8 GB is enough to get started, but not enough to do serious development; especially if you want to run some other program at the same time as Unreal Editor (3ds Max, Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc)
These days, even simple apps like the Slack client, or Amazon Music, will use a gigabyte on their own. (Probably because they’re built with web browsers as their UI engine …)
The computer I built last year is my current dev-and-play computer, and has:
Core i7-4790K CPU
32 GB RAM
Two Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD disks
GeForce 980 GTX graphics
Asus 2560x1440 resolution monitor
Genelec powered speakers
At the time, Skylake was coming out but not stable yet, so I saved a bit and went with the previous generation CPU.
That meant M.2 drives weren’t yet worth it, hence the SATA-based SSDs (which work fine!)
I have a 4k display on my laptop, but many Windows apps aren’t that great with DPI scaling (3ds Max is bad, Photoshop is mediocre, Visual Studio is partially good, …) so I wouldn’t recommend 4k unless you also get a very big monitor (32" and up.)
I put big media and projects on one SSD, and keep programs and Windows on the other.
Now, how much do you want to spend? You can get dual Xeon E5 CPUs, if you want your lightmap renders to run faster! But that drives up the price of the motherboard and the RAM that needs to go with it.
Minimum specs might be:
- Intel CPU, at least 3.2 GHz, modern generation. Good CPU value.
- RAM, at least 16 GB, but 32 GB is a very worthwhile upgrade
- SSD, at least 512 GB, but 1 GB is cheap enough to use these days. Get PCIe based M.2 if you can; especially with modern chipsets it’s worth it!
- GeForce GTX 1070 is the sweet spot I think
- 2560 wide display in 22"-27" range seems to be the sweet spot
Some case, power supply, and motherboard to go with that. The power supply doesn’t need to be crazy – a 400W Gold rated supply will probably suffice, and 500W is plenty.
These recommendations are right above the “knee” in the value curve – if you try to get any more performance, you will have to pay a lot more money; meanwhile, if you try to save substantial money below this recommendation, you will give up a lot more performance.
If you need to shave a hundred or two off, you can go with a SATA based SSD instead of PCIe M.2. Or, you can get a SATA 1 TB for the same price as PCIe 500 GB.