I want to build a new PC, as my old one sadly part way with me yesterday. I don't follow the pc market any more so what are the trends now? I play only SupComFA and PA, so please recommend a machine that wont break my bank. Motherboard, CPU, SSD, HDD, graphic card... Thanks in advance!
The best way to approach this is to give people an idea of your budget - 'break the bank' is quite a different thing to different people, after all.
Generally you want an NVidia GPU. AMD/ATI have less support and have more issues with games, PA especially.
I didn't give a number because prices here, Macedonia, Europe, are a lot different that in the US or EU. A reasonable parts, not top high end that will not be obsolete in 3-4 years.
Prices for hardware not that different anyway and without some top limit of money you can spend it's impossible to recommend anything. PS: For example for $800 budget something like GTX 760 4GB ($260-300) is reasonable, but not for $500-600.
You are right, I didn't think of that. So, my budget will be around 700-800 euros, or 1100 US$. I don't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse. As comparison, GTX 760 4GB here is 365 US$.
Do you need a new case? Or do you have an existing one you intend to re-use? If so, what form factor?
No, not the case either, nor PSU. I have CoolerMaster Wave Master case and PSU Gygabyte GE-R 460-V1 30A. So, processor, motherboard, memory, SSD, HDD and graphic card. Thanks!
Very nice set up, I will add only 8 GB ram more. Now I have to hunt down this components here, can't do on-line shopping. Thank you again!
Do keep an eye on this thread in case people critique what I've proposed. I avoided AMD because you want to play PA mainly on this rig and from what I've seen on the forums, AMD drivers can be problematic.
Hey, I would recommend you the following: Graphics: Nvidia GTX 750 ti / 130 € CPU: Intel i3 4330 /130€ OR Intel i5 4430 /150€ Mainboard: ASROCK H87M / 60-100€ depending on Size (ITX, mATX, ATX) RAM: DDR3-1600 8GB -16GB / 80-150€ SSD: Crucial M500 240GB / 100€ Power Supply: be quiet! Pure Power L8 400W or any other 400W Supply / 50€ Any Tower you like / 0-100€ TOTAL: 550-780€ Thats what my brother is using. Running smoothly with most strategy games. Endless power for Supreme Commander .
I just changed my 4 year old rig (still kicking, but given to the family) with a brand new one last month, so I spent some time checking bast value hardware lately. Here's what I learnt for a gaming rig: Forget AMD CPU, unless you target < 500€ PC i7 is mostly useless since games doesn't take much advantage of the additional cores, compared to i5. (They cost like 50% more!) If the PC is also however used for heavy software purpose (3D, video editing,...), it may be considered, since those app take advantage of the additional cores. In above link, CPU + Motherboard are like 2 years old tech, I would rather jump on 87/85 architecture (1 year old, best value) or x97 one (2 months, so more pricey) Using the above configurator, I did 2 configurations: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wpMYmG ==> (more affordable) http://pcpartpicker.com/p/GTq2WZ ==> (a bit more long-lasting since you can O/C the CPU)
i7 don't have "additional cores", Hyper-Threading just add "threads" that allow to use CPU more efficiently. Though hard to say if this will be useful for PA even if it's use tons of processes and single player server will use even more in future. Good configs actually, but I would recommend to think about GPU with 4GB GDDR5 since more and more applications start to aggressively use GPU/GPGPU and in future 2GB will be not enough for sure.
Yeah, bad choice of wording, didn't want to be too technical also (if the average Joe looks at the Windows Task Manager, Performance Tab he will see 4 cores usage on an i5, and "8" (4 HT-ed) on an i7) Good point. 2GB is mostly OK now, but may not be long-lasting. Last link can be replaced by http://pcpartpicker.com/p/vrfgFT for instance (same model with 4GB)
Sorry, but that's BS. With OC, you can get another 20-25% from the CPU - at best, typically only around 10-15%. If you are actually CPU-limited at some point, that's not even noticeable. Except for the power bill, that is, because that one actually skyrockets. New CPU generation with doubled (real!) core count is usually the better choice in that case, especially since this means increased computing power without increased power consumption. OC is only a money-saver when you are buying cheap, entry level but unlocked CPUs, and OC them to the stock clock of the corresponding high end model. Easily gaining 30-60% performance increase for a much lower price. But then again: At the cost of a significantly increased power consumption, because these CPUs have been sold at a lower stock clock for a reason. (Mostly electrical defects where some circuits need more voltage than usual in order to work properly.) Dark Rock 3 is overprized. http://pcpartpicker.com/part/thermalright-cpu-cooler-machoreva delivers almost the same cooling performance, but with a lower pricetag. Going 4GB on the GPU just because it's "futureproof" doesn't make much sense either. Even with mega textures (like the ones PA is using for planets), there is only so much memory which makes sense for a certain monitor resolution. If you wanted more image quality, you would need to activate high level super sampling first. For which the current GPU generations don't have enough computing power yet. Stick with 2GB, and from the money you have saved, buy a new model from the next or second next GPU generation. Costs you the same, overall, but that way you are not stuck with an outdated GPU in 2 years. Note that with the ongoing developments on HUMA, offloading textures to main memory is getting less and less complex, so that more than 2GB (or 3GB with 4k displays, you actually need this because higher resolution means higher bias for LOD) will most likely not be needed for quite a long time, your PCs main memory can serve the task quite well too.
If you want the extra features of the i7 but don't need the integrated graphics and don't plan to overclock an Intel Xeon can also be a good idea as they are usually priced similar to their i5 counterpart here (at least the last time I checked, not sure about Haswell Refresh).
New CPU generations didn't added anything more than 20% for long long time and even Haswell-E not released yet. Considering AMD bet on APU it's possible we won't see budget 8 core CPUs anytime soon. Unfortunately you're isn't totally correct here. PA can easily use 1.6GB VRAM and Coherent also use some (100-200MB likely). Add here fact that your OS use VRAM and you other applications too. If you just leave browser running in the background you likely get out of VRAM situation that won't end up well. PS: Also usage of "picture in picture" on different planets will increase VRAM usage even more so I can bet for multiple PiPs it's would be useful to have more VRAM.
PiP shouldn't increase VRAM usage by any significant amount since LOD bias is already adjusted for the PiP windows. I mean: These windows are so small, even the lowest resolution of the planet texture is sufficient. Also "out of VRAM" isn't much of an issue. Like I said, unused stuff is being offloaded into main memory anyway. That only results in a performance penalty when there is more than the physical amount of memory required for rendering each single frame. That's why VRAM only needs to be of sufficient size to hold all textures and buffers required for the current scene, not to hold ALL assets.
I not sure if rendering resolution affect quality of generated textures at all. When you only have camera on one planet game only need to generate textures of higher quality for this particular planet, but when you get 2-3 planets GPU will have generate more textures for sure. Also I pretty sure we'll have better features related to PiP in future and then memory usage will be higher. Most of VRAM usage it's textures that generated on GPU and likely never offloaded to RAM. There is completely no point to offload them because there they generated too fast and highest quality textures for some large planet it's few TBs in total.
