Worst hardware to play with...

[LePresident]

Today I played ET with my wife's computer, and that was awful.
It's a Apple Mac Mini 2011, i5 CPU, 2 Gb RAM, no video card, Windows 7 installed (dual-boot).

No video card, only intel graphic chipset ? Crap ! As soon as the game is launched, the fans started to run at a madly speed. The i5 CPU seems to struggle a lot

The keyboard ? quite good if you wanna type a letter with an office suite, but too hard to play ET with : the keys mechanism is so hard, most of the time, I had to press twice the same letter

The Apple Mighty Magic Mouse ? worst mouse I played with EVER ! The multi-touch surface is so sensitive that when I scrolled my weapons, a really tiny move and there you are, I scrolled 3 weapons instead of only one.
And there's no physical right-click, so most of the time, I made a left-click instead of a right-click

I managed to play 10 minutes, but it was so horrible, I gave up.
And I don't know if I'll ever play again with that computer...

Edit : clarity and wrong mouse.

[LePresident]

Another piece of crap today : nVidia 8500 GT.

I recently received an old HP m8180 as a abandongift, so I tried it with my games.
It's a early 2007 desktop machine.
The CPU is quite good, it's a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, way much better than the Core 2 Duo P8700 of my ThinkPad.

I tested the CPUs using a video edition in Blender, with a 6 second video, green screen, alpha set, etc...
Rendering results :

• the HP m8180 Quad took 150 seconds,
  
• the ThinkPad W500 Duo took 327 seconds.
  

We can clearly see that the Quad is really faster than the Duo.


But for the GPU, it's another story !!!
It's an old nVidia 8500 GT.

I tried different games, but no way !

• ET is slow and laggy, almost unplayable.
  
• Silent Hunter III refuses to launch.
  
• Age of Empires III is incredibly slow and laggy, really unplayable.
  

But I can play :

• Populous 3 The Beginning, an 1998 game, hurray !
  
• PokerStars, ok, but that's not really a powerful game, right ?