KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

[cantab]

There's concern now about the RX 480's power draw anyway.

[worir4]

9 hours ago, cantab said:

There's concern now about the RX 480's power draw anyway.

What do you mean?

[Elthy]

It uses more power from the PCIe slot that specified, its made for 75W but the crad draws up to 85W on average. This wont be an issue on stock clock rates, but could become worse with overclocking. Wait for custom designs, they wont do this since they will have minimum an 8-pin connector instead of a 6-pin one, so they dont need to draw that much from the mainboard.

[Camacha]

Never mind

Edited July 1, 2016 by Camacha

[SelectHalfling0]

I have successfully built a PC! I actually built it a few weeks ago... however I have now run into a problem. For the past few weeks, since first turning it on, everything was perfect (It had no issues whatsoever, hardly makes any sound, etc.). A few days ago, after I had put it to sleep with the "sleep" button in windows 10 (windows key -> power -> sleep) I hit the power button to power it back on, and it started for half a second, shut down entirely, then started again, however it wouldn't display anything on screen. I hit the reset button, and it powered up just fine. This happens about 50% of the time when I bring it out of sleep mode and it's getting annoying. It hasn't caused any issues with how it runs (just as well as before). Does anyone know what could be happening with the computer?

[cantab]

It could be that your computer uses too little energy in sleep mode for the power supply to behave correctly with. There are usually some options in the UEFI to enable or disable certain "sleep states" to work around that issue.

[SelectHalfling0]

Alright. I also may not have plugged in the PSU cable all the way in the CPU Power Supply slot, as it was located in between 2 fans. I'm gonna be checking both potential issues out.

[Camacha]

Did you upgrade or migrate Windows 10 from a previous installation, or did you do a fresh install?

[SelectHalfling0]

It's a fresh install of windows 10.

[worir4]

I got my new RX 480! I am just installing drivers and stuff. I will update when I have played a few games. =)

[Elthy]

Nice, 4Gb or 8Gb?

[worir4]

4Gb , the I was going to go for the 8Gb but it was more expensive than i thought it was going to be. I have played some games and it is amazing! I can play games that used to be at 30fps now at 60+

The biggest improvement is Space Engineers. I couldn't get above 20 FPS before but now i can get consistent 60 (until i look at the planets XD)

[Camacha]

3 hours ago, worir4 said:

4Gb , the I was going to go for the 8Gb but it was more expensive than i thought it was going to be. I have played some games and it is amazing! I can play games that used to be at 30fps now at 60+

The biggest improvement is Space Engineers. I couldn't get above 20 FPS before but now i can get consistent 60 (until i look at the planets XD)

Apparently, the current stock model has 8 GB on board, even when it is a 4 GB model. With a bit of luck, you can do a BIOS flash to upgrade it for free

Oh, and a Gb (gigabit) is about 8 times less than a GB (gigabyte) You would not want a card with 512 MB RAM.

Edited July 4, 2016 by Camacha

[Elthy]

It makes buying the 4Gb version quite tempting. Are there any recorded sucessfull flashes to unlock the full 8GB?

[Camacha]

37 minutes ago, Elthy said:

It makes buying the 4Gb version quite tempting. Are there any recorded sucessfull flashes to unlock the full 8GB?

Not yet 'in the wild', though reviewers got the 8 GB model and a piece of software to flash a BIOS and toggle between the 4 GB and 8 GB model that way. The 4 GB model was not supplied. Supposedly, they did not have time to rate both cards. Putting half the chips on the cards would not have worked, since that would effectively mean the cards only have a 128-bit bus and performance would suffer.

All that makes it rather probably it would work, especially since there is no technology that allows having all the chips on board without the capability of using all of the memory. Not one that is not much more contrived and expensive than simply rating both cards, anyway. Do note that it probably is it probably is a temporary situation. When both cards are rated and/or custom PCBs are created, there is no reason for additional chips to be used. It is more expensive to produce the cards that way.

Finally, do note that GB and Gb are two different things The small b signifies bits (ones and zeros), whereas the big B signifies bytes (octets of bits, so 8 bits). A Gb (gigabit) is therefore eight times smaller than a GB (gigabyte).

Edited July 4, 2016 by Camacha

[worir4]

4 hours ago, Camacha said:

Apparently, the current stock model has 8 GB on board, even when it is a 4 GB model. With a bit of luck, you can do a BIOS flash to upgrade it for free

Oh, and a Gb (gigabit) is about 8 times less than a GB (gigabyte) You would not want a card with 512 MB RAM.

U wot m8???? I got the 8GB one for cheaper??? Do you know how i can unlock the other 8GB? Links to a source would be appreciated!

[KocLobster]

So I finally got my parts and built my PC. It installed like a charm and it is soooooo blazing fast. I can't believe the speed and quality it runs at. I've never had a rig that was this powerful before, or as high end for it's time as this machine.

 

I am having some issues though, and it's most likely due to my inexperience. I OCd my CPU (i5-6600K) to 4.5GHz, and my GPU (MSI GTX 980) to about 1490MHz (GPU clock offset +175MHz & memrory clock offset +410MHz) . After reading a few tutorials, increasing the OCs slightly until I start seeing problems, and running many many benchmarks (with Heaven), I feel like a good safe OC was what I've set it to, no?

I am experiencing occasional crashes in some of my games though. I downloaded Farcry 4 and ARK Survival Evolved to test my new system. Typically I run things on Ultra or as high as they go. With Farcry4, I figured out that the crashes were caused by a particular setting, which was NVidia's 'soft shadows' setting. It is like a step above Ultra, and I turned it down and it runs great now. With ARK, I can't seem to determine what is causing the crashes. I also experience stuttering, which is really annoying. I only see the stuttering in ARK so far, I believe.

What causes stuttering in general? Why do I have these problems, and why does it seem like I need to turn down the settings, when my FPS is usually a minimum of 40, an average of 55? If my FPS is so high, why do I have these problems? What am I doing wrong? Is something OCd too hard? Can I just not run the settings as high as I do?

Edited July 5, 2016 by KocLobster

[Camacha]

3 hours ago, KocLobster said:

I am experiencing occasional crashes in some of my games though. I downloaded Farcry 4 and ARK Survival Evolved to test my new system. Typically I run things on Ultra or as high as they go. With Farcry4, I figured out that the crashes were caused by a particular setting, which was NVidia's 'soft shadows' setting. It is like a step above Ultra, and I turned it down and it runs great now. With ARK, I can't seem to determine what is causing the crashes. I also experience stuttering, which is really annoying. I only see the stuttering in ARK so far, I believe.

What causes stuttering in general? Why do I have these problems, and why does it seem like I need to turn down the settings, when my FPS is usually a minimum of 40, an average of 55? If my FPS is so high, why do I have these problems? What am I doing wrong? Is something OCd too hard? Can I just not run the settings as high as I do?

It sounds like your overlock might not be stable. An unstable overclock can cause various issues, like the error correction in de GDDR5 kicking in (causing slowdowns because data needs to be sent multiple times). Temperature could be another issue, as chips that run too hot throttle themselves back. I have not heard you about the temperatures, even though they are the main factor in determining whether you can push an overclock further.

It could also be your settings are too high. If you have certain texture settings (high AA and AF combined with large textures) or effects, the memory consumption can be off the charts. This in turn causes slowdowns, because data needs to be transferred back and forth all the time between HDD and video memory.

Personally, I feel that aiming for settings that will allow you to run a game at 60 fps is a decent approach. That way a game runs buttery smooth and has some headroom for performance heavy areas, yet generally games do not improve much visually with excessive settings. You really need to do a detailed side by side to even see any the difference. Pushing your system to the limit can be fun, but if stable gameplay is the goal, you might want to aim for 10-20% below that.

 

5 hours ago, worir4 said:

U wot m8???? I got the 8GB one for cheaper??? Do you know how i can unlock the other 8GB? Links to a source would be appreciated!

Probably. Here is a source and here is some speculation. Here is someone who confirmed the card physically having the chips on board. The fact that AMD officials adamantly deny this being possible leads me to believe they are working hard to correct the situation The best way to be sure is to check your card and see what chips are on there. If you look up the model number and size and the amount of them, you should know what you have very quickly, providing the chips are visible.

Edited July 5, 2016 by Camacha

[worir4]

3 hours ago, Camacha said:

Probably. Here is a source and here is some speculation. Here is someone who confirmed the card physically having the chips on board. The fact that AMD officials adamantly deny this being possible leads me to believe they are working hard to correct the situation The best way to be sure is to check your card and see what chips are on there. If you look up the model number and size and the amount of them, you should know what you have very quickly, providing the chips are visible.

So all those jokes about downloading more RAM turned out to be true???!?!?!? XD

I think i will not attempt anything yet. I will wait for some other people to do it first. =) I feel super lucky now, I saved £40! 

Edited July 5, 2016 by worir4

[Camacha]

2 minutes ago, worir4 said:

So all those jokes about downloading more RAM turned out to be true???!?!?!? XD

I could be a nitpick and say that you download a BIOS and not the actual RAM, but sure

 

[cantab]

@KocLobster what other software did you use to stress test your overclock? And in particular did you stress CPU and GPU together? I've read reports where people reached CPU and GPU overclocks that were stable individually which is what a single stress-test or benchmark program will focus on, but the system became unstable when both were heavily loaded which is what some games will do.

In any case if an overclocked system becomes unstable the obvious thing to do is knock all the overclocks back a notch.

[KocLobster]

18 hours ago, Camacha said:

It sounds like your overlock might not be stable. An unstable overclock can cause various issues, like the error correction in de GDDR5 kicking in (causing slowdowns because data needs to be sent multiple times). Temperature could be another issue, as chips that run too hot throttle themselves back. I have not heard you about the temperatures, even though they are the main factor in determining whether you can push an overclock further.

It could also be your settings are too high. If you have certain texture settings (high AA and AF combined with large textures) or effects, the memory consumption can be off the charts. This in turn causes slowdowns, because data needs to be transferred back and forth all the time between HDD and video memory.

Personally, I feel that aiming for settings that will allow you to run a game at 60 fps is a decent approach. That way a game runs buttery smooth and has some headroom for performance heavy areas, yet generally games do not improve much visually with excessive settings. You really need to do a detailed side by side to even see any the difference. Pushing your system to the limit can be fun, but if stable gameplay is the goal, you might want to aim for 10-20% below that.

 

13 hours ago, cantab said:

@KocLobster what other software did you use to stress test your overclock? And in particular did you stress CPU and GPU together? I've read reports where people reached CPU and GPU overclocks that were stable individually which is what a single stress-test or benchmark program will focus on, but the system became unstable when both were heavily loaded which is what some games will do.

In any case if an overclocked system becomes unstable the obvious thing to do is knock all the overclocks back a notch.

Appreciate the advice, I think you're on the mark with the 3rd explanation. I believe I'm just setting the graphics too high. I really have no baseline or experience to go off of, I have no way of knowing what is acceptable and what isn't, both for video settings and OC settings. Temperatures depend on the game, but I typically see 65C. The absolute hottest my GPU ever gets is 70C.

Which is why I feel like I have not maxed out my card, nor have I even touched voltage. This is why I am confused to why I sometimes experience artifacts, crashes, and stutters.

[Elthy]

To high settings shoulndt cause any crashes, there has to be other issues. Almost 1500mhz sound a bit to high for no increase in voltage.

[KocLobster]

1 hour ago, Elthy said:

To high settings shoulndt cause any crashes, there has to be other issues. Almost 1500mhz sound a bit to high for no increase in voltage.

I'd increase the voltage, but when I tried in the past, it didn't seem very helpful. I wasn't really sure it was doing anything for me, and at some point, even with the voltage cranked to +87mV, I could only get up to ~1530MHz.

[Camacha]

2 hours ago, Elthy said:

To high settings shoulndt cause any crashes [...]

In an overclocked system, they easily could. If you load the card more with settings that are on the edge, it could be enough to push it over. Also, you run into limits like available memory, which could mean a switch in behaviour.

36 minutes ago, KocLobster said:

I'd increase the voltage, but when I tried in the past, it didn't seem very helpful. I wasn't really sure it was doing anything for me, and at some point, even with the voltage cranked to +87mV, I could only get up to ~1530MHz.

Looking at what you are telling us here, I would stay away from the voltage a little while. If you mess up the voltage setting, especially combined with temperatures that are too high, you can damage things relatively quickly. You can generally overclock quite a bit without having to touch the voltage and it would be better to get a feel for things with the safety on.

Also, have you looked up the maximum temperatures of both GPU and CPU? Both are very different and knowing the limit is important. Not only to prevent damage, but also because pushing the hardware beyond the limit will cost performance due to throttling, not gain it.