marybono

I'm totally completely absolutely and irrevocably disgusted with SC 2013 to the point after I paid my $80 and played for a few hours I just threw it in the back of my closet never to be dug out again. That's one nice dinner with the wife I donated to EA in exchange for a big pile of poop. Thanks, EA. I hope to celebrate your landing in bankruptcy court soon. Now on the positive side. I want to go back to SC4 which I haven't played in many years. However, I'm running a hexocore i7 3930K which is kind of like taking an F1 Ferrari onto a skateboard track. So what I want to do is to configure a SINGLE CORE completely separate PC to do NOTHING but run SC4. Here are my questions: For the CPU, something along the lines of a Athlon 64 3800+ or 4000+. I'm sure I can find the mobo somewhere for it. Any better single core CPU suggestions? 1 or 2 GB RAM enough? Do I need an optical drive or can I buy SC4 online and download it so that I can install it directly? Is there an easy way to have the single core PC be connected to my main 27" monitor without plugging and unplugging? I figure that even though I only have one HDMI port in the monitor, there has to be a switch box available where I can switch between the PC systems. So if I was gonna play, I would turn off my main system, turn on my SC4 system and run it on the same monitor. The monitor runs 1920x1080. I understand that SC4 does support that resolution. Do I need to apply any patches? I can run any OS, so XP SP3 ok? I want STRICTLY unlimited, unfettered city building. Don't want disasters, limited money, etc. I have the list of the cheatcodes and the plugin URL, etc. Any suggestions on setting up the game so that I can just build and build and build without distractions? Anything else I should know? Thanks in advance for all the help!

That's great news, going to save the hassle and cost of setting up a separate PC and the HDMI 2way switch, etc. I'll definitely follow all of the great advice given here. Thanks again!

Thanks to all for some truly valuable input. I'm going to address the salient issues: 1) Yeah, what I really think about EA's evisceration of the SC franchise with 2013 couldn't be uttered on a public forum. 2) It seems like I could save myself a lot of trouble by just sticking with my current i7 3930 and just playing it on single CPU mode, or are there any real advantages to going to a completely different separate system with a single core CPU? 3) My video card on the hexacore is a GTX660 1.5GB and the system is running 32GB RAM and Win 7 Professional 64 SP1 with an SSD boot drive and a 2TB spinner data drive. Are there any incompatibilities I should be aware of in this configuration? Thanks again!