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Cheapest machine to play EVE on

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Ugliot
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#1 - 2014-06-23 01:49:15 UTC
I'll be spending the summer overseas, need something cheap and cheerful to play EVE on. My laptop is too old (and the screen is really small) so I think it will involve using a flatscreen TV as a monitor. Would one of those little Raspberry PI things work? I don't need a great frame rate or resolution or anything.... just no freeze ups or disconnects....

So, for stability, portability and cheapness, what would you guys recommend?
Kaarous Aldurald
Black Hydra Consortium.
#2 - 2014-06-23 02:05:21 UTC
Atari 2600.

All joking aside, EVE can run one client on pretty much anything with even semi modern hardware. The specs are incredibly low, I have seen flash games with a higher memory requirement.

"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws."

One of ours, ten of theirs.

Best Meltdown Ever.
ashley Eoner
#3 - 2014-06-23 02:13:26 UTC
Ugliot wrote:
I'll be spending the summer overseas, need something cheap and cheerful to play EVE on. My laptop is too old (and the screen is really small) so I think it will involve using a flatscreen TV as a monitor. Would one of those little Raspberry PI things work? I don't need a great frame rate or resolution or anything.... just no freeze ups or disconnects....

So, for stability, portability and cheapness, what would you guys recommend?

Anything with a dual core and shader 3.0 support basically. Probably would run on a single core even.
Loraine Gess
Confedeferate Union of Tax Legalists
#4 - 2014-06-23 02:16:35 UTC
Pretty much any machine made after 2000 will work just fine. Scavenge one from your garage or the local dump. That ****'s full of heavy metal pollutants anyway, much better that it be used to play EVE.
DownTwisTeD
Doomheim
#5 - 2014-06-23 02:23:39 UTC
amd athlon x2 core with 8g hyper ram ati 6970 on a msi mainboard case in around 400 dollars if you by the ati card secound hand.
Jerry Blavat
Doomheim
#6 - 2014-06-23 03:39:53 UTC
On occasion I use a PC with an AMD Athlon II 635 X4, 4GB Ram and an AMD Radeon 5450 graphics card. This is pedestrian stuff that's several years old. You could find something along those lines cheap in AMD or Intel brands.

As long as there is not a lot of ships going at it, you'll be find running with medium graphics modes.
Alexei Stryker
Council of Stellar Erections
#7 - 2014-06-23 08:07:05 UTC
Ugliot wrote:
Would one of those little Raspberry PI things work?


No. Too slow.
Maxpie
MUSE LLP
#8 - 2014-06-23 15:54:08 UTC
Not sure the details as I'm at work, but I bought a $250 laptop from Micro Center and it plays Eve just fine.

No good deed goes unpunished
DaReaper
Net 7
Cannon.Fodder
#9 - 2014-06-23 15:55:55 UTC
Although on some machines it will run like garbage, you can pretty much run eve on nearly everything. My old laptop, which was a 1st gen i5 with 4gb of ram and a non dedicated graphics card had some issues, it was playable, but not very well.

OMG Comet Mining idea!!! Comet Mining!

Eve For life.
De'Veldrin
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#10 - 2014-06-23 15:58:13 UTC
One thing to not skimp on is the video hardware - the GPU in my laptop constantly overheats and crashes on me when I get involved in anything larger than a four man fight (even with the settings on everything turned to off or low).

I'm looking for a new one (laptop) this summer, thankfully.

De'Veldrin's Corollary (to Malcanis' Law): Any idea that seeks to limit the ability of a large nullsec bloc to do something in the name of allowing more small groups into sov null will inevitably make it that much harder for small groups to enter sov null.
Ranzabar
Doomheim
#11 - 2014-06-23 16:20:15 UTC
On low settings and you're just mining or adjusting stuff, Eve works pretty well on just about anything less than 5 years old. Get into Jita and watch it slow to a crawl.

Abide
Tracy Smith
Doomheim
#12 - 2014-06-23 16:25:42 UTC
De'Veldrin wrote:
One thing to not skimp on is the video hardware


This. Try to play EVE on a laptop with integrated graphics and you're going to have a bad time.
Christopher AET
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#13 - 2014-06-23 16:44:58 UTC
Or steal a laptop and do it for free!........you can do that in real life too right?

I drain ducks of their moisture for sustenance.
Caviar Liberta
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#14 - 2014-06-23 17:53:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Caviar Liberta
Check this out.

You might find something there.
Maxpie
MUSE LLP
#15 - 2014-06-23 17:55:30 UTC
Christopher AET wrote:
Or steal a laptop and do it for free!........you can do that in real life too right?



But wouldnt the hipster at Starbucks, from whom you stole the laptop, then get the right to shoot you for 15 minutes?

No good deed goes unpunished
James Amril-Kesh
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#16 - 2014-06-23 19:57:17 UTC  |  Edited by: James Amril-Kesh
DaReaper wrote:
Although on some machines it will run like garbage, you can pretty much run eve on nearly everything. My old laptop, which was a 1st gen i5 with 4gb of ram and a non dedicated graphics card had some issues, it was playable, but not very well.


The integrated graphics was the problem.
1st gen i5 and 4 GB RAM should have no problem with EVE. My laptop is a Core 2 Duo T9800 with a Mobility Radeon HD 4670 and 8 GB RAM. I can play on max textures, shaders, and LOD when alone or in small-medium sized groups (also have drone models and GPU particles off, shadows disabled, HDR off, AA disabled, no post-processing) and still get 40-60 FPS generally.
I can also run two clients at minimum settings fairly well. Never tried a third.

The real issue with this thing is heating - I have my processor set so that it never goes above 80% frequency. Otherwise, it overheats and scales the clock speed so far back to compensate that I'm not even able to open my task manager to kill EVE, much less close it through the escape menu, much less play it.

Enjoying the rain today? ;)
Leoric Firesword
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#17 - 2014-06-23 20:10:40 UTC
it runs just fine on my 7 yr old machine with 2 gigs of ram, nvidia graphics card with 1 gig of ram. so I'd say anything from ~ 2007 on should be able to run it fine.

possibly even one of those cheap computers from wal-mart
Hasikan Miallok
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#18 - 2014-06-23 23:29:56 UTC
James Amril-Kesh wrote:
DaReaper wrote:
Although on some machines it will run like garbage, you can pretty much run eve on nearly everything. My old laptop, which was a 1st gen i5 with 4gb of ram and a non dedicated graphics card had some issues, it was playable, but not very well.


The integrated graphics was the problem.


EVE and the intel integrated graphics never played ball very well.

Intel integrated graphics seems to have a particular hatred of the jump gate animation.
ISD Ezwal
ISD Community Communications Liaisons
ISD Alliance
#19 - 2014-06-23 23:34:16 UTC
A few month's ago I managed to get EvE working on a 9 year old single core laptop with 512 Mb ram and 256 Mb on board video memory running windows XP. One client, everything on low, it managed a whopping 10Fps.
Good enough to update skills, work the market or fly through very quiet systems.

Yes I know, don't use XP. But it was just a proof of concept to show EvE can run on just about anything.
If you don't want/need all the bells and whistle, you can buy second hand gear that is able to run EvE for very little money (or new for a bit more)

ISD Ezwal Community Communication Liaisons (CCLs)
Webvan
All Kill No Skill
#20 - 2014-06-24 00:05:34 UTC
Alexei Stryker wrote:
Ugliot wrote:
Would one of those little Raspberry PI things work?


No. Too slow.


Well, you can overclock it to 1Ggz and with fan and heat sink, then cluster it with other Pi's, but I don't think that the EVE client will run under a Linux server cluster... even under Wine - it would have serious issues I would think. And by the time you build a cluster, provided it would even work, one could go out and buy a bargain laptop or even a windows tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Cheap? Maybe find a used laptop off of ebay... though used can be iffy. Or just a bargain ~$350 laptop out there, new and not a referb. If it has over a 2Ghz processor, you could even go barebones w/o an OS and install Linux and run EVE under Wine. Though it's probably best to just get the Win OS with that, as long as it's not as old as XP.

I'm in it for the money

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