Anyone Else Recently Build A Bad@** PC in Reponse to upcoming 1.1?

[T.A.P.O.R.]

@danilon62

I do like those old Mac cases.

Will it support a regular atx board or do you need to modify it?

I remember once buying a machine (not a  Mac) and not knowing it was a BTX board, which almost nobody made, which meant no upgrade path

[Hydrazine_Soup]

Edit: Images are gone

Edited March 5, 2020 by Hydrazine_Soup

[Candlelight]

Ok, now realizing how much money I have, would this $400 rig be enough for running games like KSP and Minecraft maxed out at 720p or 768p @ 60FPS or more?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor  ($112.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Motherboard: MSI H110M Pro-VD Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($44.99 @ Micro Center) 
Memory: Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($32.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($49.49 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card  ($99.99 @ NCIX US) 
Case: Fractal Design Core 1100 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($29.99 @ NCIX US) 
Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  ($29.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $400.43
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-20 07:17 EDT-0400

[Camacha]

For the love of Jeb, do not buy a new PC before the 1.1 release. The worst thing you can do is to sink money into hardware, when you do not even know what the new KSP version will require and run on best. Maybe the new setup suddenly favours the AMD architecture, maybe some other unknown peculiarity will pop-up. If you want to build a general purpose gaming computer, then sure, go ahead. But if you build anything specifically for 1.1, do wait until we know exactly what this version of the Kraken likes to eat.

If people are truly interested in throwing money at the wall to see what will stick, I have couple of very nice and empty walls available for exactly that purpose. Depending on the money thrown at it, I might even make Kraken noises while you empty your pockets.

Edited March 20, 2016 by Camacha

[Spaceception]

A lot of people are saying that their designs are overkill for KSP, but I'm pretty sure that's so they can

[Camacha]

6 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

 

Well, I tried to download a couple of moderators, but even just the first one got all stuck in the ethernet cable and was an absolute disaster to get out.

[T.A.P.O.R.]

8 hours ago, Radon86 said:

Ok, now realizing how much money I have, would this $400 rig be enough for running games like KSP and Minecraft maxed out at 720p or 768p @ 60FPS or more?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor  ($112.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Motherboard: MSI H110M Pro-VD Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($44.99 @ Micro Center) 
Memory: Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($32.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($49.49 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card  ($99.99 @ NCIX US) 
Case: Fractal Design Core 1100 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($29.99 @ NCIX US) 
Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  ($29.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $400.43
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-20 07:17 EDT-0400

Wow, I hadn't noticed the i3-6100 before.

The base speed is pretty nice and apparently it can be overclocked on z170 board too.

[Candlelight]

54 minutes ago, T.A.P.O.R. said:

Wow, I hadn't noticed the i3-6100 before.

The base speed is pretty nice and apparently it can be overclocked on z170 board too.

Skylake, i'm starting to like it .Could i get better for $400 or is this the best?

[T.A.P.O.R.]

3 minutes ago, Radon86 said:

Skylake, i'm starting to like it .Could i get better for $400 or is this the best?

Not sure that you could really.
I'm not ready to drop the $$$ just yet. But this is a price friendly option.

[Candlelight]

Just now, T.A.P.O.R. said:

Not sure that you could really.
I'm not ready to drop the $$$ just yet. But this is a price friendly option.

Thanks a bunch, man! 

[Tig]

On 3/11/2016 at 9:30 PM, chadquilter said:

On 3/18/2016 at 0:23 PM, rkman said:

This thread is about 1.1 which will use mutli-core, includes 64bit and will be much more optimized. Most likely it will not need a badass PC.

 

Let us all hope...

Yes, it will be multi-core multi-threaded.  But how many threads?  It'll finally use more than one, thank god.  But 2? 4? 8?  We'll have to see.  Even if it does have multi-threads, there may be one primary thread that still becomes a limiting factor.

 

On 3/11/2016 at 9:30 PM, chadquilter said:

On 3/11/2016 at 9:30 PM, chadquilter said:

 

I recently upgraded to a 4k rig I built from scratch, you can do better than an i7-6700k. Go with i7-5820, its got more cores and can be clocked just as fast. 

Agree that anything above a current $200 card is over-kill for KSP, but since your doing a high end machine....

That being said I have had HUGE gains on unstable mods with KSP. The extra "umph" does help, where ever it comes from, maybe it just extends the inevitable crash due to a higher threshold. I can run RSS, highest resolutions, with 50 some odd mods for a few hours before it finally crashes on the 32 bit version. I noticed a lot more stable experience upgrading from and AMD 6970 HD going to a Nvidia 970 so there are some things to say about upgrading cards. I also have less "weird" voltage issues, but that's hardly KSP's fault.

 

 

Sorry gonna have to disagree with you.  The 6 series architecture is faster per core per clock than the 4/5th gen.  Now - its not very much   But it is a performance increase per core per clock.  I think people are also generally seeing higher clocks with 6th gen chips, again not much.  6 gen architecture will be easier to replace should something break.  And the 6th gen pulls the VRMs off the chip, the FIVR decision for the 4/5th was a really bad idea for unlocked desktop cpus (I mean I get the value with laptops cause of the idle power usage) but for my desktop cpu, yeah, no thanks.

How many games actually use 6 cores?  *AND* are not gpu limited?  I mean BF4 uses all 8 cores on an 8350... course it manages 1 fps more than an i3.

The unfortunate truth is that very few games benefit from more than an i3.  Yep.  An i3.  2 cores.  i7 is usually complete overkill cause the benefit of hyperthreading is de minimis for games.

To be very clear, I'm only talking about Gaming.  Now if you're encoding video, yeah, a 5820 is gonna blow away most competition.  But for current games it just won't... I wish that weren't true...

Also, the inevitable crashing in the game has NOTHING to do with the cpu.  It's just about memory usage.

On 3/20/2016 at 7:55 AM, Camacha said:

For the love of Jeb, do not buy a new PC before the 1.1 release. The worst thing you can do is to sink money into hardware, when you do not even know what the new KSP version will require and run on best. Maybe the new setup suddenly favours the AMD architecture, maybe some other unknown peculiarity will pop-up. If you want to build a general purpose gaming computer, then sure, go ahead. But if you build anything specifically for 1.1, do wait until we know exactly what this version of the Kraken likes to eat.

 

Best advice here.  If you're buying a PC for more than KSP go ahead, but if you're doing it specifically for KSP...  Wait till 1.1 and a couple mini-patches.  Then buy a PC for it.

 

 

[T.A.P.O.R.]

Assuming I'm not upgrading specifically for KSP, how much ram do I need for gaming these days?

Are they still mostly 32bit?

Most of my other software is 32bit, so KSP is really the only ram hog I know of, and I did reach 8gb in linux pretty easily.

[NecroBones]

 

For most people, 8 to 16 GB RAM is pretty sufficient. If you tend to run multiple applications, or leave 20 Firefox tabs open while you play games, 16 is probably the better bet. Those of us who install 32 GB do so because we're insane and run everything at the same time.

 

[tetryds]

I believe that 8GB will be enogh for the vast majority of gamers.

16GB is good if you have a very high end system or run programs that can make use of it, but I hardly ever use more than 8GB out of 16, and I noticed that it only normally happens when developing plugins when I can open more than one KSP besides all the programs for development.

[T.A.P.O.R.]

@NecroBones & @tetryds

Cool, all the Z170 boards I've been looking at accommodate 64 GB.
I can't afford that much ram all in one go, however I am wondering if a single 16GB stick would run as well as two 8GB sticks (just in case I want more in the future).
Also all the Asus boards that can OC ram require all slots to be populated so that'd be 4x4gb for me to stay on budget.

16GB really seems like a sensible upper limit, since it was only in the last couple of years that I needed more than 4 for anything.

I have noticed that having switched CPU's from a c2q 2.6ghz to a c2d 3.16ghz actually took a performance hit on multitasking.
Long burns are good for browsing the net or watching start trek reruns.

[NecroBones]

 

Usually you want to add DIMMs in pairs, since the system will interleave them and take advantage of the speed of both of them simultaneously.

 

[T.A.P.O.R.]

7 minutes ago, NecroBones said:

 

Usually you want to add DIMMs in pairs, since the system will interleave them and take advantage of the speed of both of them simultaneously.

 

I see nothing has changed since 19dicketyTwo when the Kaiser stole our word for twenty.
Thanks for the advice.

I think I'll populate all 4 and take advantage of the O.C. funtion too

[Guest]

I'm probably going to save up and buy a new Mac Mini.  I might have the 2014 one, but I really want to get the one with an i7 and 16 gigs of RAM.

[Alphasus]

i3 4170, looking for an i5 4690

Asus Strix GTX 970

16 GB DDR3-1600 RAM

850 EVO 120GB

1TB Caviar Blue

Cooler Master N200

This is gonna be upgraded, but it is pretty high end. It does play XCOM 2 as well though, so that is the 2nd purpose of the machine. The 970 helps to render in Blender too.

Edited March 25, 2016 by Alphasus

[The Destroyer]

Well,  I got a R9 290 6 months ago in my upgrade, then others factors+ Canadas Economy means I'm still stuck with my FX-4100 and  500 GB HDD

[T.A.P.O.R.]

Might be buying my new rig tomorrow.

Decisions decisions.

[scribbleheli]

Anyone catch the 1.1 showcase on twitch?

The framerates with Kaspers laptops?

[T.A.P.O.R.]

Oh man, it's like 1987 in the video store all over again.

So many Schwarzenegger movies to choose from and I only have enough $ for one weekly rental!

By that I mean that I am crippled by choice.

I really want the 4790k but its more expensive than the 6700k as a CPU and an overall build.
The K series don't come with coolers, so that jacks up the cost.

i3 6100 has a decent clock speed out of the box, and can have the base clock tinkered with but apparently this kills multi-threading.
It does come with a cooler though and is a whole lot cheaper.

Do I go with the Cheaper CPU now and upgrade in the future, or is this just wasted $

My current experience going from c2q to c2d has really shown how much I relied on those extra cores.
Even now with just Chrome open and a handful of tabs with no GIF's my CPU idle is at around 60% on both cores. Ram usage is at 74% of 8gb
Loading io9.com for example, causes the whole machine to freeze-up.
Excel and a Pdf at the same time does the same thing when scrolling through the PDF doc.

Just closing a tab causes at least one core to hit 80%
Man this old thing is really showing its age.
 

Edited March 25, 2016 by T.A.P.O.R.
typing dyslexia

[scribbleheli]

Uhh, Well, I was in the same boat like 8 years ago. And mad the mistake of getting a cheaper CPU hoping to bump it up later. But got stuck with it because they change sockets.

And how is the 4790k More expensive? And regardless of build, I would recommend of getting the hyper 212 evo as a cooler. 

 

[T.A.P.O.R.]

23 minutes ago, scribbleheli said:

Uhh, Well, I was in the same boat like 8 years ago. And mad the mistake of getting a cheaper CPU hoping to bump it up later. But got stuck with it because they change sockets.

And how is the 4790k More expensive? And regardless of build, I would recommend of getting the hyper 212 evo as a cooler. 

 

I'm in Australia, so there's the Australia tax.

Every store I look at and on pcpartspicker it $10-$30 more for the CPU, 1150 Motherboard choices are more limited and about the same price as the equivalent 1151 or more.
DDR3 prices seem to be slightly higher per GB too.

I've read some good stuff about the hyper 212 evo but am leaning toward a Nepton 240m all in one cooler.
Sure its 3 times the price, but is 9 DB quieter and has an equally good rep.

Shop doesn't open for another hour... still thinking.