a neighborhood at once. You can run it with a 2.0 GHz processor… but it is not recommended (especially since it won’t let you fast forward depending on the speed). Depending on your answer you may be looking at a newer computer.
I’d hate for you to go and get a new chip and then have it yell at your processor is all.
I checked the system. It’s an Intel Pentium 4 processer, 2.88 ghz processor. On the low end of what will work with the game per the specs (2.0 ghz P4 is the minimum). It has 1 g of ram (the default was 512M but we upgraded when we bought it). It’s an IBM Netvista (this was just before the business was spun off to Lenovo).
All in all, it sounds like it should run - albeit slower than would be ideal - on the system we have now. Certainly a newer computer is on the horizon at some point though it’d be nice if we could get away with the existing one for now.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to plunk down big bucks on a graphics card - if we’re not going to use it for intensive gaming long-term, we just need to have it limping along enough for this one game. Doubtless an upgrade is in the works within the year. Good point on the Nvidia being outdated to the point of unusability, I’ll have to double-check on whatever we get.
I don’t think our machine would fit the definition of “thin client” as I understand it, did you mean the smaller form factor that some newer computers have? (which as I understand, reduces clutter but also reduces expandability). This one’s definitely not a thin client or a compact unit - it’s a full-sized tower-format unit. Just for whatever reason, it only handles the low-profile graphics card.
Ah, that makes things a whole lot simpler, and you’re correct that 2.88 GHz and 1 GB RAM should suffice to get it started. I’m certainly no expert on brand-name computers though, I just ran a Google search on “Lenovo Netvista” last night and the first page of hits was filled with companies selling upgrades for thin clients with the same name so I somehow thought that’s what we were dealing with here too.
I did see a card yesterday that might fit your case and budget though, an ATI Radeon HD 3450 AGP in low profile ready format for $50 with replacement bracket included (The mounting bracket is just screwed on, so it can be replaced with no other tool needed than a philips screwdriver.). It’s not quite ideal for gaming and a new computer will undoubtedly be a lot better equipped, but it should do for the time being even if it’s probably not going to be blazing fast or anything.
You know, this is turning into a Mastercard commercial:
[ul]
[li]Eagerly-anticipated SIMS-3 game: 60 dollars[/li][li]DVD-ROM drive to run the game: 80 dollars[/li][li]Powered USB hub to attach the DVD-ROM unit: 20 dollars[/li][li]Grapihics card to run the game: 100 dollars[/li][li]Look on the kid’s face: priceless[/li][/ul]
(we may not need the USB hub; possible the current one, which has AC power, will do the job, but it didn’t have enough juice to run the unit we borrowed yesterday to install the game)
(oh, did I forget to mention? The computer’s DVD-ROM decided it didn’t want to read DVDs any more, CDs, fine. DVDs, not so much. Googling around suggests this is a factor of being an aging device and the model in question would just need to be replaced).
$80 for a DVD-ROM drive?! Given that you needed an extra USB hub, I suppose you got an external drive. Was there any particular reason for that? An internal DVD drive would cost less than $25 and wouldn’t require a powered USB hub…
Hadn’t even thought of an internal drive - we’d been considering getting an external one anyway because we need a burner (the internal one wasn’t a DVD burner). And initially we didn’t think we needed to crack the case on the PC - until we found out about the graphics thing.
I may have to consider exchanging the external one for an internal one, given that price difference!
The problem here is that youre pissing away the 100 dollars. The AGP card that you are going to buy will not work on a modern computer. New computers dont use AGP anymore, they use PCIe x16. So if youre buying a new one in two months then youre paying 50 dollars a month to play a game. Id just wait and buy a new one.
On top of that, dont assume a new computer will be able to play the Sims. PC gamers cannot use computers with a bottom of the barrel video chipset like the intel ones or the entry level ATI and Nvidia ones. You need a gamer level card, like the ones mentioned here. So most likely, youll need to spend 50 to 100 dollars on a video card for the new computer as well. I suggest you just bite the bullet and buy a new machine, preferably with a factory installed gaming card, now and avoid this upgrade. Not to mention if you fail at this upgrade places like GeekSquad will charge you a minimum of $150 to fix it. $100 video card plus $150 in repairs is a lousy deal in anyones book.
Also, Im 99% certain that you are wrong about the mid-tower only accepting half-height cards. The PDF you linked to shows at least two different form factors. The big ass tower you have and the little desktop unit that needs the half-height card. Your machine is the tower and can fit a full size card. You can buy the cards I mentioned above, which are full height.
You can easily verify this with a ruler. Measure the blank PCI slot height. Its the horizontal silver things in this photo.
Again, I recommend against this upgrade. Your 2mhz CPU is going to be the limiting factor and gameplay may be borderline unplayable even with the best video card in the universe.
Back in the day game companies would release playable demos so you could judge whether the game is going to be any good on your computer setup.
Nowadays they some times release a demo usually a long time after the game has been released. Why is that? Are they afraid that competitors might copy parts of the code?
Amazon, and the box wasn’t a sealed box, it was actually one that doesn’t require lethal weapons to open. We haven’t actually used the drive yet, just opened the box and glanced inside. So it should be returnable.
I’m really not so sure about that. I’ve got to say it’s hard to tell how much room there is above the AGP slot without seeing the actual computer, but space issues aside the power supply is a mere 185W, which unfortunately is not going to be enough to power a Radeon HD 3850 or similar card under any circumstances, and a new power supply would add at least an extra $50 and a lot more work to the upgrade. The Radeon HD 3450 I linked to above has the lowest power requirements I could find, is adaptible to either mounting bracket, and should be sufficient for mainstream games as of right now, at least.
