Hi, my laptop is in the process of dying and I need to build a new PC and I’m not sure what CPU I should aim for to pair with a gtx 1070 (that I’m also planning on buying).
I want something in the $100 - $300(ish) price range. My focus atm is open world (dynamic lighting) so I’m not too worried about light building time. I was looking at the AMD Ryzens (1700 - 1700x) but I’m not sure if I really need an 8-core processor. I also do “some” gaming, but really my focus atm is on game dev and not actual gaming it’s self. I also use Blender from time to time for making models and sculpted tileable textures from time to time. I am on a slight budget as I will have to bust out the credit card, but that isn’t a huge concern as it will be paid back rather quickly. I’m aiming to build full rig for $1000 - $1300 (inc monitor / keyboard / win10 / etc…)
Any suggestions based on that info will be well appreciated
Side note: Should I get 32g of ram or is 16g fine?
From memory the Kite demo says that 32GB is recommended for that project, which is worth considering since you mention openworld stuff. However I have gotten away with 16GB for most stuff and memory isnt too hard to upgrade later, although most cost effective to do this if you still have spare ram slots left after the initial 16GB is installed.
I am unfamiliar with dollar pricing of pc components and I am out of date regarding AMD CPU’s but your budget sounds fairly tight to me so you’ll just have to get the best CPU you can for the price. Try to get a motherboard/chipset that gives you room to upgrade the CPU later if you find you want more oomph down the road.
on a budget you simply buy a ryzen 1600+, an ab350 board with 4 ram slots and 16gb high freq ram to start with.
or you pay twice that for the proposed intel system and get the same performance
If you believe to be able to get the same real world performance at half the price… because clearly those buying Intel and Nvidia hardware are all dumb… yep… keep dreaming.
I should have phrased my question to say “What parts of UE4 development benefit from having a higher performance multi-core CPU?”. I understand it makes a huge difference when building lighting, but I’ve been running 100% dynamic lighting and only plan to use built lighting in a few specific areas. Anything other than lighting? I’m assuming it will lower compile times when packaging a product as well, but what other actions benefit from the higher core count? If a Ryzen will only benefit “me” in a few fringe cases, then a cheaper i7 7700k (or even the i5 7600k) will likely benefit me more overall. Also the 1151 slot boards seem to be more numerous and cheaper in general compared to the am4 slot boards (at a quick glance atleast).
My point is, if I’m going to buy CPU tailored for a specific action, I need to make sure that I’ll benefit from that specific action. I’d like to avoid being a “good” consumer / poor decision maker
I’m sooo confused
jk
That’s what I was initially leaning towards only with a a 1700+ and 32g of ram if I can fit it in the budget. I would rather skip out on ram at first since it’s easy to upgrade to 32g in another month or two for next to nothing.
Yeah I’ve noticed a huge difference going from my laptop (w/ 16g ram, i7-4700mq 2.4ghz, gtx 750m) to the desktop that I built for my little brother that has 8g of cheap ram, a r9 380x, and amd a8-5600k. I never had noticeable ram issues on my laptop … but this desktop is constantly sitting at 80% - 100% ram (I had to disable all kinds of win10 things to stop this and it still has problems from time to time).
While my budget looks tight, I don’t mind spending a little bit more if I can get something significantly better as long the benefit to me is worth the extra cost. In life in general I just try to be as cheap as possible … within reason of course.
I’m guessing the shader compilation stuff uses multiple threads. And as others are pointing out, be careful with what the single-threaded performance is like on a particular CPU architecture as well.
More generally, with AMD finally getting somewhere with the performance of some of their CPU’s, and Intel responding with a variety of additions and price changes to their range, coupled with a general trend towards game engines trying to make more effective use of multiple cores, we are perhaps at a point where advice may need tweaking. I havent had time to fully absorb all of the info about newer AMD cpu’s or what Intel announced in the last week but it feels like the CPU market may be having a bit of a shakeup.
Get a WD Black … it’s $72 the 1TB there on newegg but it is far more reliable than the WD Blue… the blue models usually don’t last more than a couple of years at best. And anyway with all WD drives then always use the wdidle3.exe utility (you can find it in the freeware Ultimate BootCD utility ISO) and set the automatic head parking to the maximum allowed setting (/S300 switch) or disable it completely, WD ships the drives set at just 8 seconds which means that the drives wear out quickly if you don’t change the parameter.
I have i7-6700k, and Nvidia gtx 1070 on Asus Z270 Motherboard. Have Hackintosh. OSX Yosemite. Win 10, and Linux centOS all on one desktop. Make sure you keep it cool.
The cheap keyboard was due to me already being a few hundred dollars over budget and can be replaced later.
As for the CPU, I’m just not sure I would benefit much atm from having better multithreaded performance, which is the only reason I decided on the i7 as opposed to a ryzen 1600 or 1700.
Thanks. That actually helps a lot as it’s only a few bucks more and I also wasn’t aware of the utility you mentioned. I plan on getting an SSD or two a few months down the road as well.
Yea from what I understand a lot of people have had heat issues with the 7700k, but after some reading it seems as if those people’s heat problems were related to using higher volted ram. If the cheap cooler I picked isn’t enough then I can try a different solution in a few months. I don’t plan on OC’ing or anything either so from what I understand it will have a 3 year warranty on it.
The R5 1600 (or any other Ryzen CPU) has almost the same performance as the i7 7700K in single threading, only lower because of Intel’s highest clock, but with 2 extra cores, with a stock cooler that has almost as good performance as a Coolermaster Hyper 212 (the best selling cooler) and saving more than 200$…
And if you really don’t want a 6 core you can get an R5 1500 and save +300$…
If your main focus is deving AMD has the best processors for the money. Just my opinion of course.
You just need to be able to cool the system efficiently. If you bought a gaming spec vr pc with air cooling. It may not last long. Any liquid glycol with good heat sync is great. That $100 is great personal insurance.
