thinkin' 'boutit

[A Canadian Cat]

My previous machine which I used when I stared playing CM was not a high end machine when it was new and certainly was getting long in the tooth:

Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 (64 bit)
HP model a6500f
AMD Phenom 9150e Quad-Core Processor 1.8GHz
4 Gb RAM
with and upgraded video card: Radeon HD 6770 with 1Gb memory

With that machine I had no trouble with the CM1x titles and happily played the CM2x titles. I had to play on a middle ground quality setting (I forget exactly) and for some maps with a lot of trees, buildings or forces (e.g. Monty's Butchers) I had to turn the graphics down even more. But like I said I played happily. Oh and it took 2 minutes to load a really big turn like the above Monty's Butchers.

I have a new machine:

Window 7 64bit
Intel i5 3.7GHz
Nvida GTX760 with 2Gb
16Gb of ram
and an SSD drive

I play with the graphic settings on the max quality now. Not everything about that new machine is related to playing CM. For example 16Gb of memory is way more than what is needed. The game played on a 64bit OS can only access 4Gb so an 8Gb machine would be totally fine. But for running Photoshop 16Gb is going to be helpful for me. The SSD drive is not really doing much for CM in my case because it only has the .exe an not the game files or the mods and loading turn files is the slow thing for CM (some larger games can have turn files that are over 100Mb). It has been pointed out to me that since CM is CPU bound and only uses one core at a time you are actually better off getting an i5 CPU with a higher clock speed over an i7 with a slower one. But again that is specific to CM other apps you might be using may benefit from the additional cores in the i7 even at a lower clock speed.