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KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread


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15 minutes ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

No. It's a PC, but it is not modular. Here are my PC specs:

Operating System
    Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU
    Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz    39 °C
    Wolfdale 45nm Technology
RAM
    8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 531MHz (7-7-7-20)
Motherboard
    Hewlett-Packard 3048h (XU1 PROCESSOR)
Graphics
    E2242 (1920x1080@60Hz)
    Intel Q45/Q43 Express Chipset (HP)
    Intel Q45/Q43 Express Chipset (HP)
Storage
    232GB Seagate ST3250318AS ATA Device (SATA)    36 °C
Optical Drives
    hp DVD A DH16ABLH ATA Device
Audio
    High Definition Audio Device

I got all that from Speccy

Alright, so it's a very aging build, I would try to upgrade soon. I'd keep an eye out on PC Part Picker or r/buildapcsales as well, you can find good deals on the subreddit and find out when AMD GPU shortage is over.

 

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Just now, legoclone09 said:

Alright, so it's a very aging build, I would try to upgrade soon. I'd keep an eye out on PC Part Picker or r/buildapcsales as well, you can find good deals on the subreddit and find out when AMD GPU shortage is over.

 

Ok then. Hopefully KSP isn't going to be too laggy for now.

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16 hours ago, legoclone09 said:

It might be a laptop, and laptop processors are throttled due to temperature, and most laptops with GPUs around $1000 I've seen have 1050s, 960M, or 3GB 1060s (mostly around the $1200 price point for 1060s)

You should ask if there are some factors that could change your advice and not make to much presumptions, there could be something it those answers that helps in the advice you can give.

Few examples:
*It indeed might have been a laptop.
*The work computer might have been in the 'officeroom', which could result in 'is streaming an option?'
*The work computer might have had an massively impressive CPU. then it would be hard to beat with an second machine and forking out for it
*The work computer would not have satisfying graphics, easily solved with an better graphics card
*I don't get any work done with KSP on my work computer :wink: 
*The work computer is not mine, and I can't alter anything on it.
*The high end work computer actually is an old build with an E8400, which nowadays is pretty much good for... office work :wink:

 

So depending on the answers, there could be a completely different advice that would suit best.

 

6 hours ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

Ok then. Hopefully KSP isn't going to be too laggy for now.

What games do you entend to play furthermore?  Legoclone put toghether a nice machine, but if your main goal is to play KSP and 'ocasionally' take up a game or two, the RX570 would be overkill. To me that is an 'enthusiast' gaming card which is great if you want to pick up gaming on a daily basis. A good price/performance card would be an GTX1050TI, that will 'blow you away' graphic wise compared to what you have right now. You won't be able to play the newest games in 'the highest possible' graphical settings, but it will play all games nicely.  You spare out about 100 dollars, which you can spend on an 250 GB Solid State Harddrive, and you don't have to wait for a graphicscard that has a shortage, and because of the shortage, will be even more expensive due to it.

Edited by LoSBoL
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2 hours ago, legoclone09 said:

@LoSBoL Yeah, a 1050Ti should be more than enough for KSP, but a RX 570 or 580 would be what you'd want if you were playing more graphically demanding games.

Hmmm, find me a game that won't run on a 1050Ti. It might be that your personal preference has a demand for more eyecandy from games, but the 1050Ti is still a gaming graphicscard, one that sells like hotcakes because of the great price/performance on an entry level gaming pricepoint. Yes, an 570 or even 580 also have good performance/price value, but at an higher pricepoint.
It comes down to preferences (and budget), what do you accept on a graphical level?  Do you occasionally play a few games? , or is gaming one of your main hobbies? and what would you want to spend on it? 

Wanna play KSP with some graphic mods? then even a 1050Ti is indeed more then enough, even an 650 or 750 would do fine.

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Umm hello? I'm the one who posted a question a few posts up. Like I said,

I want to future proof myself with a better laptop for elite dangerous' next season, KSP and dawn of war 3. What price range am  I looking at for an off the shelf laptop?


 

 
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38 minutes ago, OwenM said:

Umm hello? I'm the one who posted a question a few posts up. Like I said,

I want to future proof myself with a better laptop for elite dangerous' next season, KSP and dawn of war 3. What price range am  I looking at for an off the shelf laptop?


 

 
  •  

I saw your question, sorry, In haven't got enough experiences into high performance laptop's and their priceranges. I don't think I'm qualified enough to give good advice, but somebody's bound to come along who can advise.

I however do play games on my laptop, but I use my desktop computer to run them and stream them to my laptop. Which actually works great. In that way I can use a high performance gaming rig and a cheap laptop without a dedicated graphicscard, which doesn't run hot, doesn't sounds like it wants to take off, and runs very long on a single charge.  I can really recommend playing like that, but you're bound to home to play games. So it's not 'on the go' go' gaming.

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5 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

Hmmm, find me a game that won't run on a 1050Ti. It might be that your personal preference has a demand for more eyecandy from games, but the 1050Ti is still a gaming graphicscard, one that sells like hotcakes because of the great price/performance on an entry level gaming pricepoint. Yes, an 570 or even 580 also have good performance/price value, but at an higher pricepoint.
It comes down to preferences (and budget), what do you accept on a graphical level?  Do you occasionally play a few games? , or is gaming one of your main hobbies? and what would you want to spend on it? 

Wanna play KSP with some graphic mods? then even a 1050Ti is indeed more then enough, even an 650 or 750 would do fine.

Yeah, I'm used to people wanting high/ultra graphics, I tend to recommend 570s/580s for PCs. 1050Ti is a strong card, of course!

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13 hours ago, legoclone09 said:

Yeah, I'm used to people wanting high/ultra graphics, I tend to recommend 570s/580s for PCs. 1050Ti is a strong card, of course!

a 570/580 is a perfect recommendation as well, I'd buy in a minute as well if I needed an upgrade. They are pretty futureproof if you want to stay in high quality mode for at least a few years.

Advice is usually pretty hard to give, you easily tend to advice within your own frame of reference,  especially when you have little to go when somebody just says 'build me a computer' and have little to go on further.
I have it to, I tend to buy, and therefore tend to advice 'second hand', while there could be damn good reasons for somebody wanting to buy new of the shelf. 

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This might interest you guys too:

 

2 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

Help me out here guys, how would you explain such a purchase to your wife?

The fact that you need to explain yourself at all was your gravest error.

 

 

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On 8 June 2017 at 3:10 AM, LoSBoL said:



 

What games do you entend to play furthermore?  Legoclone put toghether a nice machine, but if your main goal is to play KSP and 'ocasionally' take up a game or two, the RX570 would be overkill. To me that is an 'enthusiast' gaming card which is great if you want to pick up gaming on a daily basis. A good price/performance card would be an GTX1050TI, that will 'blow you away' graphic wise compared to what you have right now. You won't be able to play the newest games in 'the highest possible' graphical settings, but it will play all games nicely.  You spare out about 100 dollars, which you can spend on an 250 GB Solid State Harddrive, and you don't have to wait for a graphicscard that has a shortage, and because of the shortage, will be even more expensive due to it.

Thanks. I might play xplane 11 if possible. If not, probably only orbiter flight simulator or fsx with lower settings. I also might play simple orbit, but I'm not sure about that one. Sorry for the late reply. Any recommendations with the RAM? I've seen many, but I'm not sure which to get.

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1 hour ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

Thanks. I might play xplane 11 if possible. If not, probably only orbiter flight simulator or fsx with lower settings. I also might play simple orbit, but I'm not sure about that one. Sorry for the late reply. Any recommendations with the RAM? I've seen many, but I'm not sure which to get.

8GB is a bare minimum, I would recommend 16GB if you can afford it.

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On 6/06/2017 at 1:56 PM, StupidAndy said:

what's Unix?

Unix is that 'other' operating system that has been there all along... While DOS and early versions of MacOS were making their way onto small household 'mini' or 'micro' computers, Unix was running on the the big commercial and scientific mainframes.
While DOS was built to be easy to program for a single user, Unix was designed to handle many simultanious users and varying workloads. These basic principles have remained through countless variants, forks, and changes of ownership. MacOS X is probably the modern commercial Unix most are familiar with, but there are many others.

 

On 6/06/2017 at 0:43 PM, StupidAndy said:

what exactly IS Linux?

Linux is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system kernel (the bit that talks directly to the hardware). Most of the time when people say "Linux", they really mean "GNU/Linux" (which is a mouthfull).
Linux is the kernel, GNU is the rest of the operating system. GNU stands for GNU is Not Unix, apparently, but it is pretty much a free version of Unix written from scratch, one component at a time. Linux allows it to run on a wide variety of hardware.

 

On 6/06/2017 at 5:04 PM, Camacha said:

The kernel is what matters most. That is the bit of software that governs the most basic operations of a computer.

Richard Stallman would beg to differ :P The kernel is useless without a userland to run applications and a toolchain to build those applications (including the kernel itself)... all that comes from the GNU project, which predates Linux and contains considerably more code.
Linux is what it is today because Linus released it into an environment where a complete Unix system (GNU) already existed... all it needed to become a viable operating system was a kernel.

 

On 6/06/2017 at 5:04 PM, Camacha said:

Linux's claim to fame is that it is (or can be made to be) a very light kernel that can run on pretty much every four transistors stuck together.

That's one "claim to fame". The real advantage of the Linux kernel is that it is highly customisable, and customisable by the end-user.
Not only does it run on smart fridges and smart phones, it also powers a majority of the worlds supercomputers and webservers. It scales from the smallest processors all the way to superclusters.
 

To go back a bit:

On 31/05/2017 at 1:37 AM, Camacha said:

It is light and free and fairly resistent to malware

GNU/Linux can be as light or heavy as you want it to be. And as with any ecosystem, diversity is good, monocultures breed disease. Windows everywhere is a monoculture, and that's why there's so much Windows malware.

 

On 31/05/2017 at 1:37 AM, Camacha said:

However, for gaming or things like CAD applications, it is far from a Windows replacement.

I run CAD just fine, there are a bunch of applications available, both open-source and commercial. The only problem is the lack of the 2 'industry standard' applications (AutoCAD and SolidWorks), but there's nothing that you can't do without them if you're willing to learn something else. Have you tried BricsCAD or VariCAD? If you only need 2D drawing (90% of the time for me), QCAD/LibreCad is also rather good (and free).

As for games, I play lots of games. Don't feel I'm missing out on anything important. There are too many examples to list, if you want some, just look at the selection on Steam.

The "Linux doesn't have enough applications" argument is an old one, and it's getting less valid by the day. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem: In a capitalist society, consumer choice dictates production (in theory anyway), so to get more GNU/Linux applications one only needs more demand...   You see where this is going of course.
The situation is slowly improving, as more users eschew the 'default' Windows environment and ask software vendors for alternatives, more of those vendors see *nix ports as a viable business proposition.
There are holdouts, of course, and for those there's complaining... and VirtualBox or Wine.

 

 

In other news, I binned that power supply. On closer inspection, it appears that one corner of the fan controller / monitoring board actually caught fire :o.
As the board substrate is damaged, it's not really worth my time to fix it.
Here's a (lousy phone camera) pic, for anyone curious. And it's an Antec EA-750 Green, if you want to avoid them. The EA series was awesome, not so much the "green" refresh.
IMG_20170602_150712.jpg

And don't give me lip about the state of my coffee cup... I've heard it all before.

 

Edited by steve_v
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9 hours ago, legoclone09 said:

 

By not having one.

295707576358666242.png

Then who's gonna bring in the money?  :D

8 hours ago, Camacha said:

This might interest you guys too:

 

The fact that you need to explain yourself at all was your gravest error.

 

 

really not helping here!! :confused:

8 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

"Hope you enjoy it, Honey, I'll be out here in the doghouse if you need me..."

Hahahaha, I can see this working, for some, maybe  :sealed:

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10 hours ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

Thanks. I might play xplane 11 if possible. If not, probably only orbiter flight simulator or fsx with lower settings. I also might play simple orbit, but I'm not sure about that one. Sorry for the late reply. Any recommendations with the RAM? I've seen many, but I'm not sure which to get.

Ah jeeze.... Now you've done it...  Forget about a graphics card, we might have bigger issues... My head could be bitten off after this post :sealed:

All the games are physics simulators, including KSP.  These physics simulators are all bound to single thread performance and don't profit from multicores or hyperthreading. That basically means you won't profit from AMD's Ryzen bang for buck, because the performance gains from AMD are in the fields you are not going to use... AMD's Ryzen rips Intels apart when it comes to multithreading.  But equally prices Intels perform much, much better when it comes to the physics simulators you want to play. And that includes platform costs like mainboards and memory.

Please don't take my word for it, YouTube is your friend here, look up the mentioned games performances on Intels and Ryzen's. YouTube is spammed with these video's, and it really is a difference of day and night.

I'd recommend going for Intel on this one... If your main use would not have been physic simulating games, but most other games and/or content creation uses, Ryzen would have the benefit.
But in this situation its pretty clear to me...

An Intel I5-7600, preferably an I5-7600K if its just 10 dollars or so more expensive, even if you're not intending to overclock, it's single core performance is about 5% higher than the non-K
An B250 or a cheap H270 chipset mainboard if not overclocking, a cheap Z270 mainboard if you do want to fool around with overclocking.

This combination would cost you between 300 and 350 dollars (If i look at Euro prices), a bit more then Ryzen 5 1600, but the mentioned games run much better.

Like legoclone19 mentioned, I would get 16GB ram if you could budget it in, DDR4 2400 would do

The mentioned games are CPU bound, and not Graphics bound, an GTX1050Ti would do nicely. As you mentioned, with slightly toned down graphics settings.  


All in all you could have a very, very nice running machine for wat you want to do with it, all within or slightly over your budget.

Edited by LoSBoL
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On 10 June 2017 at 4:54 AM, LoSBoL said:

Ah jeeze.... Now you've done it...  Forget about a graphics card, we might have bigger issues... My head could be bitten off after this post :sealed:

All the games are physics simulators, including KSP.  These physics simulators are all bound to single thread performance and don't profit from multicores or hyperthreading. That basically means you won't profit from AMD's Ryzen bang for buck, because the performance gains from AMD are in the fields you are not going to use... AMD's Ryzen rips Intels apart when it comes to multithreading.  But equally prices Intels perform much, much better when it comes to the physics simulators you want to play. And that includes platform costs like mainboards and memory.

Please don't take my word for it, YouTube is your friend here, look up the mentioned games performances on Intels and Ryzen's. YouTube is spammed with these video's, and it really is a difference of day and night.

I'd recommend going for Intel on this one... If your main use would not have been physic simulating games, but most other games and/or content creation uses, Ryzen would have the benefit.
But in this situation its pretty clear to me...

An Intel I5-7600, preferably an I5-7600K if its just 10 dollars or so more expensive, even if you're not intending to overclock, it's single core performance is about 5% higher than the non-K
An B250 or a cheap H270 chipset mainboard if not overclocking, a cheap Z270 mainboard if you do want to fool around with overclocking.

This combination would cost you between 300 and 350 dollars (If i look at Euro prices), a bit more then Ryzen 5 1600, but the mentioned games run much better.

Like legoclone19 mentioned, I would get 16GB ram if you could budget it in, DDR4 2400 would do

The mentioned games are CPU bound, and not Graphics bound, an GTX1050Ti would do nicely. As you mentioned, with slightly toned down graphics settings.  


All in all you could have a very, very nice running machine for wat you want to do with it, all within or slightly over your budget.

Thanks. Sorry for making your head bitten off. I know that Xplane 11 is very heavy with all the details on the airports, the physics, and everything. This aviation store nearby has a really good computer. They let people try xplane 11, and they put it on maxed out settings. If I remember correctly, they have an intel i7-7700K core, 32gb of DDR4 ram at 2400 mhz, and some other expensive stuff that I forgot. I think the ram was a kingston fury or something like that.

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19 hours ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

Thanks. Sorry for making your head bitten off. I know that Xplane 11 is very heavy with all the details on the airports, the physics, and everything. This aviation store nearby has a really good computer. They let people try xplane 11, and they put it on maxed out settings. If I remember correctly, they have an intel i7-7700K core, 32gb of DDR4 ram at 2400 mhz, and some other expensive stuff that I forgot. I think the ram was a kingston fury or something like that.

The head's still on :D  Hefty machinery, must be a pretty expensive graphicscard in it to. That really does complement the game even more. But it's all where you want to draw the line. 
For the ram you really don't have to go for fancy names, just 2400mhz DDR4 will do from a respectable company like Crucial, Corsair or Kingston. There is very little performance gain in expensive ram. (buy them in pairs 2x4 or far better 2x 8GB)
One thing you will appreciate is an SSD harddrive over an HDD spinning harddrive as your main Harddrive, that will make every computer responsive.
 

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Hi everyone ! 

Do anyone know how well (or how bad ??) can new 2017 macbook pros run KSP ? 

I am currently running it on a old late 2008 core2duo 15inch MBP with a 9600GT inside and i must say that it is not that bad.

The thing that scares me is that there is no "proper" graphic card in new 13inchs, only a iris plus 650...

If anyone as tried please share !! 

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Even the cheapest of the new macbooks is able to play KSP way better than your current macbook, but dont expect heavy graphic mods or big ships to run well. But for the price of the cheapest one you could get a normal laptop and a dedicated gaming PC with way more power...

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On 11 June 2017 at 4:24 AM, LoSBoL said:

The head's still on :D  Hefty machinery, must be a pretty expensive graphicscard in it to. That really does complement the game even more. But it's all where you want to draw the line. 
For the ram you really don't have to go for fancy names, just 2400mhz DDR4 will do from a respectable company like Crucial, Corsair or Kingston. There is very little performance gain in expensive ram. (buy them in pairs 2x4 or far better 2x 8GB)
One thing you will appreciate is an SSD harddrive over an HDD spinning harddrive as your main Harddrive, that will make every computer responsive.
 

Thanks. My current ram is 8gb at 300 something mhz, so I guess it's pretty bad compared to what I should be using (especially with all my mods). Now I have to save. Also, I overheard the guy at the aviation store, and he said that he paid at least 1,400 dollars for the graphics card.

Edited by SpaceEnthusiast23
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20 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

For the ram you really don't have to go for fancy names, just 2400mhz DDR4 will do from a respectable company

When talking about RAM clock speed, you also need to look at the rest of the timings - particularly CAS latency. Most workloads care a lot more about latency than raw throughput.
A lot of vendors back off the timings to get a bigger MHz number on the box, and when they do, it doesn't translate to faster memory at all.

 

9 hours ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

My current ram is 8gb at 300 something mhz, so I guess it's pretty bad compared to what I should be using (especially with all my mods).

I'd say just get good quality modules at a clock your board supports as standard, ignore 'overclocked' (=overpriced) RAM and non-standard speeds. Memory throughput is only a minor contributor to overall system performance.
What you have is probably okay as far as speed goes (though 300MHz doesn't sound at all right) anyway, if you're hurting for RAM just get some more of the same.

 

 

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