Next week, the feverishly anticipated Civilization 5 comes out. If you’ve spent any time with your head buried in any of the other Civ games, you know well enough that this is a must-have, like a divorce-worthy timesuck of epic proportions. Just the way the girlfriend plays the original Civ on her DS is enough to make me scared to even have a taste of Civ. Addictive personality, innit.

If you’re looking for some kind of deep game preview, this isn’t your post—bit-tech has a thoughtful look at Civ 5 around the way. (But please take a look at our Sid Meier documentary.)

What we’re talking about here is what it actually takes to play the game, what kind of PC horsepower. It’s steep: a dual core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a fairly badass graphics card. In other words, there’s a real chance you don’t have what it takes, nor can you afford it. Time to upgrade? If you’re a Civ nerd, definitely.

Civ 5 isn’t the only thing out there that takes a lot of computing power to run, so we got to wondering what else on the market—or soon to be on the market—is worth supercharging for. Our list is below. Special thanks to Josh Sisk, a way more serious gamer than I could ever possibly be, for the suggestions.

Civilization 5

The graphics are this are eye-glazing in their almost fractal-like detail. Great, now my netbook is hiding under the couch.

Portal 2

There’s actually a arrow-key Flash version of Portal right here, which in a very basic way gets at the puzzle-based game play of the monstrous for-sale version which adds a whole lot of plot, graphics, characters, and gameplay. The game doesn’t come out until next year so the official requirements aren’t out but a fan-site made a pretty good guess: Core 2 Duo/Athlon X2, 1.58 GB of RAM, and another badass graphics card.

But. . . but, you can play the Flash game at work. (Note: not me, of course.)

Metro 2033

The immersiveness of this, the detail rich-ness of its Moscovian post-apocalypse is just boggling. It’s the sort of thing I wish was a puzzle game and not a shooter, so you’d actually get to spend some time in one place in its landscape.

Requirements? Har. They want you to be running a Core i7 CPU, which is Intel’s ridiculously high-end processor and probably the best thing going for consumer PCs.

Starcraft 2

A buddy of mine was a beta tester for this and would just, like, disappear for days. Requirements: dual-core, 2 GB RAM. The usual.

Fallout New Vegas

Supposedly, this is a stand-alone game and not a Fallout sequel. Turns out Las Vegas was not actually nuked, unlike the other cities in the games. Like, say, in Red Dead Redemption you can even gamble, which still seems like one of the more pointless attributes to add to a game that’s supposed to be running on a dual core chip.

I mean, I can gamble in real life with real people—but I can’t really blow their heads off.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.