What video card?

AceRider

To find out about your system without taking the back off, download this tool;

http://majorgeeks.com/download181.html It is a program called Aida32, it comes a zip file and you can just run the Aida32.exe from inside that.

It will give you a whole range of information about your computer, but more importantly it will tell you what Motherboard you have, with that you can google it for details or (as I do) google the name of the mother board in google images and look to see what expansion/graphic slots it has.

Baldur

bertietheblue wrote: »

It also says on the website that my CPU doesn't meet requirements, but that I don't get. Its reading for my CPU is:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz

and its requirements seem to be less than this:

(XP) 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent; (Vista) 2.4 GHz P4 processor or equivalent [If built-in graphics chipsets then 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent.]

The Pentium D range were dual core processors, while your CPU is the older single-core type, I suspect, therefore it doesn't meet the required CPU specification.

Knub

AceRider wrote: »

To find out about your system without taking the back off, download this tool;

http://majorgeeks.com/download181.html It is a program called Aida32, it comes a zip file and you can just run the Aida32.exe from inside that.

It will give you a whole range of information about your computer, but more importantly it will tell you what Motherboard you have, with that you can google it for details or (as I do) google the name of the mother board in google images and look to see what expansion/graphic slots it has.

Good idea, looking at the age of the rig he is using many things might be to out of date to do a successful upgrade.

OP if you can get info from this tool and post it we can probably help out a bit more!

savemoney

Not sure how good this card but it might just cut it

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9556293/PNY-Geforce-8400GS-512MB-PCI-Graphics-Card/Product.html

The sims 3? video card upgrade?

i got the sims 3 and it says it cant play because my video card needs to be upgraded and w/e whats a good upgrad? I have a dell dimension 8200 <==== different model but possibly same solution

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090604172123AANYDyd

Jaffa.

That should run on a P4 at that speed... The latter P4's have HT which would in a way give it 2 cores, well in task manager it shows as that anyway so I would have guessed that's how it would have appered to the program that checked the computer's spec.

Psychofly

Baldur wrote: »

The Pentium D range were dual core processors, while your CPU is the older single-core type, I suspect, therefore it doesn't meet the required CPU specification.

The CPU should be fine. The number of cores really doesn't matter in this case. The spec they are giving you is most likely for slowest speed processor you can use.

The one you have in your machine won't be the fastest in the world but it should support the Sim OK. There are some Nvidia 9x00 series graphics cards around that are available in PCI format but they're not the best. They might run the Sims 3 but not fantastically well. Depends how well you want it to run and how much you want to spend. Remember though if you're not comfortable with installing the card yourself then you need to budget another £20-30 for the installation of it by a good local PC shop.

Jaffa.

Can you not turn off the 'Shade Model' option in the sims 3 settings?

Psychofly

I think you can reduce from 3 to 2 but I wouldn't imagine it would let you go below that.

AceRider

As people seem to be getting confused or mis-understanding the system requirements can I advise people to use this site
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

It will instal an ActiveX control on your system but I can assure it is perfectly safe.
You can select The Sims 3 from the drop down menu then it does a very quick scan of your system to determin what you have and compares it with what you need.

It will then give you a checksheet to show you how you compared like this;

http://i44.tinypic.com/ckftv.jpg

You may notice it failed my CPU & CPU Speed despite me having a 2Ghz Proc, however it does then go on to state that shared graphics (such as those commonly found on a laptop) require a 2.6Ghz processor.

savemoney

I take system requirements with a pince of salt they nearly always far to off the mark, games may run abet slowly and with things turned off

I have sims 3 on a pcie ati 3400 (512mb on board ram), 2 x 2gbKingston ram ddr2 (800mhz), dual core 2 2.8mhz card and its on medium detail, hence why I am upgrading graphics card but needs to be low profile

AceRider wrote: »

As people seem to be getting confused or mis-understanding the system requirements can I advise people to use this site
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

It will instal an ActiveX control on your system but I can assure it is perfectly safe.
You can select The Sims 3 from the drop down menu then it does a very quick scan of your system to determin what you have and compares it with what you need.

It will then give you a checksheet to show you how you compared like this;

http://i44.tinypic.com/ckftv.jpg

You may notice it failed my CPU & CPU Speed despite me having a 2Ghz Proc, however it does then go on to state that shared graphics (such as those commonly found on a laptop) require a 2.6Ghz processor.