Hardware for game play

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Filter, Aug 16, 2019.

  1. Filter Augur

    Hi All,

    I hope I'm posting on the right forum! I'm looking to get a new machine for gaming. At the moment I'm running a Dell XPS 13 laptop with 16 GB's of Ram and i7 2.2 GHz processor with the standard crappy video card. My machine sounds like it's about to take off into space when I log into EQ. Running 2 instances it gets bad but I recently wanted to try 4 and it takes forever to zone or load into the game at the start. I would think this machine would be more than enough to power 4 or 5 instances of the game but I might be wrong.
    I'm considering having a friend build one or just buy an Alienware desktop. Are there must haves for these machines? Are there things that won't benefit my game play like excess of RAM that won't help performance? A video card that is too powerful for EQ and it's dated system?
    I don't raid, but maybe at some point would occassionally, but I box up to 5 accounts.
    I don't want to spend a truck load on this if I can help it.
  2. phattoni Augur

    the more i spend on hardware the worse the game runs, i would buy an old used pc to play on.

    its more client optimizations than anything im sure, but im running a r5 2600 with 16gigs of ram and i get worse performance than i do using my old machine that is 12 years old.

    i get no lag on my 12 year old pc, yet on my newer one i get constant frame drops in places like unrest and pok.

    there are things you can put in eqclient.ini to improve performance. i forget what they are though.
  3. kizant Augur

    I'd focus on single core CPU performance and a decent dedicated GPU. There's plenty of metrics to go by like this chart:
    https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

    For example, the AMD Ryzen 5 2600X performs similar to the Intel i5 4670S from 2013. Plus you have to consider the game itself has gotten more resource intensive and not less over the years.
  4. NameAlreadyInUse #CactusGate

    I'd consider cleaning out your laptop's cooling fans/vents, including inside. And making sure it is situated on top of a laptop cooler. If it gets too hot (and it sounds like it is, from your description) then it will throttle itself down. Also, make sure your system's video and processors aren't being throttled by powersaving plan options - make sure everything is set to Max Performance.
  5. Covennx Augur

    EQ is extremely CPU based. Higher per core clock speed will be more beneficial than more cores. 16gb of ram is good. An SSD will improve your overall performance also. If you are running more than 1 account, make sure you add the -1 cpuaffinity entries in your eqclient.ini. 1 line for each LOGICAL cpu your pc has, starting with CPUAffinity0.

    CPUAffinity0=-1
    CPUAffinity1=-1
    CPUAffinity2=-1
    ...