Civ 5 Walmart Bundle

[pantherhawk]

Walmart has a computer on its website that is bundled with Civ 5 for $620. My question is if this computer meets minimum or recommended specs. It is an AMD Athlon II x4 630 with a NVidia GeForce G210 card.

The bundle can be seen here: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Civilization-V-PC-Gaming-Bundle/15128055#Specifications

The actual computer specs are here: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/Desc...e_id=15128055&component_id=2&item_id=14089720

I'd like to get a computer that meets recommended specs for cheapest price.

 

[The_J]

If i see it right, then the graphics card does not meet the minimum requirements .

 

[tokala]

While that video card is about as bad as a dedicated one can get, it should be fast enough to handle Civ5 on min settings.

But if you are looking for something that will run Civ5 with reasonable good graphics quality, you should not get a video card below a ATI/AMD HD5570 or a nVidia GT430.

Looking at the prices for retail cards, HD5670 (65$) GTS450 (100$) and GTX460 (140$) are sensible choices for Civ5.

Prebuild systems tend to be rather weak on the video card side, so you should either build a system from scratch or get a custom build system if you are looking for a cost efficient computer.

 

[Maniacal]

Or at the very least just buy a new card, decent ones like the GTX 460 are pretty decently priced.

 

[pantherhawk]

Thanks for the info. I read on the 2k forums that Civ 5 was built to go best with i3/i5, and thought this Walmart AMD Athlon x4 would be equivalent, but guess not. It also said in that thread that the integrated graphics in an i3/i5 would be good enuff, but also guess that's not true.

I'm just going to try to get the cheapest i5 I can find (while still meeting recommended requirements) and put a graphics card in there, don't want to pay more than US$750 tho. Other than processor and graphics card, there is nothing else realistically to worry about? Read something about a power supply or something in another thread.

 

[tokala]

First of all, forget about the official "recommeded requirements"
The experience here has shown them to be pretty misleading, to say the least.

For hardware comparisons you can look up the articles linked here.

If Civ5 is the most demanding application you will run on your computer, a 3GHz+ i3 is really all you need. The integrated graphics on those is "good enough" to run Civ5, but only on low settings.
Any i3/5/7 will give almost identical turn times in Civ5, if you compare CPUs with the same clockspeed.

AMD Phenom CPUs will be slower clock for clock, but not by that much, though the Athlon CPUs will lag behind a bit more. On the plus side, you can build really cheap AMD systems which perform still reasonably well.

Ultra-cheap computers like cyberpower/ibuypower tend to come with really crappy PSUs, so upgrading those with a powerful video card will be a bit risky.

More than 2GB RAM is not strictly necessary, but as RAM is cheap, 3 or 4 GB are a good idea.

That one is pretty much as cheap as an i3 system gets, but the video card and PSU are rubbish.
Add in a decent PSU and video card and you get a pretty fast machine for $750