Whats sufficient for todays games? CPU wise

[Maximilian]

Whats a sufficient CPU for todays games? Im not buying one or anything, just interested. Would a 1.4ghz tualatin PIII be ok? or the 1.4 thunderbird? Think yesterdays CPU's as todays generation, even the low end semprons or celerons can game at acceptable framerates.

 

[tbike06]

 

[Zenoth]

 

[BrownTown]

 

[Zenoth]

Seriously though ... Soviet, I think you'd better be looking for, say ... 1.8 to 2.0 Ghz CPUs at a minimum if you'd like to play 3-D games. Recent ones that is (let's say since the past two or three years). Both Intel and AMD make superb CPUs, and their "high-end" products are far, extremely far from being anywhere near "necessary" for today's gaming. Games now are more dependent on GPUs anyway. I'm not saying an high-end CPU is "bad", it's just not necessary. Take the good ol' AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 Ghz if I am not mistaken), very good for gaming, not expensive at all (although it's probably discontinued by now).

 

[jlbenedict]

Originally posted by: Zenoth
Seriously though ... Soviet, I think you'd better be looking for, say ... 1.8 to 2.0 Ghz CPUs at a minimum if you'd like to play 3-D games. Recent ones that is (let's say since the past two or three years). Both Intel and AMD make superb CPUs, and their "high-end" products are far, extremely far from being anywhere near "necessary" for today's gaming. Games now are more dependent on GPUs anyway. I'm not saying an high-end CPU is "bad", it's just not necessary. Take the good ol' AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 Ghz if I am not mistaken), very good for gaming, not expensive at all (although it's probably discontinued by now).

Thats probably about right. Here are some of the specs, from the Battlefield 2 page regarding the minimum CPU required:
1.7 GHz Intel Celeron D / Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP/ Sempron or greater

 

[RallyMaster]

Um...2.0GHz AMD Athlon64.

 

[Maximilian]

Ok, let me rephase it.

Can i play half life 2/battlefield 2/farcry on:

A: Tualatin 1.4

B: Thunderbird 1.4

C: Northwood 2.4C


Im thinking yes, maybe, since cpu speeds have stayed stagnant for a long time after a period of rapid growth, 2003's high end is still pretty high end today, a 3.2ghz P4C still kicks ass in games.

Actually ill see if these cpu's are listed on toms cpu charts, ill go dig up an old one.

 

[Zenoth]

Go with option C then

 

[RallyMaster]

indeed. option C would be the best one.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Discontinued 'Clawhammer' Socket 754 Athlon64 2800+ (running stock) here.
Do I want a faster CPU? Yes, Dual-core would be sweet.
Do I really need one? No.

 

[imported_Skorpio]

I had a Tualatin 1.4, and yes it can play Battlefield 2 Demo.
It ran without video lag on a FX 5700LE PCI at medium settings in a 64 player server. But this is with 1GB of ram and Im sure Im more likely to be PCI bus limited than CPU.

I doubt it would run Special Forces esp Night Maps with that CPU.

Half Life 2 would run with a Tualatin 1.4 on medium settings. I beat the game with my Tualatin 1.4 last year.

Farcry would run fine at medium settings, but I started to have problems on the 2nd map. I think with the ship level, thats when it got really choppy and slideshow. (probably PCI limited)

 

[Maximilian]

Originally posted by: Zenoth
Go with option C then

Im not buying anything and i down own and never will own any of them, i just wondered if they could play todays games.

Originally posted by: Skorpio
I had a Tualatin 1.4, and yes it can play Battlefield 2 Demo.
It ran without video lag on a FX 5700LE PCI at medium settings in a 64 player server. But this is with 1GB of ram and Im sure Im more likely to be PCI bus limited than CPU.

I doubt it would run Special Forces esp Night Maps with that CPU.

Half Life 2 would run with a Tualatin 1.4 on medium settings. I beat the game with my Tualatin 1.4 last year.

Farcry would run fine at medium settings, but I started to have problems on the 2nd map. I think with the ship level, thats when it got really choppy and slideshow. (probably PCI limited)

Nice one dude, has the mobo not got AGP on it? As thats a beast of a CPU (for its time) to be paired with a PCI card.

 

[imported_Skorpio]

Unfortuantely I asked the motherboard maker to make one with AGP, but they didnt cause it wasnt economically feasible to make one custom board for me at that time S370 was long dead, and S478 was already obsolete. I would have paid $100 to probably solder on an AGP board and do some bios rework.

Because I wanted a S370 Tualatin with DDR support up to 2GB with AGP, SATA, and in mATX format.

It had all except AGP.

At that time my specs were:
1.4GHz Tualatin
ACorp mATX VIA ????? Chipset motherboard
1GB (2 X 512) Kingston Hyper - X DDR 2700? cant remember
PNY FX 5700LE 128MB
SATA Maxtor 250Gb HD
Optorite 12X Dual Layer
in a Compaq Case ( that took some rework with help from my roomate to put in)

If it did have AGP & mATX I would still have the Tualatin "Sleeper" and probably paired it with a 6600GT or 6800GT.


Unfortuantely I had to sell my Tualatin computer on ebay because I had to pay for a car accident I was in.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Soviet
Whats a sufficient CPU for todays games? Im not buying one or anything, just interested. Would a 1.4ghz tualatin PIII be ok? or the 1.4 thunderbird? Think yesterdays CPU's as todays generation, even the low end semprons or celerons can game at acceptable framerates.

Eh, that's a bit too far back for today's games.
What's sufficient for today's games is basically the lowest cpus you can find on the modern market. Here, I'll give you the lowest cpu from each line-up sufficient for today's games...
2.8ghz P4
3200+ Athlon XP
2800+ Sempron Socket 754
Any Athlon 64
1.8ghz Pentium M/Core Duo/Core Solo and above
Probably no Netburst (Pentium 4) based Celeron.
Probably Celeron M 2 to 2.2ghz or higher.

Basically, anything you can buy nowadays that isn't part of a value lineup will be fine. If it is part of a value line up, then the top end of the value line up is fine. Of course, I'm talking about playing all games with a high framerate (>50fps), not as in "well, it's kind of playable because it doesn't crash, even if it stutters along the entire time and would make some people throw up".

As far as what will run modern games, you could probably go all the way as low as a 1ghz processor and still be "running" modern games.

 

[bongsteen]

3700+ with 7600gt rocks!!!

 

[Regs]

You need a 3.0 GHz conroe and I mean now. AMD is in troub....*gets knocked out*.

Socket 754, Socket 939, a 3.2 Northwood and that's about it. Though I would get a 90nm CPU on a AMD socket 939.

Or wait for conroe of course.

 

[Ika]

I'm running a P4 Northwood 1.8ghz and it's barely at the limit. I play CS: Source and Heroes 5 and the CPU bottleneck shows up very very often. CS runs fine, usually, unless the map is assault/inferno/militia, which brings FPS down to 20 (and no setting changes will raise that number, leading me to believe it's the CPU that's bottlenecking my 6800NU). Heroes 5 runs okay when I start a new game, but is pretty laggy and not too fun to play on. Late-game, when creature numbers are high, the CPU skips too often for me to play well.

 

[PUNKtotalled]

Definitely use option C.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

all of the three options are crap and wont let u play newer games at decent frame rates, eg. 50+ fps. get a cheap a64 single core! they are under 100$ these days..

 

[xNIKx]

newer games arnt requiring much
resident evil 4 ( not out yet but i cant wait! )
1 GHz Pentium® III or AMD Athlon? (or better)
Prey
Intel Pentium 4 2.0Ghz / AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor

 

[imported_inspire]

I don't know guys - I'm a gamer, and to be honest, Minimum System requirements are like EPA mileage estimates - lies. I play HaloC with an Athlon 2000 XP+, GeForce 4200 Ti (128MB DDR @AGP 4x), 1 GB PC2700 DDR, all in an Asus A7V333. And I have to turn most of the settings down or off.