best desktop for under $300 for civ 5?

I have built quite a few PCs over the years (all AMD) and I have only ever had one AMD CPU be dead out of the box and I have never had one go bad or fail otherwise. I think I also have only had one MB literally go 'up in smoke' the first time out of the box, but I think maybe one has gone bad over time, but can't remember for sure. I have had one power supply, a few network cards, and a couple graphics cards die as well. I also had a bad memory stick, and that is the WORST as it's the hardest to diagnose causing much grief until I did.

The net is building your own PCs can be stressful, but I think you save money over time being able to upgrade in steps and have complete control over the components going into it.

When you can afford it get yourself a Zalman CPU cooler and always have good ventilation in your box. Keeping everything cool will help it last a lot longer. All that ventilation will pull in lots of dust so be sure to clean that out periodically.

In benchmarks for civ5 the i5 always seems to come out top. But the processor is about $100 more than and fx series.
Difficult choice based on price.

qwertyjjj said:

In benchmarks for civ5 the i5 always seems to come out top. But the processor is about $100 more than and fx series.
Difficult choice based on price.

Click to expand...

Only you really know your budget. Remember though, you wouldn't just be buying parts for the present, you'd be buying them for the future as well. If you know you aren't going to be in a good financial situation for the next few years, going with the more expensive option might actually be better: you might be paying $100 more right now, but by getting a CPU that gets outdated much slower, you'll be saving more in the long run by not having to upgrade your CPU as soon as you would an inexpensive one. I still have my Core 2 E8400 from about 7 years ago, and only this year did games start coming out that my machine cannot actually run properly due to my CPU.

qwertyjjj said:

In benchmarks for civ5 the i5 always seems to come out top. But the processor is about $100 more than and fx series.
Difficult choice based on price.

Click to expand...

The problem here is you have a lot of people saying `buy this` and `buy that`.

Like Delnar_Ersike said, YOU now have to decide. I had the impression an i5 was too expensive for you, so don`t go for an i5, get the AMD. As my father would say, "If you can`t afford it, you can`t afford it!"

In other words, don`t try to push further than what you can actually pay.

What all is the computer being used for....would strongly.....strongly....recommend dumping the 1TB drive and getting an SSD instead. 256GB driver under $90 now. The performance of an OS on an SSD over an HDD is miles apart. It may not help Civ particularly but running an OS on a platter drive is just infuriating.

My games live on an SSD, but my OS still lives on a nice reliable platter. I have heard SSDs have a limited amount of 'writes' built in and an OS will chew threw those pretty fast so I don't trust them yet unless I was going to RAID them, but that would get expensive.

wayneb64 said:

My games live on an SSD, but my OS still lives on a nice reliable platter. I have heard SSDs have a limited amount of 'writes' built in and an OS will chew threw those pretty fast so I don't trust them yet unless I was going to RAID them, but that would get expensive.

Click to expand...

With later generation SSDs, that "limited" number of writes is quite big. At a rate of 10 GB written per day, it should last at least 10 years (some last even 70 years). I recommend having your OS on the SSD because the PC will run significantly faster.

z284pwr said:

What all is the computer being used for....would strongly.....strongly....recommend dumping the 1TB drive and getting an SSD instead. 256GB driver under $90 now. The performance of an OS on an SSD over an HDD is miles apart. It may not help Civ particularly but running an OS on a platter drive is just infuriating.

Click to expand...

And here we go with people giving `advice`, but not really considering the op`s main problem - cash.
SSD`s are expensive. 256 is way too small. So he won`t want to go that route. He should stay with a good standard hardrive with plenty of space for now.

claudiupb said:

With later generation SSDs, that "limited" number of writes is quite big. At a rate of 10 GB written per day, it should last at least 10 years (some last even 70 years). I recommend having your OS on the SSD because the PC will run significantly faster.

Click to expand...

I don't deny the speed, but I thought it was the number of writes, not the size of writes. The OS does a ridiculous number of writes and newer SSDs might have higher limits but do they provide a status as to your percentage remaining? If that was available I might consider it the next time I need to install an OS, which hopefully will not be any time soon.

Speaking of costs, something not even mentioned yet is an OS. I would recommend Win 7 64 bit and you used to be able to get a package deal with a CPU, but not sure if they exist or if you can even still buy Win 7 anymore.

Here it is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416806

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM - $100

Purchasing an i5 individually may be something of a sticker shock, but you can buy a prebuilt Dell machine with one for within the OPs new budget (~$600). You can upgrade RAM or add a video card from there. My 1GB video card cost something like $50 when I bought it three years ago, and while it's desperately underpowered, it's enough to run the game.

Delnar_Ersike said:

I still have my Core 2 E8400 from about 7 years ago, and only this year did games start coming out that my machine cannot actually run properly due to my CPU.

Click to expand...

How much RAM do you have in that? I've been worried my machine couldn't handle the added demand created by your mod. It struggles just running the game, though most of its underperformance is due to a weak video card. Seeing as you're running on something that's more or less as antiquated as my own machine, I may need to give your mod a try.

Socratatus said:

SSD`s are expensive. 256 is way too small.

Click to expand...

Too small for what?

I get by using only half a 140GB optical drive. 256GB is probably the smallest SSD drive I would install, just because extra space on an SSD increases its longevity.

wayneb64 said:

Speaking of costs, something not even mentioned yet is an OS. I would recommend Win 7 64 bit and you used to be able to get a package deal with a CPU, but not sure if they exist or if you can even still buy Win 7 anymore.

Here it is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416806

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM - $100

Click to expand...

I was planning on running it on Linux as it works on that now. Either that or install win 7 no licence.

Socratatus said:

And here we go with people giving `advice`, but not really considering the op`s main problem - cash.
SSD`s are expensive. 256 is way too small. So he won`t want to go that route. He should stay with a good standard hardrive with plenty of space for now.

Click to expand...

Hence why I asked what all it is used for. Even still 256 is more space than most people need even all of today's digital hording. Even at a 50gb OS install 200 gb is plenty of storage and why not throw in his extra 300gb drive and 556 gb is plenty.

wayneb64 said:

I don't deny the speed, but I thought it was the number of writes, not the size of writes. The OS does a ridiculous number of writes and newer SSDs might have higher limits but do they provide a status as to your percentage remaining? If that was available I might consider it the next time I need to install an OS, which hopefully will not be any time soon.

Click to expand...

I have one of the first Intel 80gb SSDs which is now about 7 years old and still is a. 96% life remaining. The amount of writes required to reach the life span of an SSD is crazy.
Read this. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead First sectors started going bad after 100 Terabytes of data written. Unless the SSD is written to/from like a data center drive it'll be replaced from being out of date before write failure.

z284pwr said:

The amount of writes required to reach the life span of an SSD is crazy.

Click to expand...

As I've heard it, SSDs and other flash storage constantly shuffles data across the storage device. This is done because the individual memory cells degrade when they're storing data.

Number of writes shouldn't be an issue for an SSD; it's writing even when you're not doing anything.

What will kill an SSD is for it to be at or near full capacity for too long, or unpowered for too long with data on the disk.

wayneb64 said:

I don't deny the speed, but I thought it was the number of writes, not the size of writes. The OS does a ridiculous number of writes and newer SSDs might have higher limits but do they provide a status as to your percentage remaining? If that was available I might consider it the next time I need to install an OS, which hopefully will not be any time soon.

Click to expand...

To simplify things, let's say that each data cell has a guaranteed number of writes. After that, the data in the cell may get corrupted. SSDs and other flash devices use a smart algorithm when writing, so all cells get used. You can't have one cell with 1000 writes and one with 0 writes (statistically it may be possible but it's highly unlikely). This basically means that the amount of data you write on the SSD provides a good estimate of it's lifespan.

Now the bigger the drive, the bigger it's lifespan (because there are more cells). You also need to keep some empty space on the SSD because it helps the firmware to write more efficiently (thus increasing the lifespan of the SSD).

An optimized OS would do the minimum number of reads/writes on drives because it is a very expensive operation (time-wise). There is the problem with the pagefile which acts like an extension to your ram (only it is on the drive) but if you have enough RAM memory (and you probably do, since RAM is very cheap) you can deactivate the pagefile (or move it on a HDD) and greatly reduce the number of reads/writes on the SSD.

The conclusion is that with an OS installed on a 256 (even 128) GB SSD, the danger of reaching the limit number of writes is non existent. You will most likely upgrade your configuration by then, because bigger/better/faster stuff will be on the market.

I always disable my page file as windows still pages everything out very quickly even if you have lots of spare RAM. What I fear and avoid the most is a complete re-install because I have so much time put into getting my system setup and configured. I have a lot of stuff going on as I work and play on the same machine. My machine runs 24/7 and it's really two machines as I have a VM running that is like a whole other OS using the drive. The numbers seem reassuring, but I have heard of someone my friend know who lost their system to an SSD failure. The fact that the SSDs deliberately brick themselves at some unknown point is just to scary to me. My performance OS is perfectly acceptable on my old fashioned hard drives. Maybe I get a second SSD to put my VM on as I can back that up pretty easily. For now having my games on SSD is plenty fast. I rarely reboot so the true performance increase would not offset the fear factor.

Nares said:

$300 buys you a junk laptop capable of little more than word processing and browsing the internet, and some variable amount of hours of streaming movies before it dies. A laptop in general is a terrible choice for a gaming rig, even at obscene prices (ie above $3000).

Click to expand...

Hey, if you do it right you can get a decent used laptop for about $300. There's more to life than Word and Civ, you know. Laptops using Core 2 cpus are pretty capable of doing some development work. Nothing heavy, but not *that* terrible. IMO, gaming on a laptop is still a bad idea, though, simply because it's pretty much GPU bound rather than CPU bound, and that's really where laptop's stumble.

OP, you should save up another couple hundred and then get something a bit better. Just don't skimp out on the motherboard or PSU.

beetle said:

LOL, OP is at double his budget. You can get a new Mac Mini for $500 and never have to deal with Windows again.
http://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

Click to expand...

You can also just install linux and not have to deal with Windows or OSX.

Moderator Action: Two posts in rapid succession by same user merged.