What system for Morrowind

[almoststew1990]

I've got the urge to give Morrowind another stab and I want to put together an "old but not really slow" PC for the job. I've got various Socket 775 PCs that I could use if I wanted to run it at max settings and mod it but I'm going for a high settings 30 fps sort of experience on an old PC.

1)Socket A Athlon XP 1700+ with an AGP slot and 3x DDR RAM

2) Dell (eugh) Socket 478 with a 3.4GHz P4 no HT, AGP slot and 4 DDR RAM slots

3)Slocket 1GHz Coppermine CPU with SDR memory, 512mb. Also has ISA slots which makes it more usable (won't be taken apart so quickly!)

4) I've got a Socket 939 2.2GHz Athlon 64 I think with PCI-E and 4x DDR RAM

5) VIA 800MHz C3 Samuel with PCI heh

For GPUs I have a few sensible candidates - GeForce 4 MX 440 128bit which just won't die; AGP 6600GT, some other MX card. In PCI I have a 7950GT and AMD 8470. In PCI it's just my Voodoo 3 2000.

For RAM I've got enough DDR for 1.5GB in 2 slot boards, 2GB in 3 slot and 2.5GB in 4 slot boards. 512mb of SDR RAM in my 2 slot board.

I'm not sure if want to go Windows 98 or XP for Morrowind too.

 

[Bubo]

This is an interesting take on the desire for a retro experience, i.e. wanting a particular level of horsepower for a specific feel in one game. I'll be honest and say if I was going to set myself up for a retro gaming experience, and I have been procrastinating about doing this for years and years, and have piles of suitable hardware kicking about, it would be to pretty much do what LGR does and have one DOS era PC, one Win 98 era PC and one XP era PC, with the bestish hardware that was available in each era, and go with whatever performance that gives in a given game. I would at least max out the memory on each system and would go for the fastest cpu/mobo combination I have in my pile suitable to each era.

Your hardware list seems to be enough to make a win 98 and a XP machine at least, maybe even a DOS machine with the PCI gpu, though sounds like you may be short on a sound card for a DOS machine. Divvying up the RAM would seem to be the main issue if you did go for more than one machine. Then of course there is the dual boot set up if you want to forget about DOS altogether and just have one. In which case I personally would still go for the most powerful PC I could cobble together which would still be compatible for both OS's.

 

[almoststew1990]

I should probably clarify I used to do that - have a range of systems that were suitable to cover a wide range of games. But now I don't really have the space to have a bunch of PCs set up, and I don't really have the desire to build a whole fleet. I just build what I want when I get the urge. I currently have a Slot 1 450MHz / AWE 32 PC / Voodoo 3 set up for Windows 98 and DOS gaming because I want to play Doom 2, Motorhead, Hogs of War, Midtown Madness.

At the moment I have the urge to play Morrowind but I know the "minimum specs" for Morrowind are just plain lies! so I thought I'd ask the question about what I'd actually need to get a good experience!