What is the best K.S.P. For pc setup

[Ian Luedke]

Hello, I was wondering what the best possible computer setup for ops would be. Even though there are other threads about this, but they refer to the older version game. So just wondering about the newer version of the game. 1.3 and up

[softweir]

Hello and welcome to the forums!

To be honest, the tech specs for KSP haven't changed a lot since 1.2 or thereabouts, so older threads may still be relevant. (If anything, the game has got slightly less demanding.)

Have fun!

[DrLicor]

@Ian Luedke, first of all, welcome to the forums,

are you planning on buying a pc or changing something to your current build?
If so, could you post the specs of the pc?

 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

In short-

GPU: Is irrelevant. Anything remotely modern will be fine.

CPU: Highest single core Mhz you can get.

RAM: 8Gb would be fine, 16 would be better if you plan on heavily modding your game.

[Ian Luedke]

2 hours ago, DrLicor said:

@Ian Luedke, first of all, welcome to the forums,

are you planning on buying a pc or changing something to your current build?
If so, could you post the specs of the pc?

 

I was planning on building a pc, the current pc is broken and not worth fixing due to old age. Thank you for the welcome!

[Ian Luedke]

2 hours ago, softweir said:

Hello and welcome to the forums!

To be honest, the tech specs for KSP haven't changed a lot since 1.2 or thereabouts, so older threads may still be relevant. (If anything, the game has got slightly less demanding.)

Have fun!

The threads and forms that I have found were from 2013 and they were talking about when the game was a 32 bit application, so I figured that I would do one for the community and give an update of sorts. Thanks though.

[Ian Luedke]

2 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

In short-

GPU: Is irrelevant. Anything remotely modern will be fine.

CPU: Highest single core Mhz you can get.

RAM: 8Gb would be fine, 16 would be better if you plan on heavily modding your game.

I heard that K.S.P. Can utilize 2 cores even if your pc has more, like the processors that I was looking at were 4 cored 4.2Ghz (Intel core i7-7700k ~$300) I’m not sure though thats probably WAY overkill.

[DrLicor]

1 hour ago, Ian Luedke said:

I heard that K.S.P. Can utilize 2 cores even if your pc has more, like the processors that I was looking at were 4 cored 4.2Ghz (Intel core i7-7700k ~$300) I’m not sure though thats probably WAY overkill.

I would say perfect. The more Ghz, the better, plus it's a reliable processor that can go on for quite some years.

With the 4,2Ghz, you can build bigger crafts without noticing any delay. 

Also, with a good cooling system, you can easily overclock the 7700k to 5,0Ghz without even pushing the limits.

 

[Deddly]

3 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

CPU: Highest single core Mhz you can get.

Sorry but this is only half true. You want highest single-core performance available. Number of GHz is largely irrelevant unless you are comparing two CPUs of the same architecture.

1 hour ago, Ian Luedke said:

I heard that K.S.P. Can utilize 2 cores even if your pc has more, like the processors that I was looking at were 4 cored 4.2Ghz (Intel core i7-7700k ~$300) I’m not sure though thats probably WAY overkill.

KSP can and does use more than one core for some things, but single-core performance is still the major bottleneck for this game. Is that particular CPU overkill? Well, that depends on how many parts you would like to make your crafts out of. If you like to make things small and compact, it's probably overkill, yes. If you want to make a massive station with thousands of parts with no slowdown, then the more powerful the CPU the better.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

16 minutes ago, Deddly said:

Sorry but this is only half true. You want highest single-core performance available. Number of GHz is largely irrelevant unless you are comparing two CPUs of the same architecture.

Basically what I meant.

Just that Ghz is the most common measuring stick by which processors are measured.

On a side note; I was talking to someone else recently about a 4.5ish Ghz 2 core they had read about, supposed to be great for gaming. Wonder how that would run KSP?

[Deddly]

Just now, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Just that Ghz is the most common measuring stick by which processors are measured.

Yes. Please help us stop people doing that, because there are still people out there who think a Pentium 4 @ 4 GHz outperforms a modern CPU

[Ian Luedke]

6 hours ago, DrLicor said:

I would say perfect. The more Ghz, the better, plus it's a reliable processor that can go on for quite some years.

With the 4,2Ghz, you can build bigger crafts without noticing any delay. 

Also, with a good cooling system, you can easily overclock the 7700k to 5,0Ghz without even pushing the limits.

 

Yeah, that’s generally what I was thinking about doing. Probably going to get water cooling or something else epic. Thanks!

6 hours ago, Deddly said:

Yes. Please help us stop people doing that, because there are still people out there who think a Pentium 4 @ 4 GHz outperforms a modern CPU

That’s amazingly funny. In that case my 2007 Mac mini can run K.S.P. Lol. (It was a joke it probbly cant)

[Rocket In My Pocket]

11 hours ago, Ian Luedke said:

That’s amazingly funny. In that case my 2007 Mac mini can run K.S.P. Lol. (It was a joke it probbly cant)

Don't laugh!

I have a 2009 XPS laptop (Intel duo! 2 cores baby!) that runs KSP.

Actually, until fairly recently (Like a year ago?) It was all I had to play KSP on. My god that thing used to struggle, but it did it.

[Ian Luedke]

1 hour ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Don't laugh!

I have a 2009 XPS laptop (Intel duo! 2 cores baby!) that runs KSP.

Actually, until fairly recently (Like a year ago?) It was all I had to play KSP on. My god that thing used to struggle, but it did it.

Wow, thats what I had to run K.S.P. Until it broke... D:

[Rocket In My Pocket]

1 hour ago, Ian Luedke said:

Wow, thats what I had to run K.S.P. Until it broke... D:

Yeah, mine still sits in the corner...screen is half broke off. You can only see visuals if you plug it into a TV with an HDMI cable. I'm not even sure I still have the charger for it. Was good little laptop for it's age before it finally started to give out.

I'm definitely going back to Intel/Nvidia next computer. My current desktop is AMD/Radeon, and I'm just not super impressed in general.

Did you get something new to play KSP on as well or are you still between computers?

[Ian Luedke]

5 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Yeah, mine still sits in the corner...screen is half broke off. You can only see visuals if you plug it into a TV with an HDMI cable. I'm not even sure I still have the charger for it. Was good little laptop for it's age before it finally started to give out.

I'm definitely going back to Intel/Nvidia next computer. My current desktop is AMD/Radeon, and I'm just not super impressed in general.

Did you get something new to play KSP on as well or are you still between computers?

Currently in between computers, Unfortunatly. I was going to build a sick intel core i7 7700k based build, which will most likely run K.S.P. With the highest graphical settings, and have a lot of parts as well. How many parts do you think that it could run without lag, on the highest quality settings? I was getting estimates like 700 parts with no lag, which would be AMAZING! How many do you think.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

1 hour ago, Ian Luedke said:

Currently in between computers, Unfortunatly. I was going to build a sick intel core i7 7700k based build, which will most likely run K.S.P. With the highest graphical settings, and have a lot of parts as well. How many parts do you think that it could run without lag, on the highest quality settings? I was getting estimates like 700 parts with no lag, which would be AMAZING! How many do you think.

Geez I'm not sure I could say, If that's what others are saying I certainly believe it though, It sounds about right.

Being between computers is always rough, I read a lot of books and played a lot of games on my android phone while I was between computers. Finally beat Final Fantasy 1 after all these years (I first played it when I was like <10 on NES.)

I suppose that'd be my advice to you if I had any; try to make good use of the time between computers to do/accomplish something you probably wouldn't normally get around to.

Edited November 2, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Hay]

19 hours ago, Ian Luedke said:

Currently in between computers, Unfortunatly. I was going to build a sick intel core i7 7700k based build, which will most likely run K.S.P. With the highest graphical settings, and have a lot of parts as well. How many parts do you think that it could run without lag, on the highest quality settings? I was getting estimates like 700 parts with no lag, which would be AMAZING! How many do you think.

Absolutely no lag? 400 to 500. I tried launching a hopelessly overengineered 566 part vessel, and I got a very small, barely noticeable amount of lag. (OC'd 6700k (basically 7700k) 2x8GB 2400MHz DDR4 R9 290X 4GB , running on 4K) 700 parts should be doable, but why on earth would you need that? Do you really need 700 parts? And which GPU are you going to buy? Don't expect to run KSP on the highest possible graphics with just the integrated graphics.

[Ian Luedke]

22 minutes ago, Hay said:

Absolutely no lag? 400 to 500. I tried launching a hopelessly overengineered 566 part vessel, and I got a very small, barely noticeable amount of lag. (OC'd 6700k (basically 7700k) 2x8GB 2400MHz DDR4 R9 290X 4GB , running on 4K) 700 parts should be doable, but why on earth would you need that? Do you really need 700 parts? And which GPU are you going to buy? Don't expect to run KSP on the highest possible graphics with just the integrated graphics.

I was think about getting a cheeper graphics card, due to there high price, and me mostly not gaming on my pc. What graphics card would you reccomend? I want one that is CHEEP, and WILL NOT BOTTELNECK my amazing processor that I am going to buy after I get all of the other parts. 

Intel core i7-7700k (How high could I SAFELY over lock this beast being cooled on air vs. water?)

2x8 DDR4 2666Mhz Ram (I heard that 16 gigs is more than enough, but do you think that K.S.P. Will run as fast if I have 8 gigs?)

I have everything else figured out but the graphics card.

What do you guys think?

 

[helaeon]

The i7 8700 is just around the corner (they've been out since Oct 5 just unavailable), and it has a really nice single core clock speed and should do single threaded applications nicely (KSP!)
I use a tooooooon of mods and like to do other stuff while I play KSP, so I'm running 32 GB. However, my paychecks come from being a large format designer & engineer... so my rig needs lots of RAM for work KSP just benefits. When I had 16GB in mine it was fine. However, I just looked at the performance graph the other day and I was utilizing 24 GB while playing KSP (including windows, browser, cache etc). On RAM the issue isn't speed... mostly... it's about putting everything in memory. If you run out your game crashes to desktop same as the old days when we had a hard 4 GB limit.

Graphics card does matter if you're using visual mods. I have an nVidia 960 and it's more than enough.

Something I didn't see mentioned in a skim, get an SSD attached to a good pipeline and install KSP on it. PCI-e or M.2, as SATA drives are limited at 6 GB/s.

[Hay]

On 2-11-2017 at 8:08 PM, helaeon said:

The i7 8700 is just around the corner (they've been out since Oct 5 just unavailable), and it has a really nice single core clock speed and should do single threaded applications nicely (KSP!)
I use a tooooooon of mods and like to do other stuff while I play KSP, so I'm running 32 GB. However, my paychecks come from being a large format designer & engineer... so my rig needs lots of RAM for work KSP just benefits. When I had 16GB in mine it was fine. However, I just looked at the performance graph the other day and I was utilizing 24 GB while playing KSP (including windows, browser, cache etc). On RAM the issue isn't speed... mostly... it's about putting everything in memory. If you run out your game crashes to desktop same as the old days when we had a hard 4 GB limit.

Graphics card does matter if you're using visual mods. I have an nVidia 960 and it's more than enough.

Something I didn't see mentioned in a skim, get an SSD attached to a good pipeline and install KSP on it. PCI-e or M.2, as SATA drives are limited at 6 GB/s.

Just get a SATA SSD, because the decrease in loading times is insignificant, while the increase in cost certainly is.

[helaeon]

@Hay I just looked on newegg. 512GB m.2 PCI-e is $200-$250. That's what my 240 GB SATA was 4 years ago. There are quite a few for less than that. 250 GB is $124. The SATA drives are right in there too. Cheapest 2.5" SATA drives on newegg in that capacity range is $140-150. Any new motherboard should have a m.2 slot on the pci-e pipe. My suggestion is get a reasonable sized SSD (250-500 gb) and a cavernous traditional drive (3TB or more). Install programs and system stuff on the SSD and keep pictures, videos, music, documents, etc on the traditional drive.

[Hay]

9 minutes ago, helaeon said:

@Hay I just looked on newegg. 512GB m.2 PCI-e is $200-$250. That's what my 240 GB SATA was 4 years ago. There are quite a few for less than that. 250 GB is $124. The SATA drives are right in there too. Cheapest 2.5" SATA drives on newegg in that capacity range is $140-150. Any new motherboard should have a m.2 slot on the pci-e pipe. My suggestion is get a reasonable sized SSD (250-500 gb) and a cavernous traditional drive (3TB or more). Install programs and system stuff on the SSD and keep pictures, videos, music, documents, etc on the traditional drive.

Which you can do on a much more economically feasible way by not overpaying on a PCI-e SSD, which won't result in any large performance increase when it comes to loading games.

[maceemiller]

Well,I have an HP Elitebook 8440p, running with an NVIDEA nvs3100m and 2.4 on my cpu, 8GB RAM, which is very poor, however if I dont look at Kerbins oceans while launching, KSP runs fine, smooth in fact. 

[Stealthyshark85]

I run an HP elitebook 8470w, with AMD Firepro M2000. Its a bit laggy, but considering that i have more than 10 mods installed, it runs fine