A good PC for Brytenwalda?

[Uhtred Ragnarson]

I currently looking to buy a new computer, almost solely to play Brytenwalda. I was looking at this one, but I wonder what you guys think. Would it be able to run Brytenwalda at max graphics, PL + CID, and battlesizer at 1000?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229278

heres the specs:

Spoiler

Brand
CyberpowerPC
Model
Gamer Ultra 2096
Type
Gaming
Processor
AMD A8-3850 APU 2.9GHz
Processor Main Features
64 bit Quad-Core Processor
Cache Per Processor
4MB L2 Cache
Memory
8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333
Hard Drive
2 TB ( 1 x 2 TB) SATA-III 6.0 Gb/s 7200RPM
Optical Drive 1
24x DVD±R/±RW Dual Layer Drive
Graphics
AMD Radeon HD 6670 1GB PCI-e Graphics Card (Performance At HD 6690D2 Crossfire Graphics by AMD Hybird Crossfire Technology)
Audio
Sound card - Integrated
Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet
Power Supply
450W
Keyboard
Xtreme Gear USB Keyboard
Mouse
Xtreme Gear USB Mouse
Operating System
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Special Features
Coolermaster Elite 430 Gaming Case

 

[Mooncabbage]

In short, no.

That's not to say it's a bad PC, because it's not, but running all that on it is a big ask. I have an o/c'd 2500k (intel CPU), 16gb of DDR3, and a HD5870X2 (that's two generations before your card, but effectively two of them). My battle size is 750, and I still experience some frame rate chop in big battles. Here is a comparison of my card vs the 6670, and my older card is considerably better in the performance stakes, although it eats power like you would not believe, and is only a DX10 card. The 6670 series of cards is the ATI budget range, you'd be much better off looking at getting a 6680 or 6690 card. I'm not really familiar with AMD cpus so I couldn't speak to the quality of that part, but the rest is probably fine. Personally I build all my PCs myself, and only research the parts as I get ready to buy them.

That said, you're not missing out on all that much, battles over 500 or so tend to be massive blobfests anyway. And if you're willing to take a hit in terms of graphics quality, it'll probably do you just fine.

 

[Vympel]

I say build your own computer and save $500 like I did, cant recommend buying an already finished rig , people who put them together are a bunch of noobs who don't even use proper thermal paste .

 

[Mooncabbage]

I don't get how you can get thermal paste wrong, it's pretty straight forward. I've had PCs cooked before because amateur builders forgot to use the stuff. Building your own PC is certainly worth doing in my opinion, it saves you a lot of money and lets you build the rig to your exact specifications. Your budget goes a lot further and it's also really satisfying. That said it can be really daunting if you've never done it before and don't recognise where the bits should go. The manuals these days are pretty good however, and the nice thing about computers is you can't really go wrong, things only fit where they're supposed to go.

Even then however, if you don't have a friend who knows PCs and aren't confident in doing your own research, buying a prebuild is about your only option, and at the end of the day, it's not that bad, if you don't mind paying a little bit extra for peace of mind and a limited warranty

 

[Uhtred Ragnarson]

Whats the graphics card you would recommend?

 

[Mooncabbage]

Depending on your budget, an ATI Radeon HD6670 or HD6690, or an nVidia GTX 580 or 590. Do your own research to find out what's going to be the best fit for you.

 

[NoxMortus]

Hey, the first bit of advice I would give you is to avoid pre-built systems unless you have an absolute phobia of building a pc yourself. You will save money, learn a lot about computers and it is very satisfying.

Secondly, I would advise against buying an APU. They are more geared for budget HTPC systems. For a gaming rig a high performance CPU + GPU combo is still king.

Thirdly, I recommend getting at least 2 Hard drives - one for your OS and the other for games and high-resource programs (I went from a 2.2Ghz Dual core, 8400GS, 1GB DDR to 3.2Ghz Quad, HD 5750, 4GB DDR3 but the biggest performance increase was adding in a second hard drive.)

I wouldn't even consider buying that particular system as a gaming rig. The only aspect of that system that is up-to-par is the ram, everything else is poor performance and poor value for money.

Best Gaming CPUs For The Money & Best Graphics Cards For The Money

Hope this helped.

 

[Mooncabbage]

Nox is right, CPU wise you probably want a 2500 or 2600 series intel CPU, although I think there is a new series out or about to be out, so I'm not really sure about that anymore. You want a minimum of 8GB of DDR3 ram to run win7 and anything else, as it eats 2-3GB of ram on it's lonesome, so if you've only got 4gb you're going to be frustrated a lot of the time. You want to think about your hard drives in two tiers, small fast OS drives, either SSD or high RPM/datarate conventional HDDs, on which to store your OS and programs, and one or more large, cheap, storage HDDs. These days you can pick up a "Green" HDD which uses low power and has massive storage, mine are 2TB, for really cheap, I paid AUD$89 each. Thats where you put everything else where load times aren't important, videos, music, documents etc.

Certainly, there are tonnes of guides around, and forums and the like. The trouble with specific builds is finding ones that are up to date. The route I took was to post on a computer forum to get advice from people who keep up to date with hardware developments. I don't know where exactly you're from, so I'll just assume you're American, since you linked newegg. There are some example builds here, which I believe are American prices, but regardless they should give you some idea of what to look at in your price bracket. You can also look around on a site like toms hardware, or even try the whirlpool forums (although they're predominately Australian) at http://www.whirlpool.net.au

As for the actual building of the PC, there are a million billion trillion videos on youtube, and reading the manuals that come with the parts should make it more or less crystal clear. As the others have said, building your own PC is very satisfying, even when something goes wrong and you spend 3 days trying to fix it. Because then you've done something a disturbing majority of people haven't done.

 

[Uhtred Ragnarson]

Thanks for all your input guys! 

 

[Mooncabbage]

Oh, incase anyone cares, I finally managed to join a castle assault in BW! It was actually pretty fun, except I think the 750 battlesize I set was probably slightly excessive. Looking at the main melee caused major framerate lag, to the point it was totally unplayable. I'm going to dial it back to 500 I think.

Point is, I think the idea of a 1000 man limit with graphical enhancement packs is probably not feasible

 

[Uhtred Ragnarson]

Oh, incase anyone cares, I finally managed to join a castle assault in BW! It was actually pretty fun, except I think the 750 battlesize I set was probably slightly excessive. Looking at the main melee caused major framerate lag, to the point it was totally unplayable. I'm going to dial it back to 500 I think.

Point is, I think the idea of a 1000 man limit with graphical enhancement packs is probably not feasible

haha I see

 

[jelf]

If you want max graphics with 1000 battle size you need at least gtx580 or 6970.

I'm using gtx590, i7 2600, 16G ram and SSD and I still experience huge framerate drop in a 1000 men battle.

 

[Mooncabbage]

Weirdly, for me the framerate only dropped really significantly once the siege had become one melee over the gate, and even then only if I looked directly at it. If you've got your heart set on the biggest battle possible, you probably need to look at doing something with crossfire or SLI. But realistically I don't think it's going to happen, and frankly the gameplay sucks anyway. It's a shame, but it just doesn't seem to work with that many troops in a battle.

 

[jelf]

Weirdly, for me the framerate only dropped really significantly once the siege had become one melee over the gate, and even then only if I looked directly at it. If you've got your heart set on the biggest battle possible, you probably need to look at doing something with crossfire or SLI. But realistically I don't think it's going to happen, and frankly the gameplay sucks anyway. It's a shame, but it just doesn't seem to work with that many troops in a battle.

GTX590 is already considered as SLI, it's two GTX580 combined into one. I think the problem here is probably due to the coding of Mount and Blade. I doubt the framerate can improve much even if I'm using two GTX590s with server grade CPU.
But the game is still playable as the framerate is still around 20 to 40 in 1000 men battles. I've played Crysis with 10fps long time ago with my 8500GT.

 

[Mooncabbage]

It's not really SLI, so much as it is Dual GPU. For example the HD6990 is a dual GPU card, and very powerful, it costs $800-900. However compared to a pair of x-fired 6970s or 6950s with the shaders unlocked, you can have a significant performance gain over the 6990, for around $500 for the pair. The difference is the increase in bandwidth across the PCI-e bus.