Amount of RAM is also very important. I have only ~4km^2 map with ~2million vegetation meshes and 12000 actors (static meshes like buildings pieces). 16Gb run out on Win7 so had to install Win10 to get 24Gb ram enabled. I think the 24Gb is important to have. Also 6 core CPU would be plus, but those look good too. But maybe there is other with better opinions and suggestions for that.
B85 motherboard and an i5 ? think again friend trust me an i5 is not suited for development you need an i7 with big maps you can spend more than 10 hours building up lights with an i5 it could take double that , also why go with the hasswell option what’s the point dude newer technology skylak is about 10% faster and at the same price now unless you live in a country where these are the only available options and ddr4 are cheap now i’d go with 6 core option
but here is my recommendation
core i7 5820k
x99 motherboard any good brand
32gb ddr4 rams or even 64 if you can
or
i7 6700k
z170 motherboard any good brand
32gb ddr4 ram
the r9 380 should be fine it’s slightly above the gtx 960 both will never disappoint you in UE4 i used the gtx 960 before it’s great and the 380 should even run better but i hear that there are some driver issues with the r9 380 and UE4 it crashes the editor i don’t know if this was fixed lately the problem was very recent around September so not sure what happened since then
if it was me i’d go with the gtx 970 i use it right now it’s perfect.
anyway i think you can develop with UE4 using only an i3 and 6gb of ram the thing is what are you developing is the most important factor here a 21km map is crazy big needs the specs i told you about but if your budget was so limited go with your specs just don’t forget to install 32gb of ram, ddr3 today are dirt cheap don’t go below 32gb of ram if you creating such big maps.
For light map baking, which is the slowest part of development, you will want more cores over anything else. i7 gives you hyper-threading, which helps, but “real cores” are better,
The XEON E3-1220V3 is kind-of old at this point, and only has 4 cores, no hyper-threading, AND those cores are slower than the i5, so compared between those two CPUs, assuming you can get 32 GB with the i5, you’re better off with the i5.
As others said, for development, a good SSD (Samsung 850 EVO are fine) is a really important help.
But, it totally depends on what kind of development pipeline you have in the end. If you end up waiting on lightmap bake forever, buying a number of smaller, cheaper computers that can all run in a swarm may be the best way of speeding that up.
And if budget is not a problem, then dual-socket 2x 12-core Xeons is the way to go
hmm are you seriously suggesting to use baked lighting on a 21 km2 map? ^^ That’s going to be one hell of a big game if you want decent lighting quality!
AMD CPUs will not give you enough procesing power to build the lighting in a timely manner, among many other CPU intensive tasks. If I were to suggest a CPU, it would be the Intel i7 4790K.
I will do this