Hi I’m currently playing retail on a MacBook Air that runs retail reasonably well on a mix of high and medium settings. My wife is about to take that over for school so I’m looking at desktops and this one I can get for about $400 at Walmart. I know I can figure out how to upgrade the ram myself but will the rx6400 card handle retail wow well enough? I can’t find much info online about it and if it will only run it at medium to low settings I’ll just save the money for now and play on my 10 year old Alienware laptop that can do that much atleast.
Victus by HP 15L Gaming Desktop TG02-0325m
Windows 11 Home
AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600G (3.9 GHz up to 4.4 GHz , 16 MB L3 cache, 6 cores, 12 threads)
Honestly, that will be your biggest limiting factor. Windows is going to hog a lot of that ram. Probably around 4GB of it, which doesn’t leave much wiggle room for other stuff like gaming.
You can play on slider 1 settings and get 30-60ish fps on some pretty old or weak hardware. I’ve joked about this in other threads, but I used a laptop with a 540m in it until toward the end of BfA I think. I used to do some +90th percentile parses at 25fps in raids lol… Obviously, not everyone is going to be down for that kind of torture though.
Depending on your tech knowhow, you can always upgrade that ram to 16gb for pretty cheap. Probably <$50 USD cheap
Oh and that RX 6400 should probably get you 60fps on mediumish settings. Just keep the draw distances down some, like 3-5ish out of 10. It will probably run the game fine on an overall slider level of 3-4 though.
Thanks for the reply, I’m reasonably sure I can figure out how to add ram I never have but YouTube will see me through I’m sure. I just don’t have much of experience so I didn’t know if that would be the silver bullet or not
A quick search tells me that system’s motherboard only has two RAM sockets (both in use), so you can’t add memory so much as replace the existing memory with higher-capacity DIMMs and put the old memory into a desk drawer. A bit more expensive than adding DIMMs to available empty sockets.
Ahh good point, forgot to mention this part. And definitely try to get two sticks of 8GB. Won’t go into all the details, but it’s usually best to do a pair, rather than a single. Most sites like newegg and amazon have options like 16GB(2x8GB) because they know how common it is for people to want the pair.
As for the installation, it’s pretty simple, just make sure to watch some guides on youtube. Make sure the stick is facing the right way (there’s a little divider notch and the stick is not symmetric) and make 100% sure the lock pins click when you insert the sticks into the board. Most of the time, it will take a seemingly uncomfortable amount more pressure than you think it will, but those lock clips have to click.
Nowdays, it’s just plug and play 99.99% of the time. If you slap some DDR4 3200 ram in, it should work. The first boot afterwards might display some notification or the PC might beep, so watch the screen. It might ask you if you want to reset the BIOS to the defaults, go ahead and do that and when you escape the BIOS(if it made you go into it), make sure it saves the settings and then reboot.
Just make absolute sure that you’re getting DD4 ram and NOT DDR5 ram, since the two use different slot types.
Semi-unrelated question: what’s a “pv”? I can only think of letterism expansions that don’t make sense in context (“photovoltaics”, “persistent volume”).