More Awesome Than You!

So, we've previously established that my hardware knowledge is not Awesome. I know just enough to know how little I know.

I have a 3.2Gb dual core CPU with an NVidia GForce 4 6800, 4Gb RAM and S3 up to Ambitions running XP. Usual crashes and freezes occur. Is it possible to throw moderate/not extreme money at my machine and improve its S3 reliability?

Your specs sound better than mine, and my game runs pretty flawlessly.

Sounds more like data corruption.

My game usually runs well. I get the occassional slow down or freeze in large population worlds and it has been known to throw a complete fit and collapse on rare occassions. I just want to see if it could be better.

Well, your graphics card is aging.  You might want to replace it some time soon.

Video card - noted. Should I pay any attention to EA's list of prefered GPU's or go looking for the best card/card combo that I can afford?

Make sure the new video card is not overpowered for your machine. No point in buying biggest and best if your hard drives or CPU then become the bottleneck. Also make sure your power supply can hack it and make sure cooling is up to the job.

I'll check the video card choice with a friend who runs a computer shop, but knows nothing of Sims. Trif of Crazy Town is also suggesting an OS upgrade given I run XP 'la ordinaire. Any comments?

Yes, it will probably run better under Vista than XP. And even better under 7.

Why even raise the issue of Vista?  Wasn't 7 released because Vista made people want to hurt themselves and others?

Vista is a RAM hog, so it probably wouldn't run better than XP unless you have a lot of RAM to play with.

Yes, but will XP even use anything over 3 GB?

OK, so Windows 7, new video card/s and more RAM - probably in that order.

About 3.6GB Spock, on my machine, anyway.

Personally, with 4GB, I'd stick to XP. Especially on a slightly older machine.

the problem is that there's no way to quanitify the age of my machine. My floppy disc drive is probably 10 years old but the rest of my machine gets regular upgrades. My MB is younger than my video cards and my RAM is younger again.

I play just fine with a 3.6Ghz P4 dual core machine, XP pro, 2Gb of RAM, and ATI 3850 video card.  Like witch, I will stick with XP for the older machine.

Right, so keep thinking on the OS. Maybe 7, maybe upgrading to Pro. I like the idea of there being something simple I can do to make the whole Sims thing smoother and more reliable, but there's a lot to be said for not having to break my brain around a whole new OS.

Do you know what model of motherboard you have in your PC? Looking it up online would allow you to see what kind card your board can handle as well as what your power supply can do. I currently rock SLi 6800s and TS3 doesn't use my second card. I have to disable it to run the game, but I also suffer lag. I've got a similar setup as yourself, but I have XP Pro. I don't see a huge difference, to be fair.

I think upgrading the video card first by a few steps, depending on your power supply's load capacity, and give it a whirl. I don't think you'll be disappointed. The only reason why I haven't done the same is I can't afford a better power supply. I've got the 9600 in front of me, just don't have the juice for it.

Update on PC specs now I have them in front of me
XP Pro Version 2002 SP 3 (no mention of bits so I assume it's not 64)
Core Duo CPU @ 3GHz
3.25GB RAM (obviously what's being utilised of my 4GB)

I don't know what my MB is. It uses nvidia drivers for networking and IDE control. It was made by gigabyte is about all I can say.

Looks perfectly adequate to play TS3. Only thing I'd say needs upgrading is your video card.

I understand that the main difference between home edition and pro, is networking capabilities. Perhaps some other bits and pieces. If you're not running a home network or having problems with it, I wouldn't bother upgrading the OS at all. Win7 will run slower on your machine. Promise.

I agree with most posters, a video card and possibly a power supply, and you'd notice the difference.

Oh and look for a serial number on the mobo, you may be able to google that along with 'gigabyte' and find your specs.

Are you using Large Address Aware? It solves most issues, although not the freezing you've described.

LAA doesn't work under Windows XP if you didn't boot into 3GB mode. Under normal, 32bit OS mode programs cannot utilize more than 2GB of memory.

My personal experience with memory hogging games and applications is that Windows 7 is much more stable than XP, for the simple fact that programs in 32bit XP loves to crash once they consume near 2GB of ram, while Win 7 (64) allows them to utilize past 2GB without issues.

Works fine on 32 bit Vista once you've done the bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVA 3072 trick, its an urban myth that 32 bit OS cannot utilize more RAM than 2gb. I've been using this trick for a year now, and it's all fine.

You still have a floppy disk drive? Wow, this is my second generation machine without one. NOTHING I do will fit on a floppy disk anymore. What about the age of the box? That houses the power supply and if it is really old, it won't support some of the newer hardware.

I have an emotional attachment to the floppy disc drive and, even though I don't use it any more either, it still gets moved to each 'new' machine.

Box is definately getting an upgrade as it is of indeterminate age - 2 upgrades ago my old box was too small and I picked up a 2nd hand box that would fit my power supply and motherboard.

A better machine will only take you so far.  You'll get nice graphics, fairly nice speed, but the game itself is poorly written using inefficient and half-assed coding hence why it is so slow, glitchy, laggy, runs your fan to max and uses a helluva lot of CPU power, and if you use mods and packs then that adds more load to the game.

Let me translate that for you, Mim:  "I am butthurt because I cannot get the game to work myself.  Please see the thread I vomited out explaining this in unrelenting detail."

I have the same question .

My specs are:

Xp Professional Sp3
Intel P4 3.20 ghz
Ram 3.25 gigs
Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT W/1 gig video ram
170 gigs free disk space (out of about 420 total)

I'm sort of in the same boat now.  My old machine blew up and I'm using a new one I bought some time ago but never got around to setting up till now.  It's got seven gigs of ram (Vista 64bit) and a quad core processor so I don't think I'll have any bottleneck issues there.  But it has ye olde PCI-E slots.  I know the new PCI-E 2.0 cards are backwards compatible.  But is it worth dropping the money for one if I don't have PCI-E 2.0 slots?  The regular old PCI-E cards are hella cheap on NewEgg.

If you've just upgraded anyway, it hardly seems worth splashing out the money on a card that won't run to its full capacity. By the time you upgrade to a new mobo, video cards will have got better again, most probably.

I disagree and think your just full of shit and bile because you can't get it to work on your machine for whatever reason.

I am lucky if my fan speeds get above 50% of max speed, and it usually grabs one core only, which isn't really taxing on the CPU or even a "Helluva lot of CPU power" as you describe it.  I had a couple of sound issues after LN, which would drive up a core or two, but finally seem to have them solved.  The game isn't what I would call slow or laggy, unless playing on the underspec'ed laptop, even though occasionally when something specific occurs it may appear to lag or be slightly slower, but hardly the major disaster you are implying it is.  Yes it is buggy and poorly written, but mods like AM solve most of those issues and clean everything up.

The same thing applies to you as it does to Cwunts, if you don't like the game, stop playing it.

Well, I've chosen the path I'll follow. I'll get a new case, MB, RAM and OS with my current savings and do a new video card in a couple of months time.

Your computer is fine. You don't need an upgrade, and your issues are caused by things unrelated to your computer. Perhaps all the CRAP you are running.

Like I said there are little to no issues with my game. I just wanted to make sure that this update time I spent my money in the places most likely to cause improvement to the game performance.

Then you have made some wrong decisions. A new case will do squat. RAM's OK, but it's probably not the main bottleneck, you'll need the extra RAM just to run Win7 anyway. You will still be without a decent video card and it's likely your old one will not fit the new mobo. Come to think of it, you're probably thinking of buying a mobo and using its onboard integrated graphics. Oh no, I see you're going to wait awhile for the one thing that might make a significant difference on its own.

You'd get a more responsive machine by cleaning up crap that's constantly running (as per Pescadoian advice), turning off a few unneeded services (see ElderGeek) optimising your registry and possibly purchasing faster hard drives if you have SATA connections on your mobo. And a power supply and video card as previously recommended by at least two out of three shoppers.

How on Earth you made the decision you did out of the information in this thread is completely beyond me.

I need a new case. The old one is physically damaged. The face falls off it everytime I try to move it. A case was always on my list.

I recently bought a SATA HD so there is very little that has been installed on the HD excepting my protection software and, I must admit, Microsoft Office.

I know it sounds bass-ackwards to you, but if I'm updating the case the next logical step is to upgrade from my P4, which means it must be MB & RAM to go with. At that stage I don't have enough left in this kitty to do the GPU this time but I can squeeze an OEM version of Windows 7 out of it I thought that would work. I suppose I could do it in the opposite direction. Start with the card and do the others later. That jibes against my 'begin at the beginning' mentality.

OK, that explanation does add new information and make a bit more sense.

One question, do you turn off virus protection while gaming? I turn Avast off so it is not running constantly, though I never turn off the firewall. Virus protection running all the time can really slow some games.

Don't forget you will need a bigger power supply - to cover a new video card, even later on - and possibly power more cooling.

You are not likely to see much improvement in game performance no matter what you do, short of taking extreme measures like running the entire game off a RAMdisk.

I'll admit I hadn't thought of turning VET off. I suppose that might smooth out anything that might be caused by sharing the processing capabilities. I'll admit, though, that I'm vacillating. The case is a must and it's where the rest of the upgrade now idea came from.

I'm going to take this whole thread to my friend who knows hardware and have him read it. I think you were right Witch when you said I missed some intrinsic point. I'll have him add his advise on what to get as well as a new case.

Virus protection nearly killed my game. I hated it. Even when turned off, it wouldn't go completely off. It was terrible.

I switched, after a lot of research on various ones, and the one I'm using now is smooth as butter, lightweight, and effective. I can't mention it here due to the "NO SHILLING" rule, because it's not free. I can tell you that you will not find it in a store, so start googling. I don't turn it off during play.

I have a Quad Core, 2.4 GHZ, 3GB RAM, running 32 bit Vista. The graphics card is an NVidia GE Force 9600 with 512 MB Ram. Sims 3 works fine, with only the occasional judder, which almost goes away when I remember to dump the cache files. I have a pretty fair amount of CC, including AwesomeMod. I use high graphics settings in the game.

Follow Pescado's advice to turn off the crap running in the background. It doesn't need to be running and just bogs down the game and strains the computer for no reason. Reset your start-up menu.

Just what is this crap you all think I have running in the background? I definately don't leave my programs running in the background and I don't add programs to my computer that have active services if I can help it. That leaves Microsoft functions and I'm not turning those off without a specific map.

Or do you all think that my lack of hardware savvy means that I don't know enough not to install useless shit on to my machine?

I tell you again, ElderGeek.  :P

There are many programs and drivers that install shit to run in the background without always specifically asking about it, they take the general acceptance to install a program as a go ahead to install anything.  If you install adobe reader, it also adds an updater or something which starts every time you start windows and runs silently in the background taking up resources, Mouse and keyboard drivers sometimes load background tasks to check for updates etc, depending on the brand, I find ATI graphics cards have more background shit than Nvidia cards, but they may be similar in total usage, other programs are iTunes, Quicktime, Microsoft Office, just to name a few.  Not all ask specifically ask to be set to run everytime, they just do it.

If you check the task manager, or bring up the list to customise the start-up configuration, you'll be surprised at how much crap is set to start-up all the time, and most of it you never know about.

Ditto what Merlin said.

Try to use apps like FPS Limiter, Gamebooster and Task Manager (with Prio) too.

I will go and read.

Merlin, tizerist - I am aware of those sorts of programs. I try not to add them in. I also clean out my startup file (as neccessary) and check for strange processess after adding new programs.

What was the question again?

(http://i.imgur.com/QpMDy.jpg)

Always run installers in manual/custom mode, so you can disable things. They love to sneak toolbars into auto installations.

See, now you're just being silly. Who actually lets anything auto-install these days? I can honestly say that I have never accidentally installed a browser homepage setting or search function

* Jeebus raises his hand
Whoops, I know.

Just making sure.  :)

You don't want to see my "family computer"... Just glad I don't have to use it, my siblings are imbeciles.

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/7126-The-Official-Windows-7-Repository - If you still want to bother with upgrading to 7. It's essentially the OEM edition of any version you choose, without actually paying for it.

You may also want to try ccleaner to clean all the shit out of your registry, which might improve some performance.

I know where you're coming from. My virus program asked to do a full update this morning, on both my machine and my fathers. He double checked with me that it wasn't some evil plot to take over his computer and then allowed the install to start. After it had installed Windows did it's usual complaints that *wah, virus program off* *wah, virus program using old signature file* *wah* *wah* *wah*

And he rang me up to tell me about it - while I was on a bus into work. He wouldn't listen when I tried to explain why. He wouldn't listen when I told him that the Windows pop-ups were useless and he needed to open VET to see if it was still updating or what. He sent me an email later today to complain about the time it took to do a base line virus check.


edit: anybody have any comments/ideas on the preferability of one of these 2 video cards over the other?

• GTX 450 128bit 1Gb DDR5
• GTX 460 192bit 750Mb DDR5

There's almost $AU100 difference between them and (if it was worth it - ie Sims could make use of it) I'd be able to buy 2 of the 450's

What the hell are you on about?  Sims works fine on my machine because I shelled out for a top model gaming machine.  It's just a fact that TS3 is a badly written piece of trash and puts all load on the CPU instead of the GPU, so an average computer not really designed for running power-hungry games on it running TS3 will feel the burn literally whilst a well specced computer may not notice that it's being overprocessed and can handle the abuse.  I aint sputing garbage or quoting what may have been written elsewhere, I am telling you facts and it aint just with TS3 it's with all Sim games and SimCity 4 is just as crap.

And let's face it, awesomemod can only do so much.  Yeah it'll clean up a lot of the crap that the game ends up just dumping here and there and make the game more playable, but it isn't a magic wand that's gonna fix every damned thing that's wrong with TS3 and the way it got designed.

You can go and live in your own fantasy world and deny that TS3 is so badly written that it can fry a standard home computer, or that if you get a whopping big supercomputer that suddenly the game will improve beyond its maximum performance.  I aint a hot-headed teenage moron who thinks he's ace at everything that many of you appear to be.  How about rather than trying to pretend you're ace at everything and sputing bullshit back at people who are trying to talk sense that you go do something you're really good at which is finding some photoshopped artwork from failblog and spamming topics with them.

It's frickin' Sims, if you're gonna get aggressive over a virtual dolly house then you need to get a life and some fresh air.

Madame Mim, have you actually tried altering the address header? You didn't say.

This is the core improvement to the game, and I can't imagine you'd have any crashing if you tried it.

I must have missed that bit Tiserist - what address header?

I guess I was just dreaming when it worked fine on my Core2Duo with an ATI HD 3xxx/4xxx series. Yeah I shelled out the big bucks for that one.

http://nene.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Sims_3:Large_Address_Aware

The game now handles large memory addressing by default, at least since Late Night came out. Patching to the latest version should make it irrelevant whether you have the EPs or SPs installed or not.

I had just been sitting here trying to remember why I thought LAA was now irrelevant (as far as having to enable it) in my game - what Spockblock said.

No I hadn't looked into it.

I have a higher end spec'ed PC which things work great on, and I also have an underspec'ed laptop for when I am not at home to utilise the PC.  If you read my original post, I never said the game wasn't poorly written and buggy as hell, but my experience on both the desktop and laptop, isn't as bad as what you make it out to be.  I have played Sims 2 and Simcity 4, and never had any issues, even on underspec'ed systems.  My only problem with both of those game now, is that they don't support the full resolution of the monitors and graphics cards, while simcity 4 especially doesn't look very good at the resolutions available, otherwise game play is fine.

I also never said the game can't fry a standard home computer, as it can and even has the potential to fry the most high end system, but it mainly fries graphics cards, including the high end ones, rather than other components, due to the high FPS the game drives the cards at unless you run a limiter, which is a really bad design flaw on the part of EAxis.

I stand by what I said in response to the passage I quoted from you originally.  Even on my underspec'ed laptop, which has only has a 2.1 Ghz Intel Duo, the game isn't that slow, glitchy, laggy and unplayable like you are suggesting.  Yes, the desktop runs the game much better, which it should, as it runs most programs better, but the laptop handles the game to a perfectly acceptable standard for being underspec'ed and a laptop.  Yes, the game does occasionally CTD for unknown reasons, yes I have had some sound issues previously, but nothing which makes the whole thing unplayable and makes me want to stop playing.

You're the one sounding all aggressive and bent out of shape because I dare to have a different view and a game which runs just fine.  Perhaps you're the one who needs to get a life if you get this worked up over NOT being able to get your virtual dolly house to work.

Riiiiiight, so calling me a cwunt and telling me I'm full of shit and bile isn't being aggressive. >:(

And don't think for one minute I overlooked what you've posted either Jeromy.  You've been egging to get a bad reaction out of me.  It must give you a boner to make people angry.

You don't have the slightest shred of self-awareness, do you?


Not a "cwunt", a "Cwuntz".  Who is "Cwurtz", a poster around here.  Which fact you would know, if you had only LURKED MOAR.  Instead, you get even more bent out of shape over a nonexistent word, because you have obvious anger issues.

As I didn't call you a cwunt, it is aggressive only if you have a very thin skin and/or other assorted problems, which you obviously do.

As one of our esteemed senators pointed out to you, if you had lurked more, you would have known that 'cwuntz' is a name used to refer to another poster who presents the same way you do.  They bitch and moan about everything that is wrong with TS3 and how bad it all is, yet keep playing it.  Not to mention they are currently in the middle of a hot romance with their butt-ugly sim named oona, ooza or some such shit, and is probably in the throws of planning a real life wedding between them.

Back on the subject of upgrades, is a Radeon 5770, with 1 GB of dedicated memory, enough to play this stupid game? My poor ickle laptop can no longer handle the game and expansions, even on low settings. After an hour, the game starts pixelating and my laptop feels like it's going to burninate to a crisp. My laptop is a piece of shit Compaq that's about 3 years old, with integrated graphics, an Intel Core 2 duo processor, and 3 GB of RAM. Once I get my tax return, I'm building a mid-range gaming desktop for playing TS3 and Civ V. I'm looking at the 5770, as well as the new 2600k i7 Intel Sandy Bridge processor, and 12 GB of RAM. I'll be hooking it up to a 42" LED tv via HDMI for playing.

Yes, 5770 is much more than enough.  I have a laptop with an ATI 4670 and an i7 Q820, and TS3 runs well on high settings.  Your (planned) computer should do fine.

Groovy. Newegg has it on for 130 bucks Canadian right now, which is why I looked at it. I've been reading conflicting reviews about it, so I wasn't sure if it was decent.

You do not need 12GB of RAM. I'd go 4GB minimum 8GB maximum (if it's a dual-channel mobo) or just 6GB (if it's a triple-channel mobo).

What's wrong with having 12GB of RAM if you have twin triple-channels and you want it?

More RAM =/= better performance

RAM is just temporary storage for data that needs to be read/written fast. If a game uses 2GB of RAM, then that is all you need to run it; but you need a bit extra for the OS and stuff running in the background.

12GB is overkill for games, you'd only need that much if you do HD video editing for a living or something.

One thing here: you need more than just "a bit extra" RAM.  On Windoze 7 and Vista, the OS and background tasks can easily use up 2GB of RAM.  Granted, on XP, it's much less, but still fairly sizable (at least 300MB).  But yes, 12 GB is way overkill.  I've never been known to use more than 6GB or so of RAM, and I run a shitload of stuff at the same time.

On Win7 I only use 1.5GB when not running a game. And that is with Steam, Firefox, Xfire, Avast, and Pidgin running.

4GB is perfectly fine for most games at the moment, but I am planning on adding a couple more sticks of 2GB if future games require it.

I have seen TS3 at different times, along with everything else running in the background push my RAM usage to over 5GB, close to 6GB.

I know how RAM works, and what it does, and after a certain point more RAM won't necessarily help anything, but if someone wants to add more RAM what is wrong with that?  Just because a game may or may not use more than 2GB RAM doesn't mean you have to just install that amount.  You argue that 12GB RAM is overkill, it probably is, but so is a 2 or 3 x SLI GTX570 graphics set-up, and an i9 hexacore processor overclocked to some ridiculous speed, but people still do it.

Just because a game wont use all of the available system resources doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't add them.

It still won't make your PUDDING BETTER, which is the ACTUAL QUESTION BEING ASKED IN THIS THREAD.

Well, it's fine if you want to do it for purely masturbatory purposes, but...

or you use other non gaming applications that make use of the extra resources, but as the original question was specific to TS3, I agree with your assessment.

[/quote]
Given that EAxis seem to like keeping their shit able to run on the lowest craptastic machine possible, I agree.

It's not just a question of them "liking" it, it's a basic matter of common sense: The demographic of Sims-players is not the high-end techie crowd, so limiting the game to only those with the best computers is selecting from a very small subset of their potential customerbase, which would be dumb.

The people who have computers like that are either idiots who bought an Alienware, or people who actually use (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats) that (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/306242-31-video-editing-build#t2276496) power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmark_%28computing%29).

I have a computer like that, but you need way more than 12 GBs of RAMs to squeak more performance out of the Pudding, so unless you have enough RAMs to cram the entire thing into a RAMdisk, it won't help much.

What files does the game access more, the installation directory or all the crap it stuffs into "My Documents"?