Current PC is too bad for Cities Skylines 2. Can anyone judge the PCPartPicker list I’ve put together?

Wrong question. The right one would be:

“Based on the PCPartPicker list I’ve put together, how many mods will I be able to add to Cities Skylines 2?”

There is no PC in existence capable of running all of them all at once, but I’d recommend getting as much RAM as possible (256GB better than 32GB), it’s going to be your main bottleneck. Followed by the CPU… and the SSD is only a bottleneck at load time. GPU is optional, CS2 barely uses it.

Also: better to have twice as much RAM, than RAM twice as fast. RAM itself is 100x faster than an SSD, so you’re better off keeping stuff in only 50x faster RAM, rather than going back and forth to a 100x slower SSD.

Might want to wait for the benchmark tests to come out first, if the build is for CS2. I remember CS is pretty CPU heavy, so you might want to hold off on your choice of platform first.

Edit: Also, do check with the PSU tier list, don’t have to get A tier, but try something from B. A good PSU will help with the longevity of your build!

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Looks good. I’d go for 32 gigs of ram though if you can swing it. Also is there any reason why you want a 22" monitor specifically?

The reason this one should last is because ddr5 is new and so is the AM5 socket for AMD. AMD supported the previous socket from 2016-2022 so many are speculating that you should be able to do CPU upgrades for the foreseeable future without having to change the whole platform.

Gamers Nexus said they will do a Cities Skylines 2 benchmark next week I think. Not that it will necessarily change your build at all, I’m guessing this will handle it fine and the Gamers Nexus benchmarks of BG3 would have you walking away with the same set of conclusions that you’ve already arrived at.

Looks cool to me, if you’re not planning to upgrade to more power hungry components. Actually I bought a new PC too in early summer partly for C:S 2 too, and your specs are pretty similar, although you should consider some things.

1.: Assuming that you will utilize a lot of mods and custom assets, a 32 GB RAM should be needed

2.: Since C:S 2 is finally multithreaded, you could also check out Intel (if you don’t care about consumption), since theoretically it offers better multithreaded performance.

(Gonna post my build in the morning)

Hey OP,

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/possible-raptor-lake-refresh-launch-date-leaked

It sounds like Intel is releasing mid-October. I don’t know if Intel is of interest to you, and these are described as flagship cards. I also have no idea if this will effect prices on other cards or not.

Because I’m on Linux I have no interest in Intel / Nvidia, though Intel can have amazing performance on Linux when they give it the proper firmware updates.

Intel’s previous release was not great, by the way. This does throw doubt in my mind this next one will do anything for you other than potentially reflect in the prices of other products. 🤷‍♀️

Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).

A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it’s not a question of need but if it’s worth it to you.

You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that’s too slow. I’d strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.

Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I’d suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There’s a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.

I’m going to preface this with this computer will last quite a while, but you won’t have nearly as much of an upgrade path if you went with an AM5 platform (latest AMD CPU socket) on DDR5 (latest generation of RAM). With that said, your use case seems to be one that will not require keeping up with the latest games, so if you want to save some money this is what I would do.

NOTE: Prices are from Amazon, you can likely find a few components cheaper elsewhere.

CPU: You don’t need an R5 7600. I was running an R5 3600 up until a few months ago and the only reason I upgraded was I found a 5800X3D for a good price. I’d go for an R5 5600X which is $60 cheaper than the 7600 and will be more than enough for City Skylines 2

Motherboard: You can now get a B450DS3H board for that CPU for $40 cheaper

RAM: You’ll now be on DDR4. Get a 16GB kit of CL16 DDR4, will be about the same price as the DDR5 you have. May want to go for 32GB of RAM because sim games eat RAM, but ultimately up to you. You can always buy more down the road if needed as a 32GB kit is like $5 less than 2 16GB kits.

Case: The no-name brand cases on Amazon are actually quite good. You can get a nice case for ~$50. Hell, I just found a Thermaltake Versa H18 for that price. Another $55 saved.

GPU: I haven’t kept up to date on GPUs, but I’ve heard good things about the 6700XT, and benchmarks look respectable for BG3 and City Skylines 2. You could likely get away with something a bit less powerful, but price to performance seems to side with the 6700XT.

This brings the price down to $831. You could ditch the aftermarket cooler and get it under $800 as the 5600X comes with a cooler, but I’m never going to knock aftermarket coolers as they tend to be much quieter and less whiny than stock.

Looks pretty good. You might want to try and stretch for 7800x3d if gaming CPU performance is important.

Heyo! Your question led me to check some stuff since my wife wants to upgrade at some point as well.

Since we are slowly moving away from the intel/nvidia/windows ecosphere towards amd/linux/open source, we figured she should go with am5 when she changes her motherboard.

The b650-s and ryzen 5 7600 combined with gskill ripjaws s5 32gig. All together was roughly 500 bucks. The cooler needs to go on top obviously. We already have a gpu but if we needed one I‘d probably go with the amd 7600 since it is fairly new and pretty cheap.

Just so you know, I have put in quite some reaearch on gpus recently but nothing else so I‘m fairly positive about the gpu, a little less certain on the rest. The 7600 is not far from the 6700 xt imo and better in terms of fps per dollar/euro.

The nvidia 3060ti is pretty much the same but I think amd is the better decision going forward since nvidia is being a dick about their drivers forever and amd is more futureproof if you leave windows.

Good luck with your build.

I don’t know about all the hardware, but I have that same case and absolutely love it. There were so many times putting the thing together were I found myself impressed by the thoughtfulness of design and ease of use. It’s dope. Never thought I’d have strong opinions about a case!

I think a DDR5 build at this point is the way to go, but I’d highly recommend getting a bigger power supply for future proofing. I’d also consider a slight bump in the video card. Definitely get a bigger power supply though, as I made that mistake doing a 2020 build, only could get a 2000 series NVIDIA GPU at the time, so I just stuck a 650W in as that’s all it needed. Then once shit calmed down, I decided to catch the 5800x3d discount wave with a 4070ti and I had to get a new power supply. Spend the extra 50 bucks now, rather than spending $150 down the road and cursing yourself the whole time as you have to essentially rewire your whole setup. I wouldn’t go lower than 850W these days, and that’s going to be overkill for your setup right now, but it likely won’t always be.

You’ll also need more RAM soon enough too, but that’s easy breezy down the road, allocate your money to something else right now. Just make sure to get it on two sticks and if your motherboard has four slots (pretty sure it does), you can always grab two more matching sticks on sale down the road. Problem solved.

Oh, get a better hard drive than that too, there’s a reason it’s so cheap (PCI3). Just grab a 1TB for about the same price, but a PCI4 one. This is also something thats super easy to update down the road, and you don’t need to worry about for a bit, as 1TB will probably get you through the next year at least.

I just built an AM5!

My biggest concern is your storage. Thats a PCIE 3 x 4 rather than a PCIe 4 x 4. I went with the 1 TB Solidigm P44 for $50. There’s also the Samsung 990 Pro which has gone on sale a few times recently. The Samsung NVMEs all slap, it the two drives I mentioned are meant to be the fastest available.

You have a micro-ATX board with a Mid tower ATX case, by the way. You could get a smaller case, if you wanted to. $120 is an amazing price for a B650 board, I paid $180 and thought that was the best I could do because I only looked at Newegg.

On your RAM I made sure the RAM I bought was certified for AMD EXPO. The newest overclocking solution. Without overclock, RAM will often run at 5200 or 5600 depending on the motherboard. But 6000 is meant to be the sweet spot for this series of CPUs. I disagree that 32GB is necessary. You can always double it up from 16GB later on. Edit: CSky2? You mag actually want the 32GB, that would be a quick check with a benchmark or a user post about RAM consumption by the game to confirm if 32GB would have payoff or not.

Why the 6700 XT instead of the RX 7600? I decided the 7600 was a better value because I want to game at 1080p for the next few years. I went with the 7800X3D and after taxes my build was $1400. Ouch that was a hard pill to swallow. I started below $1000 and got greedy. But we’re splitting hairs, if you prefer one of these cards then power to you.

I imagine your CPU and your GPU both recommend a 650W power supply, and I imagine you know something I dont and 600W will handle it fine. But if they recommend 750W, I would just double check.

Edit: by the way Newegg has the Fantastech sale starting now-ish but really opening up on October 9th. And I think Intel is announcing new products next month? I’m unsure. Obviously I decided to do it now, and if I have buyer’s remorse so be it.