Will This be satisfactory for SL

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Processor
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4790 processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz)

Operating System
Windows 8.1 (64Bit) English

Memory
12GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz - 4 DIMMs

Hard Drive
1TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive 6.0 Gb/s

Video Card
NVIDIA GeForce GT 720 1GB DDR3

 

price 799.99

its sitting in my cart, i'm just waiting for you opinions :)

[irihapeti]

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BilliJo Aldrin wrote:

 

Video Card

NVIDIA GeForce GT 720 1GB DDR3

 

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this card is a bit underpowered. the no. 20 on the 720 is not very good for rendering 3D scenes like SL.  Best to get a 60 or better. Like 660, 760 770, 870 980 etc. The middle no. should be as high as you can afford within you budget. Less than at least a 50 is a waste of money if you want to play SL on it

[BilliJo Aldrin]

thank you, thats just the sort of reply i need to get

[SaraCarena]

I`ve ran sl with a 520, 650 and now a 770. x20 is usable but only low to mid graphics. A x50 will get you mid to high and ultra in some regions depending on how you trim some settings like draw distance etc. x70 will run ultra in a lot of situations but not all. Regions with lots of mesh heavy av`s (50+ and no av imposters) will bring high end cards to a crawl too.

i5 processors run sl very well if you want to save some of your budget on the processor and add it to the graphics card. My i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz peaks at about 85% load but mostly runs sl at about 30% load.

Good luck :smileyhappy:

[BilliJo Aldrin]

This is my first time buying anything more than a bottom of the line computer, and i want to do it right, thank you for your reply

[Innula Zenovka]

I agree completely with irihapeti about the GPU -- I recently upgraded to a GTX 660 on advice from someone who really knows his graphics cards, and am very pleased with the result.    It's a big improvement on my previous card, a GTX550.

A 720 would be very underpowered for SL -- it's good for surfing the net and Office and watching YouTube but couldn't handle SL at anything other than minimum graphics.   Twelve gig of RAM is good, but 16 might be even better, depending on what you might have open alongside SL under normal circumstances (a browser with several tabs open, plus Photoshop plus ....).

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi BIlliJo,

Here's a searchable table of graphics card benchmarks...

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

Just start typing part of the card's model number in the search box and autocomplete will give you a drop down of matching cards, then click "Find Videocard" and you'll be taken to the selected card's performance number.

Here are a few numbers.

• GT 720 = 826 (not much better than Intel's latest integrated graphics adapters)
• GTX 660 = 4118 (as Irihapeti noted, the middle digit is the one that really tells you about performance)

The graphics card is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. If your budget is fixed, you might do better to step down from i7 to i5 and use the savings to get a better graphics card.

Happy Hunting!

[SaraCarena]

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BilliJo Aldrin wrote:

This is my first time buying anything more than a bottom of the line computer, and i want to do it right.....

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 Totally understand that so it makes sense to get as much info and opinion as possible so you feel confident about clicking that cart button.

The only problem with the system you quoted is that it`s very unbalanced for sl. More cpu than you need and not enough gpu.

I`m not in the U.S. but had a quick look on Neweggs gaming pc configurator for intel and AMD ( AMD processors are widely regarded as better bang for buck processors than intel)

The configurators allow you to mix and match parts of a system

http://www.newegg.com/Store/PromotionStore/ID-2125620?name=Gaming-Entertainment

A quick look there came up with an 8gig ram/Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz/Gtx 750Ti   @ $815 or

8gig ram/AMD FX-4300 3.8GHz(4.0GHz Turbo) CPU/ GTX 750 Ti @ $725

Bear in mind that on the AMD page you have to select a minimum 500 watt psu for the GTX 750Ti, on the intel page it`s already bundled.

Both of those have plenty of cpu and a nice amount of gpu for sl. 8gig of ram is fine, no viewer uses more than 4 gig of ram.

 

I`m not recomending you buy those, just giving suggestions on better balanced search options. Maybe search i5 or FX-4300 along with GTX 760 and GTX 960 to see if you can find anything there in your budget.

Hope that helps and let us know how you get on:smileyhappy:

[DKTitan]

Get what you can afford but don't expect much to change with sl. I'm a avid lover of shadows and I am just as disapointed in sl ad when I used my gtx 660ti.

 

You can upgrade all day but it still won't overcome sl basic limitations.

[Qie Niangao]

This thread is a bit out of date anyway, but possibly you're confusing what people have said about sim and viewer FPS rates. Viewers commonly run over 100 FPS on capable machines, but sims are set to run ideally at 40 FPS, where a sim's "frame" is simply the time-granularity of the simulation. As the engine is currently programmed, a simulation that ran faster than 40 FPS would be a bug, not a feature.

The two rates are really quite independent. The vast majority of sim frames will pass with no viewer updates needed at all, and an even larger share of viewer frames are generated without using any new information from the simulation.