Best gaming PC from a store for AH3

[Maineac1]

   What's the best,  middle of the road priced Gaming PC available from a store that will work well in AH3.   Graphics,  speed,  etc.   I have a very old PC and this stuff is not in my wheelhouse.   ( Bestbuy,  Costco,  etc...)    Thanks in advance

[Max]

Minimum requirements as per the the HTC website:
Requirements
Aces High III
CPU/Processor: 2.4 Ghz
OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10
System Memory: 4 GB
Video Card: DirectX 9.0  512MB NVidia 9800GTX class, or better
Internet Connection: A 28.8 modem or faster Internet connection
Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card
Input Devices: Joystick or mouse.
Optional:Speakers, microphone, or VR headsets (Oculus or HTC).

[mERv]

I don’t have any good advice. I’m a degenerate who has always bought low end or mid grade laptops on sale from pawn shops. I’m usually in for $700 for x2 machines @$30 a month per subscription.

[Maineac1]

I don’t have any good advice. I’m a degenerate who has always bought low end or mid grade laptops on sale from pawn shops. I’m usually in for $700 for x2 machines @$30 a month per subscription.

Is that you FineTime........? 

me also,  but for the price,  looking for a mild upgrade for the money.   

[The Fugitive]

Is that you FineTime........? 

me also,  but for the price,  looking for a mild upgrade for the money.

For Aces High, pretty much any new "gaming" computer will be more than enough. If on the other hand you are going to be playing other, newer games.... you might need a bit more.

[hazmatt]

Most likely your GPU is the bottleneck. I picked up a RX 570 for $49 on Amazon which is like 8 times the speed of the 9800GTX.

My kids use the RX 570 with a 3470 (almost 14 year old CPU) with 16GB of RAM and their computers are capable of running AH3 at max detail in 1080P and in VR (depending on the headset)

Can you give us the specs on your current rig? I suspect you don't need an entire new one, unless you just want one. In that case most of the pre-built systems I've seen, they seem to come with an overkill CPU and a weak GPU.

This advice is for AH3 only. If you plan to run other stuff like DCS, requirements will be different.

[mERv]

 

For Aces High, pretty much any new "gaming" computer will be more than enough. If on the other hand you are going to be playing other, newer games.... you might need a bit more.

Great point! AH may be your primary game but invest wisely to take advantage of other great games if you so choose in the future.

[mERv]

Is that you FineTime........? 

me also,  but for the price,  looking for a mild upgrade for the money.

Baaaahhhhhh 

 

[AKIron]

It's about money. For under $500 you can get a new machine that will handle AH3 well. Other games/sims not as well.

[haggerty]

A budget pc should have no worse than a 3050, which will handle the game great.

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/ibuypower-element-se-gaming-desktop-pc-intel-core-i5-14400f-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5060-8gb-16gb-ddr5-rgb1tb-nvme-black/J3R75JY82Z/sku/6617835?sb_share_source=PDP&ref=app_pdp&loc=pdp_page

[Eagler]

Your price range would help..

Black Friday sales should help you..

Eagler

[hazmatt]

Another thing of note is I upgraded from a 12100 to a 12700 after a bunch of people telling me that my CPU was the bottleneck although I suspected it was not.  I saw less then 10 fps overall increase in AH3, IL2 and Warthunder.

From what i understand DCS needs a CPU with a bunch of horsepower but most other games do not. A CPU with good single thread performance will give you most of the performance of a more expensive one that would have a bunch of idling cores in many games.

Just something to keep in mind. My advice would be to put most of the money into the GPU as I said earlier because that is usually the bottleneck.

[AKIron]

I bought a Dell refurb a while back for like $151. Has an i7 6700 CPU. I bought it for a specific purpose. Added a little memory, a cheap SSD, and a cheap video card. I just tested it with AHIII DX11. Runs fine. I do not use it for games and would not use it for any other sim.

I added the cheap video card because I control this machine through RDP and I found the internal graphics to be unreliable for this purpose.


DCS needs the CPU for the AI controlled units. A dedicated server offloads that from the clients.

[AKIron]

If you go with a refurb know that Intel gen 8 or later is required to upgrade to Windows 11. You can workaround this however but who knows how reliable that will be. I pushed my refurb i7 6700 to Windows 11 and it seems fine with the latest version.

[uptown]

$719.99 for the cheapest gaming desktop Newegg has. Hold off until Black Friday and Walmart will have even cheaper ones that'll play AcesHigh just fine. 

 A player named Gaboon gave me a full CH fight controls one time to play this game, and I'd like to give back to someone here in his honor. He passed away years ago and he was a good dude. I was going to give this stuff to my son, but he won't bring his rig over so I can upgrade his. I'm tired of fooling with him. 

I have some stuff I'd just give you if ya want..... Gen4 Intel B660 motherboard...CPU included, ram and a 3050 graphics card if you wanna tackle installing in the case you have now.  Watch some YouTube videos and figure it out. If I can figure it out, anyone can.
 Do you know any specs on what you have now?
 
You'd probably need a M.2 Gen4 SSD drive...as I'm keeping mine to add to my upgraded setup, and a CPU fan as the pins are fubar on this one. It would work but not very good.... (It doesn't seal to the CPU good.) Replace pins maybe? It handled DCS just fine on all maps.