You may remember me - some of you at least. I used to post quite frequently and I used to make some decent material!

Unfortunately, my laptop valiantly ran parks at about 10 mb, but the overheating has significantly hampered my ability to play RCT3. (I can't even run the game for 20 minutes in a new sandbox!)

I want to know - what type of desktop should I buy to run the game smoothly.

What do you run RCT3 on and how smoothly does it play?

What kinds of graphics cards, processors, and other components should I look for?

My budget is only about 400 bucks, but I figure if I go low on all of the things I don't need (memory), and go cheap on the monitor and keyboard, I should be able to find a machine that can run RCT3 parks at 10mb.

Thanks in advance!

- Calder City

You would want a system with:

a minimum disk space of 250GB
an processor that’s at least a dual with each half a minimum of 2.4GHz
a minimum of 4GB RAM

and finally, the coupe de grace: a graphics card that’s

ATI(AMD)/Radeon
no older than DDR3
has it’s own on-board RAM which should be a minimum of 2GB
has a memory clock speed at least 1,000MHz
has it’s own CPU, that having a clock speed a minimum of 500MHz
150 or more stream processing units
a low production process rate – ideally below 50
has a shader
has DirectX support

If the card comes with Direct X11 support, DirectX 11 will install with the graphics card driver. One doesn’t have to go find DirectX separately any more.

Any more graphics card than that should come with it’s own cooling.

If at all possible get an Intel processor. 2.4GHz of processor is just that side of adequate. Processors are available now each at 3.4GHz.

You will need plenty of memory both in the graphics card and external to it.

PC fans are cheap so be sure they put one wherever the case will accommodate it.

Laptops and RCT3 are notoriously incompatible – unless the laptop is plugged into a docking station or it was manufactured as big as a brief case. Laptops, by their very nature, always run hot no matter how new or clean they are. Congratulations for moving up from a laptop.

You’ve got your priorities right in choosing inexpensive externals to begin with. One can always budget for quality ones later, or find some second-hand ones at a reasonable quality at a very good price.

Oh, and look to spend about a third to a half of your budget on the graphics card.

Thanks for the help, Flight!

I'm happy to say that I FINALLY will be getting a suitable computer to run RCT3 (much better than my 2 year old Dell laptop that can hardly start up the game anymore).

I am getting the following delivered on Tuesday:

System: AMD FX-4130 3.80GHZ Quad-Core | AMD 760G Chipset | 8GB DDR3 | 1TB HDD | Genuine Windows 8.1 64-bit
Graphics: Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5 DUAL DVI-D/HDMI/DP TRI-X OC Version PCI-Express Graphics Card 11227-00-40G

All displayed on a new 27 inch HD Monitor

So excited! I'm so ready to jump back into the RCT3 scene.

Honestly, an Nvidia graphics card is what you want. The graphics can get so extremely realistic that you don't even need a good coaster for it to be beautiful. Processor and RAM are pretty important too, but with the modern computers today you won't ever have to worry about that.

To me Nvidia is a brand that makes a spectrum of products, just as Radeon makes a spectrum of products. It seems like you can get a good graphics card from each company - it just depends on what you are willing to spend.

That's just how it seems to me. Maybe you could help me out here because I don't know a whole lot about computers.

Hopefully I can build some nice 10 Mb+ parks with this setup.

To me Nvidia is a brand that makes a spectrum of products, just as Radeon makes a spectrum of products. It seems like you can get a good graphics card from each company - it just depends on what you are willing to spend.

That's just how it seems to me. Maybe you could help me out here because I don't know a whole lot about computers.

Hopefully I can build some nice 10 Mb+ parks with this setup.

Ooh!! You are back!! Are you still building in RCT?

EDIT: I saw in the post above that you are "getting a suitable computer to run RCT3".

The reason I suggest Nvidia is because the graphics options are extremely customizable, and you can enable ambient occlusion, something that you couldn't do otherwise.