M2TW and the CPU problem

[UndrState]

Hello everyone,

I'm a long time lurker and fan of the Total War series. Medieval II is by far my favourite in the series, and I've played it for many years now, and many hundreds of hours. However, I've never been able to fully enjoy the game because my old "gaming" (*sigh*) laptop couldn't play most big battles without lag.

Well, now I'm ready to build a new computer, and I'll have a good budget to put it together. I've done some preliminary research, and feel pretty confident that I just need to buy the best parts I can afford (mid-high range) and all will be well...

...Except, then there's the CPU problem. The concensus here and @ TWC seems to be that Medieval 2 can't exploit multi-core CPUs, which leaves one with the somewhat counter-intuitive option of getting the fastest single core CPU to get the best preformance. On the other hand, at Tomshardware.com I've read some people say that a multi core CPUs' individual cores are faster than anything from the single core era, and that preformance can be aided by using the "Affinity" setting in task manager, so that M2TW can fully exploit that one core. Others suggest that won't help either.

My goal is to be able to play a Vanilla Med II battle with 2 full stacks clashing at a siege, zoom in real close to the action, and keep FPS greater than 30. I wish this were just a "throw money at it" kind of problem (I'm not rich, but I am patient), but it's not and I don't know enough about this kind of thing to get ahead of it.

I'm really hoping someone here could give me some certainty as to picking the right part for the job.

Thank you.

[AntiDamascus]

My advice is don't buy a computer based on a single game but v0v

[UndrState]

People do it all the time - how many people bought new rigs for Rome 2?

Anyway, I've loved this game longer and more often than my girlfriend ;) so I'm sure I want to do this. So the question is how, esp. regarding the processor.

[Sp4]

I think you can achieve what you are looking for with any 'modern' computer. My computer cost pretty much exactly 1000€, pretty much exactly 3 years ago. Today you can probably get the parts for 500 or 600 and the last time I played M2TW on this, it was able to run a battle between 8 full stacks at max settings without any slow downs.

[AntiDamascus]

To answer the question my desktop is about 6 years old and it plays M2 just fine (I played it waiting for R2 to be released). I would think any serious (not bargain basement) modern processor would be able to handle it.

[CanOmer]

I think you can achieve what you are looking for with any 'modern' computer. My computer cost pretty much exactly 1000€, pretty much exactly 3 years ago. Today you can probably get the parts for 500 or 600 and the last time I played M2TW on this, it was able to run a battle between 8 full stacks at max settings without any slow downs.

In which unit size, small? I have Core i7 920 @3.675GHz at 65 degree on load (I can go for 4.2Ghz but not worth it. Heat was high.).
If I have more than 5000 units in battlefield it begins to lag when fighting (not FPS drop because of GPU but the bottleneck of CPU).
M2TW is CPU-heavy game (unfortunately only a single core), it needs more CPU power than RTW (I think because of the fight animations.)

This is the list of CPU's Single-Threaded-Performance:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Desktop-CPUs...gregate-single
It could be useful.