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Need a little help prepping for SW:TOR
I bought my computer for the launch of Age of Conan quite a few years back, but since then I've pretty much left computer gaming for my 360. Now with SW:TOR out, I'd really like to be able to play it but don't want to buy it until I'm sure my computer will run it smoothly with graphics in at least the mid-settings range. I know how to swap out components but I'm clueless when it comes to differences between them. My concern is that I've had some issues with games even as old as The Sims 3 and so I'm wondering if there is anything I could replace for a relatively easy fix.
I visited a "Can You Run It?" site that indicated that I'd be able to play it at the highest setting with no problem but I'm still doubtful.
This is what I currently have:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
CPU Speed: 3.0 GHz
RAM: 2.1 GB
Video Card: GeForce 8600 GT
Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might be able to do and any specifics on which components I might want to buy? I'd appreciate more than one price option if possible.
Comments
your pc is fine, only thing id upgrade on is the ram and the gfx. maybe get a gtx 550 ti or 560 basically mid high end cards. my friend was able to run star wars old republic on high settings with nvidia 9500 with 2 gigs ram and pentium 4 hyper threading cpu 3.0ghz. he barley lagged. only time he lagged was when he got into towns. so i assume gtx 550 would do the job for u. the game itself isnt much to look at, and i havent experience a pvp where there is 100 vrs 100 players. so you should be fine atleast with 4 gigs of ram and a new gfx (gtx 550 ti or higher.
When you had computer for AoC, trust me, you will have zero problem running SW:TOR - bioware managed to stop the time :P ...
Wrong and wrong from both responses, this game is not GPU dependent it is CPU dependent, unless your cool with sub par FPS in crowded areas nothing less than i7 will do.
edit: sorry you will have to upgrade your GPU as well but you dont need a 400 card something in the 250 range will sufice. Unless of course you can afford the high end card then go for it.
Got a new computer given to me a few weeks ago : AMD 5000 . Popped my old 9500 GT card in with 4 gig RAM and I ran SW-ToR on med to high settings just fine till the damn TV tuner card blocked the airflow to my graphics card and almost burned the damn thing up before i realized what was happening. Now my vid card is almost fried. The fan barly runs now. Still running game on medium settings around 25-30 FPS.
Just ordered this puppy this morning ..should arrive next tuesday.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7228991&CatId=3669
I should be good to go then. Hopefully...
Double wrong!
25 to 35 FPS is an uplayable joke.......
Yeah I know but I hope it runs better on the new card. I was getting 50ish FPS before my old card overheated. Sisn't realize the game was CPU dependant though. Now you got me worried!
BTW is the new card worth a shit?
dude i just told you my friend ran the game on full gfx with pentium 4 ht without lagg. only time he lagg was when he got into a place with alot of people. go on youttube people ran starwars with duo core and they was running fraps and they ran it fine. u dont need i7 processor.
Some people are happy driving clunkers in the slow lane and dont know the difference between their car and the ones speeding past them, which is fine. But your idea of fine and "your friends" experience are clearly far different than my performance expectations. Also dont assume what you consider fine wil be okay for the OP. If he wants a game hitting 80 plus FPS in the open world and 50 to 60 in the heavist of areas yes he wil need an i7. If not than there is no need for an upgrade. Like I stated a game that runs less then 60 FPS is unplayable to me. Ill only put up with it in grossly populated cities.
lol ah well star wars sucks anyways. gonna wait till guild wars 2 comes out
OP, I'm sure Quizzical will be along shortly with the best and most specific advice you'll get on this site, but in the meantime...
- What power supply do you have? Make and model, not just wattage?
- The statement that an i7 processor is needed to run this game well is so absurd on multiple levels that I'll just suggest you ignore it altogether.
i agree with your brach, cause like i said i seen videos with same cpu he had on youtube mind you was running on fraps, and they was running the game at full settings without barley any lagg. the guy lagged a lil bit but not to the extent where it was not playable, but thats running fraps with it. so i think his cpu is fine along with a 4 gigs of ram and a new gfx will be good for him . new i7 processor would just overkill the game. there is no game out there that requires you to have i7 processor to run a game smooth, if they did then mmo industry would be dead broke
You will be fine - I am running on:
E7200 dual core at 2.53GHz with four gig of decent RAM and a 9800 GT 512mb
And I have the game at max settings. Playing for two or three hours at a time with no issues whatsoever anywhere in the game so far.
As long as you optimise your machine, de-frag the hard disk and turn off unnecessary processes, you won't need to worry...
well i agree with youf or some parts but he still would want to upgrade his gfx. 9800 gt and 8600 gt is dinasaur age gfx so if he wants to experience the game without further issue, lets say further down the line starwars decides to upgrade their gfx engine like what aion did , he would be able to run it no prob with mid high end cards compared to using a 8600 or a 9800. also 9800 sux ass. i had it and threw it out cause teh card piss me off. hurray for 590
IMO you are going to be held back more and more by having a dual core processor. The 8600 video is woefully behind the curve now as well. Two gigs of ram is also limiting You could upgrade on that platform, but going to new memory, CPU and video card might be close to the cost of just getting a new motherboard/CPU/GPU set up. Or a new computer.
An i5 processor is the sweet spot for gaming right now. You can get something decent and cheaper AMD side, possibly even upgradeable in the future, but if you want to aim forward now, i5 is it. Unless you are doing something aside from gaming, an i7 may not offer much upside for the extra money.
SWTOR (and many mmos) are more CPU intensive than most games, so bleeding edge GPUs aren't as much of a requirement. Depends on the size and resolution of your monitor set up though. An Nvidia 460 or one of their 560's would do it, or an ATI/AMD 6850/6870. There are apparantly some real deals on the 68xx line right now.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
"CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz"
That won't be a problem.
"RAM: 2.1 GB"
That is simply wrong. It's not physically possible to have 2.1 GB of system memory. You almost certainly have 2 GB, and it's probaby someone doing the usual stupid hard drive manufacturer shenanigans of pretending that 1 GB is a billion bytes, rather than 2^30.
If you're running Windows XP and don't have other programs running in the background, it should be fine. If you're running Vista or like to have a browser open, then memory might be a problem. Regardless, it's cheap and easy to upgrade to 4 GB.
"Video Card: GeForce 8600 GT"
That, on the other hand, will be a problem. The game will be playable on sufficiently low settings, but that could conceivably require setting your resolution below the monitor's native resolution.
The good news is that PCI Express is an industry standard and has been for a long time, so you can probably replace the video card without needing to replace the whole computer. Depending on your budget, you might want to look at a Radeon HD 6770 ($110), 6850 ($140), or 6870 ($160).
However, I'd want to know what case and power supply you have to see if you need to modify the former and/or replace the latter in order to handle a more powerful video card.
-----
" maybe get a gtx 550 ti or 560 basically mid high end cards."
A GeForce GTX 550 Ti or GeForce GTX 560 are seriously overpriced for what you get. They give about the same performance as a Radeon HD 6770 and 6870, respectively, while using more power (which is bad) and costing quite a bit more. A Geforce GTX 560 Ti is a nice card, but it's also significantly over $200, and there's a question of how much money you want to sink into an older machine.
" pentium 4 hyper threading cpu 3.0ghz. he barley lagged. only time he lagged was when he got into towns."
I guess different people have different standards of what is good. But in the busier areas, that's not even going to get you 20 frames per second. How a game performs in the busier areas is usually the real measure of whether the game runs well, as playable 90% of the time really isn't good enough when you're trying to play a game yourself. I can get 800 frames per second in Guild Wars at max settings when staring at a wall with nothing else on the screen, but that's not at all the same as getting 800 frames per second everywhere.
"unless your cool with sub par FPS in crowded areas nothing less than i7 will do."
What you really want for SWTOR is a quad core processor, because the game can get good use out of all four cores. Even a budget quad core processor such as an Athlon II X4 will run the game very well. One site took a Phenom II X4 and tried clocking it at a meager 2 GHz and it still ran the game pretty well. A dual core processor can suffice, but they'd better be relatively fast cores.
"sorry you will have to upgrade your GPU as well but you dont need a 400 card something in the 250 range will sufice."
That is somewhat nonsensical. I think you're assuming an Nvidia card, but Nvidia doesn't have anything that is a good value for the money under $200. On a larger budget, you can sometimes get a nice deal on a GeForce GTX 560 Ti or GeForce GTX 570, but if you want a good value on a video card under $200, you're going to get an AMD card.
"Got a new computer given to me a few weeks ago : AMD 5000"
The Radeon HD 5000 series is an entire series of cards, not a single card.
"TV tuner card blocked the airflow to my graphics card and almost burned the damn thing up before i realized what was happening."
Have you considered asking for help? Since you apparently fried the first two cards. Alternatively, unless the initial card was a Radeon HD 5450, it will be faster than either of your replacements.
"Just ordered this puppy this morning ..should arrive next tuesday."
See if you can cancel your order. Even if you're on a severe budget, you can get something much faster for cheaper:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102934
Might be lower power, too, in case you've had enough of frying things.
But you should say what your power supply and case are, as either of those could be significant factors, too.
"BTW is the new card worth a shit?"
Have you ever considered asking what to buy before making a purchase, rather than after? You know, while there is still time to change your decision?
"If he wants a game hitting 80 plus FPS in the open world and 50 to 60 in the heavist of areas yes he wil need an i7."
An Athlon II X4 at stock speeds can do that, too, if paired with a sufficiently powerful video card.
"What power supply do you have? Make and model, not just wattage?"
I'm quoting this just because I want the original poster to answer it.
"they was running the game at full settings without barley any lagg."
Different people have wildly different ideas of what constitutes full settings. For example, I'll bet that he had anti-aliasing turned off entirely, which not noly isn't max settings, but isn't even especially high settings. I once got in an argument with someone who insisted he could run Champions Online at highest settings on his Radeon X1900, so long as he turned off all of the settings that put much of load on the video card.
"E7200 dual core at 2.53GHz with four gig of decent RAM and a 9800 GT 512mb"
Your card has perhaps 3-4 times the performance of that of the original poster. But you're not really running the game at max settings, either. Tom's Hardware found that a GeForce GTX 550 Ti (which is faster than your card) at fairly high but not full max settings and a 1920x1080 resolution got 17 frames per second:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/star-wars-gaming-tests-review,3087-7.html
"IMO you are going to be held back more and more by having a dual core processor."
Going to be, future tense. Eventually you'll run into a game where a relatively fast dual core just isn't good enough. But not yet.
Edit: deleted double post. The first one didn't take even after I reloaded the page quite a bit later, so I reposted it, and then it finally accepted the second one.
OP, as others have noted, your CPU is just fine for running TOR.
My mobile 1.6ghz i7 has no issues (and despite being an "i7", isn't any kind of extraordinary CPU), and far more importantly, I asked my friend running a Core 2 Quad Q6600 what kind of time he's having playing the game, and he isn't having any trouble at all playing decently, in any zone. He says in very rare occasions, in especially crowded zones, he'll have a second of very minor hitching here or there, but that's as bad as it gets, and an E8400 outperforms the Q6600 in basically all situations (even in quad threaded applications).
Also, if you do run into trouble, it's worth noting that you can do a 20% overclock on basically every E8400 ever made, without having to do any serious tweaking. Just go into your bios, turn your FSB to from 333mhz to 400mhz, restart, and you're done. This assumes your machine allows overclocking, but if it does, it's a really nice speed boost that's quite free. You don't have to mess with voltage, you shouldn't have to do anything with RAM unless it's really crappy (and you should just buy a 4GB DDR2-800 kit anyways, so that solves that problem), because at 400mhz, the RAM should just run at 800mhz anyways, so you just increase the clock and you're good to go. My E8400 stayed stable a bit above that clock without higher voltages (3.7 was stable; 3.8 was not), but it may have been a good chip. Nevertheless, I've known many people who have owned that chip, and not one has ever failed to do that overclock. It also can be done with the stock cooler; I had no trouble at all.
Click my sig banner. im running on a 2 year old custom pc i built myself... and im running everything on MAX with np,
The best thing you can do to get ready is prepare for disapointment.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can
be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard
And that helps the OP how..?
Sorry, I honestly didn't expect such a great response and it slipped my mind to check this thread again until just now. If it helps narrow things down at all, this is the link to Newegg for the computer I ordered: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229026
My power supply is "Cooler Master" ATX12V RP-600-PCAR 18A.
Your power supply is a piece of junk and should be replaced. Or at least it probably is. Its successor is the Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus, which is awful. I'm guessing that the Cooler Master eXtreme Power wasn't so great, either.
Your link said it came with an Ultra power supply, not a Cooler Master one. The Ultra power supply would also be a piece of junk, but it does make me think you may have the wrong link. If your case has several case fans like the one you linked, then your case is fine (and maybe actually pretty nice) and there's no need to replace it.
First, the power supply. This one will be adequate for your needs:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151094
Depending on what you're willing to spend, this one is really nice:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182068
-----
For a video card, it's really a question of what you're willing to pay, whether you'll do rebates, and whether you want a "free" copy of DiRT 3 included. May I recommend one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131434
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131374
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131378
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102948
If you're willing to pay over $200 for a card, let me know and I can come up with some higher end recommendations for you. That's not necessary for SWTOR, though.
It's the right link, but now that I think of it I might have had the power supply replaced a few years back. I let a friend work on it when it was having some trouble and he may have replaced that as part of the troubleshooting process.
I'm actually thinking $250-$300 if you could suggest something in that range. My ultimate goal here is to be able to play Star Wars now and maybe GW2 next year without any other major upgrades.
A quick question on RAM, I had actually bought 2 additional Gigs when I bought the computer from New Egg, but I ended up pulling the 2 Gig stick because, with it, the Computer started crashing with memory dumps within just the first few days. Maybe it was just a bad stick but I haven't tried to replace it since because I thought that maybe it was unwise to max it out. Would you recommend I add another 2GBs?
Dou core is sufficient enough no need for quad and the geforce 5 series way to high for his old motherboard won't work he should go for 260 280 max. Or replace mother board but then also need to replace cpu.
P.S Again dont buy a new generation video card if your motherboard don't realy support it, it will not improve much specially with new DX11 cards they are way to overpowered for old MB.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit