HACKER Q&A
📣 bsldld

Oldest piece of hardware a user can watch YouTube and run Blender?


There are a question recently posted here on HN: "Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?" I want to ask similar question but more specific:

What is the oldest hardware on which I can watch YouTube videos and run Blender?

This will help in enabling education of poor students.


  👤 Farfignoggen Accepted Answer ✓
Blender 2.8 and above needs newer hardware and I Know for certain that Under Linux Mint 19.3/Mint 20.0 that on an Intel Arrandale(Mobile Westmere) core i3 that's 1st generation Intel core i series that only Blender 2.79b/earlier will work on my Toshiba Satellite c655 s5061.

Now Blender 2.8 will install and Run on my Intel Sandy Bridge core i series generation based laptops and on my HP Probook 4540s laptop(Ivy Bridge core i7 3632QM) laptop under Linux Mint but under Windows Blender 2.8 will not run stable on Ivy Bridge/earlier laptops when they are Booted into Windows 7.

Linux has better OpenGL support on Older hardware than Windows 7 and really none of the Intel graphics supports Blender 3D's GPU accelerated Cycles rendering so Blender 3d will Default to CPU based Cycles rendering(Takes forever compared to GPU accelerated cycles rendering)


👤 theandrewbailey
Anything with at least a Core 2 Duo and 2 GB RAM should be able to do that. You might be able to get away with something older, but I'd be hesitant with a single core CPU or less RAM.

So 2006 era? Make sure you blow the dust out.


👤 runawaybottle
Look up the system requirements for games released <= 2008, that should be enough.

Sys requirements for Half Life 2:

OS: Windows® 7 (32/64-bit)/Vista/XP/8.1.

Processor: AMD Athlon 2.4 GHz or Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.80 GHz.

Memory: 1 GB RAM.

Graphics: DirectX® 8.1 level Graphics Card (Requires support for SSE) DirectX: Version 8.1. (GeForce 4?)

Network: Broadband Internet connection.

Storage: 7 GB available space.