Nineteen Eleven

Anyone know of any good simulators like SimCity or RR Tycoon that have recently come out. I think the last one I bought was Cities XL and Tropico. Cities XL was ok at best but Tropico was cool as hell. Any recommendations?

Tropico 3 looked fun but my comp is way too shitty to run it.

I just got done building my new computer about a month ago, so I've been hitting up all the games that brought my old Dell to its knees. Nowadays you have videocards with dual GPUs (aka SLI on a single, dual-slot card) so it's pretty easy to be able to play most every game. I opted for SLI'ed GTX 580s though. Works well for Metro 2033 at least (average FPS went from 38 w/ one 580 to 81 with 2 @ 1920x1080 very high quality etc). Intel also came out with the Sandybridge processors which are cheap, and the 2600k one that I use is pretty much capable of identifical performance in games vs Intel's $1000 ripoff processor. I really haven't been impressed by the multiplayer component of any recent FPS game, so that's why I've been hitting up the singleplayer ones.

hi ward, long time no see. Some single players are **** awesome, try the mass effect series or the fallout series.

ward wrote:I just got done building my new computer about a month ago, so I've been hitting up all the games that brought my old Dell to its knees. Nowadays you have videocards with dual GPUs (aka SLI on a single, dual-slot card) so it's pretty easy to be able to play most every game. I opted for SLI'ed GTX 580s though. Works well for Metro 2033 at least (average FPS went from 38 w/ one 580 to 81 with 2 @ 1920x1080 very high quality etc). Intel also came out with the Sandybridge processors which are cheap, and the 2600k one that I use is pretty much capable of identifical performance in games vs Intel's $1000 ripoff processor. I really haven't been impressed by the multiplayer component of any recent FPS game, so that's why I've been hitting up the singleplayer ones.

I've been looking at upgrading. How much did you end up spending on the 580s... those are like 500$ a pop on newegg atm. I think SLI'd 460s are more in my price range lol

Yeah they are slightly less than 500 (like 480ish) if you go for a reference one like EVGA. 460s in SLI may work fine for game's out right now, but are going to be obsolete fairly quickly. If you do go that route, get the 2gb video memory ones, otherwise you're going to be having issues running at say 1920x1080. Hell, if I decided to go above that res with my 580s, I would probably start having issues in games like Crysis and Metro 2033. The way SLI works is although you are using two cards, each with their own video memory, the memory isn't combined. Rather, both cards are rendering the exact same frames. So 2 x 580s @ 1.5gb video memory is still going to be 1.5gb memory when it comes to loading stuff. If you go with the 460s (typically 1gb), you will be exceeding the 1gb limit in games like Crysis at 1920x1080 quite easily and having horrid FPS as a result. If two 580s is out of your price range, you can look into getting a GTX 590 (Nvidia's top card) or the 6990 (ATIs top card) which both have dual GPUs and cost around $700 (may still be out of your range lol). The 590 has 3gb ram and the 6990 has 4gb. Both perform similarly, although the ATI card tends to run kind of hot and may not fit in some PC cases. Also, down the road, you could get an additional 590/6990 and QuadSLI/Xfire them.


Z: Yeah I already beat both Mass Effect games, and I am currently working on New Vegas. My computer obliterates both games at like 100fps+ constant with every graphic option maxed lol.

yeah i'm not looking to spend that much on GPUs. I'm spending a lot of my budget for this on CPU/mobo, but generally looking for something that will play the current generation of games (extending maybe through the next year) without hitches. Things like sc2/d3... I don't plan on playing many fps games, but it would be nice to be able to pub new CoD games and that sort of thing. In a year or two I should have a bigger budget if I'm looking for a top of the line rig that can max all the new games, but right now I'm looking for parts with good performance/cost to replace my current PC (built in 2005 lol).

You'll have no problem with DirectX 9 games like CoD. They are made with the console in mind, and thus will run on even the shittiest of setups. I'm not sure about Diablo 3 though. What CPU/Mobo were you looking at?

i7-2600k w/ a z98 mobo. the mobo i priced has 6GB/s SATA so that I can upgrade to SSD in the future and supports up to 2133 RAM (going with 1333 atm for the whole performance/cost thing).

Yeah I have a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. Shit loads like instantly. With that mobo you can get a low capacity SSD and set up SSD caching so it speeds up your most used files without having to install all your games etc on it.