Ideal PC for SWTOR

[JFarmer]

Hey everyone, I am currently saving up for a new PC and am curious as to what everyone has and what components I need to have the best SWTOR experience. Thanks

[MeNaCe-NZ]

How much do you want to spend? What else would you be doing and want to achieve games/fps/apps etc.? How long do you want it to last and what sort of future performance do you want out of future gaming? What sort of resolution do you want to game at? Info like this helps. The more the better,

 

For SWToR ... The important thing is CPU, i5 4690k and you can't go wrong basically. Basically the key is avoiding any AMD CPU and aiming for the biggest stock/turbo raw speed you can get - this is where you'll see the most performance gains.

 

GPU really isn't anywhere near as important and there are a bunch of recommendations one could make in this regard and you're still really not going to see any massive performance increases between say in my case an r9 290 and the new r9 fury x since the game is so cpu bound.

 

The other big thing I would recommend would be a couple of SSD drives, one for you operating system and another for your installs. If you get enough ram then pagefile is rather unimportant.

[MSchuyler]

EVERYONE has an opinion on this one! :-) One thing you might do is get ahold of a "PC Gamer" magazine and peruse the ads. Most of the companies do a "Good-Better-Best" kind of offering starting well below a grand and going over $2K. If you have a bunch of discretionary money you could think about a water-cooled behemoth and dual GPUs, but frankly, that's overkill for today's games, including SWTOR.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

EVERYONE has an opinion on this one! :-) One thing you might do is get ahold of a "PC Gamer" magazine and peruse the ads. Most of the companies do a "Good-Better-Best" kind of offering starting well below a grand and going over $2K. If you have a bunch of discretionary money you could think about a water-cooled behemoth and dual GPUs, but frankly, that's overkill for today's games, including SWTOR.

 

Or he could make his own "educated" decision based on the replies he is very likely get in this thread which is going to make him much better off then possibly blowing a ton of money on a PC he doesn't need because some magazine recommended it ( and it may not even run this game very well which would really suck if that's all someone wanted to do ).

 

Also most "water-cooled behemoth and dual GPUs," aren't overkill for today's games and probably just about right to try aim for 60 FPs @ 4K ( if you're lucky ), depending on the cards of course.

Edited August 14, 2015 by MeNaCe-NZ

[JFarmer]

How much do you want to spend? What else would you be doing and want to achieve games/fps/apps etc.? How long do you want it to last and what sort of future performance do you want out of future gaming? What sort of resolution do you want to game at? Info like this helps. The more the better,

 

For SWToR ... The important thing is CPU, i5 4690k and you can't go wrong basically. Basically the key is avoiding any AMD CPU and aiming for the biggest stock/turbo raw speed you can get - this is where you'll see the most performance gains.

 

GPU really isn't anywhere near as important and there are a bunch of recommendations one could make in this regard and you're still really not going to see any massive performance increases between say in my case an r9 290 and the new r9 fury x since the game is so cpu bound.

 

The other big thing I would recommend would be a couple of SSD drives, one for you operating system and another for your installs. If you get enough ram then pagefile is rather unimportant.

 

Honestly the max I would spend is around $1000, and I would be mainly getting this for SWTOR and some less graphics heavy games from Steam. Basically I would want to get a PC that could run SWTOR on max setting with no lag as my current laptop is able to run medium setting well but its not as smooth or high-quality as it could be.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Honestly the max I would spend is around $1000, and I would be mainly getting this for SWTOR and some less graphics heavy games from Steam. Basically I would want to get a PC that could run SWTOR on max setting with no lag as my current laptop is able to run medium setting well but its not as smooth or high-quality as it could be.

 

Something like this would suit you fine then:

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ppzG4D

 

That's just to give you an idea of what you want for that price range ( excluding monitor ).

 

That's based on you running that cpu at stock speeds, if you want to overclock you will need aftermarket cooling.

 

None of the other parts are neccessarily the must have bits, just random ones I found on pcpartpicker to illustrate the sort of hardware you are looking at.

 

Video card - you don't need anything more powerful than that or an AMD equivalent 280/280x/290 ( 290x would be overkill )

 

Ram - you could get away with 8gig if you wanted. Again doesn't have to be that type, anything reliable will work and might aswell get the 1600.

 

Motherboard - any reliable z97 motherboard will do imo, I just put that as it's what I've got and it's pretty cheap and has decent on board 7.1 sound. Read reviews online for other motherboards types and see what features they might add you might be interested in.

 

Power supply - you could get 650w comfortably, honestly the rating isn't that big of a deal if you're not overclocking heavily. Bronze is perfectly good.

 

Case - Any nice ATX tower will do you I believe, that was just a cheap, random choice with some decent cooling.

 

Storage - 2 SSD's though both don't need be 256, could get one 128 to do for your system drive. Also a tb drive for bulk storage if you need it - you may already have one though.

 

Think that about covers it all.

If you are going to buy prebuilt / predesigned system be prepared to pay about the same but get a lot less.

 

You can always still design yourself like that and have most PC stores put it together for you for a smallish charge on top - still works out cheaper than predesigned.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Also don't expect much more than 40+ FPs in the heaviest of WZs and OPs, there isn't really much you can do about that except keeping on boosting the speed of your CPU by overclocking - adding more GPU will not help this.

[JFarmer]

Something like this would suit you fine then:

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ppzG4D

 

That's just to give you an idea of what you want for that price range ( excluding monitor ).

 

That's based on you running that cpu at stock speeds, if you want to overclock you will need aftermarket cooling.

 

None of the other parts are neccessarily the must have bits, just random ones I found on pcpartpicker to illustrate the sort of hardware you are looking at.

 

Video card - you don't need anything more powerful than that or an AMD equivalent 280/280x/290 ( 290x would be overkill )

 

Ram - you could get away with 8gig if you wanted. Again doesn't have to be that type, anything reliable will work and might aswell get the 1600.

 

Motherboard - any reliable z97 motherboard will do imo, I just put that as it's what I've got and it's pretty cheap and has decent on board 7.1 sound. Read reviews online for other motherboards types and see what features they might add you might be interested in.

 

Power supply - you could get 650w comfortably, honestly the rating isn't that big of a deal if you're not overclocking heavily. Bronze is perfectly good.

 

Case - Any nice ATX tower will do you I believe, that was just a cheap, random choice with some decent cooling.

 

Storage - 2 SSD's though both don't need be 256, could get one 128 to do for your system drive. Also a tb drive for bulk storage if you need it - you may already have one though.

 

Think that about covers it all.

If you are going to buy prebuilt / predesigned system be prepared to pay about the same but get a lot less.

 

You can always still design yourself like that and have most PC stores put it together for you for a smallish charge on top - still works out cheaper than predesigned.

 

Very cool, and thanks a bunch for this breakdown. Would getting an i7 CPU make much of a difference based on price?

[MeNaCe-NZ]

For SWToR you just don't need it, you won't get any better pure speed out of the chips. They are designed for hyperthreading ( 8 threads/4cores ) which SWToR doesn't use, it's more or less single threaded performance you are after so no point spending the extra on the i7.

 

Ideally you could save money going for an i3 but personally I think you want some future happiness with 4 core support on the i5s.

[CheaterLL]

I'd rather go with a Skylake processor.

An i5-6600K and any Z170 MB (Socket LGA1151) will be around 10-15% better from what I've heard and it's only a few bucks more.

[DarthMaulUK]

Just to play SWTOR you will probably need to spend over $70k on a processor. SWTOR isn't optimised, so you'd be wasting your time.

 

You can use a program like Razer Cortex which stops background programs running whilst you play games, freeing up extra ram etc. SWTOR is CPU intensive and designed to run off only 1 core! Outdated or what!

[Reno_Tarshil]

Just to play SWTOR you will probably need to spend over $70k on a processor. SWTOR isn't optimised, so you'd be wasting your time.

 

You can use a program like Razer Cortex which stops background programs running whilst you play games, freeing up extra ram etc. SWTOR is CPU intensive and designed to run off only 1 core! Outdated or what!

 

$70,000 just to play swtor!? That's silly.

 

OP, don't listen to this. I've played on ultra settings with just a decent nvidia card and matching power supply.

[CheaterLL]

$70,000 just to play swtor!? That's silly.

 

OP, don't listen to this. I've played on ultra settings with just a decent nvidia card and matching power supply.

 

1st: The only CPUs in that price range are Xeon Phi coprocessors, which are highly multithreaded (60+ cores) and run at moderate clock speeds, which is crap for a single threaded program like SWTOR.

2nd: You aren't doing operations are you? I would like to see a <700$ PC that can run 16m Ravagers/ToS on ultra settings and 1080p with 30/60 FPS.

 

The max money you can spend on optimising your pc for SWTOR is around 3k (i7-6700K OC'd with watercooling, GTX 980Ti, Samsung SM951 M.2 RAID0, 64GB DDR4 RAM for SWTOR unleashed)

You could go higher if you could convince manufacturers to develop stuff just for you or give you early access to their in-development products. But then you're in a 7-digit (likely higher) price range.

[SimplyCooL]

I would say get a powerful single-thread processor, the newer the chip design the better, since TOR only uses 2 cores, but its heavily CPU bound. You never see your I5 or I7cores fully utilized, but this should be your heaviest expenditure.

 

Then get an SSD, TOR demands that and lastly a 6 or 7 series Nvidia Card. Could go more modern, if you want to future proof, or are going to play in resolutions above 1080p. Otherwise, i don't see a 980 or equivalent, doing anything for ya.

 

Don't really know Radeon products, though they do go cheaper, so you know, if you can find an equivalent, go for it. These slightly older games loved Nvidia more than Radeon, so there could be some performance issues.

Edited August 14, 2015 by SimplyCooL

[Jedi_riches]

I built my own PC about a year and a half ago, now my machine is pretty overkill for this game, but I looked at getting one that would also play BF4 in ultra without lag.

 

General run down

 

Processor: Now I did get a i7 4770 processor, but becase SWTOR does not really get the benefit of the i7 and equivilent speed i5 would do the trick, its worth noting that if you don't plan to overclock then you don't need the processors that end in K for instance the i7 4770 and the i7 4770K are almost identical except the K model is overclock freindly the cost difference is not too great but if you are ridgedly sticking to a certain cost there are other areas that would benefit from the difference.

 

Graphics: My graphics card is a little older but runs the game fine in ultra which is a EVG Nvidia 780 ti anything equivilent to this should be more than fine.

 

RAM: My RAM is 16GB but again for SWTOR and general stuff 8GB should be plenty.

 

Hard Drive: I found that a SSD does really help my load times you possibly only need a 128GB or a 256GB which you would just install the operating system and most used programs on you would get a normal hard drive for your photo's videos etc.

Edited August 14, 2015 by Jedi_riches

[mmmbuddah]

Hey everyone, I am currently saving up for a new PC and am curious as to what everyone has and what components I need to have the best SWTOR experience. Thanks

 

There is no ideal pc for this game. The game is 32 bit, so it wont utilize a lot of the newer hardware anyway.

 

I have a

 

gtx 690 4gb

i7-3820 4,2 ghz

32 GB RAM

500 GB HDD/SSD Hybrid

Windows 10 Pro

 

and the game runs smooth as silk most of the time, aside from those spots where everyone lags, no matter how great their system is. Dont spend too much money if you are looking to mainly play this game only, no point to be honest, people with gty 980s and gen 5 I7s report problems as well.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

I'd rather go with a Skylake processor.

An i5-6600K and any Z170 MB (Socket LGA1151) will be around 10-15% better from what I've heard and it's only a few bucks more.

 

Yup very true, never even noticed they had finally been released to be honest.

If the 4690k price doesn't drop then the 6600k would be a better option, even if it doesn't improve swtor performance you're stll getting a more modern cpu for the same price.