Gaming Computer Optimized for KSP

[CalculusWarrior]

Hello all! My current computer is getting old, so I've been looking for an upgrade for a while.

It can only run KSP on the lowest graphics, and I'd really like to take a look at more powerful PCs which allow me to actually run the game on default (or dare I say it, high?) settings.

My plan is to custom-build a desktop gaming PC, as my preliminary research tells me that you end up spending less overall. The end goal in mind is to optimize it to play KSP, as it is certainly my most-played game. Decent performance in other games is definitely a bonus, however.

I have a few questions for those who are experts (or at least have experience) in building PCs:

Video Card:

My current computer has a relatively low-memory graphics card (128 MB), which I believe is responsible for poor performance in most games I've tried to play with it. Looking at modern graphics cards I see the memories can go up to 4 GB. As I am not interested in playing top-tier, next-gen games on max settings, what would be a sensible memory level (or perhaps even an example of a certain card) for a game such as KSP?

CPU:

I have seen countless times across the forums the adage that KSP only runs on a single processor core. I believe HarvesteR himself stated

during KerbalKon that this was false, however. That being said, Unity is not known for it's multi-core abilities, and I wonder if it is sensible to focus on a CPU which has faster processing speeds yet only a couple of cores, or a quad(or greater) core chip in which each core runs slower? Like above, what would be a sensible maximum processing speed? Is faster better, or once you reach a certain speed do you stop seeing performance improvements?

SSD vs HDD:

I believe the proponents of SSDs state that the write speed from them is so much greater than standard hard disks, though I recall seeing a thread somewhere on the forums where the performance and load times of KSP on an SSD were not significant enough to really matter. Are the speed improvements worth the extra price?

RAM:

Lastly, the question of RAM. I see that KSP does not utilize any more than 4 GB at the moment for loading textures, etc., but I am curious to know what is a good amount for day-to-day usage. I've heard RAM amounts being talked about in dollars, such as you want to buy no more than $75-$100 of RAM, but I'm not really too sure if that's correct or not.

I appreciate any help you guys are able to offer me!

[shynung]

On hard drives, I would recommend HDD over SSD, as I believe an SSD has limited write cycles, and cease to function properly when it is reached (though various software countermeasures against it has been devised).

As for RAM, for primarily KSP usage, 4GB should be enough. It is also good enough to run most recent games up to the 2012 era. If you're willing to drop Windows, KSP has a version for 64bit Linux OS, which effectively skips the 4GB limit.

EDIT: I've been convinced by the posts below about the SSD's working life, which I may have grossly underestimated. I would still avoid it for now, though, as prices per GB are still high.

Edited March 2, 2014 by shynung
Misconception

[SargeRho]

I would recommend at least 8gb of RAM, if you plan to do anything besides KSP while it's running.

An SSD lasts for a few years, by then you should replace it anyway. I'd get an SSD and a HDD actually. SSD for Windows, and programs that usually take a long time to load, and HDD for mass storage and other stuff.

CPU: Quad core. an i7-4770 costs around 300$ if I'm not mistaken. Get that, or an i5-4570, for 100 bucks less.

Even a GTX550 should do, but I'd recommend to get a newer one. GTX660 isn't all that expensive last time I checked.

[Camacha]

On hard drives, I would recommend HDD over SSD, as I believe an SSD has limited write cycles, and cease to function properly when it is reached (though various software countermeasures against it has been devised).

You can run a SSD longer than HDD's will survive, so that is not a problem. Most tests indicate a user life of 15 to 30 years, probably more. Remember that that would be equivalent to still being working with windows '98! No one uses hardware or software that long for practical reasons.

SSD wear is not an issue. SSD quality much more. Avoid cheap junk like OCZ drives and go for Crucial, Intel, Samsung or another respectable brand. I would recommend the Crucial M500, as it also has powercaps to protect you (and your data) against power outages, has a more reliable chip technology than the EVO drives and is fairly cheap.

[Camacha]

CPU: Quad core. an i7-4770 costs around 300$ if I'm not mistaken. Get that, or an i5-4570, for 100 bucks less.

An i7 is wasteful, the extra cash you spend for one is totally wasted on useless features. An i5 is a nice all round chip for games and if you only want to play KSP you can get away with a quick i3, as you only need one or two threads.

[Seret]

On hard drives, I would recommend HDD over SSD, as I believe an SSD has limited write cycles, and cease to function properly when it is reached (though various software countermeasures against it has been devised).

The wear levelling algorithms in modern SSDs ensure that this won't ever be a problem, even for quite heavy use in servers. For standard desktop use it's not something you have to worry about.

It's worth bearing in mind that in practical terms magnetic hard drives have a very limited lifespan too. They're one of the least reliable components in a computer. To be honest, with the number of moving parts they have and the tolerances they have to achieve to work properly it's a minor miracle they work at all.

There are ways to get the best of both worlds. You can fit a cache drive instead of a full SSD, this gives SSD-like performance and allows you to keep all your data on a big slow hard drive. Alternatively if you're using an OS where you can easily separate the OS from your data then putting the OS on an SSD and the data on a HDD is a good way to go. Personally I fit small SSDs to the individual machines and keep all my data on the network in a RAID array.

I recall seeing a thread somewhere on the forums where the performance and load times of KSP on an SSD were not significant enough to really matter. Are the speed improvements worth the extra price?

Not really. Loads time for KSP doesn't seem to be strongly limited by disk access. I still have to sit and wait 30s or so for the game to launch. IMO it's worth getting an SSD anyway, any time you do need to thrash the disk they do make a big difference. Once you've got used to one you'll hate the system slowing to a crawl and listening to that drive grind on an HDD.

Edited March 1, 2014 by Seret

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

Do not get only 4 gigs of ram. You won't be able to do much more processes in the background. Get 8, or 6 even

[Seret]

Do not get only 4 gigs of ram. You won't be able to do much more processes in the background. Get 8, or 6 even

Depends. You might want a bit more if you're on Windows, as it has higher background memory use. But I run KSP on a 4GB machine running Linux with no problems at all.

If you want to optimise the machine for KSP then Linux would be a good choice of OS, as you'll be able to use the 64-bit version. At least go for a dual-boot anyway.

[Nuke]

id go for single core cpu performance (i know some of these newer intel chips can boost single core performance on demand). get a 4gb of really fast memory as opposed to 8+ gig of moderate memory (unless you use linux then just pile on really fast memory and enjoy 64 bit). also might as well throw in an ssd to decrease load times. though i wish you could still find things like this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gigabyte,1111.html

battery backed dram drive. sort of the fore runner of modern ssds (for being made back in 2005, its i/o performance is on par with modern ssds). they were a thing several years ago. just fill it up with all your old dram modules and get ultra-fast storage. they dont seem to exist anymore, which is a shame because i have amassed several 4gb memory modules. though i suppose you can get a bunch of 64gb ssds on 6gb sata ports and stick them in a raid 0 to the same effect. also found this one from 2009 which has performance similar to my evo.

http://techreport.com/review/16255/acard-ans-9010-serial-ata-ram-disk

for video card anything made in the last year that is at or above $150 would probibly do great. for best results, immerse the whole thing in liquid nitrogen and crank up the cpu clock.

that said you wont get a whole lot more performance than any other gaming rig, given the rather unoptimized state of the game.

Edited March 1, 2014 by Nuke

[vetrox]

Do not get only 4 gigs of ram. You won't be able to do much more processes in the background. Get 8, or 6 even

Dammit, and there i was the last 5 years with my 4 gigs of ram thinking everything was fine and dandy

IMO the only thing that matters if all you want to do is play ksp is a CPU with the highest clock you can get your hands on. KSP Thrives on raw clock speed

RE graphics cards. If you dont want to run all the top tier games at full whack then you can get away with a nvidia 660/760 or maybe less. KSP would probably run on a 440 quite happily (or the AMD equivelent of any of these)

HDD is totally irrelivent in the grand scheme of things. I would rather have a 5TB RAID setup as I'm not fussed about loading times but that is totally personal preference Sure I may have to replace them at some point...maybe but by the time that happens I will probably need an upgrade anyway.

Edited March 1, 2014 by vetrox

[mikeydz]

Greetings!

You didn't give a budget you had in mind for your build, or a list of components you currently have that you are planning to migrate to your new gaming pc, so I'm gonna avoid naming any specific parts, and just give you my build philosophy.

Design your build to run what you need now, and to handle at least the near future (1 year min, 2 years max) of the type of gaming you do. Since you are basically building around KSP, that simplifies things greatly.

CPU

Most CPUs these days are gonna be dual cores at the very minimum, though quad cores are pretty standard. You can go up to 6 and 8 core CPUs also if you choose. Right now, KSP isn't gonna really push more than 1 core, so within a given budget, going with a faster clock beats more core. BUT by the time KSP hits final, that may change. I would look at forgetting dual cores, and stick with the quads as a minimum, and then by the fastest clock you can get. Depending on your overall budget will decide if you will have AMDs come into play (on the low end, AMDs compete well from a price/performance standpoint with Intel).

GPU

I'm biased toward NVidia vs AMD here. With that being said, you have a whole lot of choices of cards, by different vendors. Anything over a 660 is probably getting into overkill area. 440s are probably the very bottom end, not because an older gen card probably could run KSP fine, but 440s are so cheap, why only save a few bucks to buy very outdated GPU technology.

RAM

Here, I would not go with 4gigs as the minimum, unless you just have no interest in mods. 64bit will come to KSP so might as well buy you 8 gigs now rather than later. I have an aversion to mixing my ram, and wouldn't want to buy 4gigs of XYZ ram now, then not be able to find that same matching XYZ 4 gig in 6 months. Get the 8 now, and you will sleep so much better for it, you will have thought you bought a new top of the line mattress set at night.

HDD/SSD

If you have never used SSD before, don't do it! Run away. Shut the computer off, go outside and sit under a tree with a good book. Why? Not because SSD sucks, but because SSD with greatly improve your overall system performance, you will not want to go back to a HDD only system ever again.

That said, SSD with not really help KSP much at all, but it does help your overall computing performance outside of KSP quite a bit. If you can budget for it, go with a hybrid HDD/SSD setup. SSD for your OS, so you don't need a huge drive for that, And HDD for the rest. Just stick with a quality company for the SSD as mentioned above and you should be good.

[rkman]

As for RAM, for primarily KSP usage, 4GB should be enough.

4GB RAM might be enough for stock ksp (which gets at most 3GB of that 4), but the regular crashing that my modded versions of ksp did, went away when i upgraded to a 64bit OS (Win 7) and installed an additional 4GB for a total of 8GB RAM.

[mikeydz]

4GB RAM might be enough for stock ksp (which gets at most 3GB of that 4), but the regular crashing that my modded versions of ksp did, went away when i upgraded to a 64bit OS (Win 7) and installed an additional 4GB for a total of 8GB RAM.

In general, going past 4gigs won't help KSP much in windows since Windows KSP uses a 32bit Unity engine, so it won't be able to use more than 4 gigs for itself. But I'm guessing with 8 gigs, that's letting KSP use 4gig all for itself, with the OS and other programs are working in the 4gigs KSP can't see. Once Win KSP transitions to a 64bit Unity, then the benefits will really shine however.

[Elthy]

You wrote in you first post about memory on graphic cards as an important factor. It is not, it just has to be enough (2GB is enough for everything on Full-HD, even 1 GB is good enough for most games). The interesting factor is the power of the chip and here you dont need that much for KSP. You should choose a card from the newer generations (AMD 7XXX or R7/9 2XX, Nvidia GTX 6XX/7XX), the have MUCH more power than the older generations and are way more efficient, also they have better featuresets so and never DirectX versions so you can play new games for a longer time before you have to switch again. Regarding the Brand: Nvidia and AMD are tied on Graphic Power (a R290X is as good as a GTX 780ti, a 280X as good as a GTX 770 etc.) but they differ from price per performance, at least here in Germany Nvidia is allways more expensive than AMD, but that can differ in you country.

Regarding SSD vs. HDD: ALLWAYS choose a SSD (i would choose Samsung 840 Evo Series). They are more durable than HDDs in most cases and much, much faster. If you need space to store videos etc. you can buy a HDD for that, too, but allways use a SSD for your OS and Programs...

I would go to a special hardware dedicatet forum from you country, there are way more people who know about such stuff and you should read several tests about everything you want to buy (never trust the description in stores).

[Nuke]

i kinda think building a computer to specifically deal with the limitations of the current state of ksp would be rather fool hardy. optimizations will come in time and if you built your machine with really fast 4gb ram and cpu with good single core performance, you might miss out later when 64 bit and multithreading come into play. ultimately you just want a moderate gaming rig that is mostly up to date.

[xcorps]

Write endurance on modern SSD's for end users is not an issue. I have a Plextor 256G 256M5M that holds my OS and some other programs. I can go from power off to loaded windows in less than 13 seconds. From my HDD I load KSP in about 15-18 seconds. From the SSD I load KSP in about 2. It doesn't affect gameplay, but it does load much faster.

[Camacha]

i kinda think building a computer to specifically deal with the limitations of the current state of ksp would be rather fool hardy. optimizations will come in time and if you built your machine with really fast 4gb ram and cpu with good single core performance, you might miss out later when 64 bit and multithreading come into play. ultimately you just want a moderate gaming rig that is mostly up to date.

I can only agree here. Build a decent computer in general, not just for one purpose.

[CalculusWarrior]

I can only agree here. Build a decent computer in general, not just for one purpose.

I appreciate all of your responses; they have really helped! You're right, I've seen that the type of computer optimized for KSP's current state would run poorly in other scenarios.

The CPU I've chosen will be an Intel i5 4670. I was considering getting the 4670K which allows overclocking, but as it is more expensive and I don't feel 100% confident about overclocking my PC, I have decided to stick with the 4670.

I've decided to go for a SSD/HDD combo (the SSD will be about 64 GB and house the OS).

I'm still hung up on a GPU, as I am unsure of which card to buy. I'm considering a GTX 760, but I'm worried about bottlenecking the system.

Thanks again for all your help!

[Nuke]

i wouldn't worry too much about bottlenecks, worry about power instead.

[Elthy]

The GTX 760 is enough for KSP (im quite sure its an overkill, but weaker cards dont make sense). But in other recent games the GPU will be the bottleneck most of the times, since you have a powerfull CPU...

Did you check the price of a R9 270X or a HD 7950?They gave nearly the same performance. Also it is important to select the right cooling solution, but i cant suggest you one...

[Camacha]

The CPU I've chosen will be an Intel i5 4670. I was considering getting the 4670K which allows overclocking, but as it is more expensive and I don't feel 100% confident about overclocking my PC, I have decided to stick with the 4670.

I must say that overclocking with recent Intels really is a breeze. If you can follow instructions even with moderate accuracy, you can overclock.

Personally I would go with the K-version, as it is typically only slightly more expensive and leaves the option open. I have seen too many people regret their choice in hindsight. Second hand /resale value also seems to be a bit better. On the other hand you would also need an appropiate motherboard to overclock. You know best what is important to you

For the video card: pretty much any card would bottleneck an i5, so I would not get stuck on that. I would check out some reviews and benchmarks of games you would like to play and cross reference those with the performance you are expecting (frame rate, settings and resolution). KSP needs really not that much, so it boils down to what other games you want to be able to play at what performance. Or you could just set a budget and pick the best available card, of course.

[DaveofDefeat]

SSD is only really ever worth putting your OS on, I have one and its amazing but doesn't seem to help load times for ksp all that much. and all that stuff about limited writing, ya if your writing 10 gigs on it every day its going to wear out in a few years, but itll last you a good while for normal use. -maybe ill record loading times on HDD and SSD with some mods installed to see how it fairs.

[Camacha]

SSD is only really ever worth putting your OS on, I have one and its amazing but doesn't seem to help load times for ksp all that much.

Actually, it does. I thought the same, until I copied that game to a traditional HDD. It was even slower, and significantly too. I guess KSP is just not that well optimized - not a very big surprise.

The gains are bigger in games that stream, like GTA or Skyrim. I think we can safely say that for other applications SSD's are very nice too, although the biggest gains are indeed to be seen in applications where a lot of small files are read (read: OS). SSD just have become fast and cheap enough to put other stuff on them too.

Personally I am considering upgrading from 128 GB to a ~500 GB SSD, so I can run every game and application from it. The gains are just really nice.

and all that stuff about limited writing, ya if your writing 10 gigs on it every day its going to wear out in a few years, but itll last you a good while for normal use.

Even with excessive writes in the neighborhood of 30 GB a day, every day, tests show most decent SSD's should last 10 to 20 years, depending on drive size and other factors. The bottom line is that, unless you run weird and unnecessary daily benchmarks, you are going to replace your SSD for others reasons than it wearing out.

Edited March 3, 2014 by Camacha

[Nuke]

i just got a 500gb ssd, partitioned it 150/350, put the os on the small partition and the data on the big partition (i never put anything important on c:/ ). i keep my old 640gb on board for backup and video storage.

[Camacha]

Don't forget to overprovision a bit - it will help performance in the long run. I am also not sure that partitioning is necessary with an SSD, except that maybe a fresh install of Windows is a little easier.