Cities: Skylines 1080p Ultra Custom PC Build Review

If you are asking yourself, what hardware components should I buy for my next PC so it can run Cities: Skylines then that is exactly what we will be doing in this review. Our challenge is in choosing the right priced PC items to get together an optimum build, which can meet the needs of Cities: Skylines. Making our build requirement, when speccing this computer, to find the sweetest price point for our hardware list that can deliver the best FPS at top end graphics settings, returning the visuals upon a 1080p monitor screen. As new gaming components are released for PC we will continue to review prices here each day and consider swapping in and out better components.

We will be looking across a range of things to help evaluate this best gamer build. We will be looking across the range of best value for money components based on today’s prices. Something that can influence our peripheral selection is that the game is found in the Management, Strategy, Sandbox genres, and this can sometimes sway some of the requirements of hardware we choose. Something else to consider is that Cities: Skylines would have been built on PC hardware from 2015 and shortly before this period. All interesting points for sure, but what we are really after is that we want to select components that best fit this game type but will also be today’s best value for money hardware of good enough quality to meet the game’s needs.

Best 1080p Price to Performance Cities: Skylines PC Hardware Component List

Choosing A Graphics Card For Our 1080p Cities: Skylines PC Build

Not wanting to pay over the odds for hardware we dont actually need, is a gamers primary objective when building their next PC. But obviously in this specific PC build we want to ensure enough we choose something with enough performance capability to run Cities: Skylines at 1080p ultra graphics options. We have taken a look at a whole bunch of graphics card prices today and compared them to the hardware’s gaming performance and our choice for this game is the Radeon RX 550X 4GB. We will get into its expected FPS for this game a bit later in the article, but for now we know it will deliver reliable frame rates at ultra 1080p. Todays price is $99.88 which is why we have identified it as a competitive performance to price ratio compared to other hardware in the marketplace today. Its price over the past couple of weeks has increased a bit by $99.88, which makes us think additional savings can be made here if you shop around.

When choosing the right video card for this build, you need to make sure you have a graphics card with 2GB of VRAM or more. This memory is used by the card to store image data when moving it from the video card to the CPU. Our chosen build’s card has 4GB, which will be a suitable amount for this resolution.

Selecting The Right Cities: Skylines 1080p Motherboard and CPU

The motherboard we are going for is the GIGABYTE GA-A320M mATX AM4. Its the best priced Socket AM4 socket type motherboard on the market today and will give us the spot to choose a great pairing CPU for the Radeon RX 550X 4GB. Looking over the prices today we can see that the Ryzen 3 3200G processor is a great choice for this game and is currently costing $186.54. A good point of reference is that the bottom recorded price we have for the Ryzen 3 3200G is $83.59 on 17th Jun 2020.

With a price tag today of $54.99, the GIGABYTE GA-A320M mATX AM4 motherboard is certainly in good company, representing a feature rich, cost effective mobo for the Cities: Skylines PC. The cheapest motherboard price for the GIGABYTE GA-A320M mATX AM4 was recorded as $53.99, which was on 25th Jun 2020.

How To Choose The Best RAM For Cities: Skylines At The Right Price

To make sure we meet the Cities: Skylines system requirements and to help us achieve the required FPS for Ultra at 1080p we have chosen the Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1x8GB) DDR4 2666MHz, which is todays best priced system memory. It is priced at $32.99 and compliments the CPU and GPU nicely. To provide a RAM pricing benchmark the lowest recorded price we have for the Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1x8GB) DDR4 2666MHz is $29.49 on 2nd Feb 2020.

PC Performance Review at 1080p Ultra Settings on Cities: Skylines

Running a PC build with these hardware components for Cities: Skylines we expect to see about a 88 FPS average, with a few low frame rates in some of the more intense scenes. You could up the quality of game graphics to Ultra, which will see the FPS drop to 63 at 1080p.

We expect Cities: Skylines would also run in higher screen resolutions but this would be 48 FPS average, at 1440p Ultra. We would see an improvement of frame rates if we tweaked the 1440p graphics options to be around the High preset graphics option, which would then return 67 FPS.

How this build performs for other popular games

We should check some other games performance with our Cities: Skylines PC. Looking at some other popular games today, to see how the Radeon RX 550X 4GB and this setup will run on 1080p. Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to return 0 FPS when run on Ultra which increases to around 0 frames per second on High. Hitman 3 would return 0 FPS on Ultra and then go up to 0 FPS at High settings. With Watch Dogs Legion we expect 11 FPS running at Ultra settings and 16 frames on High settings.

Selecting A High Performance Mouse For Cities: Skylines

We have found a great quality and still well priced gaming mouse today with the Cooler Master MM710. A game like Cities: Skylines that has Management, Strategy, Sandbox genre, we felt it necessary to increase the quality of the mouse we would consider because the game has some additional needs that can benefit from this type of higher specced mouse.

An Alternative Cities: Skylines Graphics Card Option for 1080p

If you are looking for a graphics card from Nvidia instead of the one we have selected in this build then you could try GeForce GTX 1660 Super Asus Dual Evo OC 6GB, which has a 118% better performance difference, so still similar capabilities. We have chosen it based on its price-performance figure as well, as it is currently priced at $239.99.