slickrcbd: What do you define as a "potato"? WoW didn't work too great on my circa 2009 Gateway 4200DX with a 2.25ghz quad-core processor, 6gb RAM, ATI Radeon 3450 (now a Radeon 3600), and Win7 about 5 years ago, but it worked. Just with minimal settings.
rtcvb32: A lot of them may qualify pretty high specs as 'a potato'. A problem you get into after a while.
The lowest processors you'd use would likely be 3Mhz 6502 or similar (
8bit machines). But i'd say a '
potato' today is anything 800Mhz or under. All software processing no advanced video. (
Integrated graphics chips may offer fast 2D support but no 3D).
I've been using my 1ghz Dell Optiplex GX110 with 512mb of RAM as the benchmark, although I noticed that after the graphics card died the performance using the integrated video was noticeably degraded. MechCommander 2 (Was
released as freeware by Microsoft, but they removed it from their website because it doesn't work with Windows 10 or I'd give a working link) is really slow where before it was playable on minimum settings.
I figure since the computer is from around 2000, that using "turn of the millennium" was a good benchmark.
Now if only I could recall what some decent PCI graphics cards (NOT AGP or PCI-X, and nothing to do with credit card security) that have drivers for both Windows 98SE and Windows XP were, and what I can find for under $50 including S&H to Chicago so I could replace the dead graphics card.
