Let me ask it this way…

[Clarke Millar]

So if I was going to buy a computer that would be perfect for second life, make it run like a dream, what should I buy? (And lets kelp it say, under 2000$)

[Persephone Emerald]

Someone else may be able to give you the specs, but mine is an Alienware gaming computer that I got open box. Even so, you'd need to keep your graphics down a bit, because Alienware tends to get hot. I've had my "laptop" for about 6 years, & I've had to replace the battery & the keyboard. 

[Eddy Vortex]

I am not savvy enough to know how up-to-date LL's system requirement page is:  https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

Hopefully someone smarter can chime in with better answers.

[diamond Marchant]

It really depends on what your needs are. I am fine using a laptop with a midrange Nvidia chip since 2009, updating every 3 years. I like vehicles and building and still photography. No problems. Almost any 2023 computer that has a GPU chip is going to work at some level. 
I always go for cool and quiet. Lenovo Legion 5 works for me. It also travels.

Edited August 6, 2023 by diamond Marchant

[Chic Aeon]

I have an Alienware computer from the mid COVID days when the 3070 chips were very hard to come by.  It was a bit over #2000 then (the most expensive computer that I have ever purchased) but I am very happy with it.  It has a fairly big case (black) and is sleek looking.  I can run SL and bake in Blender quickly with no issues. I can run a few avatars at the same time (not while baking LOL).  It does put out a fair amount of heat into the room but the COMPUTER temperature stays very low (lower than any of my past desktops). I run a 30 inch monitor  or maybe 32.   

 

[CandyCole]

19 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I have an Alienware computer from the mid COVID days when the 3070 chips were very hard to come by.  It was a bit over #2000 then (the most expensive computer that I have ever purchased) but I am very happy with it.

Your first few sentences are exactly the same for me. During Covid I was saving while hardly spending any money and knew exactly what I was waiting for once supply chains returned to some semblance of normality. When it eventually became available in my area I snapped it up. It can run 3 concurrent SL logins with ease (I have 3x screens) but I wanted these specs primarily for Cities:Skylines, which can be very processor hungry, knowing that it'd be fine for SL also.

Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16 - LAPTOP
• Intel Core i9-12900H
• 32GB (16GBx2) DDR5 4800MHz
• 2x 1TB PCIe/NVMe M.2 2280
• 15.6" WQXGA IPS Anti-Glare 165Hz
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6
• Windows 11 Home
+ Plus 32' 4k LG-Monitor-32gp850

Prior to that I had an ASUS laptop which could easily run concurrent SL logins too, but struggled with advanced Cities:Skylines.

ASUS ROG GL703GM
• Intel i7-8750H
• 16GB DDR4
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
• Windows 10

As far as SL goes anything with dedicated graphics 6GB VRAM or more will be fine. Just get the best your finances can allow but that can depend upon how important your computer/laptop is to you. For me it is high priority and deserves a high end spend.

[Bree Giffen]

You need a gaming computer. That's about all you need to know. A new gaming computer sold today will have whatever good specs needed to run SL. The primary difference between a gaming computer and a regular computer is the graphics card.  All computers have a motherboard and nearly all motherboards have a built-in graphics chip which is good for regular 2D applications like watching videos, browsing the web, or most other applications but a gaming computer will have a motherboard with an expansion slot that has a separate graphics card plugged into it. The two major brands are Nvidia and AMD Radeon.

In short, if you go to any online or brick-and-mortar store and search for a gaming laptop or gaming desktop you'll find a selection which will have an Nvidia or AMD graphic card in it. Gaming computers also come with a good CPU, a good amount of RAM and a large hard drive. You should be able to find one for under $2,000.

Edited August 6, 2023 by Bree Giffen

[Silent Mistwalker]

Using Firestorm, I can run SL on mid high graphics without any issues and only occasional lag from very high ARC avatars.

Processor:    Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400F CPU @ 2.90GHz   2.90 GHz

RAM:    16.0 GB (15.9 GB usable)

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super (6GB GDDR6) 

[Paul Hexem]

Anything with a modern dedicated GPU will work fine. I'm still on a 2070 and an older i7 and getting the job done without issue.

[Clarke Millar]

1 hour ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Using Firestorm, I can run SL on mid high graphics without any issues and only occasional lag from very high ARC avatars.

Processor:    Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400F CPU @ 2.90GHz   2.90 GHz

RAM:    16.0 GB (15.9 GB usable)

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super (6GB GDDR6) 

Do you think 16 gigs of Ram is good? Because it would be nice to be able to drive a nice SL car down a linden road and be able to not have to stop and wait for the buildings and scenery to rez. 

[Silent Mistwalker]

21 minutes ago, Clarke Millar said:

Do you think 16 gigs of Ram is good? Because it would be nice to be able to drive a nice SL car down a linden road and be able to not have to stop and wait for the buildings and scenery to rez. 

It's my bare minimum. LL recommends 8 GB. https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

My old desktop has 32 (or 64, I forget) GB of RAM and SL did run better with more RAM. The 16 is sufficient but I do hope to add more someday before this pc is years out of date. lol

[bigmoe Whitfield]

4 hours ago, Clarke Millar said:

Do you think 16 gigs of Ram is good? Because it would be nice to be able to drive a nice SL car down a linden road and be able to not have to stop and wait for the buildings and scenery to rez. 

that's your connection to the asset cdn servers,  but first you are waiting for the sim to ask for the assets, then telling the cdn nodes to deliver you the items, it takes a few to get everything loaded and rezzed.  

 

I love tech and I've sat and watched for hours on end how most of this works,  so while I'm not a linden, I do have a really good grasp on it.

[Love Zhaoying]

I just made the leap for a gaming notebook that was under USD$1000 and it works just fine so far. Acer Nitro 5. 

I do plan to upgrade the memory. Note that I don't play other "games".

CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12500H (3110.39 MHz)
Memory: 16089 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10/11 64-bit (Build 22621.1992)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2

[Ted McGregor]

On 8/6/2023 at 3:30 AM, Clarke Millar said:

So if I was going to buy a computer that would be perfect for second life, make it run like a dream ....

SL will answer you this way :

[Gwin LeShelle]

Hm my desktop cost more than double your budget so that wouldn’t be smart advice but I would also say that any new desktop PC should be ok as long as it has a stand-alone GPU and not only onboard graphics.

And try to go for at least 32gb Ram but 16 should be ok too but since you want to run SL like it’s a dream … x3

And I would say you will be able to get a pretty decent PC with this amount that is much better than a laptop in this price range. 

[Sid Nagy]

I have 16 gb ram on my PC. SL works smoothly.
The possessor is mainly tapping with it's finger waiting what to do next. Every modern processor handles SL with its eyes closed.
A decent graphics card and a ditto Internet connection are the most important parts IMHO.
I currently use a 3 years old 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card.

Edited August 7, 2023 by Sid Nagy
Small text improvements.

[missyrideout]

4 hours ago, Gwin LeShelle said:

And try to go for at least 32gb Ram but 16 should be ok too but since you want to run SL like it’s a dream … x3

Agree on 32GB of ram. Especially if you might ever want to edit a high resolution photo at the same time, or quickly open a second instance of the viewer, or have dozens of tabs open in a browser, or other resource intensive multitasking. I find 16GB can start to feel low if I'm in a busy club or laggy event.

[Nalates Urriah]

You haven't told us how you use SL. So none of the suggestions can be particularly specific.

Those people that are especially tech-savvy will be in the tech section of this forum. Ask there and provide more information about what you want to do in SL, you'll get some specific answers.

Intel processors are my choice. The title for best gaming CPU bounces between AMD and Intel. It is hard to keep up and know who is in the lead today. But, whichever one you buy, the other will soon be in the lead.

Intel makes i3, i5, i7, and i9 CPUs and some other more exotic special-use CPUs. For gamers, the i5 is the sweet spot in performance and cost. For SL the i5 has enough parallel processing cores to be better than adiquit. The i7 and i9 are on the overkill side of things. While you might see a measurable, with a stopwatch, bit of improvement over an i5 it usually is not enough to justify the additional cost.

Understand. If you turn the viewer's setting up and extend the draw-distance to max you can bring an i9 down to single-digit frame rates. So to get the best price and performance you gotta be a geek. I am trying to make the point that throwing money at the computer will not necessarily get you good performance in an SL viewer.

I think the two most important factors for performance are CPU speed, faster is better, thus eliminating most laptops, and memory, which also needs to be fast and plentiful which requires a fast motherboard... see how quickly it geeks out? I consider 32GB a minimum.

For max performance, you need a RAM Drive, a virtual storage system that lives in computer RAM and pretends to be a hard drive or SSD. This means you'll want 64GB of RAM or more.

A dedicated video card is a must for performance. I prefer NVIDIA as they have provided better support for OpenGL, which SL viewers run on.

Tom's Hardware and other geeky places give you the latest on computer hardware for gamers and recommend what is needed in a gaming computer.

 

[Silent Mistwalker]

Agree on Tom's, disagree in Intel. If you've never worked there, you have no idea.

[gwynchisholm]

On 8/5/2023 at 9:05 PM, Eddy Vortex said:

I am not savvy enough to know how up-to-date LL's system requirement page is:  https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

Hopefully someone smarter can chime in with better answers.

So irrelevant and vague its not even worth mentioning. It used to be worse, so at the very least they took the outright incorrect information out of it.

On 8/5/2023 at 8:30 PM, Clarke Millar said:

So if I was going to buy a computer that would be perfect for second life, make it run like a dream, what should I buy? (And lets kelp it say, under 2000$)

Perfect for secondlife isnt a great idea as its tailoring a system to a very specific use case, though if you genuinely intend to use this PC with a $2000 budget for only Secondlife, it gets really complicated.

Youd basically want a current gen high end CPU, disable half the cores, and overclock the other ones as far as you can go depending on the cooling solution you have. SL doesnt utilize multiple cores well and the better your single core performance metric, the better your overall performance for SL. Pair this with the fastest ram you can get your hands on, 16gb will be fine for SL alone, not as exciting or exotic there. Sl does see some benefits from having faster memory, DDR5 at 7800mhz+ can show pretty drastic improvements.

For a GPU its really down to whatever is most powerful in the remaining budget. A 2000$ pc with a higher end cpu on an overclockable platform with a decent cooler, thats only about half the budget. For the remaining bit you'd be able to get something like an AMD 7900XTX.

Fast storage would be desirable but you dont need to go nuts with it as any Sata SSD would be plenty for SL's caching habits let alone any nvme ssd, so the cheaper pcie 3.0 nvme ssds would do fine.

This is a different story if youre just looking for a more conventional PC in a 2000$ budget that happens to also do well at SL. Because then you could ignore that whole "disable half your cores and OC the rest". That part isnt a joke by the way, i used to do that with an i9 11900k where id disable 4 of the cores and get the other ones to 5.6ghz on water. This did genuinely help SL a little bit but its kinda silly to do that.

Edited August 7, 2023 by gwynchisholm

[Istelathis]

2 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

For max performance, you need a RAM Drive, a virtual storage system that lives in computer RAM and pretends to be a hard drive or SSD. This means you'll want 64GB of RAM or more.

This is what sped up SL for me.  I have mine set to 2.5 gb, and noticed a massive increase in performance in SL ever since, even running on an older 1050ti card.  Previously, I had cache stored on a slower HDD and would notice huge spikes in lag where the viewer would become unresponsive.  I think with an SSD it probably is not nearly as noticeable for others, at least that is what I have been told by them.  I did find that trying to backup the ram drive every time I wanted to reboot my computer would lead to quite a lengthy shutdown process, so I just let it all clear on the rare occasion that I do need to reboot - it doesn't take long to fill it back up regardless when I am out exploring.  

Not an ideal computer for second life, but I did want to contribute to the conversation just how much of a significance having a RAM disk made on my computer, which is now old.  I wander most of the time with a draw distance of 128m.  My frame rate is not great, but compared to before having the ram disk it is a significant improvement, before just camming around would freeze my viewer, with a draw distance of 32m.  

I am looking forward to when I can eventually upgrade to a newer computer, and have some of those sweet FPS many of you enjoy - but at the very least I can get around and SL still looks decent.  I think when I do upgrade, I will still set aside a RAM disk just because I don't want to have data constantly shifting around on a SSD as I can easily go through 2 gigs in a couple of hours.

Edited August 7, 2023 by Istelathis

[ItHadToComeToThis]

On 8/6/2023 at 2:30 AM, Clarke Millar said:

So if I was going to buy a computer that would be perfect for second life, make it run like a dream, what should I buy? (And lets kelp it say, under 2000$)

Unless you are desperate for a laptop, ignore laptops, they are portable sure, but don't have the longevity and upgradability that home pcs do. And they cost more.

Secondly, I just bought myself a pretty okay gaming rig for around idk 1800ish in your money, which included the company I was dealing with building it for me, which should last me quite some time. You don't need the latest or greatest tech in every single regards.

My setup is as follows:

Rizen 5600x processor

12GB 6700XT Radeon graphics

32gb DDR4 3600

1TB WD Black M.2 drive

650W PSU

Alpenfohn cooler 120mm

Phanteks G300-A case

Gigabyte B550 mobo

Wireless card of some description

I have been able to run any game, can play SL on max, no issues.

Edited August 7, 2023 by ItHadToComeToThis

[animats]

On 8/6/2023 at 2:01 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Do you think 16 gigs of Ram is good?

After watching memory usage pass 17GB in a club with 90 avatars, it looks like in this new era where SL has crowds, you need 32GB to go to the busy places.

[Janet Voxel]

You can build a pc with all new everything except the monitor for about $1700 and could run SL and Starfield too

[Jennifer Boyle]

A lot of this discussion is over my head, but I will say that when I replaced my RTX 1080 graphics card with an RTX 3090, SL performance markedly improved. I can run it at 4K resolution, and I never have lag any more.