System Specs

Walter E Kurtz said:
You contradict yourself by saying that it runs "fine" but you're limited to standard and strategic view. Yeah, wtf man?

The OP wants to play huge by the way.

CPU speed does matter for games that involve simulation. And memory is not a bottleneck. If you're on a really old machine perhaps, but any 2 year old PC has 8GB ram and 2GB GDDR. SSD's make a HUGE difference in general performance, not necessarily for CIV. But loading times in CIV are terrible too by the way.

Finally, a desktop would do everything better for the same price as a laptop. It's a simple fact of economics. If you want to gimp yourself with a tiny screen and lower performance that's your choice though.
Click to expand...

I don't particularly like maps with more civs than standard size, so standard is indeed fine for me.
Strategic view: I actually prefer this when moving units anyway. I only switch to standard for looking at what city is building and religious influence which I don't care as much in late game anyway.

Adding a external monitor has been possible on notebooks for years now. (But I simply bought a notebook with the biggest screen that was available with them at the time)
And USB ports have allowed real mouse & keyboard for some time.

Notebooks also effectively have a built in UPS. (Mine could last an hour or two playing Civ) This is in addition to being much more portable than desk tops. (e.g. you can take it with you on vacation much easier)

8GB RAM will really help late game compared to 4GB.
 
You don't have to tell me that laptops have hdmi and USB ports. If you want to run a 27" 1440p monitor on your laptop more power to you, but it's most likely going to suck fps wise. Besides it's going to set you back another $ 500,- while the monitor would be part of the PC budget to begin with.

I don't care that you find laptops fine, really, it's just that they underperform and/or cost a lot more. In a serious advice thread I find it hilarious that 8/10 people seem to suggest laptops.

Portability is the obvious advantage of a laptop.
 
I took the plunge last summer to buy my first desktop with a budget of £1000 (~$1700). Specs:

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4670K (3.4GHz) 6MB Cache

Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
3GB AMD RADEON™ HD7950 - DVI,HDMI,2 mDP - DX® 11, Eyefinity 4 Capable

Also went for a 120GB SSD drive for Windows and installed CiV on that.

Prior to that I was playing on a dual-core (2.53GHz) i5 laptop with 4GB RAM and 512MB graphics.

To be fair, my old laptop ran CiV on low settings but did struggle on the huge maps and suffered from very long loading times.

Over the months I've found the following:

  • Loading times for maps decreased dramatically (end-game huge map times reduced by around 66%)
  • 'Grey matter'* is still there but it disappears quickly enough to not be an issue (on standard maps it's gone in the blink of an eye, on huge it can take around 1 second)
  • Standard map runs on max settings perfectly, no lag, 60fps at all times
  • Huge map (end-game, all cities/map/civs discovered, 100s of units on map) will run on max settings but there is a noticeable drop in frame rate when scrolling the screen or jumping across the map

*By 'grey matter' I mean the grey sheen you get when you scroll or jump across the map, prior to the land/sea being displayed properly. This was my biggest issue when I was first playing CiV.
 
For anyone thinking about building a gaming PC, I would say, after building two such things within a year, a very good rule of thumb is to spend exactly twice as much on the Graphics Card(s) as you spend on the CPU. Yes, for some games, you need extra CPU power, but 90-95 % of new game titles will work your GPU harder than the CPU.

First build, I spent the same on both -> wasn't happy. Second build, spent 1.5 times as much on GPU -> result was much better but still no bullseye.

If I wanted the best bang for buck today, I would get a 4670k and two GTX770s. On sale of course :) I have now a 4770k and two 760s, and I wish I had taken the other option.
If you must have a single GPU, the 780 Ti is great if a little pricey. And the 290X is good as long as you don't pick a reference card.
For a cheaper alternative, even an i3 CPU will work just fine, and maybe a Radeon 270X to go with that.

Yes, I know these Graphics card options can add up $-wise, but my exact point is if you build a gaming rig, I would like at least 40% of the total build price going to the graphics.
 
TurboJ said:
Yes, for some games, you need extra CPU power, but 90-95 % of new game titles will work your GPU harder than the CPU.
Click to expand...

Agreed.

The lower priced 4 cores are perfect. High clock speed matters though because games run on one main thread dedicated to one core, while other less important tasks like sound and networking are handed to the other cores. Keeping that one main thread running smooth is important. Even if you just want to prevent bottlenecking the gpu's at any give time. Two GTX770's crank out some serious processing power.

It's the whole problem with AMD's line up, too much parallel processing power while single thread performance is king for most applications.
 
Walter E Kurtz said:
It's the whole problem with AMD's line up, too much parallel processing power while single thread performance is king for most applications.
Click to expand...

AMD's assumption is that you will have several applications up and running at the same time. That's actually often the case in an office environment.
(At work I have the following up at the same time: MS Outlook, Skype, a web browser, SoapUI, a web server, and the IDE I'm using to develop. Sometimes I also need MS Word up as well)
Offices have more cash, so AMD caters to them ...
 
joncnunn said:
AMD's assumption is that you will have several applications up and running at the same time. That's actually often the case in an office environment.
(At work I have the following up at the same time: MS Outlook, Skype, a web browser, SoapUI, a web server, and the IDE I'm using to develop. Sometimes I also need MS Word up as well)
Offices have more cash, so AMD caters to them ...
Click to expand...

Sorry but you have no idea what you're talking about. I'll explain why. AMD is getting beat in the server segment, where multicores actually matter. Think about that for a second and look back at your statement.

In 2007 -- in AMD's strongest market (servers) -- it held roughly 15 percent of the market. By 2012 it had less than a third of that total, with 4.4 percent of the market
Click to expand...

http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Soft+Launches+Its+First+ARM+Server+Chips/article34226.htm

Your office apps don't take more than a single or dualcore to run fine. A quadcore with hyperthreading is overkill for anyone not heavily involved in video encoding, distributed computing etc. AMD is not delivering a better experience to you with their octacores. AMD just can't keep up with performance and has no other option than going 'wide' with their design. It's marketing and you're buying it. Another thing is that the modules of an AMD cpu share important resources on the die, making them less powerful clock-per-clock than older generation AMD cpu's even.

In other words, get a cpu with good performance per clock, high frequencies and don't be fooled by the number of cores. This is especially true for gaming like we're discussing in this thread.

I love AMD by the way, it's a shame it has come to this point if you remember the A64 days.
 
My eternal problem with this game...

Favourite settings: huge Earth map, 22 civs

Turn loading time: ~1 minute

:(
 
How much of a difference would Civ 5 BNW with all the expansions etc. run if you upgraded your pc from 8 gigs ram to 16 gigs ram. I have a i-7 intel chip on my mother board. I am not planning on replacing my graphics card. Just Ram. Just installed a new internal hard drive which I hope to see change in load times etc.

Thanks

Brew God
 
brewgod said:
How much of a difference would Civ 5 BNW with all the expansions etc. run if you upgraded your pc from 8 gigs ram to 16 gigs ram.
Click to expand...

Nothing at all.

From my experience the total system load is only about 3-4GB of ram playing a huge map. On smaller maps it's less. You might use a little more than 4GB but you won't fill another 4GB with background apps. Let alone another 12GB.

You will use up to 2GB of ram on your graphics card for huge maps though, so it's worthwile to check that out to prevent pop ups (grey area's on the map loading slowly).

Get a good cooler if you don't have one already, disable hyperthreading and overclock that cpu. Most Intels have about 500Mhz headroom with no voltage increase, and another 500Mhz or so with extra juice. What i7 do you have? I could post a useful link or two. For the slow loading of save games your only option is to get an SSD but this game won't ever load saves in the blink of an eye unfortunately.
 
i7's aren't worth the extra $$ over an i5 if all you're doing is gaming. Almost every game doesn't make use of multiple threads, so the hyperthreading is completely wasted. The best i5 you can afford is going to run the game just fine. Hell, an i3 is going to be able to handle almost all games these days. Processor speed used to be important, but it's been a long time since game performance was capped by that.

As far as video cards, I ran a GTX460 and played this game just fine on everything except the very largest scenarios. That card isn't available anymore, but you can definitely run a good chunk of games on that quality of a card, albeit on slightly lower visual settings than you would on a better card.

You can also build a system that's close enough to the top of the line for way less than 10k now, that you'll never notice the difference. I've got a buddy that spent that much because he likes shiny toys, and his rig doesn't load the game any faster than mine does, which is a very reasonable high end setup - (i5-4670k, 8 gig RAM, GTX 760).

SSD's also really don't speed up games very much. They're nice, don't get me wrong. Going from cold to the Windows login screen in 10 seconds flat is awesome, but you're not going to see your games running any faster.
 
Chum said:
Processor speed used to be important, but it's been a long time since game performance was capped by that.
Click to expand...

Unless you're into strategy games doing real time simulations, like Civ, SupCom, Planetary Annihilation etc. Clockspeed becomes a real factor.

It's pretty awesome that in SupCom thousands of units fire projectiles simulated in real time. Ever play a large game where simspeed dropped to -10? That game could seriously grind to a halt with slow cpu's in the mix. I used to crank an E8600 up to 4,5Ghz back in 2008 / 2009 just for that reason. :)

In Civ the effect of a slow cpu is less dramatic, but the end of turn time can go over a minute. Mutiply that by 100 late game turns and you're not happy. Generally speaking I'd say that 3-3.5Ghz on an i5 / i7 or 4-4.5Ghz on an AMD FX is enough to do the end of turn simulations turn in a good time though. That means stock clockspeed.

You're right that cpu's are generally not the limiting factor for games, getting a 4670k is still the right thing to do though. You will be able to clock it to 4.5Ghz and maintain high performance for 4-5 years on the same platform. That means keeping the same board (changing sockets, boards have become more and more expensive) and ram. All you need to do is upgrade the gpu once every year or two. This way I kepy my socket 1366 W3570 at 4.1Ghz for over 4 years.
 
Walter E Kurtz said:
In Civ the effect of a slow cpu is less dramatic, but the end of turn time can go over a minute. Mutiply that by 100 late game turns and you're not happy. Generally speaking I'd say that 3-3.5Ghz on an i5 / i7 or 4-4.5Ghz on an AMD FX is enough to do the end of turn simulations turn in a good time though. That means stock clockspeed.
Click to expand...

Disagree. Clockspeed is largely e-peen. Mine is at 3.4ghz and it's still very long turn times, which has mostly to do with the animations. Disable the animations and you speed things up. Way easier to do than to bother with overclocking, and you're going to get better results disabling the animations too.

I'm sure overclocking will increase the performance slightly. But I'm 100% convinced it's not going to do a fraction of what just turning on fast combat/movement for the AI's turns will do.
 
My turn times are long even with strategic view and animations off (and I have Intel Core 2 Quad) :c
 
Chum said:
Disagree. Clockspeed is largely e-peen. Mine is at 3.4ghz and it's still very long turn times, which has mostly to do with the animations. Disable the animations and you speed things up. Way easier to do than to bother with overclocking, and you're going to get better results disabling the animations too.
Click to expand...

Disagree with what? I've never timed it, but my end of turn waiting time is not more than seconds and I've not turned "animations" off. I'm not sure what you mean though. I hope you're not talking about enabling quick movement. Of course it's going to take more time watching every individual unit do it's thing.

Play Civ on a lowly clocked older cpu, enable quick movement, and come back. Also you never tried SupCom it seems. Your 3.4Ghz i5 is nothing there.

Like I said for the most part games are about gpu performance, and that's why you overlock your cpu, keep it for five years and upgrade your gpu a few times. For some games it's different. Civ is influenced by cpu clockspeed no matter how you look at it, and people in this thread are reporting huge waiting times for a reason. The thread also started with people recommending laptops. You obviously know something about hardware but not everyone does.
 
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