A little background - I work professionally in the film industry, but have lately been getting into learning Unreal and have an end goal of developing some VR content. So far I have just been learning on my 2011 27’ iMac - which is unsurprisingly slow for Unreal (I’m experiencing crashes too).
I’ve been thinking about getting a PC for my next workstation, which I would buy soon. The thing is that I am REALLY not PC literate. I know about monitors and basic computer stuff but when it comes to processing power and video cards I’m pretty clueless.
As you could maybe guess, I’m not that interesting in building my own PC as it’s just too much out of my realm - I want something that ‘just works’. I suppose I could get a friend to help me build it, or hire somebody to build it, or can I just buy a pre-made one that has the specs I’m looking for?
As I said, it should be as VR-ready/future-proof, and also have decent specs for editing hi-res video content and doing high-level color correction (I honestly don’t know if those two fields have similar hardware requirements).
My budget would be about $2000-3000 USD not including monitor/mouse/keyboard!!
That’s probably more than you’ll need, are you looking to buy components and build your PC or would you rather buy something that’s already assembled which will be more expensive?
These are the recommended specs for the vive and rift:
OCULUS RIFT
GPU: – NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 970 / AMD Radeon™ R9 290 equivalent or greater
CPU: – Intel® i5-4590 equivalent or greater
RAM: – 8GB+
Video Output: – Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output.
USB Port: – 2 x USB 3.0 port
Operating System: – Windows 7 SP1 or newer
HTC VIVE
GPU: – NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 970 / AMD Radeon™ R9 290 equivalent or greater
CPU: – Intel® i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 equivalent or greater
RAM: – 4GB+
Video Output: – HDMI 1.4 or DisplayPort 1.2 or newer
USB Port: – 1x USB 2.0 or greater port
Operating System: – Windows 7 SP1 or newer
And for Unreal itself:
Operating System - Windows 7/8 64-bit
Processor - Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster
Memory - 8 GB RAM
Video Card/DirectX Version - DirectX 11 compatible graphic
So yeah, your budget should be fine for that, and anything over the specs will just make it run better
Yes actually I just edited it, in US dollars my budget would be closer to $2000.
Probably I prefer to buy something already assembled, like I said I’m not somebody who enjoys troubleshooting and computer stuff so the smoother a machine can run, the better!
GPU: GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 as GPU for VR. Both are great cards. GTX 1080 is the better one but a bit pricy for that more power. GTX 1070 is still a lot better than the current minimum requirements for VR for Rift and Vive (GTX 970) especially for VR. If you would mirror your VR screen on some TV probably get a card with two HDMI outputs. In theory even DP should work… but if your TV does not support DP native then consider to by an adapter … or two
CPU: Core I7 6700 (K), 7700(K). CPU does not matter that much. Even CoreI5 would do very well for playing your game afterwards but if you compile a lot and build that lightning then CoreI7 would be nice to reduce your wait time (a bit).
Ram: 16GB should be enough for a while. DDR3 or DDR4 does not matter.
Pretty much everything else is more or less on you. HD SSD or not. If you build your PC yourself you would even take a look to get a PSU of a good brand and you would avoid buying the cheapest possible mainboard if you find some stone-age capacitors on it.
I am in nearly the exact position as the original poster. I have been creating content on Macs using Maya, Creative Cloud and zBrush. I’m starting to work with unreal engine for VR content and have been offered a prebuilt machine. I have some money to add to this system. Would anybody change anything- e.g, second graphics card, storage or does it look good to go?
IMO, there’s no reason to pick the i7-6850k over the i7-6800K, you are paying $170 extra for more PCI-E lanes that wont be a bottleneck anyway. I’d probably get an M.2 SSD like the SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 over the Samsung 850 or get both if you want to put $3000 into a PC.
Hey guys, what do you think of this computer build for my needs? Do you think the specs are good enough for both editing hi-res video (4k, 6k raw) as well as developing with Unreal and comfortably supporting a VR workflow and gaming?
Anything you would change/upgrade? (Please note - prices in Canadian dollars!)
Get an 80 Plus Gold PSU at least (Antec (Delta Electronics…the HCP series) or Seasonic among the best ones on the market) … better a Platinum one but can be expensive.
An i7-6850K with Quad-Channel DDR4 memory on a X99 motherboard is a lot faster whenever you use software that uses all cores and benefits from the highest available memory bandwidth.
Avoid Windows 10 Home like the plague… there is no way to stop it from self-updating drivers and rebooting adding hotfixes, you can only delay that mess. Get Windows 10 Pro then with the legit key download the updated .iso RedStone1 1607 from Microsoft directly and install that. On Microsoft Catalog you can get the latest 1GB+ cumulative hotfixes update file too and install that manually.
With the Pro edition you can disable all the known phone-home Microsoft mess and with a utility like DoNotSpy10 you can stop Windows10 Pro from rebooting, self-updating, changing hardware drivers. If you don’t do that prepare for a nightmare.
And then install Classic Shell to get rid of the Microsoft own UI mess too.
At that point Windows10 RS1 becomes a usable system.
Thanks for the info but I have to say I’m pretty confused - is there an alternate to Windows 10 I should be looking into? Or everybody here is pretty much using Windows 10 pro and doing all the steps you’ve mentioned to clear it of the junk?
Windows7 SP1 would still be a perfect OS absolutely stable and even better than Windows10 indeed.
The problem is that Microsoft is doing everything it can and more to drop support on Windows7 and with Unreal Engine 4 requiring Visual Studio 2015 (and probably they will move to VS2017 too) then Windows7 could become a compatibility issue soon due to Microsoft will to kill it.
Also both Intel and AMD newest CPUs won’t be officially supported on Windows7. The current Skylake ones although working on Windows7 might miss some power management features that don’t get enabled by the OS because Microsoft is forcing hardware manufacturers to drop support on Windows7 in favour of Windows10.
Okay, I’m about to order these components on Newegg. I’m going to go with Windows 10 Home for now, I’m not working at a high enough level to justify anything else.
Does anybody have suggestions, alterations or additions to make to this? Am I forgetting something (other than monitor/mouse/keyboard obviously)
I can see Windows 10 Pro 64bit at $139 and $199 on Newegg.
Don’t be afraid if it is just the license key for activation without a USB or DVD installer. As long as the key is legit that is everything you need to activate Windows10. Just download the Windows10 Redstone1 ISO directly from Microsoft. There is a webpage on Microsoft own sites to do that. Then the ISO downloaded directly from Microsoft you can burn on DVD or create your own USB boot media.
Hey im new to this stuff i was confused with all the different computer tech. What i want is a pc that will run ureal smoothly with all of the other stuff with the cost being around a thousand us dollers and where to purchase them can someone please assemble a good pc for me?
