The "Perfect Computer" to run Aurora

[Darguel (OP)]

What would be the best (budget-realistic    ) computer hw setup to run Aurora avoiding bottleneck performance issues?
- RAM size / speed?
- Processor speed / cores?
- Hard Drive type / speed?
- etc.

[Maltay]

I have never had performance issues.  I have:

Intel Core i7 920
8 GB DDR3 3200
Nvidia Geforce 660Ti
160 GB Intel M2 SSD

[Nibelung44]

Aurora is probably a monothreaded application, and is 32 bits. So I would say a computer with very high frequency, even a single core. 3 gigs of RAM would be enough (say 1 for system, 2 for the app) and to stay on the safe side, a SSD disk to minimize access time (single cell if you have a lot of money, but even triple ones are nice).

[SteelChicken]

No such thing.  Its a very poorly performing application.  As mentioned, its single threaded, so a highly clocked, late model CPU is really all you need.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Yes, a modern processor that you can overclock and fast RAM is what give you the best performance. I just bought an i7 at 3.6GHz stock speed and with 1866MHz RAM, I overclocked it to 4.6 and the game does flow much better than on my older laptop core i7 2.6GHz.

Your graphic card is probably completely inconsequential as long as you can run Windows you can run Aurora.

A good and fast SSD disk is probably a plus since the game saves all the time.

[xeryon]

A while back I did some testing with a 'standard' game which I made copies of the DB of.  I wanted to see what facet of the computer had the greatest single effect on performance of Aurora.

All numbers are fuzzy as I did this a year ago.  I started Aurora and ran through 5 second increments for a specific period of time: maybe it was 1 minute.  Provided there were no in-game breaks to the passage of time I counted the date I had processed to.  I had made numerous copies of the DB so I was able to do this with lots of machine configurations. 

For obvious reasons video card made no impact on the speed of turn processing.
Memory, 4gb vs the 8gb upgrade I installed, made no difference.  Quite possibly going from 1 to 2gb or 2gb to 4gb might make a difference but at the higher end it mattered naught.
I had an i5 and a friends i7 with board of whatever config they happened to be.  I don't remember the speeds involved but the bottom line was the i7 crunched turns faster than the i5 but wasn't enough for me to want to go out and buy one.
OS from XP to 7 made no difference but strangely enough changing win7 from 32 to 64 did make a small improvement.  My guess is it had less to do with the program and more to do with better drivers.
Hard Drive = considerable improvement.  Basic 7200 rpm SATA2 drive vs one crappy SSD was dramatic.  Somewhere on the order of a 10% improvement.  I reasoned that a pair of striped quality SSD would beat one crappy one.  Of all the hardware I played with the only thing I changed was a pair of striped Samsung 820 128gb drives.  The overall performance was greatly improved.  Something close to 25% in my 1 minute time test.

Sorry, I really wish I had better documented these findings instead of giving you fuzzy numbers.

[Darguel (OP)]

So, to sum up:
- video card --> no impact 
- SSD is better than HDD.
- RAM: 4GB should be enough.  As Fast as possible.
- CPU: Processor speed is more important than CPU cores.

Thank you for your answers, guys!!

[Steve Walmsley]

Above all, the ideal is really large monitors

[TheDeadlyShoe]

+1, can't wait for Aurora on Steambox.   It will be challenging to rename things with touchpads!

[MarcAFK]

Above all, the ideal is really large monitors

You just reminded me about the extra monitor I wanted to make from my old laptop for Aurora.
Maybe when I stop obsessing about my garden I'll finish that project.