OpeningI've been watching the forums the last two days, and it didn't take long to notice a lot of people were having hardware problems. Luckily I myself have a very good computer, and the new version has been no problem for me. I've been trying to help people a bit here and there but it's fairly overwhelming for HTC and others who usually try and provide technical support. So instead I've decided to take a different route, instead of trying to help people from my computer I decided to go to the computer downstairs that is used for nothing but Internet browsing and make it run AHII. I bought this computer maybe 2 months ago for my mother and when I built it I never intended it to even play games, I just built it so it would run normal day applications smoothly and as the title suggest it only ran me about $300 for the whole tower. I want to note that this is in no way a tutorial guiding you to optimize your computer, rather my story and results of trying to make a low-end computer run AH. There are plenty of good tutorials on the forums already and if nothing else this may give you an idea of what to look for.
HardwareFirst, lets start with the basic build of this computer, my main goal when building this was for it to be cheap and yet not make to many sacrifices on performance where I thought it would be needed.
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Brisbane 2.6GHz ($50)
GPU: Radeon HD 3450 256MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 ($30)
Mobo: ECS Geforce6100PM-M2 ($50)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb ($35)
RAM: OCZ (2x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 ($20)
PSU: PC Power & Cooling Silencer PPCS420X 420W ($50)
As you can see there is nothing spectacular running this computer, and IMO would be considered fairly low end for today’s PC gaming market. I know that doesn't total 300 but there are a few other things for the computer that don't affect the performance so I left it out. All the prices are reflected by when I bought the hardware, and I have no idea if they cost more or less now. The computer is also running Windows XP Pro (32bit).
OptimizationAlright, I won’t lie, I’m a bit tech savvy and as such I have a fairly good idea of what I was doing when I decided on this venture, but honestly none of this is hard and can be done by anyone so long as they have a slight clue of what they are doing. I myself learned a lot of this on the AH forums. My first goal was to optimize the computer so it would have more resources to put towards AH when I finally decided to run it. I was never a fan of ATI and when it came to GPUs(Graphics Processing Unit) that I would be using, I always picked Nvidia. I didn’t have that luxury this time and the first thing I went about doing was uninstalling CCC (Control Center Catalyst). For those of you who don’t know CCC is a software program for ATI GPUs that allows you to change different settings on it. Recently I had heard more and more that CCC was a resource hog and that a program called Tray Tools was the way to go. Knowing I would need all the processing power I could get I quickly uninstalled it and replaced it with Tray Tools. A quick Google search will get you the program. My next goal was to limit the amount of process’s running in the background as to free up more resources for the game. The easiest way I know to do this is to run “msconfig” and go to the Startup tab. There is no way to give a one answer solves all as every ones computer is different and requires different process’s and such to run it. What this does though is controls what your computer loads up when it boots, most programs do not need to be started immediately, but rather only when you actually decide to use them. The next thing I did is something that Skuzzy seems to have been preaching for years, and that was to turn the Hardware Sound Acceleration Level down to Standard (3/4). To do this you run “dxdiag” and go to the sound tab. There you will find a slider for it. After this I let a program called TuneUp Utilities do most of the work. They have a 30 day trial that should suffice in getting everything in order for anyone. And to finish it all off I did a HDD (Hard Drive Disc) defrag.
OverclockingHaha I wish, not on this hardware.
SettingsAlright, now that everything was in order it was time to actually install AHII and play around with different settings to make it work. First thing was to adjust the Video Settings at the main screen. The only real notable things here are AA (Anti-Aliasing), Resolution, and Max Texture. Preparing for the worst, I knew the Max Texture would have to be 128 and AA would have to be set to none. I refused to play at anything but my native resolution for that monitor though so that stayed at 1440x900. Next was to adjust the Graphic Detail settings. This is a bit of trial and error for anyone but I finally decided on this. One thing I refused to do is turn off Detailed Terrain as that really effects how the game looks, so I worked around that the whole time.
ResultsI’m actually surprised, and quite happy. With the current settings I was holding 30 – 50 fps with little to no stuttering what so ever which was completely playable for me. My main trouble was actually using the joystick downstairs as it’s completely different to what I’m used to. Obviously the game doesn’t look quite as great as it does on my own computer, but the difference is about 700$ so it’s no surprise. The game looks about on par with the old AH terrain IMO but I’ll let you decide.
