Good thread on /SecondLife for advice on buying an affordable (i.e. around $1000) Windows laptop which runs Second Life with good to great performance, with my favorite recommendation being the Acer Predator Helios 300. Writes "shadoskill", who seems to know his/her stuff:
As long as you run SL with the Nvidia GPU (adding a exe to the auto start list) it will run like a dream.
As a heads up Second life hardware-wise the CPU is most important, then RAM, then GPU.
Since SL can only use 1 CPU core the better the CPU that can do single-threaded tasks the better, the GPU is mainly used for shadows, shaders, and a few other settings.
Caveat emptor and all that! In fact, I'd recommend first going down to Costco or wherever and convincing a salesclerk to let you temporarily install Second Life on a machine you're interested in, and giving it a test run, before actually buying it. (Based on my painful experience of buying a beautiful gaming laptop that ran high-end AAA games beautifully but ran Second Life like crap.)
This "...can only use one CPU core..." is old and wrong.
Monty Linden addressed the issue in the SL Forum. See: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/412986-multi-threaded-client-and-sl-and-sansar/?tab=comments#comment-1679067
A fast CPU is debatably the most important component of the computer. More cores makes for a faster region render. A GPU takes the load off the CPU and frees system memory by supplying video memory. Those using only Intel HD Graphics need more CPU cores and more memory.
Posted by: Nalates Urriah | Monday, February 12, 2018 at 06:09 PM
Frankly, the forum post changes nothing (that matters). It is even spelled out there (less bluntly): In 99% of the time SL runs on one core. So it's vital to have a CPU that can do as much work as possible with one core. That SL uses 2.5 cores after a teleport to a new region, well that's a gimmick for the gallery...
Posted by: Estelle Pienaar | Tuesday, February 13, 2018 at 01:30 AM
What computers run fast and perfectly fine without lagging? HP or a gaming computer?
Posted by: Janay Cunningham | Friday, September 06, 2019 at 02:46 PM