What laptop should I get for Civ 5?

B-29 Bomber · Sep 14, 2010

To make it objective I'm going to keep out the laptop's brand name and the price. People tend to be a bit bias towards one brand or another and the price for good measure just to make sure.

Spoiler :

I would prefer that 2k Greg would give me an opinion. Nothing against anyone else but since he's at 2k he would have the ear of the firaxis team and therefor would have the most accurate opinion. But I would appreciate any feed back. So nothing against anyone. Oh and to make it interesting(because I'm like that) I will give one dollar for every post that gives a half way decent answer to the best answer.

Edit: Hope that helps.

tokala · Sep 15, 2010

You don't really need to waste all that text on us. The only really important line is this:
Graphics Description: Integrated Graphics

Non of those is suited :lol:

B-29 Bomber · Sep 15, 2010

tokala said:
You don't really need to waste all that text on us. The only really important line is this:
Graphics Description: Integrated Graphics

Non of those is suited

Laugh it up, laughing boy. Don't make me get my spearmen to take down your tanks! It would be helpful to know what I actually need, boy!

bhavv · Sep 15, 2010

A laptop that says '5730' under the graphics description.

Simple as that.

And yes, your OP is a waste of text. No one is going to read any of it.

chaotoroboto · Sep 15, 2010

bhavv said:
A laptop that says '5730' under the graphics description.

Simple as that.

And yes, your OP is a waste of text. No one is going to read any of it.

Or 5650. Civ V won't really need any more than that, and laptops with the 5730 are a little overpriced right now.

I read the whole text but then didn't post because I felt like this is well covered in other threads.

Jubbly · Sep 15, 2010

Jesus Christ, My computer would eat 30 of those laptops. Laptops are not for gaming period, they can't handle the heat from graphics card, they can get up to 80-90 degrees Celsius that's 176-194 degrees Fahrenheit. Buy a desktop. Laptops are for playing flash games, or kids games.

12agnar0k · Sep 15, 2010

The second one would be the best, if you want to do people a favour you could edit your post and put each one into a seperate spolier. This will allow them to view each laptop with a click on the spoiler, and it will take up like no space if you don't want to look at any of them.

bhavv · Sep 15, 2010

chaotoroboto said:
Or 5650. Civ V won't really need any more than that, and laptops with the 5730 are a little overpriced right now.

I dont really know much about Laptop specs, but that one should also be fine, or an Nvidia 335 or better.

Zhahz · Sep 15, 2010

Jubbly said:
Jesus Christ, My computer would eat 30 of those laptops. Laptops are not for gaming period, they can't handle the heat from graphics card, they can get up to 80-90 degrees Celsius that's 176-194 degrees Fahrenheit. Buy a desktop. Laptops are for playing flash games, or kids games.

Some people have really good reasons for wanting a laptop but I agree in principle.

I would never want to game full time on a laptop. It's just not civilized.

Once you've hooked up a real monitor, real keyboard, and real pointing device (aka, mouse), then you're basically gaming on a limited and weaker mocked up desktop!

A year or two from now when you buy your next game and everything about your laptop is fine - except the graphics capacity, you're kinda screwed. I build a new PC every 2-3 years and usually upgrade my video card once or twice between each build. My wife loves it! Heck, I just built a new PC a few months ago and already want to upgrade my video card and I have ZERO reason to do so, it's just a compulsion /twitch. Surely some good would come of it. Even without that excess, the idea is that you can often extend the life of a gaming desktop by just upgrading your graphics and maintain a quality rig. Or even moreso, you have the potential to upgrade. With laptops you're usually locked in and/or dealing with a lot of screwy integrated parts. Laptops usually run a lot of management/monitoring/other peripheral software too that you can't really safely disable - sucking up resources.

Lastly, I think it's crazy to say "I'm buying/building a machine to play XXX." You should always build/buy the beefiest rig you can when you buy, IMO, because you never know when a patch or expansion will suddenly jack up the sys reqs on your favorite game, and you never know if some other slightly beefier game will come out that you really want. Don't limit yourself with minimums. Go for all you can when you go for it. PCs and laptops are expensive enough that spending an extra 1-200 up front can greatly extend the useful "life" of the PC. It's usually a good investment and beats being utterly crushed a few years later when your unupgradeable laptop is just barely too weak to run some new game you want.

B-29 Bomber · Sep 15, 2010

Jubbly said:
Jesus Christ, My computer would eat 30 of those laptops. Laptops are not for gaming period, they can't handle the heat from graphics card, they can get up to 80-90 degrees Celsius that's 176-194 degrees Fahrenheit. Buy a desktop. Laptops are for playing flash games, or kids games.

They said that civ 5 would be able to be on a laptop and I've seen someone play command and conquer on a laptop and that's worse than any civ game could ever be. also I have a desktop. I just want something on the go.

B-29 Bomber · Sep 15, 2010

Zhahz said:
Some people have really good reasons for wanting a laptop but I agree in principle.

I would never want to game full time on a laptop. It's just not civilized.

Once you've hooked up a real monitor, real keyboard, and real pointing device (aka, mouse), then you're basically gaming on a limited and weaker mocked up desktop!

A year or two from now when you buy your next game and everything about your laptop is fine - except the graphics capacity, you're kinda screwed. I build a new PC every 2-3 years and usually upgrade my video card once or twice between each build. My wife loves it! Heck, I just built a new PC a few months ago and already want to upgrade my video card and I have ZERO reason to do so, it's just a compulsion /twitch. Surely some good would come of it. Even without that excess, the idea is that you can often extend the life of a gaming desktop by just upgrading your graphics and maintain a quality rig. Or even moreso, you have the potential to upgrade. With laptops you're usually locked in and/or dealing with a lot of screwy integrated parts. Laptops usually run a lot of management/monitoring/other peripheral software too that you can't really safely disable - sucking up resources.

Lastly, I think it's crazy to say "I'm buying/building a machine to play XXX." You should always build/buy the beefiest rig you can when you buy, IMO, because you never know when a patch or expansion will suddenly jack up the sys reqs on your favorite game, and you never know if some other slightly beefier game will come out that you really want. Don't limit yourself with minimums. Go for all you can when you go for it. PCs and laptops are expensive enough that spending an extra 1-200 up front can greatly extend the useful "life" of the PC. It's usually a good investment and beats being utterly crushed a few years later when your unupgradeable laptop is just barely too weak to run some new game you want.

Yeah but I'm limited by price. My max I can spend is 600 dollars.

chaotoroboto · Sep 15, 2010

Here's the deal: Civ V will run on laptops.

While it will scale well graphically on more impressive computers, the minimum specs should provide everything except for some of the flashier graphics. The dual-core is likely a requirement more for the AI programming than for graphics abilities. Otherwise, all of the specifications are REALLY LOW. A recent graphics card, a recent chip, default levels of RAM.

When I recommended a radeon 5650, my point was that it's going to be a graphics card that will handle ALMOST (but not quite) ALL of the graphics that 5 can through at it. It will scale well and run similar games at decent levels of performance, and it's available in computers that cost less that $700.

As an aside, who wants a computer that they can't take with them? Desktops were great in the 90's, but nowadays...

Anyway, B29, I wouldn't be worried about any new, $600+ laptop being able to run Civ 5. I'd make sure I was a fan of the physical build quality, the keyboard layout, and size/layout, but the specs will carry you fine. If I was worried about anything, I'd be extremely iffy on buying a new computer with only 2 gigs of RAM. Acer has good looking, well spec'ed notebooks in a variety of screen sizes running the radeon 5650 for $650 and up on newegg.

EDIT: $600? Can you squeeze it up to $650? If so, then this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115796

If not, then one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115848
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114909
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114937

I like Acers better than other computers at the same price, they always have the best price/performance ratio and decent build quality. Asus and Sony have the best build quality, but you pay for it with lower-end chips and a higher price tag.

Some people in my classes have Toshiba's, they're not real impressive but those two models are well spec'ed for the price.

B-29 Bomber · Sep 15, 2010

bhavv said:
A laptop that says '5730' under the graphics description.

Simple as that.

And yes, your OP is a waste of text. No one is going to read any of it.

But what does it mean? Explain it as though I have no idea what your talking about. I simply copy/pasted. I did not know what I needed.

tokala · Sep 15, 2010

B-29 Bomber said:
But what does it mean? Explain it as though I have no idea what your talking about. I simply copy/pasted. I did not know what I needed.

If you do not care for wasting lots of time learning about the intricacies of computer hardware, the most efficient way of shopping for a new computer is asking some guys who do.
Specify what you intend to do with it (playing Civ5, check) and how much money you want to spend ($600, check). After the general hubbub has died down (will probably not take long in this case) usually things will narrow down to very few choices. Those you might want to countercheck on some computer hardware web site (http://www.notebookcheck.net is probably most useful for laptops) and maybe check customers comments on the sites of the big vendors (amazon, newegg).

To throw my opinion into the fray, if you want to do any kind of gaming on it, any integrated video card is a bad idea. Even if you get a better processor into the deal this way. Processor (CPU) power these days is almost in no cases the factor limiting gaming performance, graphics card (GPU) processing power is.
To get a perspective: Apart from (ultra-)compact notebooks, the performance difference between entry-level and high-end mobile CPUs is about a factor of 2. For GPUs it's more like a factor of 20 .
Especially on a sub-$1000 notebook you will want the best possible GPU that fits into your budget. In this case that would be the ATI/AMD Radeon mobility HD 5650 or 5730, those two are essentially identical. From the gazillion notebooks at newegg this boils your choice down to
that one,
which will be running Civ5 just fine on medium to high settings.

If you don't mind your laptop on the heavy and bulky side, another $50 will get you a better CPU, though the GPU will have to work harder on the bigger display. Civ5 might be one of the few games where you actually will be able to notice the difference between those two CPUs, as in: late-game turns might take 15 instead of 20 seconds

bhavv · Sep 15, 2010

B-29 Bomber said:
But what does it mean? Explain it as though I have no idea what your talking about. I simply copy/pasted. I did not know what I needed.

You need a graphics card to play games.

Simple? ost laptops come with rubbish integrated graphics that are suitable for web browsing and multimedia use, but will not run games very well. To play games on a laptop, you need a decent mobile range graphics card.

To be honest, I really dont think you will find a suitable laptop for $600, though i may be completely wrong as my knowledge on laptops began developing since everyone started typing laptop specs to ask if they will be able to play Civ 5

Ganja · Sep 15, 2010

Go over to this site http://forum.notebookreview.com/

I am sure they will be able to advise you.

chaotoroboto · Sep 16, 2010

I have made a thread for you, B-29 and everyone else in your situation. My ultimate recommendations for you are exactly the same as tokala's.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=379631

A Graphics Card is a chip on you computer that does certain specific tasks for which it is specialized. The two most prominent are to calculate the 3d graphics common to gaming, and to send a signal out to control your monitor. Another use that's becoming more prominent is streaming video. The simplest chips do nothing but send the signal out to the monitor. Because all computational tasks require memory, most low end chips have access to the main system RAM, the 2, 3, or 4 GB listed on the computer's specs. The industry term for this is an "Integrated Graphics Card." When they use this RAM, the computer no longer has access to it, and so different parts of your computer are competing with each other, slowing the performance of everything. As a speci on models, you'll usually see this referred to as "Intel GMA" or "Radeon 3200 or 4225".

More advanced graphics chips have their own, specialized memory pools to draw from. This makes controlling the signal to the monitor go faster and smoother while letting the CPU have full access to the system RAM. This dedicated RAM means that the chip gets called a "Dedicated Graphics Card." The real benefit is that these chips are basically super-specialized CPUs in their own rights, but only any good at doing the types of calculations required for 3d graphics. Newer ones also have special instructions designed to make streaming video work better. Because of this, your graphics and systems performance are WAY higher on a dedicated video card. The Radeon 5650 is currently at the best price/performance ratio of the newest cards that enhance 3d and streaming video. Higher numbers than 5650 are even better, but more expensive.

Hope that answers your question about that part.

dannythefool · Sep 16, 2010

Just make sure none of these terms appear in the description of its graphics capabilities:

Integrated
Mobile
M (trailing M in a chipset name)
Intel

stealth_nsk · Sep 16, 2010

dannythefool said:
Just make sure none of these terms appear in the description of its graphics capabilities:

Integrated

Mobile

M (trailing M in a chipset name)

Intel

Mobile is ok, they are only slightly less powerfull than full versions.
My 8600M is able to run Mass Effect 2 with quite good settings.

dannythefool · Sep 16, 2010

stealth_nsk said:
Mobile is ok, they are only slightly less powerfull than full versions.
My 8600M is able to run Mass Effect 2 with quite good settings.

They run some games well and there are high end mobile chips too, but in the $600 range of laptops you're more likely to end up with crap.

What laptop should I get for Civ 5?

Prince

Emperor

Prince

Glorious World Dictator

Warlord

Chieftain

Emperor

Glorious World Dictator

PC Gamer

Prince

Prince

Warlord

Prince

Emperor

Glorious World Dictator

Chieftain

Warlord

King

Deity

King

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