This is a serious consideration. This CPU is barely adequate for much more than basic office tasks these days. For the $200+ you are looking at getting into this for a machine to run it you will be much better off putting that money into a newer machine. IMHO even a fairly basic machine will be far more powerful than your proposed upgrade. Not that anyone would be looking forward to dropping another $300-$400 to make this happen but a newer machine or perhaps an overhaul of the existing one.
Just as an example: shouldn’t be too hard to find a shop that will use your existing case and drives cost about $350-$400 to bring you up to something like a 2.5 or so dual core, new motherboard, 2g DDR2 ram, and perhaps a video card in the Geforce 8000 series (8500GT’s are around $60 and should fill the bill).
At this point, rather than doing much more to rebuild the current machine, we’d be better off buying a gently-used one.
Typo Knig is opposed to going with a Vista box (me less so) so a used XP box is probably the way we’d go if we do anything in the near future. Anything 2-3 years old would be an improvement, speed-wise. That 300-400 bucks would easily buy such a machine (though likely I’d still need to buy a video card!!).
We’d limit upgrades to the current machine to the video card and to the DVD drive (which needs to be sorted out anyway - we’ve wanted a DVD burner for some time, so while the game is prompting us to get the fix done, I don’t consider that a direct cost for the game). As noted, a new power supply just ain’t worth it, for a computer that honestly will need to be replaced in the next year or so anyway.
My hope is that for 60ish bucks for a video card, this will give us a few months of gameplay while we start putting aside the cash for a real new computer. But I don’t want to lay out any cash until we are sure the solution will work to some extent.
Good comment on the card not being usable in a newer machine. This is another argument for not laying a lot of dough for one.
And good comment on the power supply - I honestly hadn’t thought of that!!
I’m nervous about cracking the case. You know the old joke about “how many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None - that’s a hardware problem!”. But it might be fun to give it a try. Typo Knig has done hardware work in the past and is in fact eager to do it - he’s talking about adding memory while he’s at it.
Making a video game demo takes away resources that could be used to polish the actual game. Demos have to be tested too. There’s also indications that demos might hurt sales. linklink
I have a computer at work that has a similar setup with yours. It is a 2.6Ghz P4 with 2GB of ram and a Radeon X1600 AGP card. I am going to install sims 3 on that machine to see if the game works well.
If it does work well maybe it makes sense to get yourself a better graphics card.
>Anything 2-3 years old would be an improvement, speed-wise. That 300-400 bucks would easily buy such a machine (though likely I’d still need to buy a video card!!).
Thats a false economy. I cant ever see justifying a used computer. Computers are commodity items sometimes sold at a loss! Right now I can get you a Dell with a 20" monitor for 499. If you follow that link you can customize that computer and get a decent video card for 64 dollars more!
So youre saving 159 and getting a machine thats twice as slow and probably has some bad sectors on the disk drive and who knows what else. It probably wont come with a gamer level video card or if it does it will be a beater from 3 years ago that will play your game at the lowest possible settings.
I cant address your irrational hate of Vista. I tell can you that the default security settings of Vista are so much better than XP and if you have kids you want the UAC. On top of it, eventually you’ll see games no longer made for XP. They will be Vista and 7 only as developers want to migrate to DirectX 10. So if you buy that beater youre not only kicking yourself but guaranteeing that in a couple years you’ll be back on this board asking “I need to install Windows 7 on a 6 year old XP box, is this doable?” And people will tell you buy a new computer already.
>But it might be fun to give it a try. Typo Knig has done hardware work in the past and is in fact eager to do it - he’s talking about adding memory while he’s at it.
If you go this route then I suggest that 1gig of RAM is plenty for this game. Instead of spending that 60 or so dollars on RAM, I would research and find what the fastest CPU is for that motherboard and put it in there. Probably a P4 3.2ghz or higher. Im guessing that no matter what you do at this point, a new power supply will be needed. Even that beater x1650 card I mentioned earlier has the manufacturer recommending a 350 watt power supply. Perhaps you can get away with a 300 or even a 250, but a 185? Thats really pushing it.
Buy a new machine. Save yourself some real headaches.
All options are still on the table, but I wanted to ask about the power supply. Several of you have said that most of these cards will want more juice than our current power supply can provide. Where are the power requirements documented for such a card. I’ve looked over the descriptions of a couple of cards and am clearly missing something that suggests how much juice it needs. This one, for example (and I know it’s not a low profile one, it’s just the first link I grabbed). Even if we go for a new computer, we’d still need to make sure that new computer has enough juice if we have to upgrade its video card; knowing how to determine that would be tremendously helpful.
And I wanted to thank all of you who’ve responded - this is turning into a TREMENDOUS educational experience.
* PC with one 8X/4X AGP graphics slot available on the motherboard
* 350-Watt power supply or greater (assumes fully loaded system)
* 512MB of system memory
* Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
* DVD playback requires DVD drive and decoder software (not included)
Aha - thanks! I assumed I was missing something at the Newegg site. Now I’ll know to check with the manufacturer’s website if we try to upgrade the video card (which is looking iffier at this point).
The truth is, it really depends. The manufacturer’s recommendations is meant to cover all bases and is certainly a good reference if you’re building a new computer, but one also needs to keep in mind that a quad-core i7 system loaded to the gills with peripherals is going to use vastly more power than a basic single-core system with only a hard-drive and a DVD reader connected. So the best thing to do really is to read tests where they measure the power going into the system and judge from that what your power supply might be able to handle.
Here’s the chart I was using as a reference earlier, it contains a lot of older cards with details on their power use, and it’s useful to get a handle on how much they will actually consume during normal use.
It’s clear from the chart that a Radeon HD 3850 or a Radeon X1650 Pro are well beyond the capacities of a 185W power supply, a 72.5W power draw at 6 amps would likely drain the entire 12V rail and cause the system to shut down. So we’ll be forced to look at cards that draw a lot less than that, and the Radeon HD 3450 draws 23W at 1.9 amps during load, which should work within the constraints we’re dealing with here as long as you don’t load up the computer with too much else. Even if we assume that there is some loss of power efficiency because the system is not built to make the best use of energy-saving measures, which we probably should considering the age of the system, a 30W power draw at 2.5 amps should still be quite manageable, but unfortunately I don’t reckon we can get any more than that without replacing the power supply.
Yes. but a P4 is a nasty power soaking chip. The later models used up to 115watts. I dont know where this particular model falls but Im guessing any card that can render Sims 3 playable and moderately good-looking will easily tax the ps. The ps also doesnt output 185watts. A 185 ps can handle maybe 150 watts of power. Once you come close to its max it will trip a fuse. I really doubt there’s an easy upgrade for this machine.
I guess there’s a chance the 3850 will work for you, but its a shit card and spending 50 dollars to play the Sims in low texture low rez low everything mode with probably lots of random pauses and screwed up graphics is simply not worth it.
This gets into IMHO territory (perhaps), but just for kicks, I went to Dell. An Inspiron 530, with 4g memory, Intel Pentium dual core E5300 processor (2.5ghz), 500g hard drive, and a Radeon 3450 video card (256MB) (could get a 4670 with 512mb for 85 bucks more), for 579.
It looks like the power supply is 300 watts on this one. That’s a bit lower than the manufacturer of the video card recommends, is Dell being chintzy here? Would we need to upgrade the power supply to make that work?
I tried spec-ing out a Lenovo (I get a small discount through work) and could not for the LIFE of me find info on the power supplies on their newer machines. The links (same starting point as I found the manual for our current box) go nowhere. So, no way to tell whether such a machine would leave us right back where we started. Sigh.
Anyway - bearing in mind the computer’s primary purpose is normal household computing (surfing, schoolwork, spreadsheets, Quicken, synching iTunes), and the gaming usage is a distant secondary purpose, would a configuration such as the one above do the job? And would our workhorse old monitor (Sony LCD, 15 inch, with VGA/DVI input) be utterly ridiculous for the purpose?
Oh, for a new computer you will absolutely need a much better graphics card than the Radeon HD 3450. It should work alright as a quick and easy stopgap measure right now while you save up for getting a new system, but it’s going to be well obsolete in another year or two. With Dell’s pricing you’re probably better off getting an aftermarket card and installing it yourself though, a boxed Radeon HD 4670 shouldn’t need to cost too much more than $80 over the net so if it’s $85 more than a pre-installed 3450 something’s clearly wrong there. And if you’re going that route, you would do even better to pick up a Radeon HD 4770 for $100 instead and get even better performance. And yes, I know I already mentioned that card before, but I kind of want one of those for my media center and I’m having a hard time justifying the upgrade right now.
I think for a new computer you’ll want a power supply in the 400-500W range at least, components just don’t get too much more power efficient over time (Well, technically they do I guess, but then we expect them to be twice as fast too so it’s a trade-off.), so you can’t really have too much power and the power supply unit is a right mess to replace. The only caveat is that very large power supplies, say 800W and upwards, can be fairly inefficient in their power handling compared to smaller units, so if you’re looking into power-saving the sweet spot is probably closer to 400W, as long as that is sufficient to your needs of course.
Right, looks like I forgot to opinionize about the other stuff. A 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of memory should be more than enough for normal household and light office work, and as far as the monitor is concerned that’s entirely up to you. The computer would easily be able to support the higher native resolution of a larger monitor, of course, and you could probably find a decent 19-inch model on clearance for less than $100, but if you’re comfortable with the one you have it’s definitely not something you need to prioritize. There’ll be monitors around next year too, and it certainly doesn’t look like they’re going to get any more expensive.
The 3450 is just fine for casual gamers. Hardcore gamers and PC nerds have a hard time accepting a sub $100 dollar card as passable for someone who just wants to play Sims now and again and doesnt care about framerates and using the highest possible resolution for nerd bragging points.
Popping back in to say we’re still mulling over things, though at the moment we’re leaning toward getting a new computer. This is something that’s been on the table for a bit anyway, just might get moved up a few months.
I looked at a Dell Studio desktop which seems to have most of the “oomph” we’d need without getting into hardcore gaming-computer territory. Power supply is 350 watts. Any thoughts on this line? Monitor included, we’d be looking at 700-800 bucks.
Oh, and those of you who are laughing at our 5 year old XP machine… Typo Knig’s work computer is an 11 year old box that just got upgraded to 1g of memory, and is running… Windows 98. (He’d take our old home PC to the office, obviously).
Ooh, that’s a pretty good deal on the Geforce 9800, the pricing on those tends to start upwards of $100 boxed so I guess they can’t have added much of a premium on those. I’m guessing it’s the GT model at that price? It’s a bit older than the Radeon HD 4670 (Which is probably the reason it’s been specifically tested to work with Sims 3 while the 4670 hasn’t, but you can’t really go wrong with either card.), but it’s still a bit ahead in raw performance and a proven workhorse of a card that should happily run anything you can throw at it for years to come. The only drawback is that it has a tendency to run a bit hot, but as long as you don’t play demanding games for hours on end that shouldn’t be a problem.
If youre buying OEM packaged video card you dont need to worry about power supply wattage. Dell will put the appropriate ps in there. Id go with the 9800. Its a slight modification on the 8800 thats in my desktop and its a very nice piece of technology.
(He’d take our old home PC to the office, obviously).