computer for Civ V

[ProPain]

Being the computer noob I have become, I was wondering what specs a computer (thinking desktop) would need to run Civ V at a decent rate. Also I'd like this pc to still be able to run new, normal games (non FPS that is) games in 3-5 yrs or so.


CPU
I've seen i5/i7 CPU's, I understand i7 is better but is it a big difference?

Graphics cards
I see gaming pc's with 2 graphic cards. Why on god's green earth would I need two graphic cards? Is this a FPS thing or something?

memory
I understand you need 64 bit windows to adress memory above 3-4GB, still I'd expect that not only OS but mainly CPU capabilities would determine if a comp is able to adress that 4+ mem. Is this correct and if so does it matter or are all CPU's 64 bit able these days?

And how much mem do you need anyway?

[Shabbaman]

Originally Posted by ProPain

CPU
I've seen i5/i7 CPU's, I understand i7 is better but is it a big difference?

Sure. It costs more. But AMD is cheaper. Since you are not looking for maximum performance there's no need to pay premium

Originally Posted by ProPain

Graphics cards
I see gaming pc's with 2 graphic cards. Why on god's green earth would I need two graphic cards? Is this a FPS thing or something?

You can couple two cheap graphic cards for better performance. Or two expensive ones to empty your wallet. Pretty useless in both cases.

Originally Posted by ProPain

memory
I understand you need 64 bit windows to adress memory above 3-4GB, still I'd expect that not only OS but mainly CPU capabilities would determine if a comp is able to adress that 4+ mem. Is this correct and if so does it matter or are all CPU's 64 bit able these days?

All cpu's are 64 bit. Since 4 gb costs just as much as 2 gb there's no reason not to do it. Well, unless you have some ancient peripherals that don't have 64bit drivers. Windows runs better on more memory, and I think you'll notice the difference on large maps in civ5 as well.

[grahamiam]

All CPU's are 64 bit now, so go for Windows7 64 bit. At the very least, it'll allow you to go over 4gb of total system memory if you want to in the future.

I just built in August my own: I5-760 processor, 8gig of RAM, (1) GTX260 (216) gxf card, cheap EVGA H55 mATX motherboard, and a 1 TB WD Black HD. I stuffed it into a Sugo SG02B-F case. I am not mister moneybags, so I built this myself, waiting for individual parts to go on sale. I also reused the harddrive, graphics card, power supply, and DVD drive from my old computer. I go cheap on the RAM (just regular DDR3 1333) as I rarely overclock. The unit I built is small, quiet and plenty powerful, which is what I was going for. From what I understand, the best thing you can do for a computer, right now, to get maximum speed, is the use a solid state drive. However, the cost per gb is not in the range that I want to wade into atm so I'm still waiting.

Pairing gxf cards is great if you are running a very large screen and want to play FPS at maximum settings. If you go high end, the gxf card fans can get very loud and 2 of them paired together must be insane. Also, while the drivers are much better than in the past, the setups seem more prone to failures than just 1 card.

For CivV, I can't imagine that you'd need more than 1 decent gxf card (say, a 260 (216), a 460, or an ATI 4770/4830/4850). From the reading of the articles, it seems that you'd want a quad core processor, at the least. For Intel, I5-750 and 760 are 4 cores without hyperthreading (1 thread per core). I7's are 4 cores with hyperthreading (ie, they can run 2 threads per core, or 8 threads at a time). I3's and I5's (other than 750/760) are quad cores but they also have gfx built into the processor. Some mb's will allow the gfx to switch from the dedicated gfx card to the one built into the processor during light loads (ie, reading email and surfing) to save energy. At the low to mid range, AMD CPU's are very competitive with Intel and shouldn't be overlooked. MB's tend to be cheaper also so the price/performance ratio can tilt to AMD's favor for many CPU's under $200 (see Phenom II X4 945, very fast, very cheap). Here's a bench that may help explain it a bit -> http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/2

[akots]

Completely agree that Win7 64 bit is a must just to be able to use all that memory. The OS itself is not that bad and is a big improvement over Vista and XP being much faster and less glitchy.

On the i5/i7 issue, probably you might be better off with i5. I have finally bought myslef a laptop with i5 (Toshiba M645-S4050) for a bargain price at Bestbuy and am quite content with performance. AMD processors are nice but they are still strongly overheating. So, unless you want to live with that noise and changing fans every year or less, it might be better to stick with Intel.

Also, I expect to still be able to use my 3 year old desktop (dual core, 9800GTX, 2Gb RAM) quite comfortably running Civ5 but we will see what happens later this week when Civ5 is out. This machine has Windows Performance at 5.0 and IMO, at this moment, it is really expensive to get somewhere above 7-7.5 mostly due to generally slow hard drives even at 7200rpm as grahamiam pointed out. SSDs are still overpriced and not reliable enough for my taste but this might be the future for the desktops.

IMO, two graphic cards is a waste of money unless you are heavy crysis-type player and have a giant monitor.

[akots]

Originally Posted by ProPain

And how much mem do you need anyway?

4Gb should be enough for now but it might be a good idea to have an option for extension to 8Gb. It also helps to optimize your Windows to get rid of all memory hogs which are running there by default including various types of wizards and scheduled unneeded accessory processes. This usually frees at least half a gig or whole gig of memory.

[ProPain]

Thanks for all the advice so far. This is really helping a lot. And as I'm not 'heavy crisis-type player with a giant monitor' there'll be no dual graphics card for me.

Originally Posted by akots

Also, I expect to still be able to use my 3 year old desktop (dual core, 9800GTX, 2Gb RAM) quite comfortably running Civ5 but we will see what happens later this week when Civ5 is out. This machine has Windows Performance at 5.0 and IMO, at this moment, it is really expensive to get somewhere above 7-7.5 mostly due to generally slow hard drives even at 7200rpm as grahamiam pointed out. SSDs are still overpriced and not reliable enough for my taste but this might be the future for the desktops.

My laptop has :
Intel CoreDuo CPU T9400, 2,53 ghz
4gb RAM
32-bit vista business (so I'm pretty sure some of that 4gb has been idling for 2 years now )
5.2 windows score

So Civ V will run on this you say?

[Shabbaman]

That should work, depending on your graphics card.

[akots]

If you have an older version of integrated graphics, it might not work well but you should be able to play depending on settings and patches. Nice thing about the Toshiba laptop I got is that it has NVidia 330M chip for "heavy" video. When it is used, performance sharply jumps to 6.5 while at integrated graphics it is less than 5 (4.8 IIRC).

[akots]

Originally Posted by ProPain

4gb RAM
32-bit vista business (so I'm pretty sure some of that 4gb has been idling for 2 years now )
5.2 windows score

Probably it did not get wasted but was reassigned to support graphics by BIOS. Not sure about that though. A friend of mine has a similar HP laptop with 3Gb RAM which is maximal that a 32-bit OS can use. However, amount of total free RAM available to Windows is always slightly less than 2Gb so I presumed that 1Gb goes into graphics. In your case, it should be possible to see some 2.5-2.8 Gb total RAM in Windows.

The main problem with integrated graphics is not lack of memory but high CPU load and bad programming of Intel drivers. Overall, with 5.2, you should be fine IMO.

[ProPain]

I always buy laptops with a graphics card instead of integrated graphics. It's the firmly inprinted notion, which may be wrong, that this will improve the gaming performance.

This one has a ATI Mob Radeon HD 3650, iirc the card has 256 MB of it's own RAM. Although I wonder how much that helps as those 256MB use up adresses that would otherwise be used for the normal RAM.