Hey all, I want to get through my backlog of games, but im unsure of what i should aim for in terms of specifications for a laptop, Or just a way to have something small and portable that i can dedicate to old games

Im wondering what people use here, Dual core? Quad core? any Intel HD 4xxx users here? I would like to know your experiences with todays "Low spec" computing

What's in your backlog, and what do you want to play in the future? That will help determine your needs.

*raises a hand* i have a i7 ultrabook with a intel hd 4400

it runs burnout paradise pretty well

For comparison, I'll mention that I have a 3 - 3.5 year-old i7, 4MB RAM, and GeForce GT555M that runs everything I've thrown at it in 1920x1080. The newest title is Divinity:OS, and Tower of Guns is probably the heaviest burden it gets Given the age, you can probably get similar specs for $400-500 or less?

4 mb ?

dont you mean 4 gig ?

just to offset your comparison i have an dell xps 9333 ultrabook with an i7 mobile 8 gig of ram a 256 gig ssd and a intel hd 4400

it plays burnout paradise skyrim oblivion and street fighter 4 AE quite well with some tweaking


most gog games are no problem

I meant kMB. ; )

Cloud becomes more and more common so it's possible someone will develop a technology that would make hardware a non-issue for personal computers, you basically rent the level you want based upon your need and budget. OTOH, that just moves the lack of ownership yet another level away from the user and that is rather worrying.

In 2004, this would have been true, today you'd have to extend that to a couple years at least.

As for the original question though, if I recall correctly, there are some XP-era games that have problems with multi-core machines, so perhaps a speedy single-core one with 2 GB RAM (maybe 4, but that's probably unnecessary) and a high-end graphics card from 2005 or 2006. That is, if you really meant "old computer" rather than "low spec computer" - if you actually meant the latter though, well... I've no idea.

Well my main PC atm is a asus G750JM, Its a laptop and its great for the most part, But i have not experienced older generation tech for a long time i have always had the latest stuff that was out for a while, But i believe i may have too much power for some things i would like, hence why i am looking into making something with todays tech that is at least capable.

Games i want to play.... Well divinity:OS is out of the question for the time being because it does not even run that well on the GTX860M i have, Burns this laptop up and this laptop is good at cooling itself too, no issues with other games, But i just want to run pre 2008 games for the most part i think, and quite a bit of emulation, I want to be playing at 1080p or something different depending on what the monitor supports, one time ill have it hooked to the tv, the other ill have it on my desk, I believe i want to play games like Sins of a solar empire, and Warlock 2.

Im looking into these intel NUC's with the i7 4 cores and intel iris pro 5200 as its apparently better than the HD 4600 that i find very capable, I want to be limted... but not too limited.

Funny how so often old games run more poorly on a modern PC than the 20x slower machine you first ran the game on 10 years ago! And even when the games performance does improve on a modern machine, it is like about 2% improvement when the modern computer is like 200% more powerful! But you know, that's old games with limitations in the programming being the excuse.

However, when it comes to modern games, even then i have never gained an improvement in performance anything like the 'supposed' improvement in performance of the new PC compared to the old PC,, and i even had one upgrade instance where the games actually ran slower on the new pc! That was the one time i tried an AMD system, never again!

Part of it's the chipset. CPU's used to run with hardcoded opcodes and the chips were bigger, now it's all microcode within the CPU. Also games back in the day all ran on 1 processor, and having 4x the processors does not translate into 4x the processing power, it's more like 2x with semaphores and all the permissions interacting to get access to the same resources.

Then there's the individual instructions. There were lists of how many cycles individual instructions used, going down from 10, to 8, to 5 meant not only when you bought your CPU how many cycles it did was faster, but the time spent on each instruction was faster overall due to optimization.


I'm sorta reminded of an old sorting algorithm [s]quicksort[/s] ShellSort. Richard Buckland explained it basically being bubblesort, but going about the job considerably better. However it's not used today because caching is horrible for how far the indexes are to eachother, as well as it can't be worked on in parallel easily, once multiple cores/CPU's are around it was no longer an option, not because it won't work, but because it ultimately performed worse.

A GTX 680M is like the desktop equivalent of a GTX660 / 750ti. Which I think it's very good for a game like Divinity OS.

For the record I have an old system with a Pentium E3200 and a GTS 250 card which run D:OS fairly well, not full HD resolution but the game is more than playable.

Have you tried updating drivers etc?

It is kindof like trying to make a horse run faster by strapping a car engine to its back (although tying firecrackers to a cats tail, 'does' make a cat run considerably faster)

You don't keep your older computers around? We always did, and when life got tight were very glad of it, because they can still run the net and such.

To answer your question, I believe a WIN XP dual core (1.8 - 2.2 ghz, 2-4 gig RAM, and a decently large HD (500 gig+) works for most older games with plenty of power to spare.,, and you can still check your email and read the news with it.