The "Would my PC be able to run M2TW?" thread (all such queries here pls)

**hoom** · 11-11-2006, 01:58

A 5800! & you actually use it?

**AlJabberwock** · 11-11-2006, 05:36

Motep,

We used a GeForce FX 5500 OC to play RTW with most items on high or highest with normal sized units or many things on medium to low for large units. A 5800 will probably still only have 2 to 4 pipes and reduced width and bit compared to more robust 6th Gen. GeForce cards with up to 16 pipelines and better bitrates which seem to be around where the game is playing reasonably... Meaning, I think your card can play the game M2TW, but not much will be on "high" and you may be playing with small units to achieve 'relatively smooth' play. On the other hand, your Ram is barely enough to allow your system to work for much beyond the Windows OS itself, and there is likely an underpowered CPU lurking around there though you didn't tell us what it was. If only your card were on the low side, I might risk saying go for it and see what happens, but "its beginning to look a lot like christmas" will be neccessary (replace your sys- you need a new mobo anyway with PCI Ex interface for the modern gens of vid cards). Only good news is that many cards and system components you will need to make the game run like a dream are a lot less expensive (than when I bought them!!!) now that even newer items are out or coming soon and the dual core competition is in full swing.

Chopa,
I am really sorry, but much of what you have is really out of date, and cpus using the 478 socket will limit you considerably. Best likely to still be around are things like the Prescott single-core P-IV in the 3.0 ghz range. They will still have an L2 cache of 1 mb, and should also come with hyperthreading. Dothans are Pentium Ms, and these single cores are outmodes despite their hefty L2 caches. The Northwoods are cool with the 13 mu process, but lack hyper threading and SSE3 and a few other things. A few Prescott 3 gigs for the 478 are available at Newegg, Monarch, E bay and the like in the under $100 range. Even less if you like open box... Some of these should have hyper threading (which you want) and they will have sse 1,2,and 3 and a few other things you will want along with lower voltage requirements and some other conveniences if you are an overclocker. (I'm not but many are). That said, there is no 64 bit support and these cpus, while adequate to play M2TW, are woefully behind the curve in general since multi cores and some single AMD cores use memory controls right on the chip called Hypertransports which eliminate fsbs altogether... Uh, ok, just trust me, a lot of tech has gone by the boards in the last 18 months, and 478s are as common as top hats and spats in church on sunday.

Your vid card is probably ok but to play to the max it would have to go, and your Ram should be increased, preferably doubled. I am an NVidia enthusiast, so I will make no reccomendations for your video card if you prefer ATI other than it will have to be a little more modern to cope.

Bob the Insane-
Totally cool system dude. Hope to hear how it sings right through the pip-squeak tasks you give it! The "I swear I didn't get it to play the game" comment strikes as just a _little_ forced though don't you think...?

**Bob the Insane** · 11-11-2006, 06:47

Originally Posted by AlJabberwock

Motep,
Totally cool system dude. Hope to hear how it sings right through the pip-squeak tasks you give it! The "I swear I didn't get it to play the game" comment strikes as just a _little_ forced though don't you think...?

Thanks, I am totally geeked out over it... It has only taken a years worth of campaigning with my wife and god know how much money in shiny, jewel encrusted bribes to get her to agree...

I grant you M2TW may have re-ignited my interest in updating but the release of the 8800 was a big deal too (getting all Vista and DX10 ready)...

**AlJabberwock** · 11-11-2006, 07:10

{grins knowingly}

Heh! Something like that Bob... vacation destinations for mine. (e.g. Portugal in May 07).

My personal camouflage is I always point to one of the kids (hopefully looking innocent and helpless at that moment) and say "look honey, he's going to have to do _homework_ on this thing, there's just no way he can do that with these old technologies... "

The bad thing is I have three kids AND my wife who get upgraded that way before I do so I always have the crappiest danged ramshackle left over rig...

I assume you are putting it together yourself. Let me know what the mobo and all the other component details are and how it all went together for you?
Thanks!

A uh, "g'equal"

Al Jabberwock

**Motep** · 11-11-2006, 07:39

so i can run the game but with limited settings? Thats fine with me! But my cuz asked me isf his 5500 would be able to handle it, and I dont know, so naturally I must turn to this thread.

**AlJabberwock** · 11-11-2006, 08:39

Motep,
That will again depend on the rest of what he has and how satisfied he will be to turn down the settings and the unit size. I may have mentioned we used a 5500 OC from BFG for RTW. A straight 5500 can run RTW for sure. Not great, but it does if you don't turn on all the eye candy (I think we also used a straight 5500 from Norwood as I can see the box balanced about ten feet above me on top of a bookshelf but that took even more patience or trade off of eye candy).

I'm not sure which forum I read it on ( I have been surfing the org, TWC, and the .com forums the last 24 hours), but somewhere I recall someone with something like a 5200 saying they had a hard time with the game. We will make a stab at the 5500 with the gold demo. I had meant to do that anyway before work took me away for a month. Nota Bene: we will be using at least a 2ghz rated Athlon or Sempron (single core) and 2gigs of DDRam. If the gold demo runs passably, the game will run better by all accounts. We will have the results probably by later this morning and post here (as it is not a full game test in that "other" thread (grin).

Al Jabberwock

**chopa** · 11-11-2006, 12:20

al jabber thank you very much

I know im preety much stuck, and new socket is a must (PIV 1,4 Ghz
768 DDram
ati radeon 9600 pro 256)

could you please than advice what best new motherboard and processor can I get for considerably 200-250 euros max?

my video card and my old 768 DDram can go with no problems on new motherboard? (in next few moths new RAM will be my occupattion)

thnx once again on great help, you are the man

**Biggus Diccus** · 11-11-2006, 18:29

Originally Posted by chopa

al jabber thank you very much

I know im preety much stuck, and new socket is a must (PIV 1,4 Ghz
768 DDram
ati radeon 9600 pro 256)

could you please than advice what best new motherboard and processor can I get for considerably 200-250 euros max?

my video card and my old 768 DDram can go with no problems on new motherboard? (in next few moths new RAM will be my occupattion)

thnx once again on great help, you are the man

If you're going to upgrade your mobo and cpu, you'll most likely have to upgrade your ram to ddr2 as well. And you have to get a new graphics card, since new mobos now use PCIE and your card is AGP. I'd save up to afford new mobo/cpu/ram/graphics card if I was you.

If you go for a AMD socket 939 nforce4 system with a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 cpu you should be able to use your old ram on the mobo, but you still have to upgrade to a new PCIE graphics card; nvidia 7600 GT is good value for money.

**AlJabberwock** · 11-12-2006, 01:54

Originally Posted by chopa

I know im preety much stuck, and new socket is a must (PIV 1,4 Ghz
768 DDram
ati radeon 9600 pro 256)
could you please than advice what best new motherboard and processor can I get for considerably 200-250 euros max?
my video card and my old 768 DDram can go with no problems on new motherboard? (in next few moths new RAM will be my occupattion)...

Chopa,
"Owa fwend fwom Woam" is quite right, but first let me tell you about our test of the non over-clocked Ge Force FX5500.

Motep,
The straight 5500 Norwood ran the gold demo. Not particularly well, but it was playable with everything on minimum, shader 1.0, and no grass or shadows at all. We found we had to increase brightness a little bit and had reflections and bloom also off. No AA or AF at all. The intros were a bit jerky and so was the action, but not a full stutter/strobe effect. Camera control was poor under the laggy conditions. All the battles played about the same, with some of the effects (particularly the thundering of cannon and musketry) being still quite effective.

The sys we used featured a 1.8 ghz socket-A Athlon CPU (at stock) juiced to just about 2.0 ghz, 1.5 gigs of DDR (but not very fast being 266) with the Norwood 5500 running at factory settings. It was much more attractive than MTW, but way LESS attractive than anyone deserves to see the game at. Sort of a MTW in 3-d with better unit detail. The degrading of the colors and detail beauty as well as some of the more interesting effects on armor and so forth was high and it was clearly laggy, but the full game is likely to play slightly better.

Hope that answers your question Motep... Since there are more modern systems in my house, only in grave desperation might I play the game on that sys, but your cousin might mind less if he has no other option. Your 5800 will play it a bit better but not much. Truly is the 5th Gen. NVidia scraping the lower bound of being able to appreciate the game.

Chopa,

Aye Chiwawa... I don't want to steer you wrong but if you make me give you an opinion on what to do with your budget, I can only advise you that if you are limited to about $400 (I can't think in pounds being a 'colonial') you do not have adequate funds to meet the needs you will have by upgrading to a new system that a modern Mobo will require.

As Biggus stated (and I think I did also) the new generation of mobo will have PCI-ex interfaces for graphic cards, will probably incorporate dual core sockets which obviate front side buses (using HT technology instead-light years ahead) and in many cases not even having a northbridge if you are using AMD. There is also the DDR2 memory you would have to buy (the "2" standing for two-channel, where the data streams on alternating channels for theoretically up to twice the speed; although this is hardly true in practice it _is_ faster by an easily perceptable margin). You would also have to have the new vertical-storage, SATA drives if you didn't want your HD to be a bad bad bottleneck, AND you would need a significantly more beastly power source since all of these things suck in energy like the government does your income.

Lets look at what you have now:
Your card is good enough to play the game, though hardly at max settings. Since you can't change mobo's with your cash constraint, keep the card for the moment and upgrade the CPU within the limits of a socket 478 as I mentioned above. Probably a 3 gig Pentium 4 Prescott so you can get the Hyperthreading... It seems to me that components look a bit more costly on your side of the pond, but still you should be able to score the CPU for $100 or thereabouts. If it is a bit more, pay it if you have no chance of shortly saving up a few hundred more to replace the entire system. Now this should leave you a bit more than $200 US to muck about with your memory. You need to find out what rate and speed it is (SD or DD, AND 266, 333, 600, 800, etc), is it buffered or unbuffered, is registered or unregistered, and if you can, its CL or latency. Whenever I can I exactly duplicate the existing memory unless I am going to remove it altogether down to and especially, the manufacturer. If you don't know how to get these, drop me a message through the board or PM me. Once we know what kind of mem you have we will look to see what kind of sticks you already have in your board, how many slots for memory your mobo has, and what the best way is to increase what you have is... This way we eliminate most of the constraints at the CPU and memory, and the limits will be all about your graphic card. Alternatively, you could go ahead and buy that NVidia 7600 mentioned elsewhere, but it would be limited by the AGP interface your mobo has AND the very bad bottleneck represented by your CPU and probably your Ram.

There, I've said it. Have you trie dthe gold demo with the sys you have right now? Would you and tell me about it?

Al Jabberwock

**chopa** · 11-12-2006, 04:09

about the demo first

i put first auto detect option:

battle with aztecs was unplayable, other 2 battle playable but with big laggynes

then i tried with manual options:
shader 1
1024/768
no AA, no vysnc
unit med
building low
effects med
grass none
texture highest

prebattle movie was at 15-20 FPS, battle with aztecs 5-10 FPS (fraps), other 2 battles were better, but also some camera stuttering when flying over battlefield

then about my system

done some researching and came to similiar conclusion as you, to buy ONLY new CPU but seems my mbo doesnt support 3 gig Pentium 4 Prescott (cause is presscot, i dont know why, but that is no official news, as some bloke told me that on other forum, maybe you know better...)

but than again I find some other CPus that should fit like:
PIV northwood 533 mhz, 2,8 Ghz
PIV 2,4 Ghz, 533 mhz FSB
PIV 3,0 Ghz, 800 mhz FSB (that is my favourite after Prescott)

my mbo is p4pe-x asus

my memory rams
my mbo allows 3 sticks, and I have 3 x 256 DDRam (pc2100)
done some research with CPU-Z freeware and this is info:
FSB:DRAM 3:4
CAS#Latency 2,5 clocks
frequency 134,9 Mhz
registered NO
buffered NO

DDrams are Hyundai and Samsung

hope I managed to give you all info required, also must say my hardware knowledge seems to be stuck 5 years ago, and today I admit its very hard to find some quality info, as so much new is on offer, I simply got lost in all that

once again, thank you for great help so far, and can be only happy to meet someone to give me precise instructions regarding my upgrade to play this great game

waiting for reply with my eyes wide open

**scourgeofrome** · 11-12-2006, 04:11

Hey,quick question.How do I look up this information.All I know is my computer can play games like Elder Scrolls:Oblivion without any problems.

**AlJabberwock** · 11-12-2006, 05:35

Scourge,

If you are unsure of what your hardware is, go to programs, choose accessories, then system tools, then system info. After the window pops up and populates, you will be able to see the basics like your grpahic card the rate at which your cpu is rated, and the amount of physical ram you have...

You can get a little bit more info out of your machine by going to the command line...
From the "start" button, choose the "run" button, type 'dxdiag' which will start the diagnosis process from your Directx program. To get the nitty gritty, you should do what Chopa did above, which is download the free program CPU-Z. This will do all sorts of nifty listing in a more detailed way.

Show us what you find, but if you're playing obliv. 4 w/ no problem, you probably don't need any help...

Chopa
Totally cool dude. Good on ya. Yeah, the CPU is probably not up to the task, and the Ram ain't helpin' either. I am going to look up your mobo specs (which you can do as well as I can probably if you don't have them there right in front of you). What we need to see is a compatibility list from Asus-they're the arbiter of what goes on their board not some bloke on a bboard somewhere- unless he's already seen it, or makes the bloody things. This way we can see what cpus it supports and what its max ram is and per slot... Pretty soon you'll be able to sell those 256 sticks to a museum ya know... Give me a little bit of time, since I need get a shot of scotch in order to look at the Asus site...