$500 towards new PC

[King Kalmah]

Operating System:
Windows® 2000/XP/Vista

Processor:
1.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent

Memory:512 MB RAM

Hard Disk Space:1.7 GB Free

CD-ROM Drive :4X Speed

128 MB Video Card w/ DirectX 8 support (pixel & vertex shaders)

DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX® version 9.0c (included) or higher

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Basically my old computer which my friend put together crashed and died.So if anyone knows of any computers that can match that or better for $500.That would help since my older computers would keep my from playing Large map games...I could only handle Standard and Small...I also want to know if there is a PC that is good for BOTH civ and Sc4

I haven't bought a PC for 8 years and have no clue what is the right price...I see laptops for $250 now!

So can someone help me out here...

 

[azbestor]

I don't know how used part's prices are in US, but equivalent of PC, you have described, is worth around 30$ in Poland. For 500$ you should be able to buy some dual core CPU with old, but powerful GFX card.

Case - ~40$ (my current was worth something like that, nothing flashy,you want one with some coling)
PSU - ~60-? $ (don't save on that part, really, check power consumption,when you have decided on rest of the parts and buy one with some power reserve)
Mice & Keyboard - shoot me, I have no idea, basic is around 10-15$, if something better interests you, go for a4tech, cheap and quite good.
Mobo+CPU+Ram - quick look on allegro (polish ebay) and for 200$ you should been able to buy c2d with ram, for bit more some weaker quad core builds shows up. If you have choice between Intel and AMD, check performance of both. I was once quite sure, that Phenom II is better option (power/price), than i7 and was proven wrong here. Stay away from AGP boards, unless you want to stay with 7 years old gfx cards.
GFX - around 200$ remains...Radeon HD6870, then GF560, then Radeon HD5850, then GF460.
I didn't count hd and dvd, but from my experience these parts (and PSU) are salvageable from older machine, or comes really cheap if you need one.

Civ4 works quite good on athlon xp2400 with radeon x1950pro, which is ~200$ worth. SC4 - I take it's SimCity4, should be working on such config as well.

I know finding all these parts for such money will ask for some searching and buying used parts, but it's simply money saving. Good luck.

 

[kiwitt]

The key thing is get a 64bit Windows 7 and 6+ GB of RAM, and mid-level graphics card will be suitable for high settings for Civ IV.

I run giant maps on my 3-year-old PC, with a core i7 920 and HD 4870 (3 generations older - they are at 7xxx now).

It ran Civ V as well.