Trouble with Sims2 Performance - Video Card needed ?

[kjhoffman]

I am trying to get Sims 2 to work on my daughters computer. She has a Dell Dimension 2350 , 1.7gig celeron processor. The performance was very poor and after looking it needed much more RAM. So I just upgraded to 768 Meg SDRAM. Still performance is pretty poor and game is unplayable. I looked up reqt's on Sims site, and looks like with my integrated video chip (Intel 3D ) they recommend a 2Gig processor.
Does anyone have any ideas on either sims 2 performance problem or suitable graphics card I can use (no AGP slot just PCI)

 

[E_Saint]

Check ur RAM

i am guessin u add on ur ram ??? ram have a FSB value ex. PC2700 which is divide by 8 to give u a value of 337 FSB ... tis shd match ur MB and CPU ... if ur daughter PC is on a celeron P4 1.6 ghz .. chances r ur AGP card is not up to mark ... my option is to get a new com ... and some thg to look out for ... get gd PSU 450W(min)+ or ur AGP will not perform ...

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I am trying to get Sims 2 to work on my daughters computer. She has a Dell Dimension 2350 , 1.7gig celeron processor. The performance was very poor and after looking it needed much more RAM. So I just upgraded to 768 Meg SDRAM. Still performance is pretty poor and game is unplayable. I looked up reqt's on Sims site, and looks like with my integrated video chip (Intel 3D ) they recommend a 2Gig processor.
Does anyone have any ideas on either sims 2 performance problem or suitable graphics card I can use (no AGP slot just PCI)

The first thing to do is, of course, lower the graphics settings in the game.

Intel's integrated 3D chips are usually quite slow when compared to typical AGP cards, so I'd say that's the bottleneck. A faster processor probably wouldn't help much as it would still wait for the graphics chip.

Something like Radeon 9250 could work better.