New computer build for SC

Thalstan

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Do not try to get SC in 4k. I know this is not what you want to hear, but right now, the engine and back end servers are just not capable of getting you decent frame rates, no matter what you play on.

If you are looking to play WoW in 4k, yes, that spec will more than do it. My wife runs a 7700k, 1080ti, 960 evo m.2. She easily runs any programs she wants in 4k.

I run a very similar system, but using a 1080 gtx. I do not get good FPS in SC (I do get very good FPS in other games). I run at 1920x1080. I still get glitches and lag. This is a program (alpha) problem, not a CPU/GPU problem. You will not get around it by throwing money at it from the client side.

I think we are on the verge on a major shift in computer tech. I think the age of the shrinking size is almost over. The age of the number of core expansion has begun. That means to take advantage of it, we will need updated OS and programs that run processes over multiple cores. That is still in its infancy. It's coming, but don't expect things to occur overnight.

Now, in case you think I am a technophobe: I have been an early adopter since I've been out of school and paying my own way. I've had good luck (CDs), bad luck (DVD-HD, DVD Audio), and just plain "what is that?" (laserdisk). I almost always get the latest and greatest consumer processor (the i7s) since they were introduced. Before then, I bought the best processor at the highest speeds, and if I needed to, I bought the math co-processor, 3d card add-on, etc. I've owned many of the Voodoo cards, and the Riva TNT, GeForce 256 and the early GeForce cards. I've upgraded from 16, to 32, to 64 bit OSes almost as soon as they released. I've bought pre-made systems (Gateway from when they were good, Micron, and yes, even 2 Alienware - before they were Dell), and for the past 13 years, I've built and maintained my own desktops and desktops for my extended family. (I buy laptops)

Why list my cred? Because it gives perspective and will help you understand my reasoning and experience with new stuff.

What I've learned over the past 28 years of technical work on computers (beyond just adding in a card, playing games, and playing with hex-edit for the 9 years prior to that), is that the first generation of a new computer phase is buggy and short lived 99 percent of the time. Lots of these things are great in concept, but are vastly outdated within a year.

I expect most of this hardware you have listed to go live within 3-5 months. I don't expect the hardware to be settled until after the winter holidays. Right now, we are seeing a preview of the winter season. By next father's day (dads and grads sale), you will see a much revised and improved set of boards and chips with many of the first gen bugs and features ironed out. You will see PCI express 4.0 and a host of other improvements. This second generation is the one you want. If it is dying, you already know and can avoid it like a dead skunk. If it's setting sail, you can get on that ship...usually with a better seat for lower cash too.

Now...your current system isn't that old, and the 970 should still give you good use. Here are a couple of tricks you can use to help extend the life of that laptop for another year. As a reference, your laptop is a newer generation than my old desktop and it ran SC about the same as my current desktop.

1) get a notebook cooler pad for it and use it. Here is a decent one /http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/notepal-series/notepal-xl/http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/notepal-series/notepal-xl/ There are also others from different manufacturers. Keeping your computer cool will really help the performance.

2) if you are not using SSDs in your laptop (and it's a toss up if you are based on the age of your computer), move to full SSDs. Spinners are the limiting factor for most computer systems these days. This will probably mean re-installing windows. While you are doing so, up your HD space and number so you can run SC on a different disk than your OS.

3) update to the latest OS. Especially if you are using windows 8. Windows 7 is good, but I find windows 10 to be slightly faster vs 7 on the same machine. Yes, it has some...challenges..and as always, wait for a few weeks/months on the latest non-security updates because MS has had more than the occasional really bad launch, but in general, the newer OSes are better.

4) Run at lower resolutions than 4k. Yes, it's a waste of a 4k monitor, but it will do for a year. 1920x1080 is plenty of resolution unless you are "up close and personal" with that screen.

5) Either take your computer apart and blow it out, or take it somewhere to have it done if you are not comfortable doing it yourself. Getting the dirt out will really help improve the cooling, which will improve performance. Note, I still recommend adding a notebook cooler even if you do blow it out.

Sorry for the long post.
 
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Grimm_Reaper

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Everyone here has given sound advice and basically boils down to the CPU market is seeing a huge shakeup. Since the last 10 years Intel has dominated the market and the last 3 gens the processor core hasn't see major drastic improvements to warrant a change. With the next gen AMD chips coming in we are seeing a true movement to the next gen of processing power.

However heres the problem, software usually takes time to catch up to new hardware with new drivers, optimization, adoption of newer technologies etc, as an early adopter you are not going to realize any true benefits until at least a year from now. With new i9 chips comming out the only board recommended the x299 shares the same problem in that its not optimized to run well with the chipset. Perhaps by this winter to next year is when we will see truely optimized boards worthy of the i9's.

Now before you go spending $1000 on the i9 10 core know that the max coming out in the market probably end of this year is the Intel 18 core i9-7980XE to directly compete with AMD's own Ryzen Threadripper 16 core.

So basically by the time driver optimizations and compatibility bugs are all worked out the intel 10 core that you bought now will probably fall in price especially if AMD Ryzen is cheaper and out performing them. Why go for a 10 core if you can get a 16 core AMD for a similar price?

Even now early adopters of 1080Ti in SLI are not seeing optimizeations and support that fully utilizes the two GPU's. I right now have a 1960x1080 monitor and my nvidia 760 card conked of. After much research the 1080 was just overkill for my monitor type at 1080p and so I just bought a overclocked 1070. Had I had a higher resolution monitor at 1440p and higher I would have gone 1080. But this year with so much change happening in the market and SC still at least 3 years away there aren't many games that I cant play at my current monitor resolution on ultra settings.

When Star Citizen is closer to completion I will consider upgrading my setup but for now I'll keep the money. Thats future proofing ;)

Also note that most game manufacturers are going to have to cater to all systems and not just $5k rigs. Which means it will take a year or two before you actually see games truely optimized and taking advantage of this generations latest and greatest offerings.

Read this article its really good and gives and idea of whats to come
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announces-skylakex-bringing-18core-hcc-silicon-to-consumers-for-1999
 

Sirus7264

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Now that I have logged in on a computer I can actually answer back a lot easier than from my cellphone(took an hour yesterday to type all of that maybe arthritis is kicking in)




1. The reason I said don't buy Alien ware is only because it's overprices AF... it's literally Dell with some eye candy.
Yes yes it is eye candy but the outer shell is extremely durable and like all laptops they are bound to drop at least once in their life(mine has dropped 3 times about 2 feet and not even a dent did have to replace the power adapter though due to the plug being heavily damaged the laptop is a brick ) but yes you are right it's just a gaming dell laptop and you shouldn't expect them to be anywhere equal to what the old laptops use to be. Prices are lower in this case also though so it's just another gamming laptop

2. I don't advise a GTX 1050... I just think that coming from a Laptop you kinda don't have the perspective on how powerful current "mid-range" Hardware is. However, even current top-end GPU in SLI do struggle in 4k, meaning 2 1080Ti don't mean you can play SC at max settings 4k and expect high FPS.
Yes I think I mentioned that in my last post that the benchmark for MGS 5 showed that along with reviews which is why I'm not getting sli unless after the next gen comes out and benchmarks are improved by at least 50% no point in putting 2 $700 usd cards in a system if there is no real improvement 100% would be in a perfect world but we all know that isn't going to happen. I have heard putting 4 in SLI does help but there is no way in hell I'm spending 2800 in graphics cards for something so small.


4. Could you ask him which hardware he uses? I'm fairly some of the professional Software requires stuff usually disabled on Consumer-grade CPU/GPU. Also, you'd definetely want to use ECC RAM if you want to use it professionally.
Yeah i'll ask him more details when I see him next(He stops in my office maybe once a week) but from what he has told me his setup is its not very standard at all. I believe he said he has 3 or 4 apple computers(not sure which model but they are not new) working in line with each other on a single rendering job its cut his render times down from 15 minutes to 3 minutes per render

5. Overbuilding for "future proofing" isn't a good idea... it's always a waste of money if you go above the "what you need for the forseeable future" specs. I think I mentioned it before, but gaming / streaming in 4k is simply not reasonable with today's Hardware.. even if you'd get a Quad-SLI build to work with 4 Titan Xp, nobody would watch it because of the insane Data volume 4k 60fps would mean.... and "using multiple cores" has absolutely nothing to do with the GPU tbh.
Overbuilding doesn't make you futureproof yes but when you spec your computer out it gives it longevity to stay within "Standard" spec for a much greater time (instead of needing to upgrade every year or 2 years now you don't need to do anything for 5 or 6 years because the market Is catching up with you so that gives you 5-6 years time to save up for the next latest and greatest at that time its a never ending cycle) So yeah it's going to get. Also with Direct X 12 if you havnt had the moment to read up it distributes workload over over multiple GPUs now but most games and software hasn't been updated to accommodate this yet and are currently working on it, and new games being made are being made in relation to this change. But as said before the "Standard" user won't use be have 2-4 graphics cards in the computer but the ability is always there because games still cater to players who like to max everything out in games. as for the 4 titan xps it's not worth it after the 1st one as you get diminishing returns on each gpu you add on after the first 2 but yeah it will always help just not enough. As for the Data volume you can always reduce the resolution and the data bit rate of your stream within your settings

Hell, even a lot of famous techchannels on YT basically said that x299 is a failure... and frankly, I'd unsubscribe the ones saying otherwise, as that would be a sponsored comment IMO..
Yeah i'll definitely have to look into the chipset that was the one thing I couldn't find much information on day of release at computex and got to busy to go back into it to see what it offers just quick glimpses, but you know how people can be they will shoot stuff down and then still buy it in the end because its better than the last one then later say well it isn't as bad as I first said it was. Ive seen that one to many times but yeah with most new releases there are always issues which is one reason i'm not not buying it fresh out the gate and i'm giving it time to work itself out. obviously if really big issues are found and people are not happy with the x299 and the I9 i'll stall off until things are fixed even though I hate missing black Friday to buy computer parts.

As far as temperature is concerned, I assume you haven't seen AMD's TR4 Socket or processors yet?... they are quite big... :P
I havn't seen the new sockets yet as I have been pushing AMD to the side like a red headed step child. I'm still recoving from my last bad AMD purchase lol and i'm not willing to give them another chance yet. Not to mention their performace on AnandTech.com puts their current best ryzen way below most intels so intel is still dominating the market. With the release of the threadripper who knows that may change but 16 cores in any socket makes me feel uncomfortable with heat that's why I feel the 10 core is the best way to go it's only a step up from the 8 core pcs that have been on the market for a while. another thought has been that intel wants to sink amd and has been sitting on these processors for a good long time waiting for AMD to make the first move so they can prove they are the superior company.(common intel strategy sadly not very nice to the consumer for making us wait.)


1) get a notebook cooler pad for it and use it. Here is a decent one /http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/notepal-series/notepal-xl/http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/notepal-series/notepal-xl/ There are also others from different manufacturers. Keeping your computer cool will really help the performance.
Ive always got one of these for my laptop as I had a laptop burn out a hardrive because it overheated a long time ago. So my computer is always nicely cooled and doesn't have heat issues(heat issues would disable the turbo boost and id be running at 2.5ghz at that point)


2) if you are not using SSDs in your laptop (and it's a toss up if you are based on the age of your computer), move to full SSDs. Spinners are the limiting factor for most computer systems these days. This will probably mean re-installing windows. While you are doing so, up your HD space and number so you can run SC on a different disk than your OS.
I don't plan to get a new SSD due to how low end my laptop has become due to that it will be retired most likely given to my wife like I do with all of my old laptops(They are always more than enough for her i think she is still using my hp i bought about 8 years ago which finally became obsolete as of 2 years ago. since then I gave her the crappy Samsung amd i had which is and since it is a laptop I cant put that slim hdd into a desktop.


Striderevil, post: 186869, member: 578"]However heres the problem, software usually takes time to catch up to new hardware with new drivers, optimization, adoption of newer technologies etc, as an early adopter you are not going to realize any true benefits until at least a year from now. With new i9 chips comming out the only board recommended the x299 shares the same problem in that its not optimized to run well with the chipset. Perhaps by this winter to next year is when we will see truely optimized boards worthy of the i9's..
This is true but the more we are heading into this era software will be forced to accommodate for more cores and utilize them to run faster to compete with other companies.

Now before you go spending $1000 on the i9 10 core know that the max coming out in the market probably end of this year is the Intel 18 core i9-7980XE to directly compete with AMD's own Ryzen Threadripper 16 core. .
Price is not the issue for me I want performance over price if you have compared previous benchmarks of the amd products they fall short of what intel releases at the same power and have issues a lot more than intel. So yes you may get 16 cores but with that low price tag there will be problems. Ive had great times with intels and I have yet to have an intel fail on me nothing is more annoying than having to order a new processor board or whole computer because of melting issues.(My 686 Celeron back in the day melted on me haha a bit because I overclocked but it was within limitations.)

So basically by the time driver optimizations and compatibility bugs are all worked out the intel 10 core that you bought now will probably fall in price especially if AMD Ryzen is cheaper and out performing them. Why go for a 10 core if you can get a 16 core AMD for a similar price? .
As mentioned above I'm not trying to get an AMD this time around due to my constant issues with them (video cards and CPUs)


Even now early adopters of 1080Ti in SLI are not seeing optimizeations and support that fully utilizes the two GPU's. I right now have a 1960x1080 monitor and my nvidia 760 card conked of. After much research the 1080 was just overkill for my monitor type at 1080p and so I just bought a overclocked 1070. Had I had a higher resolution monitor at 1440p and higher I would have gone 1080. But this year with so much change happening in the market and SC still at least 3 years away there aren't many games that I cant play at my current monitor resolution on ultra settings. .
Yeah a lot is changing this year as with every year new major equipment is announced. and I think Nvidia knew this was coming and wanted to over spec the TI. Like I said it may act differently with the new CPUs or Nvidia has some issues with the TI card they will fix in an update give it time new hardware means new problems by November everything will be much different.


When Star Citizen is closer to completion I will consider upgrading my setup but for now I'll keep the money. Thats future proofing ;)
This computer isn't only for SC lol and I can't do what I really want with the current rig I have hence why i'm upgrading later this year.

Read this article its really good and gives and idea of whats to come
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464...ging-18core-hcc-silicon-to-consumers-for-1999.
Ive read that one before and a lot of the comments on it you can't compare the products until benchmarks are performed so need to wait until everything is officially released and tested also you can't take only 1 computer test and call it good as there may have been faults or issues with that one particular system. People are to concerned about pricing in this article and are just complaining as they always do that amd is cheaper than intel which has been a known fact for many years. This comes standard with every new cpu release.

This is probably the Longest post I have ever posted in my lifetime haha sorry I couldn't respond to each person who has posted. I'm enjoying the conversation though and a lot of you guys are bringing good stuff to the table and hopefully this is helping others along the way.
 
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Thalstan

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If you are using spinners on your laptop, that is your issue (bottleneck) right there. Trust me, get an SSD and you will not believe the performance improvements you will see.

I had platters on my machine and updated it to an SSD. Boot times went from minutes to 20 seconds. Load times for WoW and associated addons underwent a similar time reduction. In essence, it's not the CPU and GPU that is holding you back right now, it's your HD. Spend 300 bucks (very cheap at the price) and put a 500 Gig SSD in your system. I guarantee you that you will not believe it's the same machine.

Even if you still decide to replace it this year, your wife will appreciate the upgrade.
 

Sirus7264

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If you are using spinners on your laptop, that is your issue (bottleneck) right there. Trust me, get an SSD and you will not believe the performance improvements you will see.

I had platters on my machine and updated it to an SSD. Boot times went from minutes to 20 seconds. Load times for WoW and associated addons underwent a similar time reduction. In essence, it's not the CPU and GPU that is holding you back right now, it's your HD. Spend 300 bucks (very cheap at the price) and put a 500 Gig SSD in your system. I guarantee you that you will not believe it's the same machine.

Even if you still decide to replace it this year, your wife will appreciate the upgrade.
I know that an SSD does help load times and so forth by a lot and SSDs are getting massively cheaper due to the introduction of NVME as they become more and more mainstream. But yeah your right she probably would appreciate it so maybe this is a good idea to get one. I'll have to see what I can get shes been a fanatic with pictures and movies of our son but I did just get her a 500 gb external ssd last month so she would stop buying SD cards lol. so I think another 500 GB should do her good.(I just hope she actually starts using this one cause I always give her good computers then she never uses them.)
 

Grimm_Reaper

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If price is not an issue then you can probably just go for the 18 core i9 with a decent mobo when more choices become available. In the meantime you can settle on a i7 broadwell refurbished or second hand with a 1080Ti for cheap to tide you over. The 1080 would easily fit in your new system.

I'm with you on the AMD vs intel. But this years offerings of AMD piqued my interest since the tech they employ is new and similar to intels 14nm chipset and just not some overclocked hot running chip. Its good enough to have scared intel to releasing its HCC chipsets which was more for the corporate server side of their business rather than consumer side.

This is a fun year for tech junkies ;)
 

Sirus7264

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If price is not an issue then you can probably just go for the 18 core i9 with a decent mobo when more choices become available. In the meantime you can settle on a i7 broadwell refurbished or second hand with a 1080Ti for cheap to tide you over. The 1080 would easily fit in your new system.

I'm with you on the AMD vs intel. But this years offerings of AMD piqued my interest since the tech they employ is new and similar to intels 14nm chipset and just not some overclocked hot running chip. Its good enough to have scared intel to releasing its HCC chipsets which was more for the corporate server side of their business rather than consumer side.

This is a fun year for tech junkies ;)
The 18 core does look nice but i'm not sure how it will fair for gamming unless it has turbo boost on it and can swap itself down to a few cores for gamming(which I assume it will) the other reason i'm thinking the 10 core is better is due to heat distribution over the size of the core. Last thing about the 18 core is for its price of 2k and applications that will actually use that many cores is very limited. If I find out I want to step up my renders then i'll most likely buy the 18 core at that time and sell off/give out the 10 core to someone else. as for the Xeon processors they are pretty much the same as the current set coming out but a bit more pricey and getting them second hand(which I'm sure a lot are going to pop up on ebay) could be slightly dangerous as they may have a low level of life left in them.

Now for AMD yeah I have been interested in this product line to which is why I want to watch the benchmarks on their release but I'm so skeptical which I know it's not a good thing to do in this market. I just don't have much trust in their products which is why I would pay more for something that hasn't failed me yet. Hell I look at my PS4 and the XBOX one and what do I hear about the release of those and my current PS4? They had a lot of overheating problems and they crash a lot. Even now my PS4 crashes at least once a day for no reason it will be sitting in the start menu for a few hours then i'll turn on my TV for it and its crashed somewhere during that time.... Yes it could be due to software but i'm pretty sure that's not the case as this is the start menu. This is why I have no faith in them to deliver a decent product line. Like I said though i'm willing to give them a chance if they can deliver an actual good product.
 

Sirus7264

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hahaha so i bought a stick of 960 pro nvme and was informed via random forums online that the alienware r2 can use nvme. low and behold i opened up my laptop to find out it has a b key m.2 slot. so i needed sata III m.2 memory... oh well.. i can use the nvme in my new computer later. a stick of mx300 crucial is otw hopefully arrives today.

lesson learned? dont listen to random forums and dont be lazy just open up your computer yourself and look at it.
 
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