FFXIV Hardware Requirements

[Altanass]

I still havent got a new PC and release date is approaching

I was wondering what kinda settings (Low mid high + etc) I could expect to receive from the following systems:

http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/sy...ega_bundle_II/
http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/sy...ekly_sales_IV/
http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/sy..._Andromeda_SE/

They all seem pretty similar to me? Any obvious upgrades or changes? Whichever I choose:

1. I was considering upgrading the graphics card to gtx480 1536mb or should I be going the ATI route (ati 5970 2gb) or are both those cards overkill?
2. I'd appreciate advice on which hard drive & data hard drive to choose. The pc is really only for f11, ff14 and for word processing/simple applications/browsing BG
3. I've been told a sound card is necessary despite on board audio?

I have been turned off a liquid cooling system because of the alleged aftercare required. I'd prefer the old fashioned fan.

[Cooleko]

would love to help you but your links are unconfigured machines so we are comparing cases of varying-overlapping degrees.
fans require aftercare too, and in a high performance system you will be caring for both water or fan regardless.

[sruon]

1. Performance on either of the first 2 are going to be good, graphic card choice is up to your budget, there is no such thing as "overkill" when you're talking about XIV sadly. If you have the money go for something bigger.
2. Again, if you have the money, pick a /good/ SSD (no idea on models...) for boot/games and another for datas (Samsung Spinpoint I think is decent?)
3. Um... not exactly, integrated chipsets have become good the last few years.

Pick another fan too for CPU and uh, this website design blows. Whoever made it was on shrooms.

[Midge]

Apologies in advance for which is yet, I imagine, another "will this work in FFXIV" and thanks in advance for any patience shown and wisdom imparted!

I've been using this old heap of a PC for god knows how long now and FFXIV has given me the perfect reason to justify buying a new one. I've seen two through an employee purchase program, for which I will post the specs for below. I can tell how well these PCs should do with regards to minimum and recommended specification but I would like some expert opinion, especially with regards to graphics cards, which I know very little about.

Contestant #1
Compaq SG3-250 - £364

Operating system installed: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Processor type: AMD Athlon™ II X2 processor 215
Processor speed: 2.7 GHz
Chipset: AMD 760G
Graphics: ATI Radeon™ 3000; up to 1915 MB total available graphics memory
Hard drive description: 750 GB SATA 3G Hard Disk Drive (7200 rpm)
Maximum memory: Supports up to 4 GB DDR3 memory
Memory slots: 2 DIMM sockets
Standard memory: 4 GB DDR3

Contestant #2
HP Pavilion p6526 - £594

Operating system installed: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Processor type: Intel® Core™ i3 processor 540
Processor speed: 3.06 GHz
Chipset: Intel® H57 PCH
Graphics : ATI Radeon™ HD 5450 with Avivo technology; up to 2815 MB total available graphics memory, with 1 GB dedicated

Hard drive description: 750 GB SATA 3G Hard Disk Drive (7200 rpm)
Maximum memory: Supports up to 8 GB DDR3 memory
Memory slots: 4 DIMM sockets
Standard memory: 4 GB DDR3
Motherboard: Iona

Would the first, cheaper, PC struggle with FFXIV? It seems slightly above minimum spec but I don't know how the graphics card matches up.

And would the second PC cope with FFXIV comfortably? I cant afford to spend lots so I dont expect to hit the framerate cap or run it at the highest resolution but would it run FFXIV ok?

I hope that's enough information to make a reasonably well informed judgement.

Thanks!

[alecrast]

Neither of those systems paints a pretty picture for FFXIV. I did a comparison of a GTX460 in a quad-core i7 860, a tri-core 720BE, and a dual-core C2E X6800 here if you want to see the numbers. The dual-core X6800, even at 3.7GHz, was unable to extract much performance out of the GTX460 given the FFXIV client's current state. It's possible that SE has a bunch of debugging code in the client that is slowing it down, and that they'll slowly strip that out as they become more confident about the client's behavior so I would reserve judgement until after release. I can only say that based upon the existing client's behavior, I wouldn't be happy with either of the systems you've linked. My threshold for playability in FFXIV is about 20fps. I can stand dips to 15 but not constantly.

[shaddix]

Wow thanks for that, excellent info there.

[Kylewhataru]

Would the first, cheaper, PC struggle with FFXIV? It seems slightly above minimum spec but I don't know how the graphics card matches up.

I wouldn't buy either of them, it will run very poorly. As a minimum get either a Radeon 5770 or GTX460 768MB, and you need a quad core cpu, what you have there are dual cores...

And don't think it will run well just because you don't intend to run at the highest resolution or hit the framerate cap, cause no one can run it maxed out with decent frame rates, even a PC worth £1500 will struggle.

[Cooleko]

I wouldn't buy either of them, it will run very poorly. As a minimum get either a Radeon 5770 or GTX460 768MB, and you need a quad core cpu, what you have there are dual cores...

And don't think it will run well just because you don't intend to run at the highest resolution or hit the framerate cap, cause no one can run it maxed out with decent frame rates, even a PC worth £1500 will struggle.

This is not accurate. My wife's PC runs the game without any problems, capped FPS everywhere.
But, 5k USD is more than 1.5k EUR

[Midge]

Thanks for the responses guys, I think I may have seriously underestimated FFXIV! I'll keep shopping around but I think this may be a game I cant afford to play for a while!

[alecrast]

I was thinking about that GTX460 performance again this morning and I think I need to run 2 more tests:
1) i7 860 with only 2 cores and no HT
2) 720BE with only 2 of 3 cores enabled

Thinking back to my 5870 experience, I saw negligible framerate difference between i7 860 with 2 cores and i7 860 with 4 cores at stock speeds. CPU utilization was drastically different for obvious reasons but framerate was pretty even. I need to see if that holds true for the GTX460.

Core 2 takes a big hit compared to Nehalem so quad-core might be a necessity there. I simply could not push the GTX460 to its full potential with C2D. I want to make sure that's actually the case with Phenom II and Nehalem, however. It might be that 2C/4T i3 and i5 will run just fine, albeit a little harder than 4C/4T or 4C/8T i5/i7.

[lamp]

If youre willing to buy new http://www.dinopc.com/shop/pc/Veloce...770-94p763.htm this is one i was going to get until i exhausted my buy new funds. Its a very good price for what you are getting (i think) especially in the UK.

[Ruin]

Ok so im looking to get a custom PC built and have a couple questions for you tech guru's.

1) I was wondering if someone can tell me roughly what benchmark this would hit, and what would be worth upgrading to make a considerable difference? I realize most recommend a quad core and atleast 6GB Ram so if I asked for those and what else?

This is just the most "popular" custom built PC at a store in my area, and is only about 450$US

AMD Athlon 64 X2 250+ 3.0 Ghz Processor
Asus M4A785TD-M/CSM Motherboard
4GB DDR3 1333Mhz Ram
500 GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive
20X DVD+-R/RW
ATI RV610 GPU
Onboard Sound & Gigabit NIC
Standard Black Tower with 500 watt Power Supply
Windows 7 Home Premium Edition

2) I also see it doesnt even list the graphics card there.. I recently put a Zotac GeForce GTS250 in my old computer and it still only hit 2000 on low, but it is because of the other stuff in my computer im sure. What do people think of this video card? Maybe I could take it out again and get them to put this card in my custom PC?

[ufo]

Ok so im looking to get a custom PC built and have a couple questions for you tech guru's.

1) I was wondering if someone can tell me roughly what benchmark this would hit, and what would be worth upgrading to make a considerable difference? I realize most recommend a quad core and atleast 6GB Ram so if I asked for those and what else?

This is just the most "popular" custom built PC at a store in my area, and is only about 450$US

AMD Athlon 64 X2 250+ 3.0 Ghz Processor
Asus M4A785TD-M/CSM Motherboard
4GB DDR3 1333Mhz Ram
500 GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive
20X DVD+-R/RW
ATI RV610 GPU
Onboard Sound & Gigabit NIC
Standard Black Tower with 500 watt Power Supply
Windows 7 Home Premium Edition

2) I also see it doesnt even list the graphics card there.. I recently put a Zotac GeForce GTS250 in my old computer and it still only hit 2000 on low, but it is because of the other stuff in my computer im sure. What do people think of this video card? Maybe I could take it out again and get them to put this card in my custom PC?

The video card is decent enough... that build is not however. You should be looking for a quad core and that one is a dual core. see how much it is for a cheap quad core in that build like a Athlon II X4 630 or 640 at minimum, then with the gts 250 you should be good to go with medium settings.

[Ruin]

The video card is decent enough... that build is not however. You should be looking for a quad core and that one is a dual core. see how much it is for a cheap quad core in that build like a Athlon II X4 630 or 640 at minimum, then with the gts 250 you should be good to go with medium settings.

Ok thanks for input, maybe asking for more Ram to? And anything else?

[Midge]

I hear alot that people need quad-core processors and SE recommend the i7, but how would the i5 760 (4x 2.80) hold up for FFXIV?

I ask because I am looking at this build (thanks to lamp for linking me to that site):

CPU: i5 760 (4x 2.80)
OS: Windows 7 home premium 64 bit
RAM: 4gb (DDR3, 1333mhz)
HD: 500gb
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1gb

Would that cope with FFXIV?

Thanks

[sruon]

As far as XIV is concerned, a quad core i5 = a quad core i7

and yeah, the build is good.

[Everanger]

ok, so right now with my setup on low i am getting a 2400 benchmark score and i wanna get it higher. I have 200 bucks to spend so just curious on what you think i should upgrade to.

System Specs-

processer- AMD Phenom x3 8450 Tri-Core 2.10 GHz
Ram- 4GB ddr2
OS- Vista SP2 64-bit
Graphics-Nvidia 9800gt 512mb
Chipset- AMD 780G
Power- 600 Watt power supply

Also, i can get Windows 7 Professional (x64) for free cause of where i go to school. Do you think its worth having to reinstall everything to upgrade? is it going to run better?

[Cooleko]

upgrade windows for the 20 bucks, buy a newer GPU

[Pikarya]

ok, so right now with my setup on low i am getting a 2400 benchmark score and i wanna get it higher. I have 200 bucks to spend so just curious on what you think i should upgrade to.

System Specs-

processer- AMD Phenom x3 8450 Tri-Core 2.10 GHz
Ram- 4GB ddr2
OS- Vista SP2 64-bit
Graphics-Nvidia 9800gt 512mb
Chipset- AMD 780G
Power- 600 Watt power supply

Also, i can get Windows 7 Professional (x64) for free cause of where i go to school. Do you think its worth having to reinstall everything to upgrade? is it going to run better?

Windows 7 64-bit http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...Np28zmCUCtTSWA

Overclock your processor (Do you use aftermarket cooling/TIM?)
Overclock your GPU (9800 GT can overclock extremely easy, especially with a cheap cooler slapped on it with some new thermal paste.)
What brand of PSU?

[Borgasm]

Looking for input in buying and upgrading a new PC. Not very tech savvy.

Currently looking at this base PC:

http://www.avadirect.com/product_det...asp?PRID=13282

Socket AM3 Desktop Processors:
AMD, Phenom™ II X6 1055T Six-Core 2.8GHz, AM3, HT 4000MHz, 6x 512KB L2 + 6MB L3 cache, 125W, 45nm

Socket AM3 Phenom II DDR3 Motherboards:
ASUS, M4A78T-E, AM3, AMD® 790GX, DDR3-1600 (O.C.) 16GB /4, PCIe x16 CF /2, SATA 3 Gb/s RAID 5 /5, VGA+DVI, HDA, GbLAN, FW /2, ATX

DDR3-1333 Non-ECC DIMM Memory:
KINGSTON, 2GB (2 x 1GB) ValueRAM PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz CL9 (9-9-9) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC

PCI Express x16 Video Cards:
SAPPHIRE, Radeon™ HD 5670 775MHz, 1GB DDR5 4000MHz, PCIe x16 CrossFire, DVI, DP, HDMI

SATA Hard Drives:
WESTERN DIGITAL, 750GB WD Caviar® Black™ (WD7501AALS), SATA 3 Gb/s, 7200 RPM, 32MB Cache

Looking to upgrade to 3.2 Ghz, 4GB ram, 1TB hard drive. No idea on video card really. Should I upgrade or add a second card?

Any suggestions and feedback much appreciated.

Looking to mainly play 14 and have a PC that will run future games with little problems for a few years. Thank you!