Greetings friendly psychopaths!
This is maybe not the best fit for the comm but it is entirely due to rimworld, as that’s my benchmark. Please let me know if this should be elsewhere; I just figured this would be my best bet for a good and relevant answer.
I need a new computer. The laptop I’ve been playing on hard crashes and needs reboot constantly when gaming (worst with rimworld, where I freeze every 0.5-3 hrs, but oxygen not included and dysmantle both suffer as well and that’s like half of what I want to play rn). And for whatever reason the other computer I have it installed on won’t boot it anymore (I don’t have the new expansion, so that’s not it). It just crashes right before fully loading. Probably the mod loadout but nearly all of these ran on the laptop, so idk what the deal is. Anyway that tower is my Plex server so it was never meant to run games. I got it cuz it was rly rly cheap.
So, I’m not made of money or skill… quite the opposite. I need this as cheap as possible. If I had any confidence in myself I’d replace the failed components in my 2016 gaming tower but that probably just needs to be gutted at this point (mobo failure) and idk how to build into the corpse, tbh. I guess I can learn but idk if I have the mental energy for that rn. So that’s why I’m here, asking!
Regardless if I buy a tower, repair and upgrade the one I have, or build into the corpse, I’d like to know the minimum hardware requirements to run this specific game decently. Doesn’t even have to be that top-of-line sort of good! Just not constantly crashing my entire computer would be great! Currently about 3-4 years in, at best, I end up with so many entries in my spreadsheet, and so many tps (even with all the performance mods), that my pawns need rim rails just to play at a halfway acceptable speed, and 1x and 3x are exactly the same speed. That’s without even fucking with raids and stuff; just basic base building is too much. Granted they are opulent bases, and I have numerous recreation and hospitality mods, but that’s hardly the point. I’ve never run more than 150 mods at a time afaik and I understand some people manage twice that without this problem. I’m also fastidious with mod order and grouping, in the hopes it’ll improve performance.
So I’m looking for numbers. I intend to go with 32gb ram and hdd/ssd doesn’t really matter cuz I can replace that whenever. I have a dramatically overly large (for what it was running) psu, 800w I believe, so I have wiggle room even if I reuse that. I also have an old water cooling system I can throw in for funsies. I assume those don’t obsolete.
Is there a minimum CPU? What about a good mid-range GPU (I understand this to be overall the more costly portion)? Anything else I’m missing?
It’s not a bleeding edge game, and I don’t tend to play bleeding edge games, so I don’t need it to do more than this. If it can run rimworld well, it’ll do anything else I need equally well (I’ll just have to accept I’m not getting a vr for it)
I had a whole mini guide on PC building and then accidentally clicked cancel after checking my formatting and lost it, oh well…
Oh, an old GPU is perfect! One of my builds rocked a 750ti well past it’s prime, and it only got replaced because one of the HDMI ports gave up the ghost. Plus, Black Friday isn’t all that far off, so there’s a slim chance you might be able to find something more on sale once you decide if it’s needed.
Yeah, AM5 is still somewhat new, so it’s not as common on the second hand market. Plus, I get 'ya, the second hand market can be tricky for some stuff if you’re not super read up on all the tech/ acronyms and cross referencing every part (nobody wants to buy a bunch of things and go to put it together only to realize it doesn’t work together).
Another personal preference, but I might recommend a second SDD if you can swing it (I tend to favor the WD black and Samsung pro lines, but realistically anything is probably fine. I believe this list is the one the buildapcsales folks reference. Speaking of, here’s the current sales). Moving to a new system can be a bit chaotic and it always feels bad to lose data (because you forgot that Thunderbird stores your emails in appdata or that mods you were working on were in program files and not your user folder). Plus, windows can get weird if you just re-home the drive into a new board. I usually try for a clean install if I can, just to remove all the old drivers and do some spring cleaning. If you do end up with a spare drive kicking around, something like this is by no means necessary, but a handy way to turn it into a giant flash drive for backups/ PC moves.
Oh nice! That’s the same mobo I’ve got. My only real complaint is that the MSI utility for RGB will only run under the local administrator account, which isn’t that big a deal, otherwise it’s been pretty solid.
I’m happy to have helped! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!