Kalos’ Chronicles >> Kalos’ StarCraft 2 Hardware Guide >> (Page 1) | (Page 2)

Hardware Purchase Guide

Greetings people. Leord has finally been given what from my perspective appears to be his most sought after wish, a set of hardware recommendations written by me. Quite a cause for alarm really as most of the IncGamers crew rather wish for a decent meal, free games, and the company of a fine lass; a Kalos-written guide on strong computer related purchases with StarCraft II in mind does not top highly upon most people’s lists, so we do find his insistence on this matter quite peculiar. Still it is here and he can now rest easy that the monumental task has been accomplished.

Foreword and Aims

First things first, what the contents of this Hardware Purchasing Guide are. This is basically a series of able and decently performing products aimed at providing a ‘Recommended’ level of performance for the upcoming Starcraft II, which by current information would most likely be making its appearance some time in 2009, hopefully (no, that’s not official, so don’t swamp me with emails regarding it). This guide will be focusing on our North American friends, utilising their currency and their popular e-tailer hardware giant, Newegg. If I get enough requests I may write one for other regions, but I’d doubt Leord would be pleased with that as an excuse to basically duplicate the same article a dozen times or so as an easy excuse to make it look like lots of work is being done.

This article is more for those of you who like to fiddle around inside their cases, upgrading or entirely replacing their computers. Microsoft would refer to them as home system builders. For those who were hoping for specific recommendations to a specific product from their local OEM like Dell the tech forums are always ready for your query, and you can compare their systems specs to those listed in Starcraft 2 System Specs for our analysis.

Basic Standards and Selection of Components

The requirements I had in mind when selecting the below parts can be seen in my previous StarCraft 2 System Requirements article and to a lesser extent across the previous chapters of the Kalos Chronicles. Regarding the graphical requirements of StarCraft 2, we found solid proof from Blizzard’s own development team when we uncovered the contents of the StarCraft 2 Graphics Requirements Confirmed article I wrote a few months back. With this in mind, a very quick and minimalistic summary for hardware requirements, here goes our current estimated recommendations:

StarCraftWire.net Recommended Specs:

CPU: Athlon X2 / Core 2 Duo or above

Memory: 2 GB of RAM or above

Graphics Card: Geforce 8600 GT or above

The below core components either conform to or exceed these standards listed where pricing is favourable. The 9800 GT is a particularly nice buy at that price, hence why that was chosen over the actual 8600 cards, the marginal savings weren’t really justifiable.

Internals

Starting with internal components for the computer (for those lacking in their book of skills regarding the comprehension of English that would be “things that go inside the magic rectangular box” - not the monitor), these form the very core of the machine and thus this is where the performance is made.

Those who attend the technical forum on our sister site Worldofwar.net may recognise this format and even some components from the Recommended Hardware thread that is used there as well. This information will later on become a permanent sticky feature on the Tech forum at SCWire.net as well. Parts are as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 2.66GHz - Dual core processor
  
  
• ASUS P5Q P45 - ATX Motherboard
  
  
• Kingston 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) - RAM
  
  
• XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512MB - Video Card
  
  
• OCZ GameXStream 700 Watt - PSU
  
  
• Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA Hard Drive
  
  
• ASUS Black SATA DVD-ROM

Not taking into account rebates or possible fluctuations that may have happened in the time I wrote this over, this comes to around $580 for the full load if I have my mathematics worked out right. Not too bad for a machine that by all accounts should do pretty sharp ingame.

It is possible to create a far more expensive machine than this, or even skim some costs below this collection, however this is a strong performance balance, going above will not be very cost effective and going below may result in decreased performance.

Recommendations for peripherals and externals, conclusions and final words on Page 2.

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