computer system requirements

Hi,

I'm a newbie and until SL not a computer "gamer", hence my system was set up for business not gaming. SL will run on my laptop but not as well as I'd like. My desktop is a Dell Pent 4 1.5 Ghz machine with a GIG of memory. I need to upgrade the memory card, but am looking for some recommendations.

I have several choices, buy a new PC system, upgrade existing desktop PC system or buy a new MacBook. All prejudies aside, will a Mac give me an advantages INSIDE and exclusive to Second Life? If so what are they? If not, Which video card do you think I should buy?

Lacey Voom, future SL entrepreneur

well looking at the speed of your processor and the way SL hogs resources honestly I would buy a new computer but that is just me

SL is hard on resources i'm not sure its worth the money to spend on upgrading that you will need a huge graphics card agp driven is slow pci express is better. 2 gigs of ram would be optimal

I have however seen people run this game on 512 or ram and a slower processor however they are always crashing and relogging continuously that would drive me nuts

that's my honest opinion hehe computer is old not worth the cash to upgrade

Well, despite my having been a PC person my computer-owning life if I were able to purchase a new computer now I'd choose a Mac. But really...for entirely different reasons. ^_^;

If you are buying a computer to be able to run SL with the best performance you really need to look into what high end graphics cards there are out there and compare ratings. I'm sure plenty of folks here would give you their preferences as well.

When I bought my new PC it was with SL and WoW in mind. This was about three years ago so my specs are probably pretty meager by today's standards. With that in mind I have a Nvidia Geforce 6800 with 256 ram on the card. SL runs fairly well with this and the only issues I seem to have mostly stem from my lack of RAM (only 512...ridiculous, I know...I keep meaning to upgrade ^_^ and the fact that I'm on a wireless network that hiccups regularly.

Also! If you haven't already you can go in and edit the graphics settings in SL by choosing Preferences either before you log on or Edit> Preferences once you're in-world. By tapping down your draw distance and adjusting some of the other settings as well you can increase the performance even on a lower end machine. This will at least let you explore a bit more smoothly until you upgrade or get a new machine.

Good luck! ^_^

If you plan to buy a Macbook Pro, your Macbook will give you enhance sound effect (wind nose comes from your computer fan) and enhance keyboard features with two keys operations for "fn -page up" to fly up and "fn-page down" to fly down.

I write about computers for some of my living, so I have a fair range of PCs at home to play on (means "try out different configurations". My normal SL machine in the daytime is a 1.7Ghz P4 with a gig of RAM and an Nvidia 5200 card in dual-head mode; this runs SL sort of OK-ish.

Most of my machines get connected to very large monitors, so where I get speed gains out of one bit, I suffer speed losses from having big windows, so my home machine is a 3.0Ghz Dell Precision 470 with 2Gb of RAM and an Nvidia 7300LE running a 1900 by 1600 or thereabouts flat panel; this is Ok for SL but runs quite slow if I try to leave SL open while running other big memory programs. Likewise my junk-room machine - 1Gb of RAM, P4 2.8 and an ancient and very weird IBM flat panel that runs 2048 by 1536 on a NVidia 6200. This does rather better with multi-tasking SL with other apps, though I haven't tracked down exactly why this should be so, yet.

The real surprise though was a machine I never thought big enough for SL at all - an IBM Z60M laptop. Intel Extreme graphics, a Mobile Pentium 1.6-ish or so, and 512 MB of RAM. Runs SL damn fast - maybe because the screen is pretty low in pixel count, maybe because it plays well on the network... haven't had time to get to the bottom of that yet.

I guess the moral of the story is, laptops can be better at SL than you think - and desktops can be worse, especially if your connection isn't that fast.

You made some really great points and coupled with the other replies, I think I might be better off looking at upgrading my laptop as my stop gap measure. As for the network, I'll try hardwiring the laptop into the hub rather than going wireless. With that and perhaps tweeking the laptop since it is newer, I can stall a purchase for a bit. At least the Laptop runs SL right now. That will give me time to evualuate cost to reward ratio of buying a top end gaming system.

I appreciate all the responses!

Lacey Voom

I strongly recommend the Sinclair ZX-81 with the add-on 4k RAM pack. You never know when those extra kilobytes will be needed. Be sure to use a colour TV set for your monitor.

I can not recommend the Sinclair. The flat membrane 'keyboard'-- sleek as it is-- simply doesn't compensate for the lack of a mouse.

The ZX81 does colour now?

i beleive you can get a 2.5 ghz z80 these dayz (or make your own)