Hi all. I'm looking into a new PC at the moment and thought it might be a good idea to discuss it here a little. Obviously I want it to run Game Guru faster, but I also want to use it for more serious 3D rendering, video encoding as well as some other programming languages.

Firstly, I want a fast CPU. I won't be upgrading again anytime soon so will want as fast as I can afford. I've been looking at various I7 cpu's and find the prices to be pretty high across the board I can't see an I5 or AMD equivalent cutting the mustard when it comes to the heavier tasks. So it seems to me a choice between a 6700 or the new Kaby Lake 7700 equivalent. The 8 core versions are a little too high priced and I am guessing the 4 core versions will perform better in games because of the individual core speeds. Of course the top I7 cpu sounds nice for serious stuff, just the price of £1600 or so is somewhat higher than I can spend on the entire rig, lol. Even the low end ones to me seem crazy prices these days. Intel need some better competition to drop their prices a little.

I'm unsure to go for the newer cpu or the older tried and tested one. My gut tells me to go the newest possible, so as to have at least a chance to upgrade it down the line if needed. I could of course possibly save money going with the slightly older spec as I imagine there will be a bigger choice of compatible motherboards available and of course the CPu is a little cheaper.

I'm also torn with the HDD choice. SSD or hybrid? I hate the size of SSD drives. I can't be doing with installing the OS on one drive and using a second for programs and such, so size is fairly important. The prices of large SSD drives are pretty high and also I'm not keen on the write limit they still incur. Still, GG loading times are a massive bottleneck when working on anything, particularly scripting when you have to constantly run tests to check progress, so speed would be nice. I currently have a hybrid drive, but although a little faster than my old standard disk, not a huge difference and GG levels still take ages to load. I'm unsure if my current Q6600 CPU is possibly a limiting factor here, I could possibly get faster loading times with a better CPU and the same drive.

The rest of the spec will be determined by my CPU choice really so not too bothered at the moment. I'll be looking at 16 gig of ram and I will transfer my current video card (Nvidia 970GTX) across from my current machine.

So, thoughts? Which way would you go on a reasonable budget?

Hey DVader!

I'm not sure if it helps but it certainly doesn't hinder:
If you scroll down my somewhat lengthy review to performance you'll finde a code snippet with several benchmarks by 25 Watts.

LINK



-Wolf

Thanks Wolf. I've taken a look, but none of those CPU's are really up to snuff for me. I need a serious boost in productivity I can't see myself buying anything other than an I7 or possibly the new 1800/1700X AMD chips. It's unlikely I will go the AMD route though, as I tend to find Intel superior in all areas, even the CPU cooler on the Intels are better or used to be :/ The only area the AMD chips interest me is the power useage, which helps running costs along the way and I do use my PC a lot. I may be wrong here, the new chips may be well worth the small loss of speed compared to the Intel equivalents, I'm just too used to AMD chips of the past sometimes not running because of a lack of the latest Intel tech not being supported.

It's a pity the new Kaby Lake CPU's aren't really much of an advance over the old Skylake ones. From what I hear they are identical mainly, the newer version having 4K video decoding support included, which is nice future proofing, but not a big thing for most people as yet. It's not going to make any odds to me for awhile as I have a 30" Dell monitor and no plans to replace it with a 4K compatible one as yet. My budget is not massive Although it would be nice to be able to support 4k on occasion

I'm fairly convinced the Kaby Lake CPU is the way to go, but nice to see other peoples opinions here. My main quandary is the SSD or Hybrid HDD. I could save a big chunk by simply using my current drive on the new system, although that would mean wiping it and possibly losing stuff I have forgot about.
I'd prefer to have my old system on one side so if I suddenly find I have missed something I can simply load it up and grab it, even months afterwards It's defo a gutter looking at SSD prices for terabyte drives though. The HDD used to be a reasonably inexpensive part of a PC build...

My personal opinion on the SSD verses Hybrid issue is that at the moment it is that SSD is still not value for money where it comes to size, the increase in speed just does not outweigh the limited sizes when it comes down to the price. My last two machines have had 2TB Hybrids and i'm more than happy with them, not as big an increase in speed from standard drives compared to SSD, but still a good jump in speed.

That's my opinion as well, although as I haven't really seen an SSD in action to compare am only guessing. I do notice on first running the AGK app I'm currently working on the data can take 10 seconds or so to load. After that it's less than a second, I'm guessing this is the Hybrids cache taking effect.

I guess the main advantage of an SSD will be far faster initial loading and boot times. I'm definitely thinking Hybrid is the more practical option at present. Easy to change over later on in comparison to the CPU. Boot times at present do bug me though, but again that could be down to the CPU more so than the HDD.

Decisions, decisions...

I find a lot of people go a bit overboard when building a PC for game development. When I believe you should always have a unit around to test your games made with the same specs as the majority of your audience that may play it. So you can see how it will preform on their end.

However, I did just do a complete overhaul with my computer of which is a unit that is nearly 7 years old. I think its more along the lines of the standard of computers you'd get today, now. Game Guru runs now at 3 digit FPS at times; though still can go as low as 17 FPS in situation not yet optimized.

I'm using an i7 intel processor with 8 GB of RAM and a 960 Graphics Card - which required me to purchase a new power supply. I am however running on an old 1TB SATA drive which Game Guru is installed on. Same Harddrive I've been using for 7 years without reformatting. I haven't tried installing a second harddrive into the unit as I'm unsure of how the 500 watt power supply will fair in that. I have never tried SSD as they seem to still be very expensive.

You should be fine adding more HDD's Teabone, I had a 450w PSU in my old PC with three HDD's and a 960, HDD's take hardly any power, it's only graphics cards you have to worry about really when it comes to power.

An 17 7700k, with 4 sticks of ddr4 ram, an nvidia 970, two HDD's, taking into account say 4 usb peripherals, and 4 fans, and a dvd/rw drive, should net somewhere between 400w and 425w

Thanks Belidos, I upgraded my power supply from 300 to 500 recently due to the installation of the new GPU. Was worried id get a blue screen using my old power supply.

I may get a second harddrive, with that said and use this technique to be safe:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29462874-WIN7-Does-second-Hard-Drive-shut-down-when-not-in-use

Hey DVader, I recently done a major overhaul of my PC aswell, to keep costs down I used my old case and kept all my peripherals, then went with the following:

I7 7700K CPU, alternatively you could get better rendering performance form a Ryzen 7 1700 but for games the i7 performs stronger. (Also keep in mind the ryzen 7 1700 can supposedly be overclocked to within 1800x performance but are having performance issues ATM which AMD are calling bios errors and rolling out updates for but Intel is tried and tested and known to work, just my 2 cents but for now at least would stick to Intel)

ASUS Prime micro ATX board (the micro part was a mistake but it works for me and the bios is very easy to navigate) supporting up to 2400Mhz DDR4 important for speed.

16GB DDR4 2400Mhz ram, 2 x 8GB ( 8Gb is fine for most things but video rendering and encoding I would go at least 16)

Kingston 480Gb SSD, I got the 480 to run the OS and my main games, I have 2*1TB HDDS for the rest. (Definitely recommend an SSD, even just for how quickly I can start, shut down and restart my computer now, totally blew me away)

GeForce GTX 1060 6Gb, a great card that does everything I ask for it at 1080p, want 4K, wait for 1080ti to come out then pick up a second hand 1080 but for me I didnt need it, don't have a 4K monitor anyhow. (Alternatively the r480 by AMD performs very similar with 8Gb Vram and may be picked up cheaper).

Anyway I got away with that, postage and a win 10 pro key for just under $1500 Australian Dollars, built it all my old case and just waiting on a deepcool all in one water cooler for the CPU at another $80 AUD.

Hope this helps anyway, and if you do get the 7700K, I suggest a water cooler as they are known to run warm.

My experience with this build so far has been fantastic and I do gpu enhanced video encoding, ran the BETA for Ghost Recon Wildlands, Shadowplay recording while I played and it has not missed a beat.

Oh and after reading through all the comments, I usually back all my stuff into one hard drive wipe the one that had windows on it and then all the HDDs go Into the new build so I always have my old folders handy

@DVader - I have a regular HDD (7200rpm) but came across something that may be useful if you don't want to upgrade to a SSD, especially since the price is so high for a large SSD. I was looking through eBay and came across 10K RPM HDDs on eBay - I think they are used in servers. They are not much more expensive than the standard 7200 rpm HDDs, but are more than 25% faster. Might be a good thing to consider I am thinking about getting one of them next time i upgrade.

Save Money ..... I'm using an intel I3 ( much cheaper )
I have only 8 gig of ram but compensate for the best card I could afford a Nvidia GTX 960 ( which to be honest makes the difference )
I just seem to run GG smoothly now matter what I throw at it
and run all the latest like Battlefront etc quite happily

Aushadow, I have the 7700k and although I agree that liquid cooling is preferred I went for fans because I still can't bring myself to put liquid near my PC no matter how safe they say it is, so far my motherboard temperatures haven't gone over 50 (I have 5 fans).

@belidos yeah mine on air normally tops about 60 it's just that full video conversion or encoding tends to top out at 90

@Teabone. You can never have too fast a machine for development Especially with GG. The faster you can test your scripts the better. So each test run in GG eats into time you could be scripting etc. When those test runs can take minutes just to even load up that's a lot of down time waiting. I do see the advantage of having a slower machine as a more practical test unit as well, but using it to develop on is a bind ;p When you are testing code you want to see results instantly, not 3 mins wait every time. It's one of the most frustrating parts of GG for me. I'm used to seconds between running and testing with other dev languages.

Regarding power supplies I currently have a 680W Bequiet PSU which is more than adequate for the job, although I may get a new one and leave this in the old base, or get a cheaper one for the old machine and transfer the Bequiet one to the new system. I always make sure my PSU is a decent one, cheap ones are fine, until they go boom and cook your PC Seen it many times when I used to build and repair PC's.



@ AU Shadow. I can't see myself going the water cooled route. Not gonna overclock this and it really shouldn't need a water cooler on a stock CPU. I also will not have water near my PC, especially my NEW shiny one I assume your 7700 is the 4 gig+ version? If it's running hot as you say. I'm unsure to go for that one or get the 3.5 gig version for a lower TDP. Either one will be way faster than my current CPU, but apart from losing a bit of grunt, the lower TDP sounds a nice saving in running costs. It depends if I can be sensible or power mad

Heat isn't as big an issue in the UK either



@Milanko. I used to own 2 10,000 RPM Raptors. Back when that was the fastest you could get and I spent way too much cash on PC equipment ;p I actually never really rated them very highly and when one died, I ended up removing both (as they were raided) and replaced with a standard 7200 but
far,far bigger drive. the Raptors are one of the reasons I hate having a small main drive as to get those speeds they never had huge capacity. It was always a pain installing things on another drive and for me, you lose the point of having a fast HDD if you are always using the storage one all the time anyway.

Might be worth looking into possibly these days, capacity may not be the issue it was back then. Not sure how they would compare to a hybrid though.



@ Syncromesh. An I3 is just not a significant enough improvement from my current system to be worth getting (or at least I think so, not seen anything on the latest ones). If push comes to shove an I5 is the lowest I would go, or even the AMD route at that point. The I3 is fine for running GG games probably, but not going to be very fast at video encoding by comparison. I've been waiting and waiting for years now for Intel to make a significant improvement to it's CPU's but they seem to be in full complacent mode again. Remember I don't want to upgrade the CPU if possible for probably another 10 years, lol. I need to have a CPU that can still hold up, the I3 will be a dead duck by then. That is unless I suddenly become rich of course, then I'd upgrade every year more than likely ;p

CPU dev is so stale these days. Intel were on their game when they released the first Q series CPU's and the I7 series was another big leap. Nothing since... AMD needs to make another Athlon quality CPU, hopefully get Intel to innovate a bit more. Maybe I could go I5 to save more money for the rest of the unit. It is amazing how quick things add up, the CPU and board alone are probably going to cost near £500.

I see some fairly cheap I7 base units about on occasion as well, might be worth looking for one of those possibly. Seen entire I7 base units for under 500 so would be a big saving, even if a little older tech. Seen some even cheaper I5's. Hate the cases normally though, they look big glowing horrible things, lol. I'm unsure, I normally avoid secondhand kit generally, but these are probably ex school machines or such.

Thanks for the thoughts so far, all helps me make my mind up I'm not going to rush into it quite yet, I'm sort of holding back a little just to see if the AMD cpu's are better once they have had time to fix the quibbles. It's doubtful I will go AMD, but I am for the first time in years, slightly tempted. It depends how long I can be patient

If willing to wait, wait and see how the R5 AMD CPUs pan out, who knows they could be a good thing

The choice is obviously either skylake or kaby lake on the LGA1151 socket which uses the new DDR4 memory.

Knowing that Intel works with tik/tok, kaby lake is the successor and improved version of skylake with some performance gain although it isn't that much and i wonder if it will be noticeable.

Personally i've not yet made use of an ssd due to the problems that were experienced by so many.
When i upgraded 4 years ago, the choice was the WD Veliciraptor 10.000 rpm.
I don't know if they are still sold, but they are quite good and compared to the other HDD's there was a decent performance gain.

A PSU is best chosen when the components of the new build are known.
This will allow for optimal use of energy efficiency.

You can use this page to calculate the power draw of the new build.

I allways build my own comps,my only advice is get the best parts you can afford.i built my one a while ago now but it still runs everything on max.also I can run 3or 4 programs at the same time depending what they are of course.also max out on memory.

Dave

Ryzen is released, so AMD is a viable option as well.
Slightly less gaming performance but a beast for rendering and other applications.

The new GTX10x series GPU's are the way to go, the 1050 ti is 4gb and around £150 if not cheaper, the new 1080ti is suppose to be better than a Titan.
I'd look at render engine benchmarks and get some ideas

Yeah, I agree mostly. Although I was tempted to go dual processor and 2x old xeon cpu's for a short while. On second thought, probably overkill for the amount of rendering/ encoding I actually do and not gonna run the games as well as a modern CPU.

Good advice, I always think that myself, that's one reason I'm taking my time rather than jumping in feet first. I used to build PC's as part of my job and always recommended the same.

I've still not seen any good reviews of it. It seems a mixed bag to me. Also, Game Guru from all accounts at least, used to run a lot slower on AMD machines. Still giving it more time yet though, although I probably won't give it as long as it really needs to settle down more.

Hmm, I already have a 970GTX. Can't see any 10 series card being a big improvement bar the 1080 and I refuse to pay that sort of price for a Graphics card. No 1070 seems to exist and even so probably not worth the extra. So I'll probably stick with this for now. Video cards are the easy upgrade for the future and a way to keep the base relevant for longer later on.

At the minute a 7700K Kaby Lake seems to be my preferred choice. Is it just me or do they not come with a cooler these days? Not even retail boxed? Seems crazy. Always liked the standard Intel heatsink and fan, keeps it cool and is fairly quiet. I've never had much luck with 3rd party solutions and not keen to start now. If that is the case, I may as well look for a OEM CPU part...

They do still come with stock intel coolers, but most people just bin them right away, and add their own, over the last couple of years stock coolers haven't gotten any better while at the same time processors have gotten hotter.

And, yeah, if you have a 970, unless you want to save up for a 1080, it's now worth going 10xx, i had a 960 and went for a 1070, it is an improvement, but only by about 10%, just not worth the extra in my opinion.

The reviews indeed show a mixed bag, however the new architecture needs to be implemented so the Ryzen CPU is utilized properly.
AMD will provide patches to improve performance so i'm curious how it will be by the end of the year.
The first reaction of intel seems to be a huge price cut on the 6900 which shows the comeback of AMD will be to the benefit of the consumer.
If you haven't bought yet DVader, my hunch is that you can save money by waiting a little longer, end of April or so

Just thought would mention, after installing deepcool 120mm all in one water cooler I no longer go over 60 degrees Celsius, a huge improvement over a stock Intel cooler. So if you do go the i7 7700k route, just remember to pair it with a decent cooler, even a decent air cooler would be good.

Oh and by the way, the unlocked ones, the K series Intel's do not come with a cooler in the box the non k ones do

@ Belidos. That's what I figured. Not gonna get much bang for buck upgrading the video card atm. I only got it a few months back anyway, so definitely keeping it for now.

@Earthling45. Hopefully may see some price drops if the AMD chips start eating into Intel sales.

@AuShadow. That would be why I had no luck, as I was looking at the K versions. Not because I want to overclock, simply because they are better at stock speeds without overclocking.

Still looking really, so if prices drop a little in the meantime great!

Yeah I got a bit of flak on other places for building using a k series CPU but not getting a motherboard that supports overclocking (apparently), but yeah I got it for its base speeds so not too bothered and may replace the MObo one day if I ever change the case.

Overclocking is overrated. I've never seen a big difference even with good overclocks and it's nearly always a gamble on how high you will be able to go. If your struggling to run stuff later down the line, it may be more worth it to overclock then, to help prolong it's useful working life. Otherwise, unless money is no object better to leave at stock speeds and hence more stable, not gonna cook as quickly if there's a cooling issue your too slow to spot.

Still looking for the PC. The AMD release has slowed me down and I am waiting a little on more reports on those or Intel possibly dropping prices a little.

I would now wait to see what Independent benchmarks do to compare the r5 ryzen processors against the i5 and i7's and possibly how the r7's go after there have been some updates otherwise stick to an i7 . Tried and tested true but again all this my opinion, and if you do full shutdowns or restarts often enough I can not recommended an SSD highly enough. I was sceptical for a long time before finally doing it for my build and was blown away at just how much it has improved my computer boot time and responsiveness. Although there is m.2 drives now to consider but they again (for the non sata form ones) are more expensive then an SSD. (Excuse my ramblings have had a few ) I am intrigued to see how an R5 with the 6 core 12 thread set up compares to an i7 7700k though for gaming. Seeing as how the 8 core 16 thread loses in gaming due to individual core performance but the 5 series seems to be able to achieve higher clock speeds.

Long ramble about CPU but with RAM, I read often that you never go over 8GB RAM in practical use and I am going to call bull on this, even without screen capture going I often go to 9GB usage during gameplay so would recommend a 16GB set up in DDR 4, I find that 2400mhz is more then enough. Mine is commonly running at around 2134mhz so not even pushing to its max, but you can go 3000mhz if so desired. I just don't see the practical gain for the price.

Last thing I will add. If you are going the water cooled CPU route. Decide that first and do it as you build. Turned out I had to fully strip my PC again to attach a bracket to the back of my motherboard and the radiator didn't fit where I planned so that had to go in one of the side door slots, not the most ideal but it works, point being, would have been best to do it all from the get go.

What ever you decide, enjoy

I agree, I'm probably going to go Intel, but it's worth holding on a little longer to see what happens AMD wise.

I imagine an SSD is way faster, but getting one of these really depends on what I have left after buying the main essentials Considering how long they have been available now, the price is amazingly high still.

You can never have too much memory. You want to keep HDD access down to a minimum, as soon as it needs to page memory to the HDD it slows the system down. Avoiding this keeps the system running at it's optimum. I have 8 gig now, I'd really want to go to 16 when I upgrade. People who say you only need 8 gig are technically correct for games, but you will see smoother operation with more memory, especially if you have several other things open at the same time. So I definitely agree with you there as well.

I'm actually starting to think the Ryzen 1700 is the way to go. Looks slightly slower than a 7700 for gaming, but still fast enough I imagine. I've not found any games as yet that won't run on my current machine, so either CPU will be a make a big difference. The extra cores should make it far better for rendering and video encoding however, so I think it may be worth the slightly lower game performance. Also, I'm hoping that it will future proof it a little.

Price wise, it seems there is not a lot of difference between an Intel and AMD system, in fact I could probably get an Intel cheaper as the motherboards are still fairly pricey on the AMD side. Still not 100% sure, but I'm hearing better reports on AMD since some bios updates have been released. I'm really tempted by the extra cores on the 1700 though. Plus it comes with a nice looking stock fan

My PC forced my hand in the end, died yesterday. Ended up ordering a Ryzen 1700 on this borrowed base unit. Will have to see how it performs with GG. Should be a little bit faster than my old one. Not had an AMD since my Althlon 750, I think I had a 1000 as well a little later, I was upgrading way too often back then

I used to swap parts all the time,not so much these days.looking at mine I think it's time for a fresh install,nothing like a clean pic.

Dave

Yeah, lol, I was always upgrading, don't think I owned anything for anywhere near the warranty period. Crazy, but when you are in the business and also into computers, it can be hard to resist ;/

Now just the long wait for the parts to arrive...

I just bought a new PC, won't be running GG on it though, instead it is running Oracle Linux Server 64 bit with multiple VirtualBox installations of Windows XP and Windows 7 running the same client software for a customer demonstration I'm working on. The same box also has Oracle Development Studio 12.5 installed as a separate demonstration of real-time debugging of their server side apps. The box I'm using? An MSI Cubi-n, dual core celeron, less than 200 quid!

The best bit in all of this is someone actually pays me to have so much fun.

@ AmenMoses, been while since I messed with Linux, only really used it for folding@home mostly. Used to be useful for getting data off windows hard drives when the system died though Good to have when repairing PC's and such. Linux tends to run faster on lower spec machines as well No idea with server software though, not my thing. Sounds like a nightmare to me

On the new PC side I have got the parts earlier today, or yesterday as it is now. It's all working ( Thankfully. I used to build PC's all the time, but this is my first real build for 12 years, so was not sure how much things have changed. The case was quite different to the old ATX ones - not a fan - looks nice and hides the cables, but for someone like me, I prefer to be able to reach in and change a hard drive or such instantly. With this I will have to take the case apart ) I suppose it will keep my system tidier and I'll actually put the sides on permanently, lol. Just not as convenient for quick changes.

I haven't downloaded GG as yet, but am very interested to see how it compares now. I'll report my findings when I have it set back up. Otherwise, it's running 3d Mark nicely (9889 on Firestrike) and it destroys my old Cinebench score by over 1000 points. No OC, just stock speeds. I'm currently waiting for Steam stuff to DL, it will take awhile Fairly impressed so far, just seeing 16 cores in my task manager is nice in itself, with 1% usage when idling (a far cry from my old Q6600).

Not really bothered by the LED setup, but looks fairly cool, nice red lights, black case, just the way it should be Of course the case will hide all that when I put the side on

Linux with low end computers...
Yes my youngest daughter bought a laptop running win 8, its a dual core Intel and it barely worked, it was like going back 10 years, she's given up and bought a new one so I stuck Linux Mint xfce on it and what a difference.. it'll even run (under Wine)Dark.GDK.NET projects

I hope the new build works well... if its anything like motorbikes, it'll feel slow in 2 months lol

The only area it seems slow with is the hard drive, just a 2.5" hybrid. Also all I've been doing since yesterday is copying files over and download stuff. Still even a fast SSD would probably take some time to copy over this much stuff. Always slow over an external hdd. It supports m.2 drives though so I can supe up hdd access later if I want.

But yeah, it doesn't take long for the novelty to wear off. I have at least a few weeks yet though ;p

Still nothing on GG, have it installed, but still copying over my backups at the moment.

I'm not quite on the SSD train yet ... Yes its fast but I go to many a customer that has an Iffy HDD that wont boot, Bad sectors and on its way out but its enough warning to save all or most of their data .... With SSD its just usually dies instantly with no warning ...
Very rare granted but I have seen it a few times as its become more of a standard fitting. But that's just me .