KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

[HeyThisIsntFallout]

1 hour ago, JeeF said:

I'm rocking a 8700k @5ghz, 32gb ram (a must if you want to play with lots of mods, I run nearly 20gb of mods), a 1080ti and 2 ssds in raid 0 reserved for gaming only (OS in another ssd).

 

I have 8gb in my current rig and while my 100+ mod game uses about 6.5gb, I was thinking that a KSP-rig would have at least 16gb. I also keep it on an SSD to help load times, but honestly while I know that mods slow the game down, I've never really known which components you can optimize to help that. Would a larger SSD buffer cache help with that?  

 

43 minutes ago, eddiew said:

The correct PC for KSP is probably an overclocked Intel i5, which would give you the highest 1-2 thread performance on the market. You could look towards the previous (Kabylake) generation if you don't want to stump up for the current Coffeelakes. The newest ones have 2 more cores which KSP will never use.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i3-8100-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4600/3942vs3894

I really hope someone is using one of these two chips, so they can tell me how they fair in KSP. I've got no problem springing a little bit for an AIO water cooler, so I definitely plan on overclocking to get more frames. Apparently, the Pentium anniversary chips are really stable overclockers!

[Ty Tan Tu]

I have thought about it, and I am thinking that a headless edition of Linux, such as Ubuntu server, could be configured to run nothing but KSP.  You would have to edit the init file to include any GUI, graphic and sound drivers that the game needs. but only what is needed and nothing else. Most of this is still beyond me, but if you can do that -  your can have an ~/.xinitrc that looks like this;

Quote

 

#!/bin/sh

myprogram

 

At that point, the computer boots directly into KSP and it will be the only thing running, and it will also be impossible to change desktops or start anything else.

But, at that point the computer would not be running any of those other services that steal memory and CPU cycles. No Skype, no print spoolers, not even an anti-virus or internet services running. It would only be running KSP. At that point a Pentium G4560, GeForce GTX 1050 and 16 gigs of ram would approach a dedicated professional flight simulator.

[NewtSoup]

Comparatively old gear here:

Intel Core i5 3570k O/C to 3.8ghz
16 GB Ram
GTX 660 Ti 2GB
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UDH3 Mainboard
1 TB HDD
3 TB HDD
Running Ubuntu 16.04

Need to get it a 500gb SSD soon and mirror my OS to it.  I have a 256GB one but that has Windows on it which I don't want to overwrite just yes - also it's a bit small.

 

[steve_v]

Oldish, but still quick:

Core i7-4960X, O/C to 4.2Ghz
ASUS P9X79
32GB DDR3 (quad channel)
GTX1070 8GB
2x250GB SSDs in RAID0

Gentoo GNU/Linux stable. Doubles as a heater during updates

 

 

Edited February 21, 2018 by steve_v

[Vanamonde]

@ItsSeanBroleson and @MaxwellsDemon , your threads have been merged into the master thread for this sort of discussion. 

[GDJ]

51 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Oldish, but still quick:

Core i7-4960X, O/C to 4.2Ghz
ASUS P9X79
32GB DDR3 (quad channel)
GTX1070 8GB
2x250GB SSDs in RAID0

Gentoo GNU/Linux stable. Doubles as a heater during updates

 

 

Did the RAID0 dual SSD drive configuration in my 2012 Mac Mini. So far so good. Not much faster, but it's a noticeable bump in speed.

[steve_v]

36 minutes ago, GDJ said:

Did the RAID0 dual SSD drive configuration in my 2012 Mac Mini.

I went from 120GB + 256GB, for more local storage and to free up the 120GB for use as the OS drive in my home fileserver. RAID0 is just a bonus since both are now the same size.
I don't really need the speed improvement TBH, anything that needs to be silly fast is in a zram drive.

Do ensure you have a reliable backup strategy when running RAID0 though, no redundancy and all that. My desktop is synced to the aforementioned fileservers 24TB zfs pool nightly.

[Harry Rhodan]

9 hours ago, ItsSeanBroleson said:

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i3-8100-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4600/3942vs3894

I really hope someone is using one of these two chips, so they can tell me how they fair in KSP. I've got no problem springing a little bit for an AIO water cooler, so I definitely plan on overclocking to get more frames. Apparently, the Pentium anniversary chips are really stable overclockers!

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i3-8100-vs-AMD-FX-8370/3942vs2983

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-8600K-vs-AMD-FX-8370/3941vs2983

I honestly see no point in building two seperate machines. Every additional piece of hardware you need for a second machine could be invested in a much better CPU for your main machine instead. And if you want to overclock you need the k models, the Anniversary Edition was a single non-k model three years ago. All new AMD chips a overclockable but they still have a slighty worse IPC and next to no reserves to overclock.

[JeeF]

19 hours ago, ItsSeanBroleson said:

I have 8gb in my current rig and while my 100+ mod game uses about 6.5gb, I was thinking that a KSP-rig would have at least 16gb. I also keep it on an SSD to help load times, but honestly while I know that mods slow the game down, I've never really known which components you can optimize to help that. Would a larger SSD buffer cache help with that?  

The moment you run out of ram (or just coming close to running out of ram) makes your computer EXTREMELY slow, regardless of having SSDs as cache buffer.

When I had 16gb of ram, if I ran KSP with more than 12gb of mods it would regularly crash and would get my computer crawling, even opening a browser would take 60 seconds. (during game or after exiting the game)

Now with 32gb of ram, I can run nearly 20gb of mods (mostly big textures) and it's snappy and never crashes. So really just depends on how many mods are you happy with. Mind you graphic/texture mods are the heavy ones.

[GDJ]

18 hours ago, steve_v said:

I went from 120GB + 256GB, for more local storage and to free up the 120GB for use as the OS drive in my home fileserver. RAID0 is just a bonus since both are now the same size.
Do ensure you have a reliable backup strategy when running RAID0 though, no redundancy and all that. My desktop is synced to the aforementioned fileservers 24TB zfs pool nightly.

I went dual 256 gig SSD's for myself. Fairly painless and works well.
Yes with backups. Weekly seems to be enough for me.

[Camacha]

Are those SATA SSDs or NVMe?

I don't feel RAID 0 and SSDs are a very useful combination. If you want more speed there generally are more efficient or reliable ways to get there and the practical gains don't quite seem to be worth the hassle.

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, Camacha said:

Are those SATA SSDs or NVMe?

SATA here.

1 hour ago, Camacha said:

I don't feel RAID 0 and SSDs are a very useful combination. If you want more speed there generally are more efficient or reliable ways to get there

Sure, a single faster and bigger SSD would be better in most respects. But I had other reasons for this configuration.

1 hour ago, Camacha said:

the practical gains don't quite seem to be worth the hassle.

What hassle? Moving a system to mdraid is as easy as falling off a log. Is it problematic on Windoze?

Edited February 22, 2018 by steve_v

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, Camacha said:

Are those SATA SSDs or NVMe?

I don't feel RAID 0 and SSDs are a very useful combination. If you want more speed there generally are more efficient or reliable ways to get there and the practical gains don't quite seem to be worth the hassle.

Actually, you want RAID 10; speed advantages of RAID 0 and reliability of RAID 1.

We use this setup on out database servers, where we need the speed

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Actually, you want RAID 10; speed advantages of RAID 0 and reliability of RAID 1

We use this setup on out database servers, where we need the speed

Indeed, completing the migration of my home servers OS/DB md array from 10K spinning rust to SSDs is where the 120GB drive from my desktop went. 'tis a bit quieter now too
ZFS is awesome for filestores, but the COW penalty is harsh for database loads. For those, I use software raid10.

[Camacha]

On 22/02/2018 at 4:54 AM, steve_v said:

SATA here.

Sure, a single faster and bigger SSD would be better in most respects. But I had other reasons for this configuration.

What hassle? Moving a system to mdraid is as easy as falling off a log. Is it problematic on Windoze?

This isn't a "Windoze" versus anything thing. And disks crapping out and ruining your RAID set and all the data on it is what I would call a hassle.

[steve_v]

6 hours ago, Camacha said:

disks crapping out and ruining your RAID set and all the data on it is what I would call a hassle.

This is what backups are for, with any drive configuration. It's statistically more likely that you'll need to restore one with RAID0, that's all.
No hassle if one already has a good backup strategy.

[Camacha]

11 minutes ago, steve_v said:

This is what backups are for, with any drive configuration. It's statistically more likely that you'll need to restore one with RAID0, that's all.
No hassle if one already has a good backup strategy.

The ability to fix it without losing data doesn't mean it's not a hassle. You're statistically more likely to restore data and experience downtime in return for gains that are nice on paper, but generally have very limited practical use. Not to mention I've seen too many people get quite annoyed after having to rebuild their RAID sets once too often.

It's nothing that isn't surmountable, but it does mean that it's generally not worth the hassle. Only if you enjoy pushing hardware for the sake of it or have very specific requirements it seems to make sense. Especially if you run SATA, the prudent advice would generally be to save yourself some trouble and upgrade to NVMe.

[Albert_E_A]

Now when our new computers are running nicely we have gotten an issue, the router (way to old airport time capsule, around 2010) and the extender is struggling to provide Wi-Fi to the house and with the extender losing connection with most devices temporarily (it is quite strange). So now I am tasked to find a good router for our house. Our house is from from 1925 sweden so the walls are fairly thick and each floor is 128 square meters and there are three floors that need internet internet connection. So my mom went to the local store and they recommended the tp link deco m5 three pack for us. But I am not sure if it really is the best option since I have read online that the transfer speeds are mediocre when the data goes through one of the other nodes. So, do you recommend the deco m5 or any other router kit.

[Geonovast]

Has anyone every purchased a System76 laptop?  I'd really like to get a new laptop, and so far I'm liking what I see about them.  Looking specifically at this Gazelle.  I know it's a bit pricey, but I'm not too fond of the build quality of the large mass-production companies lately.

[Diggz81]

Hi to all again.  I'd really like to give this thread a chance again.  I posted back in the summer last year and didnt get a reply.  Just wanted to see if it was user error or setup error that i still get laggy gameplay.  Just built my pc yr and a half ago, figured it should run this game well.  I run in 64bit, i do have quite a bit of mods, but i get alot of stutter and lag even with 60-70 part crafts.  Ive tried adjusting res, gpu settings, cpu is OCd at 4.9, gpu is also OCd, and running XMP.  I've pretty much reached the extent of my pc modding skills... I attached a link of a list of my pc components:  https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Diggz81/saved/

If the link is dead or i posted in the wrong forum, lmk.  Looking for some help, thanks.

 

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, Diggz81 said:

I run in 64bit, i do have quite a bit of mods, but i get alot of stutter and lag even with 60-70 part crafts.

That rig is close to mine in performance (i7-4960X @ 4.3, 32GB, GTX1070, your CPU is probably a bit quicker), and I get reasonable performance (in KSP terms anyway) considering the number of mods I'm running.
Does a general benchmark show what you expect? That's going to be your best bet for eliminating hardware / OS / driver issues.
You don't mention what OS you are running, or what mods you use. IME, the latter is the important question. Do the adding one mod at a time thing and watch your framerates. Keep an eye on memory consumption too, I find the game starts to choke at >10GB, not sure why.
KSP runs like crap even on fancy hardware, and some mods can make this much worse, especially WRT garbage collection stutter.

Edited March 12, 2018 by steve_v
Quote the thing I intended to quote...

[Elthy]

Maybe KSP is runnninig on the integrated GPU...

[Diggz81]

Steve, thanks for the info, and heads up.  I did do a benchmark last spring, seemed to do really well.  I just did a new one after trimming a few win10 features.  I think this link should work:  http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/7766832

In regards to mods I have the standard ksp fan:  kspie, opt,parts/PW, kjr, kis,kas, KSS systems, and assorted parts mods.  I also have this on my mech drive, didn't see a whole lot feedback on having the game on a mech as opposed to an SSD in terms of running.  Sure its a little longer for startup but only gets laggy when i'm out of the hangars.  

[invision]

4 hours ago, Diggz81 said:

Steve, thanks for the info, and heads up.  I did do a benchmark last spring, seemed to do really well.  I just did a new one after trimming a few win10 features.  I think this link should work:  http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/7766832

In regards to mods I have the standard ksp fan:  kspie, opt,parts/PW, kjr, kis,kas, KSS systems, and assorted parts mods.  I also have this on my mech drive, didn't see a whole lot feedback on having the game on a mech as opposed to an SSD in terms of running.  Sure its a little longer for startup but only gets laggy when i'm out of the hangars.  

its the game.

KSP isnt the best optimized game and runs like crap and gets worse the longer that session goes on for.

it doesnt matter what you tweak or the settings it will remain the same.

you can try uninstalling the game entirely and start over see if that helps, then add one mod at a time and see if its one of them causing the performance issue.

the game would run for me under 30 FPS sometimes using a Ryzen 5 1600 and a gtx 1080

the new 1.4 with a few mods seems to run a lot better with 100+ fps but stutters a lot.

[Diggz81]

well thats good to know.  I can at least stop racking my brain so much over changing/tweaking settings, resolution, etc.  At first I thought I had OD'd ksp with mods since I never saw any issues with skyrim or gta v on my pc.  I appreciate your input, i'll just have to make do with trimming some of the mods i can live without..Thanks