Got AC running nicely on a very low spec build.

I recently decided to build myself a small mini-itx box to run through the TV so I could free up my main system to leave my full rig set up. I decided to use an Asus AM1i-a board and an Athlon 5350, which is a 2.05ghz quad core with an onboard Radeon HD8400/R3. Finished it off with 8GB Ram and an SSD and stuck into a Zalman case. Already had a 500w PSU lying handy, so the final cost was only £170 for a decent little TV system.

On a whim I thought I'd try throwing some games on the onboard GPU to see if it could actually do anything,

Jet Set Radio ran perfect, although it is a console port capped at 30FPS anyway. Battlefield Bad Company 2 sat around 25fps on the lowest settings. Bit ugly but ran ok. Then I decided to give AC a whirl for a laugh. Turned everything down to the lowest settings, turned off PP and it was running arounf 25FPS-40FPs depending on which view you drove from. Not great but playable for some odd hotlapping here and there with a joypad when I didn't feel like firing up the main rig.

Here's the interesting part, again on a whim I decided to throw a proper gfx card in, even though it's only got a 1X PCI-E slot. Cheap £35 GTX650 from eBay and we were all set. I expected either the card to be equal to or slighty behind the onboard, or at most to see maybe 10FPS boost. Final result at lowest settings - 152FPS.
Started turning some settings up. PP back on, reflections set to static, and it plays at around 82FPS.
Haven't tried any races yet, safe to say I might need to drop the settings back down a bit, but I'm blown away by how well this performs for a cheap build. Looking forward to seeing how the next patch with the FPS improvements will affect it.

 

Before I started upgrading my computer last year I played AC on an AMD 3870K(4 core, integrated AMD6650D GPU) and it was playable on fullHD resolution without PP.

 

Very nice..
My bro recently made himself a "media player" computer for his bedroom as his old one was a big old tower case computer he used to have in his office. It was all very noisy and dusty.. (really it just links to our Nas box which is where we store all of our movies and tv stuff)
£165 all in.. It's a mini ITX running a 2ghz celeron. it uses a Pico power supply and is fitted with 4gb of ram and an 40gb SSD (all it needs to have on it is windows and media player classic) And it is capable of running 4k video, just about from its onboard gfx.

The entire machine has no moving parts what so ever, no HDD, no processor fan (uses heatsink cooling only) and no power supply fans (as its a Pico ) which means it is completely silent.
It takes just under 3 seconds to do full boot to desktop, if he doesnt turn on his tv first the computer will have booted to desktop before he has a picture on screen (tv takes about 5 seconds to post and find an input signal)

It even has the holes for a vesa mount so you can bolt it to the back of a flat screen tv so you never have to worry about where you are gonna have it on your desk..

 

Did more experimenting with this. Got a 1080 for my main rig on Friday, so I had my 970 sitting unused. Had a light OC on the 650, so I whacked AC settings up to full to use as a reference and got 7FPS. Managed to shoehorn the 970 in with about 6 extra cables to get it powered and it runs at around 80FPS. That's with everything maxed. Obviously the card is doing all the heavy lifting, but I would never have expected to even get this kind of of overall performance from a £30 board with a £35 CPU. It's definitely given me an appreciation for mini-itx now.