Factorio Forums

Hello!

I find myself needing to purchase a new laptop. A majority of its use will be the Space Age expansion running on Linux. It needs to be ultraportable, so I am considering the StarLabs Starbook, which has an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U and up to 64GB of RAM. I am also considering an Acer Swift X with a Ryzen 7 5825U, but this unit has 16GB of soldered RAM with no upgrade path. Both are DDR4-based systems.

1) Will 16GB be enough if the laptop is otherwise minimally installed?
2) Will Space Age see any real benefit from DDR5 RAM if graphics are iGPU-based?

NOTE: Acer's unit has an RTX 3050 Ti dGPU, but I would be disabling that to extend battery life.

Thank you!
-AK

You'll need :
- As fast in single thread as you can get for CPU
- Core number will most probably never be an issue, the diminishing returns on additional cores arrive pretty quickly with Factorio
- Bigger CPU cache will most probably be better
- As quick RAM as you can, and at a given speed, the lowest latency you can
- I'm pretty sure 16 GB will be plenty enough

iGPU or dedicated GPU, no matter what, the faster your RAM the better, so Factorio will probably benefit from DDR5 (if this doesn't force you to compromise too heavily on the rest).

Note : the minimum requirements for the expansion haven't been officially released as far as I know.

Thank you very much!

We are going to try the Acer laptop first. Not only does it have dual M.2 slots, but the main memory is LPDDR4X and the dGPU uses GDDR6, so I have some options outside of Factorio. The CPU speed may be problematic unless I can control speeds and cores within UEFI, but it's worth a shot. I will also have access to a MacBook Air M3 for a short time, so I will try that.

Is there a v1.1 game-save that would be a good recommend for downloading and running to see how hardware performs when a map/game is huge? I play timed games, so my maps and factories never get very large, but I'm looking to move towards bigger scenarios.

AK

I recommend following site: https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus ... e161705504

The 5800U was already benched on this map (link above), so you can directly see where you will land and compare to other CPUs.
All maps are downloadable, if you want to do your own benches.

I don't expect that the Space Age Expansion (vanilla experience) needs even close the hardware of a today's 10k SPM base.
But if you want to do mega bases, then faster is always better.