cykarushb

Much better option. For reference because the F series processors sometimes make people think of S and U low power processors, the F series are just processors without integrated graphics. Cpu is slightly better than the i7 7700 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700-vs-Intel-Core-i5-9400F/3887vsm699058 1660ti is drastically better than the 1050 https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-1660-Ti-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050-Ti/4037vs3649 Only compromise i guess is the ram, but if you run into issues with 8gb, you can get another 8gb of DDR4 for pretty cheap. I cant find any mention on the specific details of the ram in there, i guess if you need more, just order an identical kit to whats in there or really just anything thats the same speed.

High end processor with a mid ranged GPU. Would not recommend this. Its also relatively older technology when you consider theres been 2.5 more processor releases since kaby lake and even pascal gpus are a bit older now. Its not to say its bad, though with this being a prebuilt inspiron, you should be looking for current generation hardware only. Its kinda like buying a car, you can get a slightly older model year but still new for somewhat cheaper, but why not go for the current model year? Look for something with an 8th or 9th gen processor, and a gpu that pairs with it better. A 1050 and an i7 7700 is a pretty big imbalance. This with an i7 8700 and 3gb 1060, its still not the best to mitigate the whole "overkill cpu and average gpu" issue, but its pretty much the same thing but iwth a newer processor and better gpu. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883165118 Or build your own. Heres a decent 1000$ build https://pcpartpicker.com/list/n2XtD2 Square peg, square hole and all that.

This is a really bad mindset for technology as a whole. There is no reason to not improve what we currently have. Our hardware can push 4k, and is only getting better. Why not do it? Ive got a laptop from 2002/2003 with a 1400x1050 display, where theres a review up that claims "why would you ever need such a high resolution on a 14" display?" And a 10gb hard drive from 1999, where on the box it claimed it was the largest hard drive you would ever need. And that does not directly relate to the resolution of a digital display that you can see properly. The same kind of argument is used with the whole "the human eye cant notice more than 30hz", but theres still a noticeable improvement going from 30 to 60, 60 to 120/144, ive seen a 240hz display with my eyes before and even that is a massive improvement over 120hz.

Eyefinity is a thing, works the same way but better. Multiple cards running multiple outputs to multiple displays but in one synchronized display array without crossfire. Also ATI has not existed for 13 years, why does anyone mention ATI? It's like saying "this may not work on 3DFX or S3 cards". The only person running GPUs from 2006 on here these days is probably me with my pile of AGP cards

Ryzen 2700x and Vega VII Threadripper is more multi thread oriented and suffers in single thread. Vega VII beats out the Radeon Pro WX 9100 by a small but not tiny margin. So that's really the best AMD has to offer for high end gaming right now, specifically for a single threaded game that doesn't support crossfire.

First off, furries are weird. Secondly, note the surroundings. Its not that complex of a place and theres no other avatars. Theres also no shadows which are a massive FPS killer due to it being a CPU bound rendering task. I have an RX 560 that im currently using and it will push 4k 60fps easily sitting in a non complex skybox only rendering my avatar. The same card struggles to get over 10fps maxed in 1080p when in places like NCI Kuula with 10-15 people around because theres a lot more to render. This is really true of any GPU and any game, if your card can actually output 4k, theres going to be some scenario where 4k will be playable. Technically a GT 710 can support a 4k display, two even, but its not gonna do much gaming at 4k. 4k Sims 1? Totally. 4k Battlefield V? Might actually catch fire. Could you do 4k in normal playing though? Oh yeah, youre just gonna need pretty much the best hardware on the market optimizing for single thread performance. The above mentioned 9900k and something like an RTX Titan or Quadro RTX 6000 would easily do 4k/60fps max settings in most scenarios, but there would still be some limitations in obscenely complicated places and areas with lots of players around.

Macs are... an ordeal. Especially the MacBook Air, I would suggest investing more into a standard MacBook or MacBook Pro if you really want to go Mac. The airs have a life long history of being little housefires because of their terrible cooling. As for how it'll perform in SL, at ultra probably not great. I'm not sure specifically what resolution the Retina display is on the 8th airs, it can mean anything apple wants really, sometimes it's slightly above 1080p, sometimes it's 5k. Lets just presume 1080p. You're gonna see overall adequate performance but at max settings it just won't handle complex spaces or large quantities of people at all, expect to drop ALM or at least shadows just to keep the framerate up when people are around. If you like the whole thin and light thing but want actual performance out of it and not obscene amounts of thermal throttling like every other MacBook Air before it, Gigabyte Aero.

SL is very single threaded and really only uses one core to its full potential. So the better that one core performs the better your SL performance is. 2, 4, 8, 32 cores, doesn't matter what the performance of all the cores/threads is together, SL wants single threaded performance. A dual core 2.9ghz Celeron G3930 is about on par with the 4.7ghz 8 core FX 9590 in single threaded performance, they would perform very similarly in SecondLife. As soon as you start multitasking though and using the other cores, you would see some performance hits with the lack of cores/threads. SL will run on anything, and it will always run like a dumpster fire. As far as a minimum and maximum go, core count isn't everything. SL will be comfortable and playable on a core2duo, it would obviously be better on a modern processor but a dual core of any variety would handle the CPU bound rendering and the rest of the background tasks of SL without running into core/thread related issues. Single cores are probably out of the question, I've played on socket 478 Pentium 4's and more modern single cores like a CoreSolo, it's where there's a serious CPU limitation in effect beyond more than just graphical performance. There really wouldn't be a max, a multi EPYC 64 core server CPU or quad opteron system will play SL, but only 1-2 cores out of your 32, 64, 128 or whatever will actually be used anyway. The best single thread performance, the best processors for SL, are usually the high end consumer tier conventional offerings from Intel and Nvidia. Stuff like the i5, i7 or ryzen 3/5 line. Non HEDT or enthusiast platform stuff, that jumps into the land of diminishing returns extremely fast.

I love the Alienware x51 specifically because of the story behind the 760ti that came with them. (It's actually a GTX 670 but Alienware was too slow to launch the X51 before the 700 series came out and they didn't want to ship a last gen card, so they made Nvidia provide a card bios flash and new SKU stickers to turn several thousand 670's into 760ti's) CPU wise you're maxed, it doesn't support the k series processors to allow for overclocking, and even a bios update for haswell refresh processors would only jump you to the i7 4790 tops which is a very small performance increase over the 4770 You have 2 DIMM slots, so you're going to need a 2x8gb kit of 1600mhz ddr3, it may or may not support xmp for 1866mhz but even if you got a higher speed it's most likely going to run at 1600mhz tops. It can support 32gb but it requires a bios flash and 16gb dimms of ddr3 are extremely expensive still and it's really not worth the cost. The gpu is another matter, it has a dual 6 pin connection and the cables are not 6+2, there are no current gen cards that use dual 6 pins anymore so you're limited to using cards with only a single 6 pin requirement. Which basically means the GTX 1060, 1070 has an 8 pin, RTX 2060 has an 8 pin, 1660ti has an 8 pin. You could potentially use an adapter of 6 to 8 and use a card like a GTX 1070 without hitting power limitation issues but splitting grounds can result in dead hardware if there was a power problem. A 1060 would pair well and they're pretty cheap now, 6gb optimally. For the drive just back up everything important, take the current one out and introduce it to a hammer or however you like to dispatch drives, replace it with a decent 2.5" sata ssd. You don't have nvme and you don't have room or the connectors for a second drive in that machine. Install windows 10 or really whatever you personally prefer as a fresh install. I personally still use windows 7 as my main OS because I just really hate the UI of windows 10 and even classicshell has been unable to make it comfortable for me. End of support just means no more updates, doesn't mean it's not gonna work. Potentially swap to an enterprise windows 7 version to get EOL support updates if you really care about windows defender updating every single day. Thats all just if you wanted to upgrade that machine, it's not worth sinking a lot of money into a haswell system, but I would expect a 6gb 1060, 16gb of ddr3 and a decent ssd to run around 400$ in upgrades. If you're looking to buy an entirely new system, and don't want to build your own, Dell has the Inspiron gaming series which are well priced prebuilts with a lot of part choices and they're just standard matx systems inside so they're easy to service and upgrade. If you wanted to build your own, wait for the next processor launches. Right now Intel is on a refresh cycle and AMD is dragging their butts with Ryzen 3000 processors.

This whole hate over wifi is a similar story to why some people seriously think AMD cards won't work with SL. Wifi used to be terrible, nowadays modern wifi connectivity is more than enough for SL to run without issues, I've been using wifi on SL for years on multiple viewers and never had any network related issues, and I don't have some fancy home networking setup either. Same thing with the whole bandwidth settings thing, it's 2019, we're not running 200kbps broadband anymore.

Oh boy, this is quite the topic. SecondLife can do it, but a lot of how SecondLife renders is dependent on the CPU and SL is not particularly good at utilizing the CPU. SL really isn't the most demanding of games, its graphical "look and feel" hasn't changed much in a long time and even most midrange cards from a few generations ago will handle SL at overall average settings and get decent frame rates, provided you have a processor that can allow the gpu to be properly utilized. Its really dependent on the CPU and until there's a change in the engine SL is built on that will increase performance at that level, even the most high end graphics cards today will struggle at higher resolutions. Because while something like an i7 9900K will blast through anything, SL is only using one of its cores to its full potential and the rest are being used sparingly. And one core on its own in high end processors is still really capable but not as much as it could be. This also relates to the gpu, the gpu is dependent on the CPU giving instructions, and there's a bit of a bottleneck when only one CPU core is handling its graphical workload which is directly tied to the instructions of the gpu. SL doesn't support SLI or crossfire sadly, not much does these days anyway. A few select dual gpu cards can be forced to run multi gpu profiles with SL but its really unstable and the most recent card to do that is the Radeon Pro Duo which isn't that impressive since it's really just two RX 470's together. No point in going RTX because SL doesn't use ray tracing, there's a high end GTX line hopefully coming soon, recently the GTX 1660ti showed its face implying there are non ray tracing cards in the works on Turing. Better video memory is only going to help so much, no games out there are showing drastic differences between GDDR5, GDDR6 or HBM2. SL fully supports workstation cards, they're just normal GPUs with different drivers, in some cases those driver changes can be beneficial for SL because SL is laid out more like a 3D workspace than a conventional game. It's just that this game doesn't support some of the special features that these cards have, like the radeon SSG with its onboard nvme storage for caching or really any use for the obscene quantities of video memory they have. There's not much point in buying a Quadro RTX 6000 when SL won't use more than maybe 2gb of video memory tops and doesn't support ray tracing when the card otherwise performs like a GTX 1080

Do not use bottleneck calculators, they're owned by computer part companies and are designed to trick you into getting and upgrade you don't need. fine example here, Ryzen 3 2200G and GTX 1060 "10.04% bottleneck" Just buy this Xeon! Totally pair with your 1060! It's a workstation class haswell hyperthreaded quadcore that really just performs about the same as the 2200g. Not to mention that's buying into LGA 1150, a now nearly entirely obsolete socket. DDR3 and not DDR4, no nvme, no future upgrade path at all, expensive motherboards if you wanted new, realistically all those parts would be used... Bottleneck calculators are just overall a click bait sort of site designed to provide a person with SOME information, wether it's useful, true or even vaguely based in any kind of comparative research is out the window.

cramming big parts into a small case on my secondlife machine

It would simply be way too much effort to put in for very little end reward. The reason not a lot of people play SL is because not a lot of people bother with any kind of social game at all. Theyre all pretty much dead, Smallworlds/Habbo/IMVU/SW/etc. If you wanted to count some similar games from a younger target audience, like Adventure Quest or even Club Penguin... "making the graphics better" just isnt really that easy with SL, the engine this game is built on is ancient, it would pretty much have to be rebuilt from the ground up, and that comes with a lot of problems like: 1) will anyones content work in the new game from the old game? 2) how much of a bug infested mess will it be? 3) how long until someone finds a game breaking exploit? Really to get this game "playable" at higher settings you dont need much hardware wise. You can still play SL on hardware from its launch day, you can play SL comfortably on hardware from over a decade ago, ive done it, way too many times. Its not that demanding but because it performs terribly on all hardware, people with PC's like mine who have no problems with any AAA game today would come to SL and see that it doesnt look as impressive but its giving them balls tier framerates are going to really notice something like that. And on some level it really isnt acceptable at all, its not just user content, thats a huge part of it, the content on this game isnt optimized to run efficiently. Playing a game like say, Grand Theft Auto V or Fallout 4, those games run well at high settings on decent hardware, but that same hardware will struggle with SL. The reason is that every single little tiny thing in those games is designed to look the best it possibly can while requiring the minimal amount of system resource usage. If you take off the textures of many objects in a lot of AAA games that look super complex, you find that theyre actually very simple shapes hidden underneath a detailed texture. But then you notice the texture itself also really isnt that detailed, its low res and involves a small spectrum of colors if its an object thats generally one color. Its all designed to run as well as it can because the studios have massive dev teams to make sure that everything is optimized so their games will run on a large variety of hardware, which allows for a larger audience to buy and enjoy the game. SL doesnt have that, its all made by other users, and while many people here are excellent at making 3D objects for this 3D world, they are god awful at optimization. But its not just the fault of that, testing done by many users on this forums and myself has shown that SL really just bombs at using your hardware well. It does not matter what GPU youre using in SL as long as its moderately recent and not super low end. 8800GTX from 2006? Itll play, not maxed, but 1080p at decent framerates, itll play. Even with a matching Core2Quad Q6600. Hell ive got a windows vista machine i put together recently to play Halo 2, with a Core2duo E6550, 8800GT and 2gb of 800mhz DDR2. That wouldve been a high end but not enthusiast tier PC if it was still 2007. It still plays SL, 1280x1024, so around 720p. Generally medium settings, lots of avatars can crumble framerate but its smooth for the most part. That is a 12 year old PC. There is no SSD, its running Vista, it is all 2007 inside and it still plays SL fine. Next to me right now is my current SFF project with an i5 4570, 8gb of ram and a GTX 680, older stuff but nothing to be scoffed at even in 2019, and it plays SL about as well as you'd expect. But if you compare the difference in the overall playing experience you get from the Vista Machine compared to this PC or my main PC, its some really, really small jumps. You expect more. The Vista Machine can only play GTA V with 4gb of ram installed (i just dont because its not appropriate to the time), its terrible in 1024x768 basically all low settings and around 30fps. But it can play GTA V. But theres this massive jump going from that to this pc with an i5, and an even larger one to my main PC. Like complete night and day, suddenly im playing 1440p max settings 60+ fps all the time. Its a whole different experience. SL being how it is, just doesnt run well on anything. And going from the vista machine to the i5 its just like, well i can turn ALM on and play in 1080p now. But overall the framerates are only marginally better in some places. So it looks a little nicer and its higher res but thats it. GTX 680 was 2012, so 5 years of technological advancement got me ALM and higher resolution. The i5 came out a year after that (so 7 years from the Core2duo at 2006). Thats not SL content, thats the base game, thats the stuff in the background, the "engine" behind it all. Processors and GPUs are really just underutilized in every single way on this game. More cores != better in any way, people with Threadripper 16 core processors get about the same performance as people with decently modern dual cores. Got a RTX 2080ti? Dont matter much, your framerate will be minimal over someone with a 1060/1070. So maybe one day in the future we will see if SL will get some large scale upgrade to the game that will make it look more appealing to a larger audience. I personally think it looks fine, not everything needs the complex lighting and shaders that you see a lot of in AAA games. But that also depends on if people would actually play it anyway. Sl is one of those weird relics of the past that somehow stuck around because it quickly built a massive playerbase that just doesnt leave. New players show up now and then, most quit but many stay, and chances are the only reason they stay is because theres a bunch of diehard SL citizens already here to interact with. That was the death of a lot of social games. Smallworlds died because the new players showed up to a nearly empty game and nobody stuck around, and the original players stopped playing because (well there were a LOT of things, mainly the economy that got ruined) they ran out of stuff to do. You aint gonna run out of stuff to do in SL, i dont expect it to die anytime soon, but a large scale upgrade to the game wouldnt really draw anyone here since almost nobody is actively looking into playing games like SL these days. Its just not popular anymore.

I did a whole thing testing this. The requirements page is really vague and out of date along with being host to a lot of misinformation. You can run SL on an absolute toaster, but don't go buy a GTX 275 because that's what the requirements page lists. Depending on your budget you can have a lot of options ranging from modern hardware to some older core2duo/core2quad kind of stuff and get playable results.

Try not to necrobump, start new threads in the future. Im not sure how you found this considering it was from march of last year. I could definitely see it being a vram limitation but ive personally never seen vram come into play on my 970 no matter where i was. Most ive ever seen SL use was about 2.2gb and that was in a rather people packed location. If youre playing in much higher resolution than 1080p, yeah, you will probably see your vram get maxed. But 4gb shouldnt have any problem with SL in 1080p. If vram is your main concern and you dont need the best of the best gpu wise, you could look into an AMD RX 580/590, which have 8gb options and perform like a 6gb 1060 which performs slightly better than a 970. Its not the greatest jump overall but it will give you overall better performing video memory compared to the 960 with its 128 bit memory bus. Let it be known i was right, while 1000$ was incorrect it was pretty damn close, with a 700$ rtx 2080 and 800$ "founders edition". Not to mention the 1200$ 2080ti founders edition. Oh, or the 2500$ rtx titan. And also that a used 980ti is going for about 250-270$ right now, as are gtx 1070's. Though oddly enough i would still say the 980ti would be a safer buy because Maxwell was terrible for crypto mining and a lot of the used 1070's are from crypto mining. So at this time in march we were at the peak of the cryptocurrency GPU inflation, 1080ti's going for 1100-1300$ new on average, their MSRP used and even higher. We got these cheap cards: With no video outputs, and then like a month later crypto crashed and Nvidia was left with this massive stock of 1060's they cant sell, oddly enough people figured out how to game on the cards with no video output anyway. People wonder why i like old tech. Anything current is always a complete mess to deal with.

Just having a blast in Missouri.

Pretty sure you can just install linux and run it on linux. The hardware isnt going to be up to the task but it should start. I dont think SL cares what architecture youre on.

Both intel and AMD can overclock, it gets a bit complicated to explain but heres the simple tl;dr version: 1) Overclocking means you are running the CPU at a higher clock speed than stock. i.e a 3ghz processor overclocked to 3.4ghz. Doing this basically increases the voltage going to the processor by a small amount to get the clock to run faster (think of it like giving more power to a lightbulb, more power, brighter light). 2) This requires specific processors and specific chipsets. Chipsets are a small microprocessor on the motherboard that control things like CPU features, SATA (storage drives) controllers, pcie (slot interfaces) controllers, memory controllers, etc. Older motherboards have integrated graphics on the chipset but thats now moved to being on the CPU instead. 3) AMD is a preferable budget option SOMETIMES because of this. AMD has less restrictions on which processors and chipsets can overclock. Almost all processors and chipsets on AMD platforms can overclock at some level. Currently the mainstream AMD Ryzen processors can all overclock, and all but one current chipset type motherboard can be used to overclock (B350/450, X370/470, but A320 cannot overclock). 4) Intel overclocking is limited to "z" series motherboards and only works with "k" series processors. So for example, an i7 8700k can be overclocked on a Z370 motherboard. It cannot be overclocked on an H310 motherboard. Likewise a regular i7 8700 non-k cannot be overclocked on Z370 or H310 (or any other intel chipset). 5) The upside to overclocking is better overall CPU performance, higher clock speed means it will perform slightly better since its running slightly faster. The downside is that this draws more power and creates more heat. With a "stock" cooler on most processors you can usually overclock a little bit, but if you want higher clock speeds you need a better cooler. Extremely overclocking involves liquid nitrogen to keep the processor cool. 6) You can do the same with many components including the GPU and RAM I wouldnt look into that as a deciding factor for your PC choice. You can overclock those APUs, you may not 100% be able to do it on that specific motherboard however. Large system providers like Dell/HP/Lenovo tend to have weird semi customized chipsets that may have some features enabled or disabled at a hardware level. Not to mention that those machines have a 240 watt power supply and overclocking draws a lot of power at times. You also have the stock and likely proprietary and non up-gradable cooler that may not be able to handle the heat. SL likes single thread performance. I highly suggest using >> https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ Use that to compare different processors in machines you find to see which ones have the best overall performance and single thread performance. But also account for a GPU solution. Those machines you posted have decent integrated graphics. And theyre cheap machines. An equivalent priced Optiplex 790 at around 140-160$ will have a processor like an i5 2400 which would absolutely decimate that A8-5500B >> https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-A8-5500B-APU-vs-Intel-i5-2400/1868vs793 But, the integrated graphics are substantially weaker and you would need to factor in the cost of a graphics card to make SL bearable.

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.

Both of those are running extremely low end APUs by modern standards. Its single thread performance (how well a single core out of all the cores can perform, which is very important for SL) is lower than the 30$ haswell low voltage dual core im currently testing out (Intel Pentium G3260T). Its better in multi core/thread loads for sure since its a quadcore, but SL being the old game that it is on an old engine really doesnt use multiple cores well (this is a longer story, tl;dr version is that the games current engine has been built on an original version made when Dual cores were fairly new). https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-A8-5500B-APU-vs-Intel-Pentium-G3260T/1868vs2566 Thats gonna be the killer with SL, graphically it will do it ok, its integrated graphics are kind of mediocre but not terrible, from the benchmarks ive seen of that APU youre looking at running the game maybe in 720p tops, definitely lowering graphical bound settings (textures and view distance, avatar cloth and glow settings (for Firestorm). CPU stuff settings wise is shadows and lighting, which will also likely have to be turned down. So summary, its a good option at sub 200$, theres no real big noticeable difference between the two of them. It does have two pcie x16 slots internally, though obviously low profile only. This will allow for a low profile, low wattage graphics card upgrade in the future (such as a GT 1030 for example which would be a pretty drastic improvement over the integrated graphics).

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 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?

Yes, SL will run down to first gen mobile intel I-series HD graphics (Ironlake HD graphics). Though it's only officially supported down to HD 3000. 4000 will run it, might not be the best experience but it will run.

Windows XP is where its at, no problems there.

This is always a concern with used GPUs, you just need to know what to look for. GPUs are killed by heat, BGA failure and various power delivery components can die due to excessive heat. And its not always just "was it hot" because most of the parts of a gpu will have no problems with running at 120c 24/7, its rapid cooling/heating cycles that damage them, similar to ice forming and melting in a crack, solder can slowly form a small crack and eventually heat and separate, if it happens on the ball grid array (bga) of the GPU die, its bga failure. So used cards you generally want to look for things that ran cooler, and wouldnt have been used in a way that kept them hot then cold then hot, etc, all the time. You also want to avoid post cryptocurrency mining cards that got particularly hot because they have much higher used failure rates than others. For example, the AMD R9 200/300 series was really popular for Crypto mining, lots of dead 280x's out there. But Maxwell and Kepler from the same time really werent popular in the mining scene so things like the 700/900 series cards are pretty safe used buys. Ive got dozens of used gpus from various hardware eras, high wattage extremely hot cards, stuff from the early 2000's like Geforce4 cards, none of them have shown up DOA after extensive testing yet. Maybe im just lucky, but my general synopsis is that as long as you know what youre looking at, you can learn what cards are going to be a safe used buy. Christhiana points out something interesting here, which is that SL is more CPU bound than GPU bound. And your Phenom really isnt up to it anymore, it'll play SL. Ive got some of its performance equivalents sitting around and ive played on them before: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Phenom-II-X4-940-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q6600-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q6700/367vs1038vs1039 But this is far from a good experience with SL, just about anything paired with any of those processors is going to be a bottleneck if you were to upgrade. The 560ti isnt even that bad for SL, ive got two of em, i ran em for SL all the time, their performance is graphically "adequate", but that was with a more recent i5 processor which is much better suited for SL, a cpu bound game. The 4gb of ram is definitely an issue now, if all youre running is the stock LL viewer, itll be fine, but 8gb is generally the minimum you see in newer PC's in 2018. Network connectivity doesnt determine framerate, just load times and things like soft freezing out or delays in chat/movement if your connection is unstable. 1050ti would be ideal, but if youre on a budget and have a decent power supply (which you should with a 560ti, should have at least dual 6 pin pcie power connectors) there are cheaper performance equivalents. The GTX 960 will perform about the same but cost about 20-40$ less used. Make sure the card you are buying is a real one, there are a lot of fake GTX 960's on the market. If the price seems too good to be true, it definitely is. A GTX 960 goes for 90-110$ used not including shipping. Buy from a reputable brand like Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, EVGA, etc. Bigger number != better card. Each generation of Nvidia cards goes up by 100 in its naming scheme. GTX 680, 780, (800 series was mobile only), 980, 1080, with an exception for RTX which is now 2080. But overall per generation of card you see a 10 number jump in performance each generation. The GTX 680 performs like a 770 which performs like a 960 which performs like a 1050ti. Now thats not always the case, there are some exceptions to that, mainly as you go further back though and find much larger performance jumps. Dont trust internet bottleneck tests, theyre owned by companies that sell PC parts, and their goal is to make you think you have a problem you really dont. Note that many of them go "you have a gpu bottleneck, insert this part to see the bottleneck go away!" and then after you do you get "you have a cpu bottleneck, insert this part to see the bottleneck go away!" and your intended upgrade of a gpu turns into buying a 4000$ custom PC. However if you dont have an SSD, it will be beneficial for secondlife, you keep the game and the cache on it and things generally load a bit faster. Among other stuff like windows boot time being quicker. You dont need a super fancy SSD, as you get into the high end SSD territory theres only one big jump and its moving from SATA or NVME to things like PCIe Optane drives which go from 120 bucks for a 1TB 860 evo to 1300$ for a 960gb Optane drive. Adding another 4gb of ram is a good option, though read my ending tl;dr on this brick of text because upgrades might not be a good idea at all to start with. This is really what it comes down to, its not worth upgrading at all. The Phenom cant be upgraded any further besides a minimal performance jump to an x4 960, and even the 560ti is being bottlenecked by that processor. You need a whole new PC or at the very least you need a motherboard and CPU upgrade (and depending on what motherboard its on you may also need entirely different ram). You can add an SSD, a new GPU, more ram, but its really all going to be hindered by the processor. You wont see the most drastic of performance changes. Ive got a Q6600 box set up right now if you want to see the change in performance going from a 560ti and 4gb of ram on an HDD to a GTX 1060 and gb on an SSD? Spoiler, its pretty much nothing. New != better, because UHD 600 is gemini lake (i think?) which is low end mobile celerons and pentiums. Its not strong or fast, theyre trying to sell you a netbook and make it look good. The reality is that its not going to be useful for much more than regular web browsing or very light gaming. Your current desktop outperforms it drastically. So my tl;dr here, its not worth it to upgrade anything. Save up your money and buy the parts for a whole new PC, start with the Motherboard/CPU and RAM, because SL is going to perform much better with a much better processor. Look into budget options for AMD Ryzen if you dont want to sink a lot into it. An AMD A320 motherboard and a Ryzen 3 1200 regularly go for 30-40$ and then 80-100$ (USD). You could go B350/450 and get an R3 2200G as well for slightly more money and get slightly better performance. Ram prices are currently dropping as well, so DDR4 wouldnt be as expensive as it was a year ago. If youre really intent on upgrading this system, go as cheap as possible, because at some point you will need to build or buy a whole new PC and this one is going to be decommissioned. Buy the cheapest SSD you can find, buy the cheapest performance tier equivalent GPU you can find (and your power supply can power), there will be a list in a second, add 4gb of ram and absolutely nothing more. Theres just no point in upgrading a Phenom ii system in 2018. GPU wise as i posted above, a 1050ti is like a 960, 770, 680. Any card around each will also perform better than the 560ti anyway, just pick whatever you can find thats cheapest, a 760, 670, 580, 950, etc. Just make sure your power supply is up to the task of powering the more high end cards. A 560ti should have a dual 6 pin requirement, a 770 will need an 8 + 6 pin, a 670 will need two 6 pins. If youre not sure and you dont know if your PSU is up to the task, a 1050ti is a much lower wattage card and will run usually with just pcie power (no connectors, slot power only) or with a single 6 pin.