Well, it happens every four or five years and it’s happening again. Firaxis is about to release a new version of the extremely fun and highly addictive computer game Civilization (Civ V, if you must know) and so we need to build a new Windows PC. It could be months or even years before the powers that be get around to issuing a Mac port of the game and we just don’t want to wait around. As I blogged about the last few times, here are few key choices I made in building the PC and why I made them.
1. I bought a Shuttle mini PC case
We had gone away from Shuttle the past few iterations, using MSI and Acer ASUS bare bones boxes. But the Shuttle is considerably smaller and more elegant. There is no need for extra hard drives or other bulky components that would not fit in the compact Shuttle case. And Shuttle has expanded interior room available for the graphics card. So I spent a little extra and got an SH55-J2-BK-V1. Now how about improving those model names?
2. I picked an Intel i5 CPU running at 3.33 GHz with dual cores
This is not a cheap chip but has a fast clock speed and 4 MB of speedy cache memory as well (more detail). I could have spent more for more cores but we’re not going to be using a lot of software built to take advantage of multi-cores. In some recent computer reviews, chips with higher clock speeds and fewer cores actually outperformed much more expensive chips with lots of cores and slower clock speeds.
3. I spent more than usual on the graphics card
I bought a Powercolor AX5770 running a Radeon HD5770 chip with 512 MB of RAM, which the Tomshardware site recently picked as one of the best video card under $200. In the past, assuming graphics weren’t that important to a game of Civ, I have cheaped out on video cards. But the folks over at Firaxis seem determined to add as much eye candy as possible. Thay left our system crawling a bit sometimes with Civ IV, so I’ve spent a little more (about $150) this time around.
4. I went a little crazy and decided to try an SSD hard drive
There are a gazillion spinning platters covered with bits of data around our house but the latest fashion in computer storage is a disk that doesn’t spin. So-called solid-state drives are pretty much just like the flash memory drives you use in your digital camera to store pictures. They’re a lot faster and quieter than ordinary hard drives though a lot more expensive per gigabyte. I could only afford an 80 GB model in this PC’s budget and it was still the most expensive single component. We’ll see…
5. I bought a copy of Windows 7 Home premium
Past gaming boxes made due with really old versions of Windows until I picked up some copies of Windows Vista at a CompUSA going out of business sale. But now XP is just too ancient and copies of the well-reviewed latest OS from Redmond are running at less than $99.
More as we play it out.
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