Build a PC for Rome 2 / Hardware Recommendations and Advice Thread

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

I was pretty sure I had my stuff sorted out, but I had no idea that i5s were better than i7s for gaming. My past 2 comps have had i7s, but I've never spent more than $1000 on the rig. I'm planning to upgrade in about september, so can you tell me why I should go for an i5 instead of an i7? I'm looking at spending between $1500 and $1950 AUD

[Biggus Splenus]

i5 are not better for gaming, i7 are just unnecessary. You spend an extra $100 for an extra 5 frames max. The reason for this is because games are not heavily threaded, ie. cannot take advantage of multiple threads. Battlefield 3 has the most heavily threaded engine and is suppose to be able to support 6 cores, but even when just using 4 cores there is only a tiny difference. The difference may be noticed online with 64 players though. Shogun 2 could only utilise 2 cores properly, and hopefully Rome 2 will be upgraded to 4 cores.

Back to the processors; the reason why you are paying the extra $100 for an i7 is because of the 'hyper-threading' technology, which essentially means that it has 4 physical cores, but can use them as 8 virtual cores. No games at this time or the near future can utilize that many cores and are far from doing so, which is why the i7 is a waste of money for a gaming machine. The i7 has a little more L3 cache in it too, but again this is unnecessary for gaming. If you do video editing/rendering, 2D and/or 3D art, then the i7 is a good investment.

That's a big price range you have there if you can tell me exactly what you want this machine for ie. any photoshop, autodesk, sony vegas, gaming etc. that will help me a lot. If you can tell me what games you want this rigged for that would help heaps too, do you play Battlefield, Crysis, Farcry.

Do you need to purchase Windows, a new monitor, keyboard and mouse? Personally, when I built my PC I had to buy all these, because a brand new system just doesn't feel brand new without a new monitor, keyboard and mouse.

[Sharpe]

What can I do with about 800 quid? For max framerate and graphics.

[Biggus Splenus]

You could most probably max out Rome 2, or have some thing on very high instead of ultra. But I have the same questions for you as above:

That's a big price range you have there if you can tell me exactly what you want this machine for ie. any photoshop, autodesk, sony vegas, gaming etc. that will help me a lot. If you can tell me what games you want this rigged for that would help heaps too, do you play Battlefield, Crysis, Farcry.

Do you need to purchase Windows, a new monitor, keyboard and mouse? Personally, when I built my PC I had to buy all these, because a brand new system just doesn't feel brand new without a new monitor, keyboard and mouse.

[Sharpe]

I need a mouse, screen and keyboard.

It would be used for games, films, music and word processing for my uni work.

I could probably push the budget to 1000 quid. It has to last for about 6 years.

[General George S. Patton]

I could probably push the budget to 1000 quid

I did the same thing, lol just a little more, well maybe just another 100...

lol

[AngryTitusPullo]

Just do it man. Who cares for vote.

Please give me the best budget up to MYR 5000 inclusive of OS / monitor etc. from these 2 links.

http://www.startec.com.my/wp-content...price_part.pdf

http://www.viewnet.com.my/downloads/..._pricelist.pdf

[Sharpe]

I will ask my parents for some money haha, at 22 years of age.

"It's not for playing games I swear, Microsoft Word has becoming a demanding program in modern times"

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

i5 are not better for gaming, i7 are just unnecessary. You spend an extra $100 for an extra 5 frames max. The reason for this is because games are not heavily threaded, ie. cannot take advantage of multiple threads. Battlefield 3 has the most heavily threaded engine and is suppose to be able to support 6 cores, but even when just using 4 cores there is only a tiny difference. The difference may be noticed online with 64 players though. Shogun 2 could only utilise 2 cores properly, and hopefully Rome 2 will be upgraded to 4 cores.

Back to the processors; the reason why you are paying the extra $100 for an i7 is because of the 'hyper-threading' technology, which essentially means that it has 4 physical cores, but can use them as 8 virtual cores. No games at this time or the near future can utilize that many cores and are far from doing so, which is why the i7 is a waste of money for a gaming machine. The i7 has a little more L3 cache in it too, but again this is unnecessary for gaming. If you do video editing/rendering, 2D and/or 3D art, then the i7 is a good investment.

That's a big price range you have there if you can tell me exactly what you want this machine for ie. any photoshop, autodesk, sony vegas, gaming etc. that will help me a lot. If you can tell me what games you want this rigged for that would help heaps too, do you play Battlefield, Crysis, Farcry.

Do you need to purchase Windows, a new monitor, keyboard and mouse? Personally, when I built my PC I had to buy all these, because a brand new system just doesn't feel brand new without a new monitor, keyboard and mouse.

You're right, and I'm just now thinking about factoring in those kinds of accessories. I'm still using a Dell wireless keyboard with one of the arms from a bulldog clip acting as one of the stands, and the other one falls out if you lift it up!
I bought an Alienware Optx AW2310 mid last year for a bargain, and although its only 23", I'd need to be convinced to upgrade. Is two monitors worthwhile? The one reason for not keeping it would be that at present I'm an AMD man, and this one only has Nvidia 3D capabilities. I guess I'll have to wait to experience this new 3D porn fad

My price range is dependent on how much expendable income I have by September as I'm starting a heavily commission-centred job tomorrow!

I use the brunt of my specs for gaming, with some sound editing on the side, but nothing major. I've got some nice creative desktop speakers. At current I play BF3, Skyrim, Tomb Raider and all the TW games, so you can work out what kind of gaming that is. I do however put R2 @ ultra settings as my benchmark, and we can be pretty realistic about what those specs will be already.

The i5 vs i7 thing is good news, as I've now seen on review sites too, so that will clear up some dosh for a 128-256gb SSD.

What else?

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

I will ask my parents for some money haha, at 22 years of age.

"It's not for playing games I swear, Microsoft Word has becoming a demanding program in modern times"

Oh jeez! i did that for my last one 2 years ago. I also said I'd pay them back for it too!! We're bad.

[Bolkonsky]

Fact of the matter is that we don't know what will run and will not run Shogun 2, forget about at medium settings. If they finally add decent multi-core support then yeah we'll see worse rigs be able to run it, but if they don't well you'll need a more powerful CPU to even touch 45 fps, regardless of graphics settings. In between now and the release, Nvidia and AMD will be releasing next-gen cards, and Intel will be pulling out Haswell. It's not gonna be groundbreaking but it's at least 10% faster, though they claim closer to 20% increase. Also don't discount AMD. They're launcing new APUs and really pushing GCN on everyone. We know CA wants to land on consoles at some point, if they're rewriting the graphics engine they could be doing it with next gen hardware in mind. (Next gen hardware being GCN APU's.) At this point, it's just impossible to tell what will and will not run Rome 2. You might be better served spending money on a low frequency multi core CPU, or a high frequency dual core. We just don't know yet.

Honestly though, threads like this are best posted in the Basement. We've already written up a million guides on how PC's work, what each part does, how to assemble them, etc. Making them new from scratch again is kinda redundant. You'd be better off working with some of the people who already do this kind of thing.

[Sharpe]

I'm going to buy my PC at the 11th hour, literally days before Rome 2 releases. Need maximum time for those sweet, sweet price drops.

[Biggus Splenus]

Ok, so I have an:
800-1000 pound PC build ($1160-$1450 AUD)
5000 ringgit PC build ($1560 AUD)
1500-1950 AUD PC build

Some more advice (Thomas you may not like hearing this if your an AMD boy )
- Nvidia is superior to AMD for TW games, because nvidia cards can handle more demanding situations for intense number crunching, such as the thousands of soldiers on TW battlefields. AMD is more superior in raw graphics though, games such as Crysis and Farcy. The reason why nvidia can crunch numbers faster is because of their 'CUDA' cores, which separately compute some of the processes that the CPU would otherwise be handling, thus relieving the CPU of some pressure and allowing it to work more efficiently. Some games don't need this though, which is when AMD takes the cake. AMDs high end cards for between $320 and $420 AUD have 3 gigs of GDDR5 memory, compared to nvidia's 2 gigs. This memory will not make much difference at all if your just going to be playing on a single 1920x1080 screen, but it makes a huge difference when you play on multi-monitor systems.

- I personally wouldn't use multi-monitors for gaming unless you were to invest in 3 screens, which gives a great surround affect. Having just 2 screens will block out the very centre of the screen because the the 2 monitor's bezzles, so that would be horrible.

- Finally, if you want 3D REALLY BAD then get Nvidia because their 3D vision is much better than AMDs HD3D. BUT, if you want multi-monitor (3 or 5 I suggest, not 2 or 4 for gaming), then get AMD because their eyefinity is better than Nvidia's surround.

EDIT: @ Bolkonsky - AMD processors should be considered when on a budget lower than ~ $1200 AUD in my opinion, especially for gaming. Nvidia and AMD will not be releasing their new graphics cards for a while, either the last quarter of this year, or the first quarter of 2014. And yes, Haswell is more aimed at mobile platforms than desktops. AMD's APUs should be a great consideration when someone is on a very tight budget, in any other case if someone wanted an AMD processor, I would suggest the FX CPU series. And again, what I am doing here is trying to grab the attention of the majority, not the people that wonder over to the basement forum

[Sharpe]

Why would someone need more than one screen?

[Biggus Splenus]

No one needs more than one screen, but some people just love having it. It's obviously for people that don't have the word 'budget' in their dictionary

I personally don't care for multi-monitors or 3D, so I don't take those aspects in consideration when choosing a graphics card, and I'm sure there are a lot of others out there that think the same.

[Bolkonsky]

EDIT: @ Bolkonsky - AMD processors should be considered when on a budget lower than ~ $1200 AUD in my opinion, especially for gaming. Nvidia and AMD will not be releasing their new graphics cards for a while, either the last quarter of this year, or the first quarter of 2014. And yes, Haswell is more aimed at mobile platforms than desktops. AMD's APUs should be a great consideration when someone is on a very tight budget, in any other case if someone wanted an AMD processor, I would suggest the FX CPU series. And again, what I am doing here is trying to grab the attention of the majority, not the people that wonder over to the basement forum

Well there's an issue with AMD, and potentially it makes sense. CA wants to make a move to consoles at some point and if they're re-writing code, it makes sense to optimize it for GCN and AMD's pipeline while they're at it. FX 8350 is as good as if not better than the 3570k in some games, granted Total War is not one of them but we don't know about Rome 2 yet. From a developer standpoint, it makes sense to develop for AMD going forward. And as far as I know, we can expect next-gen GPU's in holiday season this year, around the same time as Rome 2 is coming out. Plus they've worked with AMD in the past and including Shogun 2. This is why I say hold off until the last minute, because there is no news of what kind of optimization to expect in terms of CPU. Graphically any current gen card will be able to run it if I had to guess, it's simple enough geometry. It's the CPU and VRAM that traditionally makes or breaks the game. And there's no news on that yet. (Not a good sign. )

And I'm not recommending an APU, thought I do want to do a Micro-ATX APU build at some point, but the issue is that the APU's are what all games for the next 5+ years will be running on. The tables have been turned on Nvidia and Intel. GCN will take over as the dominant architecture and that's definitely something to consider with upcoming releases. The consoles make it a lock, hands down. The 7xx cards use GCN, so they could end up running Rome 2 better, and the FX (or whatever replaces them, it looks like they might be sticking with FM2) series might be better optimized for Rome 2 as well, all because CA wants to break into the console market.

If that's not the case though, Intel brute forces much better than AMD thanks to their 1:1 integer/floating point core ratio. So again, it's really just a waiting game.

Why would someone need more than one screen?

Few different reasons. I'm not a fan of big screens, so I have a pair of 22" ones. Most IDE's require the use of a full screen, so having a web browser or Autodesk open in the second one is much handier than constantly minimizing stuff. Or just general chat programs, Netflix, etc. If you spend a lot of time working at a computer, it's handy. If you want to do multi-monitor gaming though, you need 3 screens or the crosshair in every fps is in the middle of the two screens, separated by the bezel.

[Biggus Splenus]

CA have been talking about consoles for a while, but I think the decision is still indefinite. I wont be expecting to find a CA title on the console any time soon, especially not a TW. It will be like playing Age of Empire on the console, which i did and it was terrible.

AMDs more recent CPUs are definitely geared to run at future games because of their high core count. Right now though, you will be better off going with an Intel if your budget allows it (I think if you can't afford the 3570k, then just go AMD). I haven't yet said to anyone 'get Intel' or 'avoid AMD', I have just stated some strengths, weaknesses and unnecessaries of a few of them. FX 8350 does out perform the i5 3570k sometimes, but it works the other way around too. Everything has it's strengths and weaknesses, and yes it is too early to decide whether Rome 2 will support 4 cores, 6, or hell even 8 cores. But considering what Shogun 2 was like (2 core support), I wouldn't expect Rome 2 to support any more than 4, and even at that number Intel is still the prominent choice because Intel excels at excessive data-crunching over AMD's CPUs, which is what Total War games need.

Total War doesn't need a huge amount of CPU and GPU power compared to other games either, such as the infamous Crysis graphics engine. But in TW, a strong CPU is definitely more important than a strong GPU.

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

I knew about AMD cards pushing quality and eyefinity over Nvidia, but i didn't know about CUDA cores, so thanks. I was set on a single 7970, but by then I may be able to accept a GTX 680
My plan would be to have one very decent GPU, and then add a second one in a year or so when price comes down so as to stay competitive with next gen coming out early next year.

BUT AMD ARE WAY COOLER!! On ebay at the moment when you search 7990 you get the card come up at ~$1700, and then the next up is a full gaming rig INCLUDING THE CARD at ~$1820. Something either seems very wrong about that OR shut up and take my money.

[Bolkonsky]

Rewriting an engine costs millions of dollars, GCN hit the market already, and it will be used in all major titles for the next 5 years. It would make no sense to not optimize it for AMD while they're under the hood, so to speak. Especially when the game is already supposed to be optimized for AMD.

I really appreciate the effort behind doing something like this, but I just don't think it's prudent to start now when we could easily be thrown a curveball that could seriously upset the way the game plays.

I knew about AMD cards pushing quality and eyefinity over Nvidia, but i didn't know about CUDA cores, so thanks. I was set on a single 7970, but by then I may be able to accept a GTX 680
My plan would be to have one very decent GPU, and then add a second one in a year or so when price comes down so as to stay competitive with next gen coming out early next year.

BUT AMD ARE WAY COOLER!! On ebay at the moment when you search 7990 you get the card come up at ~$1700, and then the next up is a full gaming rig INCLUDING THE CARD at ~$1820. Something either seems very wrong about that OR shut up and take my money.

Never buy new parts off of eBay. It's always worth the warranty. That said the 7990 is about $900 brand new from Newegg right now. And the GTX Titan for $1000 is definitely the better card. Nvidia typically wins the ultra high end battle.

[Semper_Fidelis]

I'm upgrading to a z77 SLI capable ASUS motherboard with an i5 3570 and a GTX 670 FTW, do you think this will do the trick or is another 670 needed to max Rome II out? I'm trying to get as many opinions as I can before I shell out the caps.