Best Computer for CIV 5

Bresim

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 1, 2011
Messages
7
Hey good people!
Long time Civ Player, First time Civ poster. Love all of the Civ titles. Going to purchase a new computer here in the next month and would like suggestions on what I need to purchase to help me play CIV 5 in the late rounds on huge maps with lots of rivel civs. Currently I have:
HP Pavillion Processor: Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66 Ghz, 2667 MHz, RAM 4GB.
It runs waaaaaay too slow on huge maps...

If there is already an article devoted to this please refer, otherwise any help offered would be appreciated!!!
 
for huge maps you're eventually going to hit the hard limit of 32 bit address space, so to see big improvements you're going to want an SSD hard drive for your os / pagefile.

aside from that any modern hardware will do.
 
Yeah, I have a very good computer as well, but it still lags on huge maps, though not as bad as some i imagine, but like vexing said its due to Civ5 being 32 bit/ your OS possibly being 32 bit (Civ5 being 32 bit is the bigger problem). And I believe that we won't see a 64bit version of civ until the next iteration (Civ6 or whatever comes next) :(
 
Get more ram and a decent video card. I don't think processor speed is that important. I bought my PC a bit over a year ago, and it works great on huge maps. These specs should be a lot cheaper now:
i7 920 2.67ghz
12gb ram
ati radeon 5800 1gb

I have a standard 7200 rpm hard drive, never noticed any slow downs. If you are buying a new PC, look at the current Microsoft promotion where you can get a new 360 (4gb) for free on certain PCs.

If you don't care to get the 360, just sell it on e-bay or craigslist.
 
I have a 10000 rpm drive, and the RAM is limited (civ5 is 32bit) to 4GB, and I have a pretty decent Video card (GTS450), but it still lags for me. Its not bad until you hit the later stages of course.
 
Okay. Same question. I personally don't play Civ. But my boyfriend does and desperately needs a new computer. I'd like to get him something really nice for his Birthday. However, I'm totally illiterate in computers (I own a Mac, I know I know)...Can someone post a link to a great computer or give me a specific name of what I should be looking at. A link would be better. thank you
 
Computer don't really work like that (buy this brand and model, and such). You have to go by the parts. Which means you need to know a bit before hand.

For Civ V, I won't recommend anything less than 4 GB of RAM.

A good processor is important, I'm fond of the Intel Core i5 and i7 line. i5 is cheaper, and i7 is usually faster. There are exceptions to that, but generally i7 is better, and more expensive. Even an i3 (cheaper, weaker) can handle Civ V.

Graphics are important. If you have an i5 or i7, it the computer has integrated graphics (known as HD 3000), the game will work, but it might be slow. You will want a dedicated AMD or NVIDIA card. With graphics, there will be a series of numbers for each model. NVIDIA will have three numbers (670) and AMD will have four (Radeon HD 7950). In either case, the first number is how recent the card is (6 is current for NVIDIA, 7 for AMD Radeon HD). The second number is the quality of the card. In either case, I'd recommend a 5 or more on both those numbers.

That would adequately run Civ V with good settings and a decent framerate.

Edit: Just a warning, parts need to be similar quality. If you get a good graphics card, but a bad processor, the computer will suffer (this is called bottlenecking). So if you're going to go for a better graphics card or processor, you need the rest to be better as well.
 
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