Lowest budget for a decent pc for sl?

[JVlagic]

Hey there, I haven’t played second life in a few years, thus I have been wishing to play it once again. But there is a problem, I don’t have a computer what so ever. Playing on laptops for years, I have finally decided to invest in a pc. Ive read the forums of people asking what kind of pc to get and I don’t understand any of the terms or names of the parts others say are great and what they even do which is a tad difficult as it leaves me confused on what I should even get. I was curious if 800 dollars was going alright for a decent pc for sl if not I’m willing to save up. I’ve been looking at prebuilt ones on Amazon one is $1,800 the other $800. But I’m asking for links and recommendations on what the community thinks on a low budget pc that performs well! :)

here are the links of pcs I have been considering please let me know which one you think is the go to. 

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B078H7WQ8B/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_CASiCbAWZ04A3

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0757FV6Y4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_LDSiCbTGQ2VEP

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07DNT2HTX/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_QCSiCb0GBYTQ1

 

 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

First and 2nd one will do fine,  that 3rd one, no.  8gb ddr 3,  that's system ram,  that's not enough to run windows and SL at once,  windows will use 4gb at the minimum,  firestorm will use right up to 3.5gb of ram for 32 bit client.

You need to look at the top 2 and leave that 3rd alone.

[cykarushb]

On 12/25/2018 at 9:16 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

First and 2nd one will do fine,  that 3rd one, no.  8gb ddr 3,  that's system ram,  that's not enough to run windows and SL at once,  windows will use 4gb at the minimum,  firestorm will use right up to 3.5gb of ram for 32 bit client.

You need to look at the top 2 and leave that 3rd alone.

8gb of ram is more than enough to run windows and multiple instances of SL...

windows will not use 4gb of ram unless you have some extremely broken bloated version of windows running, im running at about 1.9gb right now with multiple firefox tabs going on windows 10

On 12/25/2018 at 6:14 PM, JVlagic said:

Hey there, I haven’t played second life in a few years, thus I have been wishing to play it once again. But there is a problem, I don’t have a computer what so ever. Playing on laptops for years, I have finally decided to invest in a pc. Ive read the forums of people asking what kind of pc to get and I don’t understand any of the terms or names of the parts others say are great and what they even do which is a tad difficult as it leaves me confused on what I should even get. I was curious if 800 dollars was going alright for a decent pc for sl if not I’m willing to save up. I’ve been looking at prebuilt ones on Amazon one is $1,800 the other $800. But I’m asking for links and recommendations on what the community thinks on a low budget pc that performs well!

here are the links of pcs I have been considering please let me know which one you think is the go to. 

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B078H7WQ8B/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_CASiCbAWZ04A3

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0757FV6Y4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_LDSiCbTGQ2VEP

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07DNT2HTX/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_QCSiCb0GBYTQ1

You dont need the fanciest PC in the world for SL. If you wanted to go super budget, you can. I can tell you how if youre interested because it can be either way more involved than buying an off the shelf PC, or a matter of 1-2 small and easy to do upgrades to an existing machine, or just a cheap prebuilt.

There are a lot of reviews of different prebuilt companies and what they have to offer. There are a lot of prebuilts out there, and each company has its own perks and flaws. Personally i say stay far away from OriginPC and iBuyPower, which are super common on amazon. I would personally suggest Maingear, NZXT's BLD systems or DigitalStorm

https://www.maingear.com/

Maingear is a pretty expensive option but these PC's are built by people who really know what theyre doing and provide only the best product they can, along with having pretty fantastic customer service.

https://www.letsbld.com/

If youre looking at NXZT's BLD computers, click on the Counter Strike Global Offensive preset for performance, SL and CS:GO have very similar hardware requirements despite being extremely different games, they both like a powerful CPU and dont really care what GPU you have. This is also a more expensive option at around 1000$ for an intel based model with an i5 and gtx 1060, but again, built by people whos entire company is based around extremely high end PC components (NZXT is mainly a case and cooler manufacturer).

https://www.digitalstorm.com/

DigitalStorm is a much more budget friendly option for a prebuilt, but ONLY at the low end. Theyre where you can find a 700$ prebuilt: https://www.digitalstorm.com/configurator.asp?id=1864480

However note that this machine does not have a dedicated graphics card and is using an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, which is an APU with integrated graphics. This isnt on the same tier of crappy laptop integrated graphics however and its a very capable APU graphically, itll play SL without issue. But as soon as you move up to their 1000$ tier PC, you get lesser specs than the NZXT BLD pc's have to offer. (Their 1000$ pc has an equivalent processor, but no solid state drive and the GPU is a GTX 1050ti, while NZXT offers an SSD and a GTX 1060 at the same price).

 

Specs wise you want a strong processor and fast storage drives, but graphical capabilities dont matter too much as long as you dont go super low end. Look for something with an Intel i5 processor or AMD Ryzen 3 or Ryzen 5 processor, a minimum of 8gb of ram, a Solid State Drive (SSD) is a must and graphically anything at or over a GTX 1050 (AMD Equivalent being an RX 560 or 460).

If you want to go super, super cheap, i can explain how but thats a much longer wall of text. SL will realistically run on just about anything you want, i would know, ive run it on some absolute toasters for computers and you can get very playable results on extremely old and very cheap hardware.

An alternative on a tighter budget that is a bit more involved than just buying a prebuilt is to buy an old office PC and do some upgrades. A dell optiplex 790 (those little silver boxes in pretty much every school and government building in the world) with a decent processor, 4 or 8gb of ram, windows preinstalled on a small hard drive, tend to cost next to nothing and then can be easily upgraded with a low power graphics card and maybe some extra ram to perform extremely well for under 400$.

If you are interested in that, this right here: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Optiplex-790-Performance-Refurbished/dp/B071NM6RNC/

Has a capable although older i5 processor, 8gb of ram, and an SSD, all that other normal PC stuff like Wifi and a decently sized hard drive and Windows 10 installed. From there you plug in something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-Geforce-GDDR5-Graphic-GV-N1050OC-2GD/dp/B01MG0733A/

And install the drivers for it, restart the PC and you have an entry level gaming PC for very, very little money. The only fiddling around with a PC required is plugging in a graphics card, which is a matter of two screws and a slot.

Or you can build your own, but that as well is something that belongs in a much larger block of text, or really just some links to a few youtube videos. The difficulty in building a PC is not the actual assembly, but knowing what it is you need and what is the best options in your price range. Anyone can slap together a PC, but will it be a "good" pc in the end?

[bigmoe Whitfield]

I am currently USING 10.1 GB. subtracting the 2.2gb for firestorm.  and turning off discord and steam. leaves me at 7.9gb usage on windows 10.

Base install with no crude added.  as I just refreshed.   so 4gb is enough with multiple instances of SL., um. 

[cykarushb]

5 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I am currently USING 10.1 GB. subtracting the 2.2gb for firestorm.  and turning off discord and steam. leaves me at 7.9gb usage on windows 10.

Base install with no crude added.  as I just refreshed.   so 4gb is enough with multiple instances of SL., um. 

Something is extremely wrong with your windows installation...

My windows 10 machine idles at around 1-1.2gb tops. 

Hell, this last week I've been working with the "Chinese PC" with a Pentium G3260T, GT 1030 and 4gb of ram. It was enough for SL with the linden labs viewer, a few tabs of Firefox going at the same time. However that is windows 7, which idles around 300-500mb usage.

2 viewers running at once is definitely possible without running into *shudder* page file issues on 4gb.

ive heard of some specific versions of Windows 10 using 3-4gb of ram on idle but nearly 8gb is definitely not normal.

If you have an SSD, try disabling super fetch, you wouldn't notice the load speeds in windows on an SSD anyway if it was off.