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KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread


Leonov

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I ran an over clocked C2Q9550 for years. Great chip. Finally gave it up last year for a new system built around an i5-6600k. I've been very pleased with the new rig, which only has a mild OC but runs nearly silent most of the time.

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If I was building a new desktop right now I'd base it around the I3 7350K.  It's got a base clock speed of 4.2Ghz and is unlocked so you can overclock further if you wish.    It's only two cores but KSP won't make use of more.  "Triple A" titles that launch on games console first tend not to interest me very much these days,  I play a lot of stuff that's done by smaller publishing houses (Hearts of Iron 4, Euro truck simulator etc)  and they don't have the resources to make their code good at multi threading.    Xbox games sell more and can afford to do more optimisation, and also it's kind of obligatory because those xbox cores are very weak individually.

I3 7350K is simply the highest single thread performance you can get atm.

I'd also check intel's site to find out what the fastest officially supported speed grade of DDR4 it supports and buy the lowest latency ram i can get at that speed grade.

Graphics card - KSP is not intensive, you could probably get by with a midrange offering.   Stock, it'd probably run ok on the inbuilt graphics, but I don't want any of my CPUs thermal budget going to rendering, and i want all my ddr 4 memory bandwidth available for processing the physics engine, not copying textures back and forth from the frame buffer !

 

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There are a good comments in the thread and I fully agree with the statement that single thread performance is what is most likely influences the performance of the game (especially in physics heavy scenes). We're however taking this conclusion from what we think is affecting the performance.

The best way to be certain would be to create a repeatable test simulating different activities in the game (launching a huge ship would certainly need to be there) and throw it at the community to learn. Knowing us all I guess somebody has tried it but I have not found any benchmark mod or anything to support it.

I am actually surprised that there is no mod like this as it would be a great help to find out i.e. how a mod affects frame rate.

Or maybe there is but I have just not found it?

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While we are still reeling from the Ryzen release, AMD has announced their new Naples server chips. Up to 32 cores, 64 threads and octochannel memory in a single chip. If that was not enough already, the beta for Quake Champions has also been announced. Yes, a game in Quake 3 and Quake Live style. The beta does not seem to be limited, so enter if you are interested.

Things just got real!

 

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29 minutes ago, Camacha said:

While we are still reeling from the Ryzen release, AMD has announced their new Naples server chips. Up to 32 cores, 64 threads and octochannel memory in a single chip.

That thing could be the real cashcow for AMD. Workstation stuff is where Ryzen shines and apparently dualsocket systems are the big thing for servers. The closest competitor product is the Xeon E5-2699v4 (22 cores at >4000$), it will be interessting to see how AMD will put up against that. I wonder how the different approaches (4 dies/cpu vs. one gigantic die) will play out, both have their advantages.

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On 08/03/2017 at 0:30 AM, Elthy said:

That thing could be the real cashcow for AMD. Workstation stuff is where Ryzen shines and apparently dualsocket systems are the big thing for servers. The closest competitor product is the Xeon E5-2699v4 (22 cores at >4000$), it will be interessting to see how AMD will put up against that. I wonder how the different approaches (4 dies/cpu vs. one gigantic die) will play out, both have their advantages.

With these kinds of chips, the sticker price is not all that interesting. It is about the TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership. That often largely depends on power consumption and license fees, the latter of which are often dependent on core or processor count. It will be very interesting to see how competitive this product is. The 1800X being more power efficient than the 6900X (which is basically Xeon server silicon) is a good start, though.

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My 10yo son had saved up all his birthday, Christmas, and newspaper money (He helps deliver with myself and his older brother) for his own laptop and had over half the money he needed. After some poking around, I found this laptop on sale, so we chipped in the rest.

It doesn't have an optical drive, although there is space for one, but those are rarely used these days anyways. The on-chip Intel 620 graphics seems to be reasonably capable; certainly better than the nVidia GeForce GT630m on my older 3rd gen i7 laptop (passmark G3D scores: 943 vs 678). Nothing spectacular, but reasonably priced. The best part? The specs on the linked site (where I bought it) say it does not have a touchscreen or backlit keyboard, but the reality is, it has both! I think it's a pretty good score. I'm still in the middle of setting it up, but I'm sure he'll be happy with it. Now I just have to get him hooked on KSP!

It's certainly tempting to trade computers with him, but my wife won't let me...

Edited by StrandedonEarth
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I finally put a build together on PC part picker and was almost ready to pull the trigger. I asked my thermodynamics TA (who built his own PC) whether to get a 1060 (EVGA SC Gaming) or RX 480 (Sapphire Nitro 8GB), and he suggested a 1060 for CUDA cores and better quality. I'm not sure if this is just his opinion or whether that is a good reason to go with the 1060 over the RX 480. I intend to use the computer for gaming (KSP with graphics mods mainly), a bit of development (Unity, Monodevelop, GIMP and Blender as of now), and Solidworks (which doesn't support CUDA or gaming cards at all) for a class (and maybe Matlab (which supports CUDA) and some other programs later on). 

Should I get the RX 480 for better game performance (which isn't extremely important to me) and better long-term support from AMD (something I do care about), or should I get the 1060 for CUDA cores and hope they will become useful someday?

Edit: Should I be concerned about RAM clearance with the CPU cooler?

Edited by Robotengineer
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Yes, AMD R5 had been released. Is will be very interesting to see how they perform and what the actual prices are going to be. Though they will most likely not beat the 7700K, most people would not have bought an i7 regardless. For more price concious gamers, this might be a very interesting product range.

Also, hints are being dropped that an enthusiast HEDT platform might be released. You may have thought that the R7 range was intended to compete in that area, but it seems AMD has a platform with 16 cores and 32 lined up between their consumer and their server product ranges. If you are into VM's, rendering or other forms of serious computing, this could be the thing dreams are made of. Performance wise, the chips seem slated to compete with very, very expensive Xeon chips.

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Just now, legoclone09 said:

Only problem with the R5 series is that the 4c8t still run off two CCXs, we'll have to wait for the APUs to get one CCX module CPUs, so if I upgrade I'll likely get a high end APU.

Having two CCXs means having better thermal dissipation and cherry picked cores within a CCX. You do not get that with a single CCX. Somehow people are fooled into believing the two CCX setup makes the chip unsuitable for gaming, but that could not be further from the truth. There seems to be a minor penalty so far. AMD has announced that a new stepping will soon appear that should mitigate or fully fix the issue. Whatever the case, the chip as it stands is already an absolute performer.

It baffles me that people have so much trouble looking at the bigger picture. These are relatively cheap chips with what looks to be awesome performance. What more could you want? It is a bit like going to the car dealership, getting a great deal on a really fancy car and then complaining that you do not want it, because a much more expensive car accelerates slightly faster. To make matters more confusing, most people never wanted to buy that more expensive car in the first place.

The community confuses me sometimes. I like computers. I understand computers. The annoying little buggers.

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31 minutes ago, Camacha said:

AMD has announced that a new stepping will soon appear that should mitigate or fully fix the issue. Whatever the case, the chip as it stands is already an absolute performer.

Have they? From what i know they want to fix some issues with Ryzen-2, which wont come for at least a year. The CCX link design isnt something you fix with a new stepping, its a fundamental part of the architecture. I can only imagine one short term "fix" for the bandwidth limitation; currently it seems that the link speed is coupled to the RAM frequency. Maybe they can add in a factor, so even with cheaper RAM it could run at full possible speed, but even that would be to big for a simple new stepping.

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A quick look into it myself indicates the performance penalty will be partly alleviated with an OS that understands the relationship between the cores. The initial issue is similar to with Bulldozer when the OS's didn't know about the two-core modules sharing resources. Or it's like if you had an Intel chip and the OS hadn't heard of hyperthreading.

On the other hand, Windows 7 and 8 stickers might never get the required OS updates. Once Win 10 does, it might be interesting to see how much Windows 7 actually suffers with Ryzen and also KL.

Edited by cantab
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46 minutes ago, cantab said:

On the other hand, Windows 7 and 8 stickers might never get the required OS updates. Once Win 10 does, it might be interesting to see how much Windows 7 actually suffers with Ryzen and also KL.

Surprisingly, Windows 7 has better performance than Windows 10 and appears to deal with things better.

Edited by Camacha
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2 hours ago, Camacha said:

Surprisingly, Windows 7 has better performance than Windows 10 and appears to deal with things better.

I think it's due to the highest end Intel Core 2 Duos being on a system similar to Ryzen.

Edited by legoclone09
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Well... I was cable managing earlier because my management is horrendous. I get a 2-port SATA power cable out of my Thermaltake PSU bag and unplug my 4-port one, I only had two ports being used so I figured why not consolidate. Guess what brand that SATA power cable was? Corsair. Not Thermaltake. Boot up, hear a click, smell burnt plastic. Unplug PC immediately and ask PCMR discord for help with what went wrong and they said try another SATA power cable. Tried the previous one I used and it worked fine... on my SSD. There goes about 400GB of games. And this all happened on my birthday...

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Ouch.

Yes, modular power supply cables are in general not compatible with different power supplies, and using the wrong one will make stuff Go Horribly Wrong. Even two supplies with the same brand can need totally different cables.

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18 minutes ago, cantab said:

Ouch.

Yes, modular power supply cables are in general not compatible with different power supplies, and using the wrong one will make stuff Go Horribly Wrong. Even two supplies with the same brand can need totally different cables.

Yep. I knew stuff can be screwed up but I didn't see the text on the cable until after I killed my HDD.

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