I definitely need to quit renaming this thread.

[Death Eye]

My current one is woefully inadequate. Can't even handle a few really big robots.
Problem: I have about $225 and no idea what is and is not a good processor.
About 3/4 of the desktop computers I can afford from Walmart.com are refurbished ones with Intel dual-core processors with larger L2 caches and sometimes higher clock speeds than my laptop's single-core processor, but I'm almost certain there are a dozen other variables to consider, especially since those are dual-core processors. And that's not even getting into that quad-core one I can almost afford. Or the whole graphical processing issue I have even less understanding of.
This being the internet, I'm sure somebody here knows about all this nonsense, so... help?

[Stove]

I lost you at Dual Core Processor.

[Indigo]

Intel Core 2 Duo? I'm pretty sure those are pretty good. But, are you trying to emulate Gotcha Force? Not sure what you meant by handling a few really big robots, but if you do mean GF and its large transformer borgs lagging you, those things are dang CPU-hogs and $225 is out of question to buy a CPU that can handle them.

Anyway, you should send a few links to what you're planning to buy. It varies by CPU makers, but I think you'll be good with a dual core CPU with around 2.8 GHz. Again, not sure what you're trying to run, but it won't be easy to find something great with only $225.

[Metal]

My laptop is quad core.....

[Death Eye]

Feb 17, 2013 3:48:22 GMT Indigo said:

Intel Core 2 Duo? I'm pretty sure those are pretty good. But, are you trying to emulate Gotcha Force? Not sure what you meant by handling a few really big robots, but if you do mean GF and its large transformer borgs lagging you, those things are dang CPU-hogs and $225 is out of question to buy a CPU that can handle them.

Nah, nothing that insane. (I was hoping that would work, but that's not really what I was concerned with.)
What I am concerned with is Copy Kitty not lagging five levels in. (I'll probably have posted a thread for that game within a minute of this post in case you don't know what I'm talking about.) And running bsnes would also be a nice ability to have.

Anyway, you should send a few links to what you're planning to buy. It varies by CPU makers, but I think you'll be good with a dual core CPU with around 2.8 GHz. Again, not sure what you're trying to run, but it won't be easy to find something great with only $225.

(I'm going to pretend you said "send a few links to what you think would be a good thing to be planning to buy" because I know I know nothing of what I'm looking at and therefore have no plans to buy anything at this point.)
Pretty much any multi-core thing with an equal or greater clock speed than the 2.1GHz of this AMD Sempron SI-42 I have in my laptop. Which happens to be so many things that I'm finding myself overwhelmed trying to compile a series of links. Linking to all of them would be overkill.
But taking into account your recommendation of 2.8GHz, it gets quite a bit more reasonable.
They're all small form factor, but I don't know what to take from that beyond "hey, it's slightly smaller than that one sitting on your floor."
Also, just for the record, I'm pretty sure the one I linked to on the word "it" is the best of them. But if I had any way of knowing with any certainty this thread wouldn't exist in the first place, so yeah.

[Deleted]

Janes is getting a new laptop I will have a I3 prosessor

[Deleted]

i3 is more up to date but it uses 2 cores

[Deleted]

Kari stop googling things

[Death Eye]

Feb 17, 2013 18:24:42 GMT @kari said:

i3 is more up to date but it uses 2 cores

What's more up-to-date doesn't really make a difference here; I can only afford what I can afford, regardless of how current it is.

[Deleted]

i didnt mean anything by it i was just stating a point i did mean to offence sorry i was just saiyng that its a newer version on a dual core

[Death Eye]

Feb 17, 2013 21:03:17 GMT @kari said:

i didnt mean anything by it i was just stating a point i did mean to offence sorry i was just saiyng that its a newer version on a dual core

Never said you did mean anything by it. I was just saying that I can only really afford less recent stuff and therefore don't really have a good reason to concern myself with the cool new technologies. Aside from upgrading purposes, but I know nothing about that anyway.

[Indigo]

You should go with that first one, it's the best by far, assuming you can scrounge up the extra ten dollars. I'm not sure how good the integrated graphics card is, but at least, I'm sure you'd be able to run Copy Kitty, and Gotcha Force better than me with a good graphics card.

[Death Eye]

Feb 17, 2013 21:46:53 GMT Indigo said:

You should go with that first one, it's the best by far, assuming you can scrounge up the extra ten dollars. I'm not sure how good the integrated graphics card is, but at least, I'm sure you'd be able to run Copy Kitty, and Gotcha Force better than me with a good graphics card.

Problem: As far as I can tell this is what it has for graphics (unless it's actually this, but as usual whoever handles Walmart.com doesn't understand the concept of specificity, so all I know is it's an Intel GMA with a 4500 in its name), while this is (allegedly) what I already have somehow. It's a pretty significant downgrade in that regard, apparently. In 3D, at least, if not all-around. So is that internal 3.5" bay I'm seeing in the product details how you upgrade your graphics? Just get a graphics card and put it in there? Because that'll clearly become a necessary thing to do at some point. (Also I know even less about those than I do about CPUs, so that'll also be an issue at some point, but I'll worry about that later.)

[Indigo]

Well, I can't say I know a whole lot about computers, I'm not sure what the bays are. Your current graphics card is better, of course, but the main difference in performance power is in the CPU. That Intel Core 2 Duo is a pretty great processor for the cost, although it's aging a bit. Still, it's better than what I have, and I can run Gotcha Force emulated at 100% speed through the majority of the missions.

You'll want to get a graphics card eventually, which fit into the PCI and PCI Express slots. Preferably express, because PCI is really outdated and the integrated one is probably better than any PCI card. Though I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference it will make. Here's the one I have, just as an example of something decent.

[Metal]

Feb 17, 2013 23:07:47 GMT Indigo said:

Well, I can't say I know a whole lot about computers, I'm not sure what the bays are. Your current graphics card is better, of course, but the main difference in performance power is in the CPU. That Intel Core 2 Duo is a pretty great processor for the cost, although it's aging a bit. Still, it's better than what I have, and I can run Gotcha Force emulated at 100% speed through the majority of the missions.

You'll want to get a graphics card eventually, which fit into the PCI and PCI Express slots. Preferably express, because PCI is really outdated and the integrated one is probably better than any PCI card. Though I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference it will make. Here's the one I have, just as an example of something decent.

a bay is a slot to install a card. Ie a graphics card or sound card. I took a few classes on comp maint in hs, i still remember how to do most of it, but not the terms and numbers for good products. Though most graphics cards now i woukd assume say what hd pixel resolution and frame rates they are capapble of

[Death Eye]

Feb 17, 2013 23:07:47 GMT Indigo said:

Well, I can't say I know a whole lot about computers, I'm not sure what the bays are. Your current graphics card is better, of course, but the main difference in performance power is in the CPU. That Intel Core 2 Duo is a pretty great processor for the cost, although it's aging a bit. Still, it's better than what I have, and I can run Gotcha Force emulated at 100% speed through the majority of the missions.

...I need this computer. I mean, I already did, but this certainly isn't making not having it any more bearable.

You'll want to get a graphics card eventually, which fit into the PCI and PCI Express slots. Preferably express, because PCI is really outdated and the integrated one is probably better than any PCI card. Though I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference it will make. Here's the one I have, just as an example of something decent.

$140 not on sale and that's only decent?
That's... actually not as bad as I expected. Anybody with a full-time job could probably make that in a week.

[Indigo]

Well, graphics cards can get really expensive. I've read ATI graphics cards run faster, and Nvidia is geared for more quality. Still, remember that the one I linked to is just decent. The problem is that as time goes by, so do system requirements on games, but with my E5500 Pentium Dual Core processor and that graphics card, I've been able to run many games on high/medium settings (besides a few very recent games like Hawken and Planetside 2 that I can barely run, but I think they're just poorly optimized too).

The Intel Core Duo processor you're going for is pretty solid overall, so it's better than what I have even beyond the .2 GHz more it has, so it should be a decent gaming computer (again, decent as there's stuff like 5x better now but still very viable, and my opinion on this may or may not be due to my computer being 'horse poop' among computer gaming communities, even if it's been amazingly decent considering emulators run on pure computer power and I can run many modern games with medium or high settings). You probably won't be able to run stuff like GF on an emulator until you get a graphics card, though, but it should be able to run other stuff that isn't so demanding right off the bat. My computer could run Cosmic Break with an integrated graphics card pretty well, so assuming that the integrated card on what you're getting isn't super horrible, running Copy Cat will run easily.

[Death Eye]

Feb 17, 2013 23:33:59 GMT Metal said:

Feb 17, 2013 23:07:47 GMT Indigo said:

Well, I can't say I know a whole lot about computers, I'm not sure what the bays are. Your current graphics card is better, of course, but the main difference in performance power is in the CPU. That Intel Core 2 Duo is a pretty great processor for the cost, although it's aging a bit. Still, it's better than what I have, and I can run Gotcha Force emulated at 100% speed through the majority of the missions.

You'll want to get a graphics card eventually, which fit into the PCI and PCI Express slots. Preferably express, because PCI is really outdated and the integrated one is probably better than any PCI card. Though I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference it will make. Here's the one I have, just as an example of something decent.

a bay is a slot to install a card. Ie a graphics card or sound card. I took a few classes on comp maint in hs, i still remember how to do most of it, but not the terms and numbers for good products. Though most graphics cards now i woukd assume say what hd pixel resolution and frame rates they are capapble of

That sounds slightly off. Mostly because I just checked Wikipedia and it's saying they're "most commonly used to store disk drives." Which makes sense, what with that one computer having a floppy drive and a 3.5" bay.

Feb 18, 2013 4:41:45 GMT Indigo said:

Well, graphics cards can get really expensive. I've read ATI graphics cards run faster, and Nvidia is geared for more quality. Still, remember that the one I linked to is just decent. The problem is that as time goes by, so do system requirements on games, but with my E5500 Pentium Dual Core processor and that graphics card, I've been able to run many games on high/medium settings (besides a few very recent games like Hawken and Planetside 2 that I can barely run, but I think they're just poorly optimized too).

The Intel Core Duo processor you're going for is pretty solid overall, so it's better than what I have even beyond the .2 GHz more it has, so it should be a decent gaming computer (again, decent as there's stuff like 5x better now but still very viable, and my opinion on this may or may not be due to my computer being 'horse poop' among computer gaming communities, even if it's been amazingly decent considering emulators run on pure computer power and I can run many modern games with medium or high settings). You probably won't be able to run stuff like GF on an emulator until you get a graphics card, though, but it should be able to run other stuff that isn't so demanding right off the bat. My computer could run Cosmic Break with an integrated graphics card pretty well, so assuming that the integrated card on what you're getting isn't super horrible, running Copy Cat will run easily.

Well then, looks like I'm going to be negotiating to get somebody in my family with the ability to buy stuff online to buy a computer buying a computer.
...Except I kind of have a shortage of space. Not that's stopped me before or will stop me now, but it is a thing that will be addressed.

Unrelated: this computer here looks like a VCR, and that's awesome. Too bad it has half the maximum RAM, no PS/2 ports, and no noticeable advantages aside from an additional 3.5" bay, an eSATA port, and a DisplayPort.

Actually relevant: This video card's $40. Clearly it has a severe issue. Does it not do 3D or something?

[Indigo]

I'm not entirely sure of just how different it is, but that's a low profile graphics card. Basically, they're smaller, and as such, not as powerful. But also, they need less cooling, and are quieter, and have less power requirements.

But, I wouldn't write it off as a good buy, especially since it seems to have slightly better specs than my GeForce 9800GT... And it's surprisingly cheap. It's probably worth looking into.

[Metal]

Feb 18, 2013 5:56:37 GMT Death Eye said:

Feb 17, 2013 23:33:59 GMT Metal said:

a bay is a slot to install a card. Ie a graphics card or sound card. I took a few classes on comp maint in hs, i still remember how to do most of it, but not the terms and numbers for good products. Though most graphics cards now i woukd assume say what hd pixel resolution and frame rates they are capapble of

That sounds slightly off. Mostly because I just checked Wikipedia and it's saying they're "most commonly used to store disk drives." Which makes sense, what with that one computer having a floppy drive and a 3.5" bay.

Feb 18, 2013 4:41:45 GMT Indigo said:

Well, graphics cards can get really expensive. I've read ATI graphics cards run faster, and Nvidia is geared for more quality. Still, remember that the one I linked to is just decent. The problem is that as time goes by, so do system requirements on games, but with my E5500 Pentium Dual Core processor and that graphics card, I've been able to run many games on high/medium settings (besides a few very recent games like Hawken and Planetside 2 that I can barely run, but I think they're just poorly optimized too).

The Intel Core Duo processor you're going for is pretty solid overall, so it's better than what I have even beyond the .2 GHz more it has, so it should be a decent gaming computer (again, decent as there's stuff like 5x better now but still very viable, and my opinion on this may or may not be due to my computer being 'horse poop' among computer gaming communities, even if it's been amazingly decent considering emulators run on pure computer power and I can run many modern games with medium or high settings). You probably won't be able to run stuff like GF on an emulator until you get a graphics card, though, but it should be able to run other stuff that isn't so demanding right off the bat. My computer could run Cosmic Break with an integrated graphics card pretty well, so assuming that the integrated card on what you're getting isn't super horrible, running Copy Cat will run easily.

Well then, looks like I'm going to be negotiating to get somebody in my family with the ability to buy stuff online to buy a computer buying a computer.
...Except I kind of have a shortage of space. Not that's stopped me before or will stop me now, but it is a thing that will be addressed.

Unrelated: this computer here looks like a VCR, and that's awesome. Too bad it has half the maximum RAM, no PS/2 ports, and no noticeable advantages aside from an additional 3.5" bay, an eSATA port, and a DisplayPort.

Actually relevant: This video card's $40. Clearly it has a severe issue. Does it not do 3D or something?

well there are two different kinds of bays. Empty ones for drives. And one with extra card ports for ram and such that are wired to the motherboard