| Hardware Requirements |
PC-BSD has moderate hardware requirements and commonly uses less resources than its commercial counterparts. Before installing PC-BSD on your computer, please make sure you meet the minimum requirements.
Minimum System Requirements
At a bare minimum, you need to have the following computer hardware in order to install PC-BSD:
- Pentium II or higher
- 512 MB RAM
- 4GB of free hard drive space
- Network card
- Sound card
Recommended System requirements
Note that these are minimums and that the faster your computer hardware, the better your computing experience:
- Pentium 4 or higher
- 1024 MB of RAM
- 20GB of free hard drive space (if you will be installing KDE, GNOME, or lots of software)
- Network card
- Sound card
- 3D accelerated video card (NVIDIA or Intel)
You can never have too much RAM, so install as much as you can afford. To play modern video games, you should use a fast CPU. If you want to create a collection of tunes and movies on your computer, you will want a large hard disk drive which can be internal or external.
Supported 32 bit (i386) Processors
PC-BSD will install on 32-bit systems containing the following processors:
- Intel 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4
- Intel Xeon and Celeron®
- Intel Core 2 Duo
- Am486®, Am5x86®, K5, AMD-K6®
- AMD Athlon, including Athlon-MP, Athlon-XP, Athlon-4, and Athlon Thunderbird
- AMD Duron™
- AMD Élan SC520
- Transmeta Crusoe
- Cyrix
- NexGen
Supported 64 bit Processors
PC-BSD will install on 64-bit systems containing the following processors:
- AMD Athlon™, including 64, XP, 64 X2, FX
- AMD Opteron™
- AMD Sempron
- AMD Turion 64, AMD Turion 64 X2
- all multi-core Intel Xeon™ processors except Sossaman
- single-core Intel Xeon processors Nocona, Irwindale, Potomac, and Cranford
- Intel Pentium®, including M, D, and Extreme Edition
- Intel Core
- Intel Pentium® D
- Intel Pentium 4
- Intel Celeron D
