What kind of processor/gaming rig is best for Aurora?

[Automatedminion (OP)]

Any advice, for someone looking for a new computer?  (I hope this is the right forum for this thread. )

[Erik L]

Probably Off topic is best

As for specs... As much ram as you can get. and lots of screen real estate. Dual monitors rock for Aurora. Beyond that, it's really up to you.

[niflheimr]

A ssd will help a bit with processing times for big empires .

CPU wise , though I'm an AMD fan , you're going to get a lot more performance for aurora with an Intel - A 4770k +  decent mobo can be had for about 650-700$ .

[Hawkeye]

I´ll second Erik´s advice re. monitor real estate.


I am playing Aurore pretty much from the get-go with a dual monitor setup (am still considering upgrading to a three screen setup)

Just be warned!

Recently, I tried to play on my one-screen laptop. 
Forget it.
Once you get used to the dual screen config, playing on a single screen becomes nearly impossible  .

[SteelChicken]

Monitor space is the biggest factor as mentioned.  Also, it doesn't matter how fast your rig is, get used to waiting for aurora to process.

Disk speed doesn't seem to matter much.  I put the entire aurora folder into a ramdrive once for testing and it made a negligible difference.  Visual Basic and Microsoft Access do not a speedy game make.

[sloanjh]

Disk speed doesn't seem to matter much.  I put the entire aurora folder into a ramdrive once for testing and it made a negligible difference.  Visual Basic and Microsoft Access do not a speedy game make.

This is as expected, since ~5 years ago or so Steve went through and changed the time-stepping routines to work off of in-memory objects.  So the only disk I/o is at the beginning and end of the time step.

John

[xeryon]

When I recently upgraded my desktop the single greatest factor I could manipulate for overall Aurora performance was my hard drive.  I have a newer i5 system with 4gb of ram.  Adding additional 4gb ram made no measurable difference in my Aurora performance.  This was measured by creating a stock new game and running auto-turns and measuring the speed it took to process an arbitrary number of turns.  The installation of an SSD greatly improved my test runs.  So I went overkill and set up a striped SSD boot drive that I run Aurora from.

When I created my new game I duplicated the database.  With each test I deleted the updated and copied in the original database with my stock game to try and get as similar of a test as possible.  Thanks to RNG no test can be identical, but half a dozen tests and the results were pretty consistent. 

[alex_brunius]

As for specs... As much ram as you can get. and lots of screen real estate. Dual monitors rock for Aurora. Beyond that, it's really up to you.

Screens are so cheap today that I would easily advice getting 3 of them if your investing in a new computer anyways. I am considering getting a fourth just to be able to have system and galaxy map open on one each