FFXIV Hardware Requirements

[bluefan]

If anyones in the market for a SSD, and it's not being driven the Sandforce chip, it's not worth it. Simple as that.

$700 is my budget for building a new tower. I've got to get the CPU and GPU under $350 to meet my goal.
I'm stuck between

AMD Phenom II X4 955 w/ Radeon HD 5770 1GB
or
Intel Core i5-750 w/ GeForce GTS 250 1GB

I'd like to up upgrade to Phenom 955 w/ GTX460 or maybe an i5 w/ 5770 but my wife is going to kill me if I spend anymore money I was going to spend paying off her student loan.

Both make it under my $350 price point, but I'm not sure if which setup will run XIV better?

Hmmm....what's the other $350 being spent on, I assume the motherboard+RAM?

[Rasengan]

Hmmm....what's the other $350 being spent on, I assume the motherboard+RAM?

Case, motherboard, RAM, power supply, HDD (probably not a SSD for the budget), optical drive(s)...?

[Sprinkles]

Sorry I have been a console gamer for years but am looking into buying a semi-budget pc for this game I found a setup for @800.
Phenom II X4 955(3.2GHz)
4GB DDR3 750GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250

Any suggestions?

[Kawfee]

Didn't want to make/bump another thread since I've already did that enough

Anyways, I needed a new mobo for i7 and $200, which I was directed to:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813188049

However, seems I can stretch an extra 50 bucks. I heard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-641-_-Product

works nicely. Anyone have any input to which I should get? (or something else completely different for that matter)

The EVGA board is great, however, I would recommend spending an extra $39 to get this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813188039

Main differences (copy&paste from evga faq):
E757 (the one you linked) primary graphics card will operate at 16x the second graphics card will operate at 8x.
E758 both graphics cards will operate at 16x.

and more importantly:
Any product which part number ends in –A1 or –AR (my link) includes an available Limited Lifetime Warranty*. This is activated providing that the warranty policy is followed especially, but not exclusively, that the product is registered in your EVGA.com member account within 30 days of purchase.

Any product which part number ends in –T1 or –TR (yours) includes an available 2 Year Warranty*. This is activated providing that the warranty policy is followed especially, but not exclusively, that the product is registered in your EVGA.com member account within 30 days of purchase.


I've no experience with the ASUS board but like you have heard good things. I have the EVGA, and love it. Great support, worked right out of the box on the first try to boot, starts up fairly fast. Make sure you get the latest bios as soon as you install (well, really should do this regardless of what mobo you end up with).

[Rasengan]

I've been contemplating an AM3 build.... For $800, you can probably do better than that GTS 250. In your case:

X4 955 $160
890G Motherboard $140
4GB DDR3 1600 $100
5770 1GB $150 (or 460 1GB $230)
750GB 7200RPM $60
DVD Burner $20
650W PS $60
Full Tower $100

Total $790 ($860)

If you buy from newegg, you might want to check to see if there are any combo deals that add extra discounts to lower the price.

[alecrast]

If anyones in the market for a SSD, and it's not being driven the Sandforce chip, it's not worth it. Simple as that.

I somewhat disagree with this. While I love my Vertex LE and my OWC Mercury Extreme SF-1500, I'm also very pleased with the Intel X25-M G2 drives. If you want a drive that just runs and runs very well, the Intel drives are perfect. Windows 7 immediately recognizes them as SSDs and does all the necessary tweaks such as disabling defrag. Given that at least half the world is running on an Intel ICH, I wouldn't doubt for a second that Intel's drivers have extra code in them for the case where an X25 is detected. Intel's firmware upgrades are obscenely easy thanks to the utility they provide with the drive which also comes with a handy optimization utility which takes care of the case where the drive isn't getting TRIM directives passed to it (older Intel storage drivers, NVIDIA chipset drivers, etc).

Intel also doesn't deliberately gimp their own firmware like SF does on their SF-1200 controller to make it run slower in order to differentiate their SF-1200 and SF-1500 lines. Recent revisions of SandForce Mass Production firmware intentionally limit IOs on various OEM drives except for OCZ (And Corsair, but only on an older revision of firmware - if you upgrade, you're hosed). The SandForce water is very muddied; with OEMs now renaming their firmware revisions, you never know exactly which one you're going to get.

The Intel drives have never given me a problem with sleep states or hibernation. The same cannot be said of the SandForce drives though the issues I experienced were fixed in release candidate firmware (I was a very early adopter with beta firmware so problems were to be expected).

So I would qualify your statement by saying SandForce drives or Intel drives. I use a mix of both. I typically use Intel X25-M 80GB G2 drives for booting/Windows, and then put my apps on 100 - 120GB SSDs depending on model.

If you're comfortable tweaking, get a SandForce drive. If you don't want any hassle, get the Intel drive.

If you can get a deal on one, the Indilinx-based drives also perform very well but are definitely for tweakers. I have a 120GB Vertex with the Indilinx and, while it's always been a strong performer, I've spent a lot of time on OCZ's forums downreving, jumpering, flashing, and reflashing the drive as they added garbage collection, or TRIM, or a mix of TRIM and garbage collection, or patching garbage collection for being too aggressive, etc. OCZ Indilinx firmware feels like EVGA BIOS revisions for nForce motherboards all over again, sometimes.

[Sprinkles]

Thank you Rasengan actually i was going to buy from new egg that setup was from one of the ibuypower pc's. I was looking in the range of 600-850ish and their was quite a few available just didn't know which was the better setup for this game.

[firion]

Case, motherboard, RAM, power supply, HDD (probably not a SSD for the budget), optical drive(s)...?

yeah no SSD, because of my budget, I was planning on getting a 700w PSU in case I upgrade/OC. I might purchase another video card after release when people find out more about sli/cf, So I'll plan ahead and get mobo that's capable. With RAM,HDD,and case that uses up the other $350.


I'm not that tech savvy but the Intel processor seem to be out performing the AMD on the benchmark, as it should for $40 more, but the 5770 is a better card than the GTS 250. Having the i5 and the 5770 puts me over budget. I wonder which would bottleneck my performace more the Phenom 955 w/5770 or i5 w/GTS250?

[alecrast]

yeah no SSD, because of my budget, I was planning on getting a 700w PSU in case I upgrade/OC. I might purchase another video card after release when people find out more about sli/cf, So I'll plan ahead and get mobo that's capable. With RAM,HDD,and case that uses up the other $350.


I'm not that tech savvy but the Intel processor seem to be out performing the AMD on the benchmark, as it should for $40 more, but the 5770 is a better card than the GTS 250. Having the i5 and the 5770 puts me over budget. I wonder which would bottleneck my performace more the Phenom 955 w/5770 or i5 w/GTS250?

What resolution are you planning on running at? For 1920x1080 or higher, get the better video card. While one CPU might be better than the other, they're both very capable processors and your benchmark score will be affected more greatly by GPU than CPU the higher your resolution becomes.

[bonji]

finalfantasyxiv.com/media/recom/jp/pc.html

maybe its been posted already, are those the official mini requirements?

[Soap]

finalfantasyxiv.com/media/recom/jp/pc.html

maybe its been posted already, are those the official mini requirements?

Hahahah thats a Joke right?

OS 32bit/64bit Windows 7 (※1 )
CPU Intel ® Core ™ i7 2.66GHz
Main memory 4GB or more
Hard drive / SSD space Installation: at least 15GB of free space
Download: My Documents drive space of at least 6GB
Graphics Card NVIDIA ® GeForce ® GTX 460 (VRAM 768MB or more)
Sound card DirectSound ® compatible sound card (DirectX ® 9.0c or higher)
Communication environment Over broadband (always-required)
Screen Resolution More than 1280 × 720 32bit
DirectX ® DirectX 9.0c
Other Mouse, keyboard, game pad

[Kurokikaze]

Yeah lol... Thats minimum to run the game smoothly with the settings that were listed. Thats how I understood it.

What was that whole bit about FFXIV certified/recommended or w/e?

[shaddix]

well that blows. I hope that doesn't hold true for the actual game.

[Rasengan]

All that, and they built FFXIV to be more "user-friendly" for a broader audience... I guess they only want PS3 users. lol

[Hyan]

AA offf... and maybe my i3 is enough? ; ;

[shaddix]

Dude if the game requires what's listed there to run it just at 720p, the PS3 version is going to look like shit

[Kyrra]

finalfantasyxiv.com/media/recom/jp/pc.html

maybe its been posted already, are those the official mini requirements?

You should at least post a link to the English ones:
http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/media/recom/na/pc.html

To add, this is the RECOMMENDED requirements, not the minimum.

[Amele]

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yes.

The difference between the MTRON you pointed out and today's SSDs is night and day. The old drive has technology from before people really understood SSDs so things like over-provisioning, garbage collection, and TRIM weren't even considered. Not to mention new fab processes and faster flash. The MTRON lists a <100MB/sec read rate. SSDs now are hitting anywhere from 170MB/sec - 350MB/sec (SATA 6Gbps required). Seek times haven't changed too much but real-world random write speeds are waaaaay up compared to that drive.

thanks for the information, time to go looking ^^

is it worth a sata 6gb/s add-on card if the board only supports 3gb/s, or should I just look at SSDs in the lower bandwidth range? (add-on cards are less than full throughput etc.)

[alecrast]

thanks for the information, time to go looking ^^

is it worth a sata 6gb/s add-on card if the board only supports 3gb/s, or should I just look at SSDs in the lower bandwidth range? (add-on cards are less than full throughput etc.)

There's only 1 SATA SSD on the market that can make use of 6Gbps and that's the Micron C300 so I wouldn't worry too much about it. For home use, random IOPS are more important than raw throughput. Especially in a gaming situation, you're very unlikely to notice the difference between a file read at 350MB/sec versus one read at 250MB/sec because you're almost never reading sequential files large enough to make a difference in that kind of scenario.

[Gethsemane]

I think there's a point where everyone has to realize that some games are definitely moving past the console scope due to the shift in technology getting a lot better. Soon enough the 10 year life span of a console concept will not work anymore. I believe the time has already come. In another 5 years I'm not sure what will happen if the PS4 does not come out. More developers will probably make the move to develop for PC first and then port to PS3 which in a couple of years might prove pointless to do.

Also Playstation 3 can already run games at 1080p at 60 frames per second as well as 720p/60. Minus the memory problem I am sure Square Enix will come up with something that works.