Upgrading my PC to play Civ V - is it worth it and what spec do I need?

[RobM77]

My current PC, built in late 2006, is as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo 6600
2Gb RAM (I can't remember the speed, but it was the quickest possible in 2006)
Radeon 1950XTX
XP SP2
DX9

Although most of the games I play are older ones and running on maximum detail with ~70fps (Oblivion, RFactor, GTR2), I've been toying with the idea of upgrading for a while now to improve performance on some more demanding games (e.g. FSX) and make newer DX10+ games possible (e.g. Just Cause 2, and others to come I'm sure). I love Civ V and it's made me think about upgrading very soon.

If I now upgrade the motherboard, CPU and gfx card to get to the absolute top spec PC possible, i.e. if I get the top benchmarking CPU and gfx card, will I be able to play Civ V without waiting ages between turns? I've noticed there are people on these forums with quick Intel i7 CPUs and 6GB of RAM that are reporting 30 second waits between turns, which for me would be completely unacceptable and probably not worth upgrading for.

thanks in advance for any thoughts.

 

[rf900]

I have an Quad Athlon with the 5770, 4gb ram, I would say it takes around 10seconds later game in standard maps waiting for the AI. I may suffer from a similar thing in CivIV that you had to restart the game because it became more slow over time.

Anyway, if you expect to get instant turns by the AI forget about it, it is similar to what they took for CivIV. You could always try the demo with your current computer... I guess what most matters is the CPU depending on map size.

 

[RobM77]

I have an Quad Athlon with the 5770, 4gb ram, I would say it takes around 10seconds later game in standard maps waiting for the AI. I may suffer from a similar thing in CivIV that you had to restart the game because it became more slow over time.

Anyway, if you expect to get instant turns by the AI forget about it, it is similar to what they took for CivIV. You could always try the demo with your current computer... I guess what most matters is the CPU depending on map size.

Thanks. I have the full game already; I pre-ordered it a month ago mindful of the fact that if it didn't run on my old machine I'd keep it till I upgraded. After 3 hours of gameplay it's starting to slow down, although not the turns yet, just the graphic update. Ten seconds is still a rather long time, but I guess if I went for the very latest CPU I could get that down a bit.

I think maybe that my expectations are out of line with what's currently possible. The only other Civ version I had was Civ 1, which I played avidly as a teenager on my Amiga (along with Populous, Megalomania etc). I only got back into gaming four years ago, mainly with flying and driving sims. Therefore I'm really a newbie to this sort of game.

I'm not sure I'd be prepared to wait more than 10 seconds for anything on a computer, other than infrequent actions such as booting it up in the first place, virus scans, initially loading a game, or perhaps encoding video or audio. Based on that, I think I will upgrade, but with a mind on other games. I'll try Civ V on the new PC, but sadly if it I have to count to ten every time I click "next turn" it may just gather dust on a shelf.

 

[warhead66]

Get more ram.. 4 gb should do.. you can already run it with what you have.

Yes.. it is worth it.

 

[tokala]

Ten seconds is still a rather long time, but I guess if I went for the very latest CPU I could get that down a bit.

The emphasize here is "a bit" Buying high-end CPUs is usually very inefficient, as the difference between a $200 and the $1000 one tend to be only a few percent in games. And to make matters worse, the AI turn calculations seem to make no use whatsoever of multiple cores. So for your personal preferences, you should probably get an dual-core i3 or i5 and overclock the heck out of it. For more than just Civ5, the i5-760 looks like a good choice at the moment.
Video cards scale better with price, but for Civ5 there is just no point in buying one of the more expensive ones.