Hi guys, right so I built a pc for skyrim (my only installed game ) and now I have decided that I would really like another pc at my parents gaff for when Im not at uni. The sole purpose of this pc will be to play oblivion on high detail. Looking at the sys requirements, it seems i won't need a power house to do this... I would ideally like it to be as cheap as possible, but very stylish all going inside a fractal design arc 1000. I'm going to go for a dual core cpu and 2gb ddr3 ram. My question is, how cheap can I go with the other components, eg gpu? I have no budget as such... just want the cheapest components that do the job.
You could probably get away with a secondhand 5770 or a 275gtx costing around £65- £70 for the gpu. A Corsair CX430 ought to be enough to provide the power. They're new at £35. A cheap (£20 new) coolermaster 212+ should be enough for a dual core. A 64gb ssd (£80 new) will be cheaper now than a 1tb hdd and should have enough space for windows and oblivion. So around £200 for these bits mentioned. Cheaper if they're all second hand.
Go for 4 gb. It's so cheap now anyways. A second hand 5770 would be a great card to get. A 275GTX is also a good card but it has a huge power draw and its that powerfull by todays standards. 4870 wouldnt be a bad card either. +1 to an ssd. I wouldn't bother with a HDD at all if your not going to use it that much. (Unless you have one spare) If its not gong to be used much i wouldnt bother with an after market hSF. You would be able to pick a second hand i5 530 at a good price or even a pentium. Should be able to do it for under 300. When you have 75 posts you will have access to the marketplace here, where you can get what ever you want pretty much.
would it be possible to run oblivion using a mini-itx board? I like the idea of the pc being little an un-obtrusive, I could even stack it on top of my dedicated skyrim pc sometimes lol
You would need a dedicated GPU, Llano (currently best IGP) wouldnt be able to run Obvilion at max settings on a normal res (not tried it since no Llano, but i would imagine so). But yes, you sure can use a mini-ITX platform with a cheap SB intel in there. For maximum compactness you will want a single slot cooler (m-ITX cases will hold a full height card, but often will not allow too much overhang from the bottom of the mobo. Although this varies from case to case, so if you find an awesome M-ITX case that allows double slot coolers then you are open to much more choice). This nice one by Asus will run Oblivion (and many more modern games) at 1680x1050 or 1920x1080 i would expect. Again, if you can squeeze a double slot cooler into the case, you are open to many better options that will be cheaper, or faster or quieter. A suitable SB motherboard, of any particular flavour will do. Cheapest are H61, you wont be missing out on anything needed for your needs. Prices vary between £55 and £70. For CPU look no further than the socket 1155 Pentiums. Sandy Bridge Dual cores with plenty of power for you. The G620 is the cheapest, and two 2.7Ghz SB cores are not to be ignored. The motherboard will have 2 slot for RAM so get a 2x4GB kit for the price of a Mars bar while its low. Complete overkill sure, but DDR3 is here to stay for a while, and prices are insanely low right now. Sadly HDD prices have almost tripled in the last month, i would suggest just getting a small 2.5" drive if you have none spare (3.5" may not fit into m-ITX case, again depends on the case). Just go for the smallest, cheapest one you can actually find in stock, its a real nightmare at the moment though. Ebay may be your savior, at least for the short term needs. You'll be looking at around £200-220 plus a HDD and case of your choosing. Oh and a DVD drive. Check to make sure it will all fit in the case (and if it has a PSU/fans included). In grand total terms, about £350 is a reasonable target for everything (minus monitor, peripherals) that allows you to spend a little extra on things you want more of (better case, better GPU etc).
thanks for the help so far, after looking around at mini-itx setups i have decided against the idea and will go for a micro-atx motherboard. Still think I'll go for that G620 mentioned above as it is insanely cheap - unless theres a better amd alternative? really the only decisions are the motherboard, cpu and gpu, the rest i have an idea what i want. if i go for an intel g620 should i go for an h61 or h67 board? I think i plan to find a gpu on ebay for cheaper so that'll be whatever is listed on the day! What sort of nvidia card is equivalent to the 5770? I will be going for an 64gb SSD, 500W modular psu (i need to have a tidy case), 4gb ram, some attractive case... wont need a dvd drive as i never use them. i have a usb one for the few times i do.
Most H61 boards only have SATA 2. So if you want to use that SSD to its full potential you would be better off getting an H67.
Whilst on my search for components I bought a fully built pc with the following parts off ebay for £150. Motherboard: ASUS M4A78LT-M CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 450 3.2Ghz RAM: 4GB DDR3 Corsair XMS3 GPU: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD5770 PSU: 500W others: 250gb sata2 hdd, dvd drive, shite case. Is this a good enough spec to run oblivion with texture modes do you reckon? Is there any parts that would desperately need swapping out? I plan on getting a nice new case (not that that is too important)
Oblivion is not really demanding... until you start adding mods. Get 8GB of RAM - it's just so cheap there is little sense not to really. A fast dual core processor will also be more use than an average quad core as Oblivion is a primarily single threaded game. Depending on how far you want to take the modding, graphics card memory will be another important factor with all those texture mods. A 2GB card would be the best, but not everyone is made of money If you really want to get the best experience out of Oblivion, you definitely need to mod it. see tesnexus.com for all mods - I recommend Deadly Reflex, FCOM (requires a bit of work to get working!) with most of the optional parts, Kvatch Rebuilt, and as many texture mods as you can handle - especially QTP3. If your system can handle it (it's a really big if) then get MTAEVWD, which will increase the LOD on all objects to encompass the whole world at max detail, no matter how far away an object is.
@murraynt - Probably the Fractal Core 1000, cheap and attractive Will 8Gb of ram be necessary? I ran it before on 2gb and it seems like it would be a waste of £20.. Yeah tesnexus was probably my most visited site about three years ago, havent played oblivion for a while now so kind of forgot about it, but since skyrim came out and im building a very good pc for that, my addiction to oblivion has been rekindled. I intend to get all the better cities mods, all those added areas which are beautiful and amazing and i cant remember their name, qtp3 is a must!
Well for texture packs like QTP you need all the graphics memory you can manage. So that is really limited by your budget. The different between the Corsair 1600MHz 4GB kit and the 8GB kit is £16 on scan - so no real reason not to get the 8GB. It would allow Oblivion to use the most RAM a 32-bit program can handle (with a large address aware mod, much like 4GB Skyrim for, umm, Skyrim) with the remaining 4GB for OS caching and general memory use. I bought 6GB of memory when I built my computer. I recently upgraded that to 12GB. With the foreknowledge back then, I would have got 24GB straight away (I'm on triple-channel). I sometimes do use all 12GB, but mainly only on high performance programs on Linux.
@lp rob1 - if the system has 4gb and the gpu has 1gb, does that give it a total of 5gb it can use? (pretending nothing else is taking up any memory in some fictitious computer world) So with windows and a few other processes (itunes, etc) running won't it still basically have the full 4gb that a 32 bit program can use? The listing on ebay just stated it had 4gb XMS3 DDR3 ram, not sure in what dimm arrangement, but i have almost no money for this pc so if both dimms are full on the motherboard i'll just have to leave it.. if its a 1x4gb dimm i could buy another i suppose. I started modding my dedicated Skyrim PC and i will create a modding thread soon. I think i will also mod this case. Thinking of maybe trying to get it to look like some iron box (drybrushed gun metal etc) any oblivion related suggestions for modding?
Id just leave it. After a certain point the returns aren't worth it. You got a good deal, now go enjoy the game
