Battlefield 3 - Help and Hardware Information
I started this post to help keep everyone informed with upgrade and Hardware support information that will allow clan members to play BF3. BF3 is now only 4 months from being available (10/25/2011), so this should give most of our clan members time to select and purchase whatever hardware upgrades they may need!
Electronic Arts (EA.com) has no official minimum or recommended hardware specification, but officials there keep promoting users to use whatever it takes to play Bad Company 2 at reasonable resolutions and frame rates above 60+FPS. They have also posted an unofficial minimum and recommended settings which I also have adjusted and listed on this page.
BF3 uses an upgraded Frostbite 2.0 Engine, a new Destruction 3.0 Engine, hardware supported extreme Tessillisation and new 128 player maps. Between the new much larger 128 player maps, the Destruction 3.0 engine, Graphics Improvements, and the Tessillisation, I personally believe any hardware playing Bad Company 2 right now will see about a 20-35 FPS drop in performance with similar settings in BF3. Armed with this information I値l list which nVidia and AMD/ATI cards will play and at what general levels they are likely to play at. I知 only going to list cards that can currently play Bad Company 2 at least 60 FPS now on a mix of High and Medium settings as these cards are likely to play BF3 on the same settings and still maintain frame rates above 30 fps. Since frame rate can be subjective, I知 stating these frames as rates when a player in the game is actually in vehicles and fighting or is fighting with a large number infantry as these are the conditions on BC2 that create the lowest playable frame rates. I値l also recommend some processor upgrades for older Intel Socket 775 AMD AM2/AM3 motherboards as EA痴 minimum recommended processor hardware is dual cores! I値l only list a single Intel or AMD low cost high power dual core that will be capable of playing. The rest of the recommended CPU痴 listed will be quad cores.
Most recent information from EA directly from their official forums: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/5411136.page Minimum "low End" System Requirements (Big Dog Performance Adjusted 40+ FPS):These upgrades are for members that allready have older Socket 775 or AM2/AM3 motherboards and want to do minimum cost upgrades.
Processor: (Intel E5800 3.2Ghz or higher, AMD Athlon x2 260 3.2Ghz or higher)
Memory: 2 GB DDR2 / 4GB for 64Bit systems
Hard Drive: 15 GB for Digital Version, 10 GB for Disc Version
Video Memory: 512 MB (nVidia GTX260 or higher, AMD/ATI HD 4850 or higher)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 10
Keyboard and Mouse
DVD Rom Drive
Operating System: Vista 32/64 Bit or Windows 7 32/64 bit
Hardware Links:
Intel E5800 3.2 Ghz CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116385&cm_re=e5800-_-19-116-385-_-ProductAMD Athlon x2 260 3.2 Ghz CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103873&cm_re=x2_260-_-19-103-873-_-ProductnVidia GTX260 GPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/EVGA-Nvidia-GTX260-Core-216-USED-Graphics-Card-PCI-X16-/180685976468?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item2a11b93394AMD/ATI 4850 GPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ATI-Sapphire-HD4850-HD-4850-GDDR3-512MB-PCIe-Video-Card-/250829236341?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item3a66966875*NOTE: above upgrades require at least a 550 Watt power supply! I reccommend the 630 Watt unit listed below.
Recommended "Midrange" System Requirements (Big Dog Performance Adjusted 50+ FPS):
Processor: (Intel Q6600 2.4Ghz or higher, AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz or higher)
Memory: 4+ GB DDR3
Hard Drive: 15 GB for Digital Version, 10 GB for Disc Version
Video Memory: 512 MB (nVidia GTX285 or higher, AMD/ATI HD 5850 or higher)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 11
Keyboard and Mouse
DVD Rom Drive
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit
Hardware Links:
Intel Q6600 2.4Ghz Quad Core CPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-Core-2-Quad-Q6600-SLACR-2-40GHz-8M-1066-CPU-/110707295119?pt=CPUs&hash=item19c6ab438fAMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103940&cm_re=x4_925-_-19-103-940-_-ProductnVidia GTX285 GPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/XFX-GeForce-GTX285-BLACK-EDITION-Video-Card-NVIDIA-SLI-/170660750145?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item27bc2c6341AMD/ATI HD 5850 GPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ATI-Radeon-HD-5850-ASUS-EAH5850-/330582243586?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item4cf83cb902*NOTE: above upgrades require at least a 730 Watt power supply!
Recommended "High Performance" System Requirements (Big Dog Performance Adjusted 65+ FPS):
Processor: (Intel Core i5-2500k 3.3Ghz or higher, AMD Phenom II X6 1075T Thuban 3.0GHz or higher)
Memory: 4+ GB DDR3
Hard Drive: 15 GB for Digital Version, 10 GB for Disc Version
Video Memory: 512 MB (nVidia GTX295 or higher, AMD/ATI HD 5870 or higher)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 11
Keyboard and Mouse
DVD Rom Drive
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit
Hardware Links:
Inet Core i5-2500k 3.3Ghz:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115072&cm_re=2500k-_-19-115-072-_-ProductAMD Phenom II X6 1075T Thuban 3.0GHz:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103858nVidia GTX295 GPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/XFX-NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-295-/110706623684?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item19c6a104c4AMD/ATI HD 5870 GPU:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ATI-RADEON-HD-5870-1-GB-GDDR5-EYEFINITY-VIDEO-CARD-/140569656796?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item20ba9abddc*NOTE: above upgrades require at least a 730 Watt power supply!
Other Recommended Performance Hardware:
Since these upgrades may require a replacement power supply and/or a better CPU heatsink for overclocking and additional hardware power.
Power Supplies:
#1 630 Watts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152035#2 730 Watts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152036#3 850 Watts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182072#4 950 Watts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817159072#5 1050 Watts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121070Overclocking CPU Heatsinks:
Cooler #1 (Good):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233088Cooler #2 (Great):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118046Cooler #3 (Amazing)*:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835154014&cm_re=Tuniq-_-35-154-014-_-Product*Cooler #3 may not clear the inside of the side cover on some cases and some Micro ATX and Mid-Tower cases will not work with thier sides on.
*NOTE: CPU Overclocking, High End Video Cards, Extra Memory (Over 4Gig) and/or Muliple RAID Hard Drives may require a power supply of 850 Watts or higher!
*NOTE: Enhanced Windows and Gaming Performance can be configured with multiple hard drives and/or single or multiple SSD drives, improving Windows, Games, Game Maps and Application load times!
*NOTE: If you would like to configure CPU/GPU Overclocking, RAID Performance Disk Drives or SSDs, SLI or Crossfire Video and would like some help, join TeamSpeak 3 and talk with me!
P.S. I tried my best to find the most cost effective parts I could.
Tue Jun 28, 2011 10:34 am