New computer for Shogun 2?

[Stabby Joe]

I've been out of loop with PCs since my last one kicked the bucket 5 years ago and through a combination of reasons over the years I'm only now able to get a new tower. Now I mostly wanted to catch up on games during those 5 years and being on a PC they are mostly strategy games. Now while some games like Civilization V appear to do fine enough on a good chunk of machines, Shogun 2 Total War is the game that I not only want to play the most but also play it well.

My budget is up to £1000 BUT I need to emphasize now that I'm not in the technical know how to build one from scratch and my just go pre-built even though, yes I've heard the former is the cheaper option... I'll wait a moment for you to dig your monocle from your brandy.

I can get a good deal from this site for custom built rigs, one better than what is actually advertised here. Basically what would suit a high end to even best settings for a game like Shogun 2? Keep in mind you can still customize the pre-builts to. Any help would be great and really appreciated.

http://www.computerplanet.co.uk/systems/gaming/performance-gaming-pc.html
http://www.computerplanet.co.uk/nextday/index.html

 

[BENZOOKA]

Learn the technical know-how for choosing parts intelligently and you'll get absolutely what you want, and the best value for price. There won't be any bottlenecks or bad parts when you get to decide them yourself. It's not difficult. Once you learn the basics; all you need to do the get the status quo, is to glance at the prices, decide a socket and a general performance level for your budget, and then find out what are the current way-too-costly state-of-the-art options, the bit-too-weak-for-the-other-parts-of-the-rig, only to find the immaculate sweet spot, where you want to splash the money at.

£ 1000 is, let's see, 1200 ?. You can get a good rig with that money. One that will definitely run Shogun 2, assuming that you won't be spending a large amount of that to peripherals like monitor, mouse or whatever.

If you want to know what kind of a system you need for a game to run properly is to check out the system requirements/recommendations for it to get a rough estimate.

 

[Stabby Joe]

First off, thank you.

Secondly, no I won't be buying the additions like monitor, cables etc. That I already have. While I can easily get a PC that can run the games, having not actually being able to test or demo some games, I'm not 100% whether the recommended specs are even close to highest quality.

I may also look into Alienware to. Expensive, sure but heck, I may go an extra hundred or so.

 

[Zeckt]

Forget Alienware, your just paying alot of extra cash for the name. Make it yourself or pay a friend to do it.

 

[Stabby Joe]

Haha, just looked it up before coming back to this thread and I actually agree. Although as for a friend, I'll probably have to visit another town...

...somewhat lacking in the tech department where I currently am. *sigh*

 

[BENZOOKA]

Okay, just looked at the site. Times have changed a lot in a few years when it comes to pre-built PC's. You can pick the parts easily from a sufficient list.

I think you should order from there, especially if you can get the special deal, and it certainly makes it easier when you don't have to assemble it yourself.

The GX2000 looked pretty good even to begin with. Unless Shogun 2 is somehow badly built regarding resource usage, you should be able to run it on high. At the least.

Since it was a bit on the light side regarding RAM (I'd say 8 is the current minimum and the cost for that upgrade was basically nothing), and your budget left room after the original price, I changed a couple of the parts to what I think would be the best.

Can't link the list without registering, so I'll just copypaste the things I changed from GX2000 here, in case you happen to find some use for it.

£917.45
Computer Case Antec Midi Three Hundred Black
Memory Corsair 8GB XMS3 PC3-10666 1333MHz (2x4GB) - Lifetime Warranty (DDR3)
Graphics Card 1280MB Gainward GTX 570 Phantom, 40nm, 1950MHz GDDR5, GPU 750MHz, Shader 1600MHz
Hard Drive #1 1 TB Seagate ST31000524AS Barracuda SATA-III 7200RPM, 32MB Cache, 8.5ms

I know that case and I think it's the best out of the options on that price range, but should you want a different one, you can't go too wrong out from those options.

Gainward has for long been one of the consistently best graphics card manufacturers.

I'd pick Seagate out from those. It's a constant 7200rpm too, while I've got nothing against the new self-speed-adjusting intellipower system either.

Personally, I'd add there Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio (PCI-E) to get better audio, and 90GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD SATA-III to use as a boot disk to only include the OS and softwares. The difference between SSD is a very noticeable one, and I'd always recommend to have a separate disk for the OS. At least the OS absolutely has to has it's own partition. The SSD would run you 90 £ but it's not mandatory at all. Doesn't even affect much on gaming performance, but boot times and general desktop usage is a lot more pleasurable with it.

 

[Musiclly enhanced]

really really dont go for the AMD FX/ bulldozer I have it and hundreds of people have issues with shogun 2 where it blue screens on launch

 

[Stabby Joe]

Wow! Thanks a lot for these suggestions. I'll definitely take them into consideration. Funny thing is, all of this has actually boosted my technical know how.

 

[Blunderboy]

I got a decent build from PC world for this very game about 9 months ago. I think I spent about £700, and my mate gave me a slightly better graphics card for free.
Never been so happy with a purchase.

 

[Xearo_Disaster]

When I was looking at getting a custom-built PC I looked around dino-pc for a while and they gave the best deals I could find for what I wanted. If you do what I did (go through their gaming category, pick the lowest spec one and then raise the specs through the customisation) you'll get the items you want without them adding random shit you don't want or need. I would've gone with them for my build, but I decided to make it myself and I'm going for a i5-2500k (going any higher for a gaming PC is pointless, this is the perfect processor for it - will overclock until it melts),8GB RAM at 1600mhz, 500GB HDD @6GB/s, GTX570 1.5GB and everything else plus a monitor for about £940 delivered. £1000 will easily get you a brilliant PC. Shogun 2 is awesome, by the way, and running it that high will be so damn pretty.

 

[VladG]

Well, I don't know what the prices are where you live, but 1000 pounds sounds like a lot, it would certainly buy a very strong rig here.

I spent some 500$ on my new components and they are more than enough to max out Shogun 2. It didn't include any sort of peripherals, just mobo, processor, memory and graphics. (The graphics card was purchased from the US, so that's cheaper than Europe, but the rest are from Europe, I just converted the euro cost into $)

I use an AMD Phenom 960T processor, ASRock 970 EXTREME4 mobo, 6GB Kingston CL7 DDR3 memory and a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6850, all powered by an old Thermaltake 500W psu (the psu just manages to keep that and 3 hdd's powered, it's pretty much maxed out). That GX2000 pre-build rig is considerably stronger than my rig. No idea if the price is bloated or not, but you'd certainly have no trouble running Shogun2 on max with that thing. (unless there's some horrible cheap-ass mobo, or something like that in there, but I REALLY doubt it)

Now this config is able to run any PC to date on max detail, it certainly doesn't break a sweat with Shogun 2. I've posted it as a comparison, and it's a very good performance/price ratio rig. I don't recommend Intel processors for regular gaming since and AMD will be cheaper and will have no difficulty running any game (my proc is mid-range AMD and no game has so far managed to get it over 80%). AMD also has a much better backward compatibility policy regarding mobos, for example I could use this proc on a 6-7 year old mobo with some reduced performance, but I wouldn't need to change the mobo for a big upgrade.

However, if you want some extreme stuff out of your rig, like running 5 monitors, multiboxing several games or stuff like video encoding, graphics rendering, etc, go for Intel. They are pricier, but stronger.

I'd suggest you go for Nvidia graphics cards, they have much better driver and software support, the only reason I got the ATI was because it had considerably lower power consumption for similar performance over it's Nvidia counterpart, and as I've said above, my PSU can't handle more. The 570 suggested by others is a wonderful choice, very powerful, should last you quite a while. You would be fine (and by that I mean easily max out any game out now) with a GTX 560 Ti, but what the hell, usually the graphics card is the first to get outdated and some futureproofing is never bad.

Also don't cheap out on the PSU, you can see a 650W psu for, say, 30 pounds and another 650W psu for 150 pounds (prices are speculative, it's about the difference) and there's a good reason for that. The expensive one should have much better materials, build quality and integrated protection. Remember, the PSU is the heart of your system, and if it goes out, it might just take your entire rig with it. Go for Corsair (with Seasonic components), Enermax or Seasonic

And don't go for the cheapest case. Get something with a decent air flow and preferably large size. It will save you a lot of trouble.

Oh, and if you do go for AMD, avoid the Bulldozer/FX series, they are terrible. The whole 8-core thing sounds tempting, but in reality no game actually uses 8 core, nor is it likely that any game will do so very soon. It's overall performance is low even when all 8 cores are properly used. Phenoms are your friend.

 

[XUnsafeNormalX]

I have a rig I built around Christmas.
i5 2500k
Nvidia 560 Ti
8 GB of RAM

It runs Shogun flawless except in the biggest of battles. The only time there was a noticeable frame rate drop was with the blood pack on and 7500 bodies being rendered in a small area.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPIXAtNGGCw

Watch this video series, it should give you more confidence in building your own rig. As always I would suggest an Asus motherboard for any gaming rig, as they have been the most reliable and user friendly boards I have worked with.

Your dollar WILL go farther in assembling your own rig, but if you choose this route make sure follow the "measure twice, cut once" approach and assure that all the parts you're getting are compatible with each other before ordering anything.

 

[Upbeat Zombie]

I would recommend getting an hp, you can go to their website and buy a custom gaming pc. You can get a pretty decent gaming pc for a good price. That and you can change what parts you want based on price or performance or whatever.Then they send you your pc in a couple weeks already built. You might be able to get a cheaper pc by buying all the parts separate. But this way is much easier if you look into the pc specs a little.

 

[VladG]

Since it was a bit on the light side regarding RAM (I'd say 8 is the current minimum and the cost for that upgrade was basically nothing),

Nah, 8gb is overkill unless you want to do some heavy multitasking and multiboxing. 4 is enough for any game (I technically have 6 installed, but can only use 3 because of my 32bit OS... blasted thing... and I can run any game on max). But since memory is very cheap, there's no reason not to get 8gb for a little futureproofing.

 

[BENZOOKA]

Since it was a bit on the light side regarding RAM (I'd say 8 is the current minimum and the cost for that upgrade was basically nothing),

Nah, 8gb is overkill unless you want to do some heavy multitasking and multiboxing. 4 is enough for any game (I technically have 6 installed, but can only use 3 because of my 32bit OS... blasted thing... and I can run any game on max). But since memory is very cheap, there's no reason not to get 8gb for a little futureproofing.

It's definitely not overkill. Especially with the differences in prices at the moment. RAM is cheap.

I'd see the 3,25GB RAM, restricted by a x86 OS to be a bit of a bottleneck.

FYI I'm using 3,19GB RAM now, with just a couple browsers, origin, steam, foobar and such running on the background. I can boot up BF 3 and enjoy those ultra textures with quite a minimal loading time, without closing the aforementioned, all because I've got enough RAM.

 

[VladG]

Since it was a bit on the light side regarding RAM (I'd say 8 is the current minimum and the cost for that upgrade was basically nothing),

Nah, 8gb is overkill unless you want to do some heavy multitasking and multiboxing. 4 is enough for any game (I technically have 6 installed, but can only use 3 because of my 32bit OS... blasted thing... and I can run any game on max). But since memory is very cheap, there's no reason not to get 8gb for a little futureproofing.

It's definitely not overkill. Especially with the differences in prices at the moment. RAM is cheap.

I'd see the 3,25GB RAM, restricted by a x86 OS to be a bit of a bottleneck.

FYI I'm using 3,19GB RAM now, with just a couple browsers, origin, steam, foobar and such running on the background. I can boot up BF 3 and enjoy those ultra textures with quite a minimal loading time, without closing the aforementioned, all because I've got enough RAM.

Yeah, I said the same thing about memory being cheap and that there's no reason not to get 8gb. But you don't NEED it to enjoy any game out right now, and it's nowhere near "minimum". I also run several programs in the background, I keep a couple of streams open at all times in browser windows and I host some stuff, having a pretty much constant 1MB/s upload and my 3gb of memory hasn't afffected game performance. Also loading times have more to do with the speed of your RAM memory and storage device than the actual amount of memory (sure, only having, say 512 MB would slow your loading times, but we're not talking that low).

Also I don't think you're actually using over 3GB of memory in the background unless you run a HELL of a lot of stuff there, and I've said that for extreme multitasking you do indeed need a lot of memory. Windows does a neat little trick with the memory, generally keeping a large portion of it occupied with data it doesn't really need that can either be accessed very fast or removed very fast depending on needs. So out of those 3gb, maybe half is actually in use, the other is just storing recent files and the like. Your task manager will report it as "in use" but most of it is available instantly if any application needs it.

 

[BENZOOKA]

Since it was a bit on the light side regarding RAM (I'd say 8 is the current minimum and the cost for that upgrade was basically nothing),

Nah, 8gb is overkill unless you want to do some heavy multitasking and multiboxing. 4 is enough for any game (I technically have 6 installed, but can only use 3 because of my 32bit OS... blasted thing... and I can run any game on max). But since memory is very cheap, there's no reason not to get 8gb for a little futureproofing.

It's definitely not overkill. Especially with the differences in prices at the moment. RAM is cheap.

I'd see the 3,25GB RAM, restricted by a x86 OS to be a bit of a bottleneck.

FYI I'm using 3,19GB RAM now, with just a couple browsers, origin, steam, foobar and such running on the background. I can boot up BF 3 and enjoy those ultra textures with quite a minimal loading time, without closing the aforementioned, all because I've got enough RAM.

Yeah, I said the same thing about memory being cheap and that there's no reason not to get 8gb. But you don't NEED it to enjoy any game out right now, and it's nowhere near "minimum". I also run several programs in the background, I keep a couple of streams open at all times in browser windows and I host some stuff, having a pretty much constant 1MB/s upload and my 3gb of memory hasn't afffected game performance. Also loading times have more to do with the speed of your RAM memory and storage device than the actual amount of memory (sure, only having, say 512 MB would slow your loading times, but we're not talking that low).

Also I don't think you're actually using over 3GB of memory in the background unless you run a HELL of a lot of stuff there, and I've said that for extreme multitasking you do indeed need a lot of memory. Windows does a neat little trick with the memory, generally keeping a large portion of it occupied with data it doesn't really need that can either be accessed very fast or removed very fast depending on needs. So out of those 3gb, maybe half is actually in use, the other is just storing recent files and the like. Your task manager will report it as "in use" but most of it is available instantly if any application needs it.

I agree, you don't necessarily need all the memory for gaming only. I do prefer to not allow browsers for example to not store temporary files, writing unnecessarily things on the disks when I can instead use RAM for that, which is one reason for the high RAM usage. Opera looks to be using 300mb while only on Escapist now. The same goes for pagefile. I can use pagefile instead. I haven't seen any certain info on the subject whether it's better to have no pagefile at all performance-wise, but RAM is a lot faster and it should at least lessen the use of pagefile, should some program insist on using that. So even if I'm not using all of it, it works as a storage, which is just as useful. Like you said. Again. We're just repeating things, it seems. But no harm done.

64-bit OS also uses more RAM for mere upkeep, compared to x86. As well as the better performance, stability (at least I'd like to think so, and subjective experience says that as well. Changing from XP to Win7 at least, the difference for better has been incredibly huge.) and lightening that 3,25gb noose to 24gb. The subject was about gaming, but working heavy on Photoshop for example, you can cap that 4GB quite fast. Couple of friends have suddenly even got 8GB capped while doing other related things as well.

One factor in regards of gaming is of course the graphics card memory. I don't have much of a clue how all the data is used and stored, but I think that has changed a lot. For the better. DirectX 9, and older seemed to be pretty CPU-reliant when it came to performance.

At least there's no need anymore to sharpen your sword while skimming through processes, until finding that program hogging all the memory at the cost of performance with a game, "How can it use a whole 30mb of RAM for something? Way too heavy".