EVE General Discussion

You have to turn the details down because the game is GPU intensive. You can run multiple clients by turning graphics details down, because the highest load the game places on your hardware is on the GPU. You can run 10 clients without upgrading the CPU, you'd have to get a monster GPU to run that many instances of the game with anything but minimum graphics options. If you get a GPU that is too low-end, a lot of the effects processing will be offloaded to the CPU. So simply getting a recent card that can handle Shader Model 3 can remove a lot of load from the CPU.

Advice from other threads has been to ignore the upgrade from i5 to i7, for example, instead using that money to upgrade the GPU. Since processor cost tends to increase exponentially relative to processor speed, you can save a lot of money by down-speccing the processor in order to up-spec the GPU.

For RAM, a bare minimum is to have 8GB of RAM, after which you have more than enough RAM for the game (and maybe three copies running at once).

For disk, an SSD will help load the game faster and load grid faster. After loading is done, the disk is barely touched. Unless you are routinely jumping into grids with hundreds of objects present, you will be better off sticking with a spinning-platter drive and spending the money on a better GPU.

So given a limited budget, get 8GB RAM, i5 processor & motherboard in the low-to-middle end of the market, a decent 22" or larger IPS monitor, with all the remaining budget spent on the GPU and supporting power supply.

I was recently having some issues with a laptop (that subsequently died this week). While troubleshooting the issue, I was monitoring different attributes and I found that Eve takes about 1/2 GB of RAM per client, but it did not seem to use much CPU as far as I could tell. It definitely can use up some GPU power when you configure it for quality.