Can I run SimCity5

[Hawk0900 0]

I love sim city and i'm just wondering if my laptop can run it before i decide to waste money on it. If not I guess ill just have to wait until I get a new laptop. Thanks in advance.

HP Dv6 notebook

AMD Phenom II N830 Triple Core

4 GB RAM

AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

[JamesBond276 1]

Since there's a topic for this, I'd like to find out as well.

Gateway NE56R12u

Intel B950 Dual Core @2.1ghz

8GB DDR3 RAM

Intel HD3000 Grpahics

[jdenm8 362]

There's already a thread for this, but for the sake of brevity, I'll answer it in here.

I love sim city and i'm just wondering if my laptop can run it before i decide to waste money on it. If not I guess ill just have to wait until I get a new laptop. Thanks in advance.

HP Dv6 notebook

AMD Phenom II N830 Triple Core

4 GB RAM

AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Maybe. You've got an aging low-end graphics card teamed with an aging CPU. You may have some luck, but don't expect it to run spectacularly.

Since there's a topic for this, I'd like to find out as well.

Gateway NE56R12u

Intel B950 Dual Core @2.1ghz

8GB DDR3 RAM

Intel HD3000 Grpahics

No. A 2.1Ghz Pentium processor would probably struggle toward the top end of city sizes and the graphics card doesn't meet the Minimum Requirements.

  Edited October 7, 2012 by jdenm8  

[JamesBond276 1]

There's already a thread for this, but for the sake of brevity, I'll answer it in here.

I love sim city and i'm just wondering if my laptop can run it before i decide to waste money on it. If not I guess ill just have to wait until I get a new laptop. Thanks in advance.

HP Dv6 notebook

AMD Phenom II N830 Triple Core

4 GB RAM

AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Maybe. You've got an aging low-end graphics card teamed with an aging CPU. You may have some luck, but don't expect it to run spectacularly.

Since there's a topic for this, I'd like to find out as well.

Gateway NE56R12u

Intel B950 Dual Core @2.1ghz

8GB DDR3 RAM

Intel HD3000 Grpahics

No. A 2.1Ghz Pentium processor would probably struggle toward the top end of city sizes and the graphics card doesn't meet the Minimum Requirements.

Huh. I thought it'd do better, it runs SimCity 4 Deluxe flawlessly...

[jdenm8 362]

Huh. I thought it'd do better, it runs SimCity 4 Deluxe flawlessly...

The thing is, SimCity 4 is nine years old. It's designed to run with a 1.0Ghz Pentium III processor and something like an ATI RAGE graphics card or an original nVidia Geforce series.

This new game is designed to run with a Core 2 Duo and something like a Radeon HD3000 Series or a GeForce 200 Series card.

They're not different ballparks, they're different continents.

  Edited October 7, 2012 by jdenm8  

[JamesBond276 1]

Huh. I thought it'd do better, it runs SimCity 4 Deluxe flawlessly...

The thing is, SimCity 4 is nine years old. It's designed to run with a 1.0Ghz Pentium III processor and something like an ATI RAGE graphics card or an original nVidia Geforce series.

This new game is designed to run with a Core 2 Duo and something like a Radeon HD3000 Series or a GeForce 200 Series card.

They're not different ballparks, they're different continents.

Is it possible to add a graphics card to my laptop?

Also, what exactly is the difference between a Core 2 Duo and a B950 if both are 2.1 ghz dual core processors? I've been wondering for a while.

  Edited October 7, 2012 by JamesBond276  

[jdenm8 362]

Is it possible to add a graphics card to my laptop?

It's... not impossible if your particular laptop was available with a dedicated chip and you can get a hold of a laptop the same as yours but with the dedicated chip. Then it's a hard and tedious soldier to get it onto your board. In the end, it's not impossible but really, really not worth the effort and there's a very high chance you'll stuff it up and fry your laptop.

Also, what exactly is the difference between a Core 2 Duo and a B950 if both are 2.1 ghz dual core processors? I've been wondering for a while.

The Front Side Bus and Cache mostly. Most of the cycles will be filled up with crap, you'll have a smaller and slower cache (Meaning stuff has to be committed to memory more frequently since you can't store as much of it directly on the processor and it takes longer to access that data), A slower Front Side Bus (Meaning that information passes to your Northbridge and by extension your Graphics Card, HDD and RAM slower than normal) and they're generally attached to lacklustre motherboards with shovelware chipsets which further slows everything down.

While I may be saying " a bit slower" a lot, it really shows up in benchmarks with these chips really performing badly compared to the more expensive chips with faster clocks and a larger cache.

  Edited October 7, 2012 by jdenm8  

[idcaf 65]

Alternatively, if you really would love to play this game and you have no other option, you could buy an external graphics card.

You should realise, that this has a serious connection bottleneck, but you will definitely be able to play. I've heard about them. Don't know how available they are.

You can try searching for one, yah

Edit: a picture to demonstrate, I don't know if your laptop PSU could handle a big-ass graphics card. Maybe it comes combined with it or you would need an additional PSU, which would start to make things really messy .

You should definitely inform yourself on the internet as much as possible about external graphics cards, before buying anything and then realising it doesn't work/(that good)

  Edited October 7, 2012 by idcaf  

[cirugo 1,889]

what kind of internet connection do you have?