Laptop/tablet spec?

[RizzoTheRat]

There's a few old threads on this subject, but I'm assuming the required spec has changed a bit in the last couple of years.

I'm toying with the idea of buying myself a new lightweight laptop, or maybe a 2 in 1 like the Surface Pro 4, and I'd like to have something that I can run KSP on.  My understanding is it needs a reasonable processor but not much in the way of graphics performance, is this still true of recent releases?

The Wiki recommend and i5 or better processor, but doesn't mention speed.  I've tried it on a Win 8.1 Dell Venue tablet, which has a 1.4 GHz i5 with 4GB ram and it's rubbish (runs at about 1/4 speed with a 7 part craft), so I'm guessing a 2.4GHz i5 Surface Pro isn't going to be a lot better.

Any recommendations on minimum spec I should be looking at?

 

[Red Iron Crown]

Moved to the Lounge, where computer-spec threads usually go.  

Very basically, CPU is more important than GPU, and single thread performance is king for KSP. So a modern Intel processor, with the highest clockspeed you can afford, will perform best.

[RizzoTheRat]

Ooops, failed to check which sub forum the old thread I found thread was in.

 

So is the clock speed generally more important than the processor type?  Back when first upgraded my 486 there was a choice of about 4 processors, these days the choice is bewildering.  I was originally assuming Atom < Core M < Celeron < i5 < i7.  But then there seem to be different generations within each processor...  Anyone got any good recommendations for review/benchmark sites, and also any ideas which benchmarks might best reflect KSP performance?

[Pronoes]

Do a google search for toms hardware processor comparison. He usually has an up to date list of CPUs (and other components) sorted it into tiers. 

Sorry can't post link. My iphone skills suck and I'm about to sneeze

 

Back home now and here we go

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu-hierarchy,review-33355.html

Edited December 21, 2015 by Pronoes

[RizzoTheRat]

That's very useful, thanks

so some i3's are better than some i7's and i5's, but Celerons are uniformly crap.  Given that my home PC is a Phenom II x4 970 I guess anything in the top 3-4 tiers are worth looking at.

Annoyingly the neither Surface Pro's i5-6300u  or the Dell Venue's i5-4300y are in the list, but given that the other i5's starting with a 6 are all near the top it bodes reasonably well for the Surface.

 

[Athlonic]

3 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

...

so some i3's are better than some i7's and i5's, ...

 

Seriously ?

I mean really ? I don't know I never had other cpu than i7's.

I just can tell you I am currently on the move and I use an Asus ROG751JT, which has a ... **checking specs** i7 - 4720HQ and I have an surprisingly good gameplay experience with KSP (even quite heavily modded), framerates shows 40-75 fps (75Hz screen), thanks to nVidia G-sync technology, all stay perfectly smooth.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Edited December 21, 2015 by Athlonic

[Camacha]

4 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

so some i3's are better than some i7's and i5's, but Celerons are uniformly crap.

 

Celerons can be fine too. It all depends on what you want and how you want it. As always, and I keep repeating this over and over, you can only really tell what's what by looking at real world benchmarks relevant to the subject. Anything else is either a broad-ish assumption or marketing.

[Alphasus]

9 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

That's very useful, thanks

so some i3's are better than some i7's and i5's, but Celerons are uniformly crap.  Given that my home PC is a Phenom II x4 970 I guess anything in the top 3-4 tiers are worth looking at.

Annoyingly the neither Surface Pro's i5-6300u  or the Dell Venue's i5-4300y are in the list, but given that the other i5's starting with a 6 are all near the top it bodes reasonably well for the Surface.

 

No, the u is for under clocked. It shouldn't perform better than an old Pentium g3258 CPU. The performance will also be thermal throttled, thus, look for an i7QM CPU if you can. That will have very high performance, doubling that of the i5 6300u. The 4300y is even worse at 60% worse than the new i5. So, expect about 30 parts at quarter speed at best, and at worst 10 parts at quarter speed. I'd recommend a desktop for games, and a low performance tablet for portability. With 2 in 1s at that price point, you can't have both.

[Red Iron Crown]

4 minutes ago, Alphasus said:

No, the u is for under clocked.

"u" is for "ultra low voltage", those chips are optimized for low power consumption and low cooling requirements. The lower clockspeed is a side effect of that.

[cantab]

What KSP wants is a processor with great single-thread performance, which means a recent "proper" Intel processor, not one of their ultra-mobile ones, at a good clock speed. Core count doesn't really matter. It also needs competent graphics, but nothing mega-powerful there.

With laptops it's a case of pick two: fast, light, cheap. And even fast light and expensive will never match the performance of fatter laptops or desktops.

In the case of the Surface Pro 4 the Core i5 model should do pretty well. It turbos to an OK clock for a laptop and two cores is plenty enough for KSP. (Yes, two cores in a laptop "i5", not four like in a desktop Core i5 - gotta love Intel marketing). Graphically it's competent, I've played KSP on worse graphics. The Core i7 model is a little better on the CPU side (still only two cores though!), and also significantly stronger graphically which is a factor for games other than KSP. The "Core m" model on the other hand is best avoided - that's using one of the ultramobile processors I mentioned, and they're nowhere near as good performance-wise.