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[Miuramir]

... The cheapest LGA1155 mobo with 2400MHz support is http://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-motherboard-z77ag41 at $55 ...

I'm not sure you can reliably get them for that price; Newegg is out of stock, and the forums indicate that MSI is really picky about the mail-in rebate.  Also, the reviews are a bit alarming; many reports of USB 3 failures, including one where it caught fire (!), seem to indicate that there's at least one design problem. 

As for the speeds... we've been saying that clock speed is only meaningful as a comparison between CPUs of the same architecture and similar generation for a reason   Poke around some other sites to make sure, but I'm not at all surprised that an Intel CPU does more single-core work per clock cycle, that's one of the things they're known for.  370K vs G2030 comparison from CPU World

[Bloax]

Pentium G3258

In the chart it's one of the highest ranking ones (and also just about the cheapest of the highest ranking ones), and that's just at stock clock rates; you can overclock it, unlike most of the other intel CPUs.

So just get a decent cooling setup and run this cheap babe into the ground.

[Bloax]

what a disasterpiece (at least you can have the joy of overclocking the living shit out of that CPU!)
now with more cut corners

[JTTCOTE]

Would much rather a 2TB 7200RPM drive than a 120GB SSD. My current computer has a 250GB SSD and I hate it. I NEED MORE ROOM! (Yeah, dunno why I got that 250...)

Afraid I don't understand the RAM. 12/2666 (CAS/MHz) = 4.5 whatever-the-unit-was, while as 9/2400 = 3.75 whatever-the-unit-was, so better response time. As I understand it DF cares more about response time (CAS/MHz) than straight up speed.

And yeah, lots of room to overclock with that fan, which is something.

[Bloax]

If you're using 250 GB for DF alone (hiya, we're talking in the Building a PC exclusively for DF thread) then you're doing something terribly wrong.

With the mad airflow it should probably also be plausible to sink the RAM clockrate somewhat and knock the timings down.

(the reason there's a 120 gb ssd in there is primarily for the boot times, as you can easily run DF on a 2 GB RAM drive)

[mnjiman]

The biggest advice I could give is to wait until worth wild optimizations can be done for Dwarf Fortress. As time passes technology diffuses and replaced. Getting one right this instant would prove wasteful in terms of how much "fun" you would get from your computer purchase. The current version of DF is very un-optimized and the FPS rates you get in comparison to .34 vs .40 is drastic (In situations where I would get 300 fps I would only get 80 fps.)

In short, get it now and you are forced to play an un-optimized game until it is optimized better.
Wait, you end up getting a better computer and you can start playing an optimized game right away when you get it.

This of course doesn't matter if you plan to play .34 anyways.

My 2 cents.

[Reelya]

Would intel or AMD be better? I'm considering intel

AMD is cheaper, and although the hardware has smaller numbers it seems (in my experience) to perform relatively well. If you have the funds and want to go all-out, Intel is a better choice.

For the OS you want one that has low CPU overhead - basically something that's not doing a whole lot in the background. Some kind of Linux distro is your best bet here. I don't really know about Mac, but Windows is vastly (vastly, vastly) better on the compatibility front.
Realistically though, your choice here is going to impact most heavily your experience using the computer. Pick something you're comfortable with using.

You should be looking at single core speed for the CPU

Nope. A dual-core CPU allows for the OS and background operations to run on a separate core, giving DF free reign over the rest. Everything else you've said is accurate, though.

You should be looking at single core speed for the CPU

Can you explain? Right now I'm looking at an i7 haswell. Is there a better option?

Higher frequency (i.e., more GHz) is always better. The i7 Haswell (apparently) has two cores, basically meaning two sets of instructions can be processed at once.

"single core speed" did not mean "get a single core processor". what it means is that it's better to have a dual core @ 3.6 GHz than a quad core @ 3.3 GHz, for the purposes of Dwarf Fortress, even though technically the quad is the "faster" chip.

So you really want to focus on a machine with the most powerful individual cores possible. Can you even buy single-core Intel / AMD processors anymore?

BTW CPU memory cache would also be important, since DF is very memory intensive, and has a lot of miscellaneous memory reads / writes then a nice fat cache could help overall speed.

Would much rather a 2TB 7200RPM drive than a 120GB SSD. My current computer has a 250GB SSD and I hate it. I NEED MORE ROOM! (Yeah, dunno why I got that 250...)

You're doing it wrong. Why would you e.g. have your videos and audio running of your SSD? They only "play back" at the rate they play back, so the basic common sense is your apps on a small SSD and your multi-terabyte drives for bulk storage for stuff that doesn't really benefit for fast seek times: documents, audio, video and any program with you either don't use that often or games which don't hit the drive that much during play. Knocking a few seconds off the load time of games isn't worth degrading an SSD for, they're not going to magically improve on framerate.

I have a 64GB SSD C drive, a 500GB internal and 2 x 2TB externals. I only use about 15GB of the SSD at any time.

[Orange Wizard]

"single core speed" did not mean "get a single core processor". what it means is that it's better to have a dual core @ 3.6 GHz than a quad core @ 3.3 GHz, for the purposes of Dwarf Fortress, even though technically the quad is the "faster" chip.

Yes.

[MeMyselfAndI]

"single core speed" did not mean "get a single core processor". what it means is that it's better to have a dual core @ 3.6 GHz than a quad core @ 3.3 GHz, for the purposes of Dwarf Fortress, even though technically the quad is the "faster" chip.

Again! Clockspeed is not a good indicator of single-core performance!

[SimRobert2001]

So, wait a moment, is an 8 core AMD processor at 5ghz slower than an I7?

[Putnam]

Depends on the AMD processor and the i7.

It'll probably be slower than a 5GHz i7, but probably faster than a 3GHz i7.

[superbob]

Since I didn't spot this explicitly stated in this thread (although I admit to only skimming the posts), I'll just add that the turbo boost speed depends on the number of active cores in an intel processor (i5/i7 charts). So when building a PC with at most dual-core performance in mind, there's no reason (other than cost) to stick to dual-core CPUs - you can disable the extra cores in BIOS for playing DF and get a little boost out of that without any manual overclocking. Disabling cores may also help attain better results while overclocking the CPU, so your 3,4GHz 4670K may be capable of doing 4,6GHz with only two cores enabled.

I guess this isn't terribly relevant now that all high-end CPUs are at least quad core, but still something to keep in mind. I wonder though, would an extra GHz on CPU speed or super fast RAM really be able to defeat FPS death? Or just delay the point where it's unplayable by a few ingame years?

[SimRobert2001]

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-3770K-vs-AMD-FX-9590

Well, i did find this.

[i2amroy]

Just a few things I didn't see being mentioned:
1) If you play on STANDARD graphics (which I recommend anyways, since it's just as stable as 2D and a little faster) then it's slightly multithreaded (due to Baughn doing the graphics code). As such you can get slightly more out of at least 2 cores on your machine (plus more if you want to run other things).
2) This just showed up in the latest month report:

a 64 bit test

So RAM limitations might be going up sometime soon. (Alternatively linux and OS X don't have the same limitations for RAM that Windows does).

[Miuramir]

Just a few things I didn't see being mentioned:
1) If you play on STANDARD graphics (which I recommend anyways, since it's just as stable as 2D and a little faster) then it's slightly multithreaded (due to Baughn doing the graphics code). As such you can get slightly more out of at least 2 cores on your machine (plus more if you want to run other things).

The recommendation has always been to get at least 2 cores, because the OS itself takes up some time on the processor; to get maximum single-core speed for one process you need to have at least one other core for all the "other stuff".  Plus, as noted, DF in some graphics modes is marginally multi-threaded.  If you frequently have a browser open with the wiki, a spreadsheet to track info, use the PC to listen to music in the background, etc. you probably should go for a 3-4 core processor to insure that DF can "run free" at full speed. 

2) This just showed up in the latest month report:

a 64 bit test

So RAM limitations might be going up sometime soon. (Alternatively linux and OS X don't have the same limitations for RAM that Windows does).

I saw this and while it may be a while yet, it's very encouraging!  I've been recommending 6 to 8 GB and a 64-bit underlying OS on the general principle that you need enough memory for DF to run unhindered except by the limitations of its 32-bit world; but it's looking like that recommendation should include "expandable to 16 GB in the future".  In other words, you should try to choose memory such that no more than half the slots on your motherboard are full if you have 8 GB or less. 

IIRC some earlier tests and growth curves would imply that a 64-bit DF could take in the neighborhood of 6 GB for a large embark with a lot of depth and history, and probably more if deliberately stretched.  An 8 GB system should be able to run all but the craziest embarks for a while yet; but future versions may expand out further once it is practical to do so.