I am going to be building a PC rig soon to run Unreal Engine 4, as my Mac Pro 2013 model desktop mac can’t do so very well. It can run the software, but as soon as I try to edit the landscapes and whatnot it gets a bit wonky and when I try to test run the thing with any decent sized map and a single character it slows to 10-12fps. Not good.
So I’m going to be building a PC dedicated to game development, and I would like to know what kinds of specs everyone recommends. I am not afraid to buy the expensive parts if need be, but I’d like to keep the budget under 1K if possible. Between $750-$1,000 would be best.
So what are some of the best graphics cards, processors, motherboards, cooling systems, etc that anyone would recommend? Any help would be appreciated, as I’ve never built a PC before and will need all the help I can get from anyone willing to lend a hand.
Thanks guys, and good luck with all of your projects and game builds!!
You should increase your budget to at least $1,500 to $1,800 if you want to build a good PC. A LGA 2011-3 6-core Intel CPU is $450+ , a good motherboard is well above $200 and then 32GB DDR4 RAM is going to cost quite a bit too… and a good PSU is needed too. Even without any hardware RAID controller but just a good SSD for booting the OS and a fast hard disk $1,000 is not enough. with LGA1151 CPUs you might be able to assemble something good but still… you would need a Nvidia GTX 1070 GPU. You could get an old GTX 970 that is cheaper but it is half the speed too although it is good with UE4. Anyway those are quite expensive as well and a $1,000 budget limits you a lot. Getting a Core i5 instead of a Core i7 could be an option but you would lose quite a bit of performance anyway.
Many will tell you to go for AMD Ryzen and AMD Polaris. Check the prices the difference compared to an Intel+Nvidia PC is not that much and you would end up with a way slower PC
I would definitely be open to increasing the budget if need be. Thank you for your suggestions. I’ll keep my options open and an eye on the best choices to make.
Do you have any specific items for each category such as a specific CPU that you know for certain would be good, or a graphics card (or set of cards), etc?