KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

[Camacha]

Yeah, buying video cards isn't a lot of fun at the moment.

[invision]

On 1/9/2018 at 10:33 PM, Camacha said:

Yeah, buying video cards isn't a lot of fun at the moment.

yeah its brutal

i was going to return 2 Radeon rx-580's for 3 gtx 1060's but when i went to ship them back the prices sky rocket over 350.00 each so i decided to just keep the rx-580's and use them.

 

just looked again and now gtx 1060 with 6 gigs of ram are over 500.00 PFFT thats what i paid for my gtx-1080 and the rx-580's are sold out and reach upwards of 700.00

 

 

Edited January 12, 2018 by invision

[invision]

i got this in the mail today

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6PF4837790

 

for anyone who wants wireless controller setup on pc, it was simple to pair up with and the controller was usable in less than 2min. (ps4 controller)

for a while i was using the usb cable to use the controller but the wire was becoming an issue and just didnt like it.

i gave it an hour test run and no disconnects and the button presses were instant using the bluetooth adapter.

 

[Camacha]

On 12/01/2018 at 8:01 PM, invision said:

yeah its brutal

i was going to return 2 Radeon rx-580's for 3 gtx 1060's but when i went to ship them back the prices sky rocket over 350.00 each so i decided to just keep the rx-580's and use them.

 

just looked again and now gtx 1060 with 6 gigs of ram are over 500.00 PFFT thats what i paid for my gtx-1080 and the rx-580's are sold out and reach upwards of 700.00

 

It really is no fun. My video card actually isn't horribly slow, but the 2 GB of RAM is starting to become a source of slowdowns. Anything that would mean a decent enough upgrade would costs me $350 or up and I'm not going to spend that on a video card. I'd rather spend the money on something that'll last a little longer.

Considering the Spectre and Meltdown issues, it's not unlikely I'll upgrade all the hardware as soon as a resistant chip is released. That might be a year or so off, though.

[Dafni]

I just finished my first PC build ever. Very happy with it. Went the long way and saved up for the top gear. It has a i7-8700K, a 1080Ti and a very nice screen. Was saving $$ for ages! So happy everything is up and running now. Finally I can use all the mods I wanted (64GB of 3000mHz RAM) So cool.

Anyway, now I am messing with my new router and internet connection as I am playing a shooter game with my son sometimes. I have no idea what numbers to expect. So my question here is what is considered enough for online gaming? I have 100Mbit/s down and 20Mbit/s up, with a ping to the local server of the game we play between 20 to 50ms.

Think these numbers are acceptable for gaming an online shooter?

Thanks in advance

Daf

[Harry Rhodan]

15 hours ago, Camacha said:

Considering the Spectre and Meltdown issues, it's not unlikely I'll upgrade all the hardware as soon as a resistant chip is released. That might be a year or so off, though.

That seems very optimistic. I would guess Zen 3 and the Ice Lake successor in 2020 could be the first generation that might be free of that stuff.

[invision]

3 hours ago, Dafni said:

I just finished my first PC build ever. Very happy with it. Went the long way and saved up for the top gear. It has a i7-8700K, a 1080Ti and a very nice screen. Was saving $$ for ages! So happy everything is up and running now. Finally I can use all the mods I wanted (64GB of 3000mHz RAM) So cool.

Anyway, now I am messing with my new router and internet connection as I am playing a shooter game with my son sometimes. I have no idea what numbers to expect. So my question here is what is considered enough for online gaming? I have 100Mbit/s down and 20Mbit/s up, with a ping to the local server of the game we play between 20 to 50ms.

Think these numbers are acceptable for gaming an online shooter?

Thanks in advance

Daf

20-50 ms is great for online play, some people play with worse and still win.

thats a nice system and the only thing i can fault is too much ram. unless you plan to start rendering your own videos you will find you wont even come close to using it all. my mid range gaming pc has 32 gigs of ram and i never seen it use more than 12 and that was battlefield 1 using it.

when i built my new system i went with 16 gigs and normally there is 8 gigs or more left to use.

that 1080ti is going to blow your mind, i am very impressed with my 1080 and how it effortlessly eats up games with all the eye candy on.

[Dafni]

4 hours ago, invision said:

20-50 ms is great for online play, some people play with worse and still win.

thats a nice system and the only thing i can fault is too much ram. unless you plan to start rendering your own videos you will find you wont even come close to using it all. my mid range gaming pc has 32 gigs of ram and i never seen it use more than 12 and that was battlefield 1 using it.

when i built my new system i went with 16 gigs and normally there is 8 gigs or more left to use.

that 1080ti is going to blow your mind, i am very impressed with my 1080 and how it effortlessly eats up games with all the eye candy on.

Thank you. I appreciate your opinion.

I hear you on the RAM. The plan was to go 32, but I found a deal for a set of refurbished 4 x 16GB bars that I could not pass up.

 

Thanks again. Cant wait to go to town on my new setup. So far I am very impressed indeed.

Edit: your statement made me pass on half the RAM to somebody who needs it more. And you are right, most probably I'll not gonna miss it anytime soon.

Edited January 16, 2018 by Dafni

[Geonovast]

Hey guys, could use a little advice.

It's tax time, and I'm looking at adding a few ponies to the KSP machine.  KSP certainly isn't the only thing it does, but it is its primary mission.

I currently have an Intel i5-7500 @ 3.4ghz

I'd like to go to an i7.  The two I'm looking at are the i7-7700 @ 3.6ghz and the i7-7700K @ 4.2ghz  The K is about $35 more, and doesn't come with a cooler.  The only difference I see(and understand) other than the clock speed is the wattage, 91 vs 65.  Given that, I'm assuming my current i5 stock cooler will not be enough.

I'm leaning towards the K, but I don't know squat about what makes a good cooler.  I don't want to go water.

Are those sweet extra 600mhz worth it?  Any advice on the cooling?

According to this, the three processors have single thread benchmarks of:

• i5-7500: 2,119
• i7-7700: 2,350
• i7-7700K: 2,582

But I don't know what those numbers really mean.

Thoughts? Advice?

[Elthy]

If you want to upgrade i would go with the i7 7700k, since its overclockable and already runs with a very high clockspeed out of the box. But dont expect miracles from it, it will be about 15% faster in purely CPU lmited tasks (20% if you overclock), which is imho a to small upgrade to justify the costs, especially now that quadcores are outdated and the resale value of your 7500 will be quite low.

A new cooler would be a good idea, even with your current CPU as it lowers the noise quite a bit (if thats a concern of you). I like the Alpenföhn Brocken Eco as a realy good budget cooler...

[Albert_E_A]

What chipset do you have? Z, B or H. Only the “Z” chipset is overclockable...

[Geonovast]

34 minutes ago, Elthy said:

If you want to upgrade i would go with the i7 7700k, since its overclockable and already runs with a very high clockspeed out of the box. But dont expect miracles from it, it will be about 15% faster in purely CPU lmited tasks (20% if you overclock), which is imho a to small upgrade to justify the costs, especially now that quadcores are outdated and the resale value of your 7500 will be quite low.

A new cooler would be a good idea, even with your current CPU as it lowers the noise quite a bit (if thats a concern of you). I like the Alpenföhn Brocken Eco as a realy good budget cooler...

Not big on overclocking.  The i5 does pretty well, 15% is about what I would expect.  Ideally I would have done the 7700K when I built this thing, not sure why I talked myself out of it at that time.  Not too worried about resale value.  Either it'll get stored for a future build or a backup, or my wife will get it to replace her G4400 (unlikely, since her computer is basically a Facebook machine)

I'll look at the Alpenföhn Brocken Eco, thank you for the suggestion.  Seems right about what I expected to spend.

16 minutes ago, Albert_E_A said:

What chipset do you have? Z, B or H. Only the “Z” chipset is overclockable...

B250, but not worried since I won't be overclocking.  I do see overclocking options in the UEFI though, but I haven't tried them to see if they actually do anything.

[qzgy]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

I'm leaning towards the K, but I don't know squat about what makes a good cooler.  I don't want to go water.

Are those sweet extra 600mhz worth it?  Any advice on the cooling?

One thing to also remember is that a good air cooler will do nothing if your airflow isn't good.  Case in point - My sisters PC. Its got a decent cooler, but still runs hot cause I don't think there's enough airflow.

[Geonovast]

Just now, qzgy said:

One thing to also remember is that a good air cooler will do nothing if your airflow isn't good.  Case in point - My sisters PC. Its got a decent cooler, but still runs hot cause I don't think there's enough airflow.

Got that covered.

[qzgy]

Hmm. This isn't really a computer building/buying question, more like a "help somethings screwy and I don't know why" kinda thing.

So I used to be able to relatively comfortably run KSP and Firefox in parallel and that does not appear to be the case any more. Checking task manager shows that while the active memory usage is nicely within the range, the cached memory (which swells to 2 or more gigs for some reason) is slowly being pushed out of the 8 gigabyte system hardware limitation. Is there some fix around this or some possible program that might be eating all of this memory that is probably causing fairly frequent crashes? An ideal one is one where I don't have to get more RAM.

Oh, and another thing - the memory kit that I am using is supposed to run at 2400 mhz, but is only running at 1600 mhz according to the windows task manager. Any particular reason, and/or possible fix?

Edited January 20, 2018 by qzgy

[Geonovast]

I'm certainly not an expert, but I do know that the new Firefox Quantum crap is designed for multiple cores.  Maybe it's sucking some sweet clock cycles from the core running KSP?

I dunno.  All I can say for sure is that the new, shiny, faster FF is certainly slower than the previous versions.

[qzgy]

Possibly. Although I think that would lead to more game performance issues rather than instability. But I'm no expert either, and computers are finicky things.

Really though? New FF is slower than older one? It certainly sucks up a lot of free memory.

[Geonovast]

10 hours ago, qzgy said:

Really though? New FF is slower than older one? It certainly sucks up a lot of free memory.

It has been in my experience. Both Windows and Linux.  I am seeing the massive increase in memory usage as well.

[invision]

On 1/20/2018 at 11:53 AM, qzgy said:

Hmm. This isn't really a computer building/buying question, more like a "help somethings screwy and I don't know why" kinda thing.

So I used to be able to relatively comfortably run KSP and Firefox in parallel and that does not appear to be the case any more. Checking task manager shows that while the active memory usage is nicely within the range, the cached memory (which swells to 2 or more gigs for some reason) is slowly being pushed out of the 8 gigabyte system hardware limitation. Is there some fix around this or some possible program that might be eating all of this memory that is probably causing fairly frequent crashes? An ideal one is one where I don't have to get more RAM.

Oh, and another thing - the memory kit that I am using is supposed to run at 2400 mhz, but is only running at 1600 mhz according to the windows task manager. Any particular reason, and/or possible fix?

you can set your ram speed in the bios.

if you dont know how to do it look it up online its usually pretty easy.

one thing to note which may or may not pertain to you is "did you add ram to this system?" 

if you did and the old ram is "1600mhz" it will run your faster newer ram at 1600 too so it matches the slowest ram stick.

if all ram is 2400 mhz then go into bios and change the speed from 1600 to 2400

 

[invision]

On 1/19/2018 at 5:17 PM, Geonovast said:

Hey guys, could use a little advice.

It's tax time, and I'm looking at adding a few ponies to the KSP machine.  KSP certainly isn't the only thing it does, but it is its primary mission.

I currently have an Intel i5-7500 @ 3.4ghz

I'd like to go to an i7.  The two I'm looking at are the i7-7700 @ 3.6ghz and the i7-7700K @ 4.2ghz  The K is about $35 more, and doesn't come with a cooler.  The only difference I see(and understand) other than the clock speed is the wattage, 91 vs 65.  Given that, I'm assuming my current i5 stock cooler will not be enough.

I'm leaning towards the K, but I don't know squat about what makes a good cooler.  I don't want to go water.

Are those sweet extra 600mhz worth it?  Any advice on the cooling?

According to this, the three processors have single thread benchmarks of:

• i5-7500: 2,119
• i7-7700: 2,350
• i7-7700K: 2,582

But I don't know what those numbers really mean.

Thoughts? Advice?

it doesnt seem worth it honestly.

you will only gain about 15% speed but would spend 50% more money comparing the i5 to i7

in the gaming world theres only a 10-15fps difference so you really wont notice the gain.

i would buy a new videocard if you havent already. thats where you will see the biggest system gains in performance for gaming.

 

 

[Geonovast]

2 minutes ago, invision said:

it doesnt seem worth it honestly.

you will only gain about 15% speed but would spend 50% more money comparing the i5 to i7

in the gaming world theres only a 10-15fps difference so you really wont notice the gain.

i would buy a new videocard if you havent already. thats where you will see the biggest system gains in performance for gaming.

 

 

I've got a GTX-1050Ti, forgot to mention that.

[invision]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

I've got a GTX-1050Ti, forgot to mention that.

that card should be fine for 1080p gaming.

so you have a decent rig actually, what is it not doing you want it too?

[Geonovast]

2 minutes ago, invision said:

that card should be fine for 1080p gaming.

so you have a decent rig actually, what is it not doing you want it too?

I just seem to be flashing yellow more and more often when I have other things going on on the other monitors (which is always).  Since I seem to be modding more, I started thinking about some more horsepower.

[invision]

6 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

I just seem to be flashing yellow more and more often when I have other things going on on the other monitors (which is always).  Since I seem to be modding more, I started thinking about some more horsepower.

KSP has terrible coding, you can have the best CPU in the world and it can cripple it.

all you can do is make sure only important items stay in orbit like sat's and space stations

if you have too many things in orbit it can really bog down the system, sometimes the save file is wonky and only solution is new game.

also more ram may be a good idea if you use 8gigs

just to give you an idea of what i mean i built a new PC with a Ryzen 5 @3.9 ghz with a gtx 1080 @ 1924mhz

i was entering the muns SOI and my fps went from 90+ to 15......yes 15fps

something in KSP commited suicide and i went to tracking station then back to ship and my fps was back to 90+

so something somewhere in KSP's coding is just not right.

[Geonovast]

6 minutes ago, invision said:

KSP has terrible coding, you can have the best CPU in the world and it can cripple it.

all you can do is make sure only important items stay in orbit like sat's and space stations

if you have too many things in orbit it can really bog down the system, sometimes the save file is wonky and only solution is new game.

also more ram may be a good idea if you use 8gigs

Oh I know KSP is pretty harsh on processors.  I'm just wanting to fight the good fight, hoping that going from a 4 core 3.4 Ghz to a 4 core hyperthreaded 4.2 Ghz processor would help greatly with the multitasking while it's running KSP.

I am planning on building a computer for the basement soon so my old i5 would be used again fairly quickly.

Maybe I'll hold off on it until then unless stuff starts going on sale.

Oh, and I have 16 Gigs of Ram   That's never been an issue except the one time I left the game paused overnight and it was using 13 gigs by the next morning...