Upgrade suggestions

Alvirdimus

Hello!

First post here so please don't hit me on the head

I'm running ESO on two PCs and both of them are rather dated but work fairly well for day-to-day stuff so I'd like to find out what would be my upgrade options if I'd like to have a smoother gaming experience but didn't want to toss my old machine to the dumpster just yet.

One is a desktop PC I bought in 2011 (or was it 2012?) tailored to Skyrim specs, and since then it only got a new HDD. ESO performance is rather poor on this one, turning almost into a slideshow when moving in the cities among many players and only running more or less well in desolate areas. Sometimes the graphics card also gets overheated, which causes the network adapter to stop functioning (don't ask me how) until a full reboot. The current specs are:

Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 970 3.50 Ghz
System RAM: 4GB
Motherboard: ASRock 870 Extreme3 R2.0
Hard Disk: Toshiba DT01ACA050 500 GB SATA 6Gb/s
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550Ti

Another is a HP ProBook 4540s laptop from 2012, last year HDD got corrupted so replaced it with SSD, since then runs super fast for most everything except gaming. Runs ESO better than the desktop PC but the lag is noticeable when precision is required, i.e. lockpicking. Specs:

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50 GHz
System RAM: 4GB
Hard Disk: Samsung SSD 750 EVO 250GB SATAIII
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7650M

So please, let me hear your suggestions

(And yes, I've seen the official system requirements)

Nestor

Take the desktop to 8 or even 16 GB Ram, it's cheap. Put a newer video card in it minding if the PSU can handle it. Finally get an SSD. Nice thing is they come with software to clone your current drive so no need to reinstall, and it takes about 5 minutes to do that.

Loc2262

Things like lockpicking will probably always be laggy. They even are for me on my rather okay Core i5 6600 system. The game client is just coded really terribly.

I agree with Nestor that getting a new gfx card and an SSD should be okay for ESO. It's not too harsh on the CPU I think, your Phenom II should be okay. And yes, you definitely want more RAM. ESO uses 2-3 GB on my 16 G system.

UnseenCat

I'll second RAM and GPU upgrades. Give the computer plenty of memory to do its inevitable background tasks without crowding the game in memory. 8GB is adequate, but if you do things like have a browser open in the background for reference, go with 16GB -- trust me.

See if you can find a nice used GTX 960 or 970 card for a GPU. Lots of people are jumping on the GTX 10xx series; so there ought to be some decent secondhand cards out there. I built a system in late 2016 and put in a GTX 960 because I didn't want to spend a lot with the 10xx series just around the corner. ESO ran just fine on a 960.

If you don't want to spend on a desktop SSD, a high-quality 7200RPM hard drive, like the Western Digital "Black" series is also good.

FPS drops in and around cities is a plague on us all. Even with high-performing computers, there are still stutters. It's a code optimization problem in the game... or lack thereof...

Alvirdimus

Thanks for the suggestions! Any recommendations what to opt for graphics card-wise?

Loc2262 wrote: »

Things like lockpicking will probably always be laggy. They even are for me on my rather okay Core i5 6600 system. The game client is just coded really terribly.

Strange thing is, although the desktop PC runs TES much poorer than the laptop, there's no lag in lockpicking or similar things like precise rotation/targeting...

UPD: @UnseenCat we posted almost simultaneously! Thanks for the GPU suggestion, seems like a good idea