Bought a new PC

[Deleted]

Hi, my partner has been playing wow for a while now on a really shit laptop (intel graphics) on lowest settings with the fps maxing out at 20 if he's lucky. I've bought him a new PC for his birthday but I didn't have a huge amount to spend but I figured what the hell anything is gonna be better than the laptop. Anyhoo here are the specs... I was wondering if anyone could tell me what settings he will be able to play on/what fps roughly..it won't be delivered for another few days and I'm hoping I havent wasted my money as I spent £144. Thanks very much

Processor: Intel Pentium D Dual Core 2.66 Ghz x 2Memory: 3GB (3072MB)Hard Drive: 250GBOptical Drive: DVD WRITERGraphics : (New) Geforce 9500 GT 1 GBUSB ports - 2 front & 6 rearPre-installed softwareClean Install of Windows Vista Premium with All Updates

edit forgot to add specs lmao

[Deleted]

Well, it cerctainly isn't very good, but for 144 pounds, I can't say it's bad.

[Drunkenvalley]

It's a fairly poor computer, but maybe worth the price. I doubt he'll be seeing really awesome boosts in performance though. :P

[Deleted]

I'm not really sure if it's worth getting a computer for $140... It might not even top the laptop.

[Deleted]

the laptop has 2.1ghz pentium t4300 dual core processor and integrated graphics...surely the computer can't be worse than that?

The PC I am using is the AMD phenom x2 black edition overclocked to 3.4ghz and this runs everything fine... can someone please tell me what is bad about the processor in the pc I've bought as after googling it I'm still not sure.. I'm not very hardware savvy

[Arslay]

That Pentium D is a few generations old, you would have been good off with a Llano build, some super cheap RAM, a scavenged/used HDD (to save) and disk drive and Ubuntu. But that build should be more powerful that that laptop.

[Shakadam]

Well the pentium D is a first generation dual core processor, basically 2 old pentium 4's lumped together into 1 chip. It's not very good, I think the t4300 might even be better but I'm not really sure, too lazy to look it up at the moment.

A gefore 9500 GT is better than integrated graphics though.

[Deleted]

The PC spec you have given will run World of Warcraft, i've seen WoW running on a netbook, obviously it wont have blistering FPS but it wont need a couple of hamsters to get it working every time you want to play.
The Nvidia 9500GT will run your graphics in game i would however suggest that you dont try running things on ultra settings because the video card wont cope with it, fair to high would be your best bet for good game experience. The RAM you have is plenty which is okay, as is the hard drive size, the processor will run World of Warcraft quite happily, as i used to run WoW on a dual core machine before changing.
A good replacement at a later date for your video card would be an Nvidia Geforce GTX 550ti i have this in my current machine, this is an excellent card which is Direct X11 ready and under £100 with the price dropping weekly. Also upgrading to a quad core processor at a later date would greatly improve performance, again with prices going down regularly you can always pick up a bargain in a couple of months.
I'm in UK as well so if ya need more info or guidance give me a holler

[EzriEU]

Don't worry too much. Your partner will definitely see better gameplay than with the laptop. Also, 144 pounds isn't wasted, if the whole thing is in good shape. Of course, you won't go to "ultra" settings and won't see 60 fps, but still...

The problem with Pentium D CPUs and why everyone's frowning upon these (I agree, had one myself) is that it probably was Intel's worst CPU ever. At the time (about 2005/2006), AMD's Athlon64s were heavily superior to the Intel chips. Iirc your's should be a Pentium D 805. There's one good thing to be said about that CPU - it's overclockable as hell! With the Intel stock heatsink you can easily take it up to 3.2 GHz just by software OC'ing right out of Windows. Check your mainboard and if you didn't get the original CD with it just download the software.
My Pentium D 805 with a Zalman heatsink still runs absolutely stable (5 1/2 years now) at 3.6 GHz without raising Vcore. Although I've moved on for my own rig long ago the old one is still around.

If you really want to know why Pentium D's are considered bad, here's why:

- basically, it's just 2 Pentium 4 on one module, and since Pentium 4 wasn't really designed for multi-core it's probably the worst multi-core that ever saw the light of day. AMD's Athlon 64 X2 were probably lightyears ahead back then.

- being two Pentium 4 smashed together, the energy consumption was just horrible. Plus, two cores that were already known for being power draining in one CPU module severely limited clockspeeds. Still, Intel was way too conservative and the CPU (especially the 805 model) can easily be overclocked as said above.

- Pentium 4's architecture (dubbed "Netburst") was a one way street (down to processor hell) and thus finally abandoned by Intel. It was designed around having a very long pipeline and originally intended to reach clockspeeds of ~ 6 GHz. As we all know, this never happened. Intel replaced the "Netburst" architecture with "Core" and it got them where they are now - back to being better than AMD as far as desktop CPUs are concerned, anyway (please don't turn this thread into the old Opteron vs. Xeon vs. Itanium discussion ).


In sum - hug your boyfriend and celebrate a happy b-day. I'm sure he'll appreciate the thought you put into this!

[Deleted]

Thanks for all the answers guys, very helpful We'll see how it runs when it arrives and I'll be sure to update you! If it is as terrible as some of you believe it will be will it be easy enough to upgrade the cpu?

[Ominouscloud]

Thanks for all the answers guys, very helpful We'll see how it runs when it arrives and I'll be sure to update you! If it is as terrible as some of you believe it will be will it be easy enough to upgrade the cpu?

If you decide later to upgrade the CPU you'll have to replace the mobo with one compatible with the new model CPU you choose and possibly the RAM as well. Not especially hard per se, but will be costly all at once.

[Deleted]

You wont be able to upgrade the cpu to something amazing because of the motherboard - You will be able to run WoW quite well aslong as you have view distance quite low, no ground clutter and shadows off

[Wries]

You wont be able to upgrade the cpu to something amazing because of the motherboard - You will be able to run WoW quite well aslong as you have view distance quite low, no ground clutter and shadows off

This plus no high expectations in raids, 40 man bgs or TB.

[Deleted]

Hi everyone. Just wanted to update as I recieved the computer today and have just tested.

On all ultra settings including shadows and distance on full in orgrimmar running at a nice steady 20fps and on all high settings 30fps. Very happy with this. Thanks again for all your input but I guess the processor wasn't as terrible as everyone seemed to think.

Also played black ops which also ran really well.