Minimum Hardware Requirements

After reading the a few of the threads here on the forums, it seems clear to me that the minimum requirements to run SL is either out of date or misleading.

I have a box with 1GB of memory, an ATI Radeon 9600, and a 1.86 GHz P5 processor. This machine meets and in some areas, exceeds the minimum requirements to run SL. At times while running SL, it gets laggy and at times the hard drive is spinning around mad. The SL program will have on the title bar saying it's "Not Responding". If I'm lucky, the hard drive will be finished and I'll be able to continue in SL, if not. It crashes a miserable death. Now I'm not running wireless, I'm hooked up directly onto my router.

When I run SL, I shutdown all other apps.

My questions for the group (PC/Intel/Athelon users only please)

What are you all running is it enough to run and use SL.

Are any of you experiencing the same thing?

Minimum hardware requirements, I would guess would be

AMD (or Intel Equivelant) Sempron 2500+ 512MB ram.
High Speed Internet connection, Aim for CABLE not DSL
umm.. 7200 RPM Harddrive space
Integrated video is okay


If its sluggish, try shutting down some of your programs in the background with
CTRL+ALT+Delete in processes. anything with your USERNAME and not SYSTEM is generally okay to turn off. for started. just turn off the ones you know.

And you can optimize your computer with Diskeeper. You can download it for free at
http://remotepclabs.com in the Software section...

Other then that.. too improve performance. I recommend at least

and AMD Athlon 3200
1GB of ram
Geforece 6600 w/256mb DDRAM


it will run very well on that system..

I have to disagree when it comes to integrated video. Unless it has its own dedicated RAM, integrated video shares system RAM. 512MB of dedicated system RAM will work with SL with some settings set low. An integrated video chipset can eat up as much as 128MB of system RAM (depending on the chipset).

I built a test machine last summer with higher specs than Justin's minimum spec machine. The motherboard had an integrated Nvidia 6100 chipset and I put in 1GB of DDR400 system RAM. I used a Turion 64 processor (yeah, I know its a laptop processor). SL ran horribly. Granted, it was running an early Vista beta, but with the 6100, it was almost unplayable. I put in a GeForce 7300GS, and there was a big improvement. Not perfect given the state of Vista at the time, but it was playable. The big difference was that it was using the whole gig of system RAM and the 7300GS had 256MB of RAM. The 6100 used 128MB of system RAM.

If you have to run with only 512MB system RAM, get at least an older Nvidia 6600GT.

My Garage box is a P4 1.6, 512Mb RAM, 80 Gig HDD, and a GeForce2.

It runs just fine, very little lag, but then I don't have all the fancy graphics on either, I've left the sliders where they started (about halfway)

If your having serious problems, try winding back the graphics, it might also be that your connection speed is not up to par.

Note: While I can run on this machine, it does not give the full SL experience like a decent setup does.

I have an old Dell Optiplex machine that I rescued from a trip to the dumpster at work. Its purely an office drone machine. When I found it, most of its hardware was already gone. All it had was a floppy drive. I put in a 1ghz PIII (not easy to find in 2005), 512MB PC100 RAM, GeForce 4MX vid card (PCI) a DVD/CD burner and a 40gb hard drive. This humble POS can actually handle SL. Its playable if you can live with a permanent fog, blurry trees, no shiny or fancy lighting and a draw distance of 64. I was even able to move around during the hell we older residents knew as v.1.7. Sometimes its amazing what the low end machines can do. And before anyone asks, this machine is not my main SL machine.

I dug up my old forum post on some benchmarking I did with various computers around my house. Here's the Link so you can see the differences hardware makes.

Also, as others suggest, you can try turning down some of the settings to see if that helps.

BTW- on my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop, it runs SL pretty damn well. Almost as good as my Desktop!!

Inspiron 6400 Specs: Intel Core2 Duo @ 2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, ATI x1300 video card (128 MB on video).

Anyone else notice the OP said "P5"? There is no P5 yet.

I'm guessing the OP may have meant P4. Its also possible that the OP meant to say G5.

I dragged an ancient 750mhz Duron pc out of the back of the closet, put 256mb ram into it, and tried running it on sl. It has an Nvidia FX5200 (agp) and winxp. So it just about meets sl's minimum requirements. It worked better than I expected. Performance was slow, and sl didn't look very pretty with all the sliders turned to the left, but it ran reliably. fps was about 5-10 on typical sims, about half of what I see on my usual sl machine (2ghz Sempron with 1.5gb ram and Nvidia 7600). I tried the main browser, the first look browser, the beta grid browser, and the Linux alpha browser (it also boots Ubuntu), and they all ran successfully.

Well, there is, but I don't think it'll run Second Life. P5 is the original Pentium/Pentium MMX core. P6 is the Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III core, and P7 is the dead-end ridiculously-long-pipeline Pentium 4 core. The "Core Duo" chips use an updated P6 core with the faster system bus from the Pentium 4. There was no P4, the P5 designation was created when the upcoming 80586 was renamed the Pentium after Intel lost the court case over the "486" designation being used by Cyrix and IBM and AMD for their clones.