The 'help me choose hardware to run PA' megathread

I want a laptop that can play PA reasonably well. One I'm considering is here: http://www.ebuyer.com/640809-asus-x550cc-laptop-x550cc-xo108h

I'm happy that the rest of the spec is good, what about the i5-3337U CPU? I'm not especially bothered if it can't handle an offline server, but it does need to at least be able to run OBS to record PA whilst playing on smallish systems. Funnily enough it looks like it exceeds the graphics capabilities of my main desktop.

It's dual core + ht... similar to the i5 in my laptop. My machine runs PA ok though only on minimum settings however I think that is more to do with a fairly old graphics card than the CPU. It should be fine playing the game, I'm less certain about running OBS as well though?

Edit: actually looking at the GPU, despite the '7' series branding this is actually a 4 series part! It's the same GPU as I've got in my laptop (I have a 420M, same chip though with 96 shaders). It's not really all that powerful by modern standards, it's enough to run PA on minimum settings reasonably well that's all

Basically, think of it as a desktop i3 CPU. Since PA doesn't benefit from Hyper Threading, it'll function like a boring old dual core, which should run the game, though I imagine you'll have potential slowdowns late game of there's a lot of units/planets.

This is probably worth a look:
http://www.ebuyer.com/620643-asus-n550lf-laptop-n550lf-cm115h

It's more expensive, but if you could stretch to it I think it's worth the money. Main differences: the i7 is still dual core + ht, but it has much higher turbo mode and is based on a newer architecture so its a decent bit faster. Also the graphics card is much much better as it has 384 shaders based on the much newer 'Kepler' graphics series (Geforce 6XX / 7XX range) + double the memory badnwidth...

I'm not so worried about late game slowdown or graphics, but I am worried about working with OBS. For comparison, I'm using integrated HD 4600 graphics on my desktop and am happy with that. The more I think about it, the more I doubt whether a dual core will be able to do what I need reliably. Is 720P h264 @5000kb/s too much to ask?

Thanks for your input both of you.

You could look at an AMD A10 based laptop... those are native quad core (due to AMD's less efficient architecture it's probably not much faster than Intel dual + HT but in some situations 4 'real' cores are better than 2+ cores if you follow).

I follow. Initially dismissed amd entirely because on the desktop they are generally worse, unless maybe making a media centre pc. It seems a close call between intel dual core and amd quad for laptops, definitely worth considering.

Thinking bout sumthin round these, MB goes to 32gb but there is the newer version which is only a few bucks more and holds 64gb but id prob have to rethink the setup then. total pakage price around a meeger 750$

If you want to go AMD route, you may be better looking at an AM3+ motherboard and an FX chip instead of Kaveri- Kaveri is very powerful *if* you want to use the onboard iGPU, however it only has 4 cores whereas you can get an FX8320 (8 cores) for less money which would potentially be a better option in the long run.

Also I think 32gb of ram is more than enough for PA- and a good motherboard with 4 slots will allow you to add in more later if you really need to...

Edit: Pa Client only really uses 4 cores, *however* once the server is released this uses 1 thread per planet, so has the potential to use quite a few + you'll probably be playing on the machine as well so the FX 8 core chip gives you a bit more flexibility overall.

And the FX chip Would prob be better for Lan and hosting? As I understood hosting uses its own threads per person also?

I thought it was per person but after some further reading the simulation works per planet I believe. Still that means quite a few threads in a large system (current limit is 12 planets (?), though that will likely go up) + 4 threads for client means you can already use up to 16 cores for a big game That's why I think FX would make a good candidate for a reasonably priced LAN server system. Also I currently run on a FX 8320 and CPU performance is great for PA.

i also read They are trying to at least lower the thread count by a fraction.

I think that's in relation to the UI- the 'Coherent UI' system they use is basically a web browser so to improve performance they split all the various panels in the UI into separate 'tabs' which each use a thread. Downside was that UI uses over a gb of ram due to it making something like 20 threads. Now they've put in an option to allow this to be reduced for people without very much ram, as dropping it to say 8 threads saves lots of memory but doesn't effect performance much.

The render engine uses about 3 threads (can't really use more as that is a limitation of Open GL at the moment) so I think that is unlikely to change.

Not sure weather this holds up under scrutiny but I have seen quite a few people complaining about buggy performance of Pa when using amd cpu's, mind you this could be due to many other things so take that with a grain of salt....

If I was building a gaming pc I'd go something like this...

Core i5 haswell K-series plus a decent cooler. My preference would be corsair H80/100i.
Mid range gaming mobo, my preference would probably be Asus or Msi.
Gtx 970. My preference evga, msi or maybe Galax although I've not tried Galax
8gb ddr3 1600 my preference would be corsair.
600 -750w psu (always better to have a bit more than you need) my preference would again be corsair.
1x ssd 250gb is good if you can afford it. Samsung evo's seem to be quite cheap considering their speed atm
1x Hdd Not sure what the sweet spot is for price per gigabyte atm, but I'd imagine it's probably around the 1-2Tb mark.

For Pa possibly core i7 if you are wanting to use the server for large systems and 16gb ram for larger planets...

A pc like this will have you playing with max settings for 95% of titles for at least 2 years, and at a stretch will last 4-8 years with a gpu upgrade after 2-4 yrs..

Also I'd consider win 7 64bit or newer anything older is just not worth it imho.

I'm running happily on an AMD cpu so I don't think this is the issue. Note for *server performance* the sim is currently limited to 1 thread, so ideally you need a cpu with the most *single core* performance to achieve the best sim speed- i.e. an Intel Haswell based i5 / i7. That said, the AMD FX range of CPU's do offer allot for the money, and if hosting a LAN the server does use additional threads per connected client + about 3 for rendering + a load for the UI. So an FX 8 core makes for a cheap local server and the performance isn't bad, which is really worth considering when the entry FX 8320 only costs £100 (core i3 territory).

With respect to graphics cards, Nvidia and AMD cards are running pretty well these days, though potentially a few more problems on the AMD side. One word of caution, I've read a few threads on here where people are getting atrocious performance on the new GTX 970 / 980 cards- now I'm certain this is a temporary problem (very new so drivers probably need adjusting to suit the new cards) but might be worth considering when looking at graphics card purchases. Stuff from the previous gen (e.g. GTX 780) are running really well. Similarly things like the R9 290 are running fast and are currently available at very good prices due to the 970 / 980 being out.

@maxcomander I do like your suggestion of system- definitely a good build, though I think more oriented towards people with a higher budget.

For those with limited cash I'd recommend looking at the following:

AMD FX 8XXX cpu + mid range motherboard. (circa £150 all in) Now you could also go with an Intel core i3 or (maybe) an entry level i5 for similar money. This may perform better if playing purely on line, however if you plan on hosting a server for lan the extra threads on the FX 8 series are worth it imo.
AMD Radeon R9 270x 2gb or Nvidia GTX 760 graphics card (circa £120 now)
8gb DDR3 1600 ram. More if you can afford (PA loves ram).
Corsair CX 500 psu or above (this is a decent single rail supply that can cope with most graphics cards up to GTX 770 / R9 280X range). ~ £45
1tb+ standard sata hdd (ssd's are great for loading times but *wont* improve the actual game performance so are a bit of a luxury for a budget build). ~ £50
OS: Latest version of xUbuntu or kUbuntu 64 bit (I preffer these to standard Ubuntu due to the UI). Note there are issues with PA on linux that require a bit of tinkering like using the "--softwareui" flag and a few other things, however nothing that can't be worked around. Alternatively windows 8.1 64 bit is probably the easiest OS to go with for PA (though windows 10 is out soon so maybe a poor investment right now?).

For shore man, managed to crack the 16gb recomended last night...
1300r planet vrs 7 absurd ai's max ram usage was 18.5gb. Also every single thread was showing usage (that's 12 for my system).

Omg

Just a FYI on thread usage as shown by task manager in windows... the Windows kernel has a habit of bouncing threads around so it *looks* like things are more threaded than they are.

A good example is load up a single threaded application (e.g. LAME mp3 conversion of an audio file). On a quad core machine, you'll see a bit of usage on all 4 cores, however if you go to the processes tab, and order the processes on cpu usage you'll see that programme doing the conversion is pegged at 25% cpu usage (i.e. 1 core maxed out).

In the case of PA, the client.exe uses 1 primary thread + a few support threads for rendering, in my experience it can max out about 2 to 3 threads. The server.exe also uses 1 main thread for the sim + a load of smaller threads. Coherent (UI) also uses separate threads. All in it can easily use a quad core, however adding more cores after that gets less effective as the actual performance is limited by the sim and server threads. More cores *is a good idea* however if you're using the machine to host LAN.

The point is usage of each individual thread as shown in task manager isn't that helpful as windows moves them around all the time anyway. What is helpful is looking at total cpu usage %. If you say got 50% overall usage on your 12 core machine, that would suggest PA is using 6 cores fully.

That particular game peaked around 60-70% usage, most games run at around 20-25%.

Another odd thing was that no single thread was fully loaded but my sim was down to 10 with my fps around 30 normally I see 1 thread at 95% garenteed....
Mind you I was hosting the server locally so maybe that had something to do with it?

Thank you for taking the time to explain it for me. Always ready to learn something.

Edit Ran the same game again, this time with Ethernet cable removed.. Cpu not more than 30% ram not more than 15gb...Odd?!?

10 fps is the max sim speed so you were doing fine.

Ahh thankyou for the info, the game was slowing down visably tho, so I guess it was an anomaly. Especially seeing as I ran the same game again but this time my results were consistent with what I normally see, Ie no more than 8 threads showing use and cpu at around 25-30% loading....