Rebuild box for TW2?
 

I don't remember when I've last seen a game as nearly unanimously praised as this one. Given that I loved the bejeezus out of The Witcher, I'm seriously tempted to get back to cRPG's with this one, after a hiatus of more than a year and a half.

But my rig is hopelessly out of date. I've also not paid any attention whatsoever to developments in hardware. I have a vague idea that something called an i5 and an i7 has come out in the meantime, and an i7 is supposed to be better, and that all the kool kids run kuad-kores these days, but beyond that, zip.

And I really don't feel like doing the research.

So, suppose a grizzled old fogey wants to do one final upgrade to his gaming rig, with a budget fork around $500–1000/400-800€, for the CPU, mobo, RAM, and VGA (keeping the rest: box, PSU, OS, disks etc.). What would you recommend? I would want something that does justice to the game at High detail; it deserves that much at least.

I would go for an AMD system:

Mainboard - 100€ (AM3+, Gigabyte, Asus)
Phenom II 965 BE - 100€
nVidia GeForce 560 Ti - 200€
Ram 8 GB - 60€ (you can do with 4 or 6 GB but ram prices are really, really low at the moment)

Totals at about 460€. If you want I can get specific hardware details. And the prices I stated above are German retail prices (incl. VAT).

With this system you should be able to play any game at max details in 1080p. If you want to use max AA and AF settings or a higher resolution I would recommend a better VGA.

It's very CPU dependent, so you definitely want a fast one. In my experience, there's no need for the absolute top-end, as they're prohibitively expensive and will show only minimal benefit with the vast majority of games.

I have an i7-950 (IIRC) - and it handles TW2 very admirably. However, I really don't follow the CPU market, and I'm sure there are better CPUs out there today.

These days, I'd recommend at least 6GB of fast memory. Since it's relatively cheap, there's no need to make do with less. There are many speeds - and the higher the better, really. Make sure the mobo supports the speed, though.

As for video cards - you need to decide if you want to splurge or not.

If you just want to play TW2 comfortably, without consideration for the future - something like an ATI 5850/5870 would be quite sufficient. The comparable Nvidia card would probably be something like 480. Faster and more expensive cards like Nvidia 580 wouldn't make that much difference today.

A nice fast SSD drive would definitely help as well :)

Personally I have

Core i5 2500K Sandy Bridge
MSI P67-GD65
MSI nVidia GeForce GTX560Ti Twin Frozr2
4 giga ram Kingston 1600mhz

It was pretty cheap upgrade. I played (finished yesterday, very sad!) Witcher 2 in 1920*1200 at ultra settings (without antialiasing) and it was smooth experience throughout.

Just for fun I have the CPU overclocked to 4ghz (with stock, boxed cooler), it is so simple and useful when converting videos and stuff like that.

SSDs are great, but too expensive, still.

Sadly i7 is not necessarily faster than i5 - this gen i5 is faster than last gen i7, and this gen i7 is not really any faster than this gen i5. Intel haven't been helpful.

That said, this would be my build for TW2.. as in fact it's what I'm just buying for that express purpose for my wife.

CPU - THE most important thing for TW2 performance, so I've concentrated on this: Intel Core i5 2500K
RAM: 2x2GB corsair vengence 1600DDR3 1.5v (4GB is still more than sufficient)
GPU: nVidia 560 (non-ti) 1gb. (GPU is not as important for TW2, and there doesn't seem to be any particular favouritism towards a vendor for this game, but another game she plays prefers nvidia. If you play things like crysis then go for an ATI 5870 instead, it's faster)
Motherboard: Any p67. I picked the Asus p8p67 (non-LE).

Should be able to play ultra, which I'm not sure an AMD solution can at the moment. However new chips are coming from AMD which might be worth a look at for a similar level of performance to the above.

Just to provide links:

CPU - 2500K http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc…82E16819115072

GPU - GTX560Ti http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc…82E16814127593

Memory - 8GB Kingston http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc…82E16820104173

MOBO http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc…82E16813130574


700 dollars total - and you will be able to play everything on maximum for quite some time.

Witcher 2 is BTW the most beautiful game ever released - both technologically and art design-wise. But the main star is the story and interactivity..

Not to get into an AMD vs Intel debate, but I play on max w/out ubersampling just fine on my Phenom 965 + ATI 5870. I only get 15-20 fps with ubersampling turned on but I've read posts about people with i7's also struggling.

I get 30+ with Ubersampling set to 1 (2 default) - but I'm not sure it's actually doing anything.

All other things on max.

I'm running a Phenom 965 + Geforce GTX 470 OC, and I also play with everything on, except ubersampling and motion blur. I turn off motion blur simply because I find it annoying. I use the "high" preset, but with some of the individual effects turned up even higher, and anistropic filtering at x16.

Runs pretty smooth for me at those settings at 1920x1200 with vsync on. I do get a slight pause when I enter the map and meditation screens, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the graphics level.

I'm pretty sure ubersampling is meant for dual-GPU systems for now.

The Witcher 2 maybe very CPU dependent but even with my 2 year old AMD 955 BE I'm not even near full use on any of the four cores. The reason I choose AMD in my previous post is that is is cheaper than Intel and can get a comparable performance in low to medium performance levels.

That's good to hear. I don't have any leaning towards AMD or Intel as companies - my last computer was an X2 based system - I just wasn't convinced by their competitiveness this round. Looking forward to bulldozer though as mentioned.

Whoa, cool! That's a lot of good info there. Much thanks! I'll have to check out my local friendly electronics hell next, then…

:me runs off to check my friendly electronics hell

Um. Okay. How does this look?

BTW, does the 1600 MHz RAM make any difference over 1066 MHz — the price difference was about 20 € so I kinda thought might as well.

(Prices a tad higher here than in DE, it seems…)

Unless you are trying to built a extreme high end / overclocker rig the ram speed barley matters. It is measurable but do yourself a favor and put the 20€ aside and save for a SSD. That'll help much more.

Edit: The stuff you choose is more than ok.

Edit2: And it really is more expensive than in Germany. Here I would pay 474€ for all the stuff you listed. Interesting.

Yeah, I have an SSD on my main computer (MacBook Pro) and it rules. Definitely worth it for something I use a lot every day. But I've got a pair of Velociraptors in the big box, and they're not too bad either, especially when RAIDed.

Guess I'll save that 20 then.

I just noticed that I picked the overclocked 560Ti, which is 20 € more than the standard one. Worth it?

(Your VAT is 4% less than ours, which accounts for a part of the price diff, by the way.)

Okay, here I go again, reading Tom's Hardware. Should stay away from that place.

Anyway, they seem to like the ATI Radeon 6950 more than the GeForce 650Ti. It comes in at 20 € more than the 560Ti OC (900 MHz). Worth it? There does seem to be a consistent difference in the test scores, but not that huge, on the order of 10-15% or so.

Looking at a price range of about 510-550€ now, depending on the GPU.

That's honestly a question of personal preference. nVidia GPUs have PhysX integrated (some games use it), ATI has Eyefinity, etc. I chose my card (Gainward 560 Ti Phantom) based on the fact the the Gainward cooler/fan is far superior to the basic one (way more silent) and because the card slightly overclocked (though that shouldn't matter that much).

I always buy the card with the best performance/price level and upgrade when needed (DX11 and a full HDMI port where my reasons for upgrading a few month ago).

Thanks a bundle. Will still reflect a bit on whether to jump now or after the summer. "Not at all" seems a bit unlikely at this point…

FYI, I took the plunge. Thanks again for all the help.

Cool, let us know what it's like!

What, the game or the box?

Just setting up the box. I was cheap and didn't upgrade to Win 7, so I've got updates up the wazoo, since I'm installing from the original Vista media. Other than that, so far so good.

Bought the Nordic edition boxed set -- a bit cheaper than GOG, and it came with all kinds of cute stuff, like a game guide, a coin, maps, and even paper dolls. It'd be pretty sweet even for a collector's edition, let alone for a normal price. You can tell the folks making this had fun doing it. Total nerdgasm.