Released September 1st, Hideo Kojimas final Metal Gear Solid game is out and getting amazing reviews from every major publication and gamers alike.
As of the 3rd, this game has a 95/100 on meta critic and 97% on steam user reviews making the highest rated game of the entire year to date. If you haven’t seen it already take a look at IGN’s 10/10 video review for an idea of why.
Now with all that out of the way, lets get down to what we’re really here for, building a custom gaming PC to play Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.
Selecting a CPU.
In most cases publishers low ball the actual ‘recommended’ hardware requirements in an effort to sell the game to as many possible customers as possible, but in the case of The Phantom Pain Konami have gone the other way with the CPU selection, and we are not sure why.
- Publisher Recommended : i7 4790 or Better
- Evatech Recommended : i5 4670
- Budget Option : i5 4460
Why do we recommend a lower end CPU than Konami? Well, we played this game on a i5 4670 powered PC (with 8GB of DDR3 and a GTX 780) and it ran great at 1440P on high/ultra settings. Even an i5 4460 should get the job done pretty well when paired with a decent video card.
Selecting a GPU (Video Card).
If we though Konami’s recommended CPU was overkill, the opposite is true for their recommended GPU. This game can be gorgeous, especially at higher settings, and to get the most out of the experience we would think most gamers would want to play at high to ultra settings at 1080P or higher resolutions.
- Publisher Recommended : GTX 760 or Better
- Evatech Recommended : GTX 970
- Budget Option : GTX 950
A GTX 760 equivalent (GTX 960) will get the job done and on medium graphics presets still run very smoothly at 1080P, possibly even a GTX 950 if you can bare 720p. Yet this game really shines when you crank up the settings and a GTX 970 is a good baseline to get this done.
How much RAM? (Memory).
RAM (or memory) is one of those components generally only negatively effects performance if you don’t have enough, but doesn’t really add any performance by having more than you need.
- Publisher Recommended : 8GB
- Evatech Recommended : 8GB
- Budget Option : 4GB
Konami say this game will run with 4GB, and they are probably right, but it won’t run well. Especially when you take in to consideration how much overhead there is in the operating system and any background applications you might be running. 8GB is enough to stop the RAM being a bottleneck and we didn’t see any performance increases dialing it up to 16GB, so the choice is simple. Don’t worry about DDR3 vs DDR4 or the clock speeds, in all our tests it all makes a negligible difference at the end of the day.
So how about all the rest?
None of the other components of PC really have a big impact on the games performance. We would recommend an SSD for faster load times, and of course you will need a DirectX 11 ready operating system (Windows 7,8 or 10) but that’s about it. Any motherboard that suits the video card, CPU and memory will be all you need, and pretty much any case with a couple of fans in it will be all the cooling you need. Bare in mind this game takes up 28GB once installed so a 128GB SSD might be stretching it a little thin when you factor in Windows, drivers, apps and a couple of other games at the same time.
What next?
Jump on over to our custom PC builder page and start putting together a system for an instant quote. Our website will even highlight the minimum, recommended and ultra preset requirements to make it that much easier! Just click the link below to get started.
Customizing a Gaming PC to Play Metal Gear Solid V : The Phantom Pain.
If you get stuck or have any questions feel free to contact us, sales@evatech.com.au