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

[cantab]

"370" is the important bit, that's the model number of the GPU itself. It's a decent GPU for 1080p gaming, though far from a high end powerhouse, don't expect to run everything at ultra.

Pairing it with an i5-6400 makes a build that to me is a bit CPU-heavy for gaming, though other uses may justify the Core i5.

[Pipcard]

My current PC (from 2012) is prebuilt, because I was hesitant to build one. It has:

CPU: A4-Series APU A4-3400 (2.7 GHz)

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6410D

and can only run KSP in low settings.

 

The PC I am planning to build this summer will have:

CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core (it was originally going to be an i3)

GPU: Radeon R9 380 4GB (originally GTX 760 or 960)

Can it even handle visual enhancement mods like Scatterer?

Also, I am not sure whether I should get a 480 GB SSD or a 1 TB HDD + 240 GB SSD (both add up to about the same price these days), because I have only used ~40 percent of my 500 (actually 465) GB hard drive in the four years that I have owned it so far.

 

Edited April 3, 2016 by Pipcard

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

1 hour ago, Pipcard said:

 

Can it even handle visual enhancement mods like Scatterer?

Also, I am not sure whether I should get a 480 GB SSD or a 1 TB HDD + 240 GB SSD (both add up to about the same price these days), because I have only used ~40 percent of my 500 (actually 465) GB hard drive in the four years that I have owned it so far.

 

My 9 year old beast handles Scatterer and EVE just fine (as long as its not the height of summer).

I'm sure yours will be fine

I do have an SSD but its only 120GB and filled up quickly with the OS and a handful of applications including KSP.

240 would be better, but beyond that I don't have much of a use for.

Most games (if they're even installed) are on a 400GB 7200rpm drive along with a few larger programs, such as those with sound sample libraries.
I don't torrent so its not even close to full even after all these years.

[Camacha]

22 hours ago, cantab said:

"370" is the important bit, that's the model number of the GPU itself. It's a decent GPU for 1080p gaming, though far from a high end powerhouse, don't expect to run everything at ultra.

Pairing it with an i5-6400 makes a build that to me is a bit CPU-heavy for gaming, though other uses may justify the Core i5.

Video cards become faster quickly, while CPU development has been stagnant for years. Also, it is a bit easier to swap out a GPU, changing a CPU is a bit of a pain. Buying a CPU that will almost certainly last you 3-6 years is not a bad idea. You will likely wear out more GPUs in the process.

Beefing up the GPU a little bit would not hurt, though

[Tig]

On 4/2/2016 at 0:10 AM, Camacha said:

I would not, at least not for KSP. Why not? Because an i7 will likely yield no performance increase over an i5. The same goes for almost any other game. Hyperthreading simply does not line up with what games need too well.

I keep trying to tell people the same thing...

But they all want their i7s, yea know for those games with 8 equal threads, like, umm... oh yeah they don't exist.  lol.

Seriously though, if you're on any kind of budget, please do yourself a favor and go for an i5 if your rig is for gaming.  Look if you're doing things that benefit from hyperthreading, like encoding video, and your willing to pay the premium, hey, go for it.  But if you're getting an i7 cause 7 > 5, or if you don't know what hyperthreading even is... get an i5. 

 

 

[Tig]

On 4/2/2016 at 2:17 PM, The White Guardian said:

My computer either has HD Graphics 4000 or 4400, I thought it was 4400 but I could be mistaken.

I read through all the info on the card AND compared it to the recommended hardware of the games that it has to be able to handle, and it passed with flying colours on both accounts. Still, I really appreciate your concern, one can never be too careful.

EDIT: I was mistaken, it's an AMD card, not Nvidia. Here are the specs:

Raedon R7 370 4GB
GDDR5
5,7GHz
Videochip Raedon R7 370
normal speed 925MHz
max speed 1,07GHz
1024x cores
Max resolution 4096x2160 (Cinema 4K)

An R7 370 = R7 270 = HD7870.  All just rebrands of the original pitcairn line.  A good card still, just fine to play KSP... certainly good enough for stock and quite a few mods.  4GB ram on is complete overkill for that gpu, imo.  You really don't need 4gb vram unless you're playing at 1440p or 4K at ultra quality, and to do that you need a much stronger gpu.

[tetryds]

I recently got the i7 4790k as I mentioned previously on this thread, the performance gain is insane, this CPU is simply amazing and I didn't even overclock it yet.

Now I myself need more than an i5, games don't tend to use more than 4 threads but the tons of stuff always going on on the background do.

I am really satisfied with it, and didn't have a reason to go after a skylake i7, performance gains on gaming and the stuff that I use it for are close to negligible on most cases and I wouldn't be able to overclock.

I upgraded every part of my pc so now I have my previous one assembled, will format it and sell

[Camacha]

1 hour ago, Tig said:

Seriously though, if you're on any kind of budget, please do yourself a favor and go for an i5 if your rig is for gaming.  Look if you're doing things that benefit from hyperthreading, like encoding video, and your willing to pay the premium, hey, go for it.  But if you're getting an i7 cause 7 > 5, or if you don't know what hyperthreading even is... get an i5. 

For encoding, QuickSync or GPU accelerated encoding is advised. That will yield a massive difference, as opposed to the handful percent that HT will gain you when encoding.

42 minutes ago, tetryds said:

Now I myself need more than an i5, games don't tend to use more than 4 threads but the tons of stuff always going on on the background do.

Thing is, you get more threads, but not more cores. The latter do the actual work. Hyper-threading enables you to switch between internal calculation jobs more quickly, which helps you out when you do a lot of relatively simple tasks. TThink of applying filters on images, doing video work, et cetera. Having 10, 20 or even 50 normal, average tasks in the background will likely yield little to no performance gain relative to an i5. The switching simply is too minimal to show any noticeable gains and it can even work against you, costing performance.

 

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

So the only advantage of i7 is higher clock?

That's the only aspect I'm interested in really.

I'm being good and delaying my purchase until more fruitful times (even though I have the dollars).
Is this what it means to be a grown up?

[The White Guardian]

5 hours ago, Tig said:

An R7 370 = R7 270 = HD7870.  All just rebrands of the original pitcairn line.  A good card still, just fine to play KSP... certainly good enough for stock and quite a few mods.  4GB ram on is complete overkill for that gpu, imo.  You really don't need 4gb vram unless you're playing at 1440p or 4K at ultra quality, and to do that you need a much stronger gpu.

Well, it's good enough for what it's going to be used for (Plants Versus Zombies: Garden Warfare, Space Engineers, KSP...), but it might be upgraded later.

On 2-4-2016 at 11:13 PM, cantab said:

"370" is the important bit, that's the model number of the GPU itself. It's a decent GPU for 1080p gaming, though far from a high end powerhouse, don't expect to run everything at ultra.

Pairing it with an i5-6400 makes a build that to me is a bit CPU-heavy for gaming, though other uses may justify the Core i5.

It isn't going to be used for anything beyond 1080p and I know it isn't a powerhouse, but powerhouses come with quite the price tag, so for now this card will do just fine. Add to that, the i5 is a reliable and strong core that will be sufficient for quite a few years while it isn't too expensive, plus the games the computer must be able to run are more CPU-based than GPU.

[Camacha]

5 hours ago, T.A.P.O.R. said:

So the only advantage of i7 is higher clock?

Most i7's do not have a higher clock, or the difference it too marginal to matter. The real difference is usually hyper-threading. That only helps in specific scenarios.

Quote

Is this what it means to be a grown up?

It is either this, or not having the money to spend because you needed it for food, housing and, the most adult thing ever, taxes.

[John FX]

I still have my old machine from a couple of years ago. I7 [email protected] 32GB RAM@2Ghz GTX670(4GB) 256GB SSD 6TB RAID 10.

Cost a fair bit when all those parts were new.

Why yes, I do work in video. How did you know?

If that machine is busy I could use the really old machine which is I7 950@4Ghz, 24GB [email protected] GTX580(2GB) 256GB SSD 5TB RAID 5 but the GFX card is noisy on that one. Early tech is always noisy and hot. Both liquid cooled of course.

Both also waiting for multi monitor support from KSP...

I think the next machine I get for video will be one of those new Xeon chips with 12+ real cores (24+ with HT). I`d get a board that can handle more RAM too. I`d really like to get 128GB or more. Then I could use closer to 20 cores in After Effects while doing basic editing in Premiere at the same time. Currently with 32GB I can only really use 5 cores to a decent level. Sometimes even on the good machine it can take 72 hours to render 30 seconds of footage...

[scribbleheli]

I see the 5820K is on sale for $220 bucks now...

That's 6 real cores....for the price of a 6600k

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

6 hours ago, Camacha said:

Most i7's do not have a higher clock, or the difference it too marginal to matter. The real difference is usually hyper-threading. That only helps in specific scenarios.

It is either this, or not having the money to spend because you needed it for food, housing and, the most adult thing ever, taxes.

#1 was referring to the top end of both lines. EG the 6600K 3.5/3.9 vs the 6700K 4.0/4.2 (actually, looking at it like that, the difference at boost isn't much is it?).

#2 I feel like I pay more in insurance than I do in taxes....

N.B. Buying a PC wont take food off the table.

[FancyMouse]

16 hours ago, Camacha said:

For encoding, QuickSync or GPU accelerated encoding is advised. That will yield a massive difference, as opposed to the handful percent that HT will gain you when encoding.

Only when speed is the only concern and you absolutely don't care about quality/compression ratio. In the case of H264, I'm still not aware of any hardware encoder that can do more than H264 baseline and with a not-stupid rate control, including QuickSync and NVenc. They are generally at the quality level of ultra fast ~ super fast of x264 presets, if not worse.

[Camacha]

On 04/04/2016 at 9:53 PM, T.A.P.O.R. said:

#1 was referring to the top end of both lines. EG the 6600K 3.5/3.9 vs the 6700K 4.0/4.2 (actually, looking at it like that, the difference at boost isn't much is it?).

If you buy a K-processor, you are likely to overclock anyway. An i5 will typically overclock equal to, or a little better, than the comparable i7. The lack of HT and associated heat means a little more headroom.

On 04/04/2016 at 1:50 AM, FancyMouse said:

Only when speed is the only concern and you absolutely don't care about quality/compression ratio. In the case of H264, I'm still not aware of any hardware encoder that can do more than H264 baseline and with a not-stupid rate control, including QuickSync and NVenc. They are generally at the quality level of ultra fast ~ super fast of x264 presets, if not worse.

I am not going to put my hand in that hornets nest. People tend to have wildly varying opinions on the matter, though they also tend to be based on personal opinion rather than benchmarks or other objective proof.

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

2 hours ago, Camacha said:

If you buy a K-processor, you are likely to overclock anyway. An i5 will typically overclock equal to, or a little better, than the comparable i7. The lack of HT and associated heat means a little more headroom.

Huh, Good to know. 

Considering downgrading to my old c2q as performance for everything except ksp is pretty poor on just a c2d.

id I can find a used 3ghz c2q for a reasonable price, that might not be too bad of an alternative to buying a whole new machine.

[cantab]

On 04/04/2016 at 0:50 AM, FancyMouse said:

Only when speed is the only concern and you absolutely don't care about quality/compression ratio. In the case of H264, I'm still not aware of any hardware encoder that can do more than H264 baseline and with a not-stupid rate control, including QuickSync and NVenc. They are generally at the quality level of ultra fast ~ super fast of x264 presets, if not worse.

I'd venture that for streaming or recording on a single PC, that is the case - you want your video encoding to have the minimum impact on your gaming. When streaming it's an ephemeral medium anyway and I doubt viewers are going to care much. When recording, can you not initially do NVenc with a high bitrate and then later transcode to better compression?

Now if you're dual boxing or working with camcorder footage or whatever, then I'll grant that you might want the high performance CPU to do the editing and encoding on.

Edited April 7, 2016 by cantab

[Camacha]

22 hours ago, T.A.P.O.R. said:

id I can find a used 3ghz c2q for a reasonable price, that might not be too bad of an alternative to buying a whole new machine.

As long as you are aware that these chips have aged pretty significantly by now. Even the fastest Core 2 Duo is going to be slow compared to an equally clocked modern chip. A direct side by side is hard to find, but even compared to an i5 3570K or i3 3225 an overclocked Q9550 is going to lose out. That i5 is about twice as fast and we are already two chip generations further into things, which is almost again as many generations as that Core 2 Duo is separated from the mentioned i5. The best guesstimate is that a modern i5 at stock speeds will be well over twice, and possibly three times as fast as a Core 2 Duo Q9550 with a stiff overclock.

As long as you are aware of that and are willing to deal with the consequences, going for older technology is not a horrible idea. If you have to spend more than, say, $50 to make it happen, you might want to start considering a full upgrade. Not to mention the difference in power consumption and how that also costs money

Edited April 8, 2016 by Camacha

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

Power consumption has been a concern for quite some time.

I haven't been able to find a q9650 for a reasonable price, so I'll probably just get a new mobo/cpu/ram combo but trying to resist temptation right now.

I did find some q9650's over $1000!

how is that any way reasonable?

[Joshwoo70]

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

Power consumption has been a concern for quite some time.

I haven't been able to find a q9650 for a reasonable price, so I'll probably just get a new mobo/cpu/ram combo but trying to resist temptation right now.

I did find some q9650's over $1000!

how is that any way reasonable?

the reason basically is ... : its an antique

the price of that cpu will soon increase as less and less of that kind exists in the world.

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

17 minutes ago, Joshwoo69 said:

the reason basically is ... : its an antique

the price of that cpu will soon increase as less and less of that kind exists in the world.

There is that.
But, the prices are typically $150AUD so not crazy, but not worth it.

There are also loads of whole ex office PC's with that particular CPU for around the same price.

I got my e8500 for $15 used.
While its ok for KSP, it sucks for my homework.
 

[Joshwoo70]

@T.A.P.O.R. probably would get a cooler master or gigabyte board around my area.... go to RL computer stores.. their prices are cheaper.

[Camacha]

16 hours ago, T.A.P.O.R. said:

I did find some q9650's over $1000!

how is that any way reasonable?

It is the top model on a certain socket. Those models always fetch high prices, since everyone stuck on that socket will be looking for them. Of course, $1000 is overdoing it a bit.

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

Took the plunge and bought my new hardware.

I ended up scaling back a little as I didn't see a $150 value in going for the 6700k.

My new system (currently installing drivers etc...) is thus

MSI Z170A Krait Gaming Motherboard
6600k
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) 2400MHz DDR4
Cryorig H7 CPU Cooler (super quiet and same price as the evo212)

Carried over from my old system is the Fractal R5 case (Nice & quiet) Gigabyte GTX650 and a 650 Watt coolermaster PSU that'll need replacing in a year or two.

Will report back with performance specs later.