Digital Storm - How well would this computer run SL?

Cristiano

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You can buy the CyberpowerPC units from Amazon as well, which tends to make returns much easier.
I bought my most recent desktop pc from CyberpowerPC through Amazon and I've been thrilled with it.
 
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Kokoro Fasching

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Thanks, but I know it's not the card, because I've replaced that already with a better card than I had before.

And again, my computer USED to run SL very well. So it's something that's gone wrong with what I have left in the box.
Sadly then with Windows there are only 10 million other possibilities.

One other thing to try is get Furmark - FurMark > Home - get a benchmark and it will also let you know if it sees a problem in the other areas of the computer that is slowing down video performance.

And one final test would be to get a cheap 120gb SSD, take out your existing boot drive, put in new drive and install base windows, then SL, and see how performance is.
 

Katheryne Helendale

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I put this together back in early 2013, so 6 years old now. I'm willing to upgrade parts, but I have no idea which parts are causing my issues.

Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Extreme4
CPU: Intel Core i5-3570 Ivy Bridge Quad-Core 3.4GHz
PSU: SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold 650W
RAM: 16GB
Boot Drive: 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I forget the video card specs, but it was a decent used card that I bought from Veritable, so I know it runs SL well. It seemed to help for awhile, but the last few weeks when I've logged in to SL, I can barely move.

For awhile I just assumed it was my ISP, but if that were the case, I'd have trouble running from my wife's computer, too. But I can move easily, almost free of lag, on her Dell.

Spending over a $1000 to start from scratch is a pretty drastic solution, but I'm feeling very worn down. I'm just not savvy enough to figure this out.
You should not be having major issues with that setup. I'm with everyone else that a Windows reinstall and cleanup is probably needed.
 
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Soen Eber

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If I remember right, whey you uninstall a SL viewer some of it's directories get left behind so you don't lose customizations. Lose them.
 
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eku zhong

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It could be your PSU. How old is it? I recently had troubles with my pc and ended up replacing the PSU and changing to a full tower from middle tower. All problems went away.

I had a really good PSU but looking into it, I realised it was already almost 9 years old.

It is one of the less costly things to attempt to fix before going all out on a new system or replacing GPU and MB and CPU.
 

Beebo Brink

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If I remember right, whey you uninstall a SL viewer some of it's directories get left behind so you don't lose customizations. Lose them.
Yes, I trashed everything. Clean installs, several times.
 

Beebo Brink

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So tomorrow morning I'm taking my computer in to the local repair shop to:
  • install new CPU cooler
  • check for viruses
  • refresh Windows
  • update drivers
  • stress tests and health checks, whatever they can do
If that doesn't work, I'll start replacing parts. PSU first.

At six years old, I figure all of this is routine maintenance anyway.
 
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So tomorrow morning I'm taking my computer in to the local repair shop to:
  • install new CPU cooler
  • check for viruses
  • refresh Windows
  • update drivers
  • stress tests and health checks, whatever they can do
If that doesn't work, I'll start replacing parts. PSU first.

At six years old, I figure all of this is routine maintenance anyway.
There are a lot of shady places who say they will do things like that and all it accomplishes is losing a $100 bucks or something. Best Buy comes to mind particularly.
 

Beebo Brink

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There are a lot of shady places who say they will do things like that and all it accomplishes is losing a $100 bucks or something. Best Buy comes to mind particularly.
:qft:

Yeah, I'd do it myself before taking to Best Buy. Fortunately there's a computer repair shop about 6 blocks from my house that we've used for 10 years now. They have a pretty good reputation.
 

Cristiano

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I am curious, are you having similar issues with performance in the Sims 4? It's not as taxing obviously as SL, but at max settings it is no slouch either in the graphics dept.
 
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Beebo Brink

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I am curious, are you having similar issues with performance in the Sims 4? It's not as taxing obviously as SL, but at max settings it is no slouch either in the graphics dept.
The problem is that I don't really have a frame of reference for Sims 4. With SL, I've got over 10 years of experience and I know what good performance feels like. But what's normal for Sims 4?

The software takes a very long time to load and open. Some of the games with lots of avatars and assets can experience intermittent freezes and time glitches, but based on Sims 4 forum comments, that's not unusual. Should I be experiencing it on my build? I have no clue.

BUT even as I type this sentence, I'm experiencing a sllllooooooowwwwww down , so something is definitely wrong.
 

Knutz Scorpio

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...
BUT even as I type this sentence, I'm experiencing a sllllooooooowwwwww down , so something is definitely wrong.
May have been the latest major update to Windows 10. Had a noticeable impact on my main desktop system while it happened back on the 14th. Last night it made my much older laptop unusable for over four hours till it completed.
 

Chalice Yao

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If it should sadly come to replacing the more workloadish parts of the PC (after the PSU), it's good to keep a couple of things in mind:

- SL does not care about your cores. The CPU that runs SL best is the CPU with the most gigamegahurtz*. SL will not care if you have 4, 6, or 18 cores. As pretty much all new processors these days come with 4+ cores, ignore any core considerations if your main focus is SL. Check how many GHz the CPU will turboboost to on ~2 cores load.

- If you have a tool to check your GPU (not CPU!) usage, open it, push it to the side, but then focus on SL and go first to a calm and quiet area and wait for things to have loaded, then to a busy-ish area and observe for a while.
Do keep SL focused (i.e. clicked into). If your GPU is not near 100%, your limiting factor at the time is the CPU. if the GPU is close to that 100% mark, the bottleneck is the GPU.

Windows 10 lets you monitor this without any special tools right in the task manager, it's the 'GPU - 3D' column. Just, as I said, make sure you are clicked into SL, else SL will lower the FPS and thus the CPU/GPU usage.

Ignore the processor usage itself, since SL will - while in focus - always nom a bit more than 100% of one core worth of CPU time. Doesn't matter what you put into your machine. (This would display as, say, ~27-30% CPU usage in a 4 core machine in the task manager)

*The efficiency of the gigamegahurtz, in simple laymen's terms, usually gets better from generation to generation of CPU, and usually it's silly to compare CPUs between generations (or Intel vs. AMD) directly/only by that metric - to a degree. But for SL the general rule of the thumb stands if the CPUs aren't multiple generations apart.



EDIT (Added a GPU thing):
Not only pretty much disregard the core count of any new CPU if your main/exclusive focus is SL when it comes to gaming...ish...things (#notagame), but also you can pretty much disregard the memory of any newish GPU. SL runs fine and dandy on a GPU with ~3GB of memory and won't really make use of more than that. Most newer GPUs come with more than that, nor will SL make use of any super special features so.....yeah. Like with the CPU, it's the raw speed that matters.


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Beebo Brink

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I took my computer into the shop last Saturday, and it's still there, much to my dismay. Fortunately, I can use my wife's computer since she's not nearly as addicted to being online as I am.
 

eku zhong

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My poor PC, after being coddled along as much as possible, has taken a turd dive.
The motherboard is toast, so to speak, and since it is a socket 2011, I cannot afford to replace atm (points to fixed roof).
Luckily, yure's bro Zen, has a 3yo MB and CPU (and 32 glorious GB of Corsair RAM) that he has given me.
So today is the dreaded rip apart and replace day (once I am finished backing up stuffs that resided on the C drive like materials and settings for Substance painter and PS and etc.. and Chrome settings etc etc ugh and so on and so forth..

Luckily PSU is new, C drive is a newish (Nov last year) 1TB SSD and backup spinner drives are working well. Also GFX card is relatively new GTX 1070.

Wish me luck as I dive into the void...
Beebs, wishing your PC a speedy and not spendy recovery.