Upgrade pc for UE4

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

So i’m thinking of upgrading my pc in order to use unreal far better, meaning that i want to work with a decent frame rate, while i’m now getting around 25 fps on epic settings.

I’ve been searching for potential upgrades, and i am quite undecided on what to choose.

First and foremost i am more of a AMD guy, so i was between getting either a R9 380 or a R9 390, but i want a long-term upgrade to be able to play future games decently, so i didn’t discard the option of getting a R9 390X, which is quite expensive.

Then there’s the CPU. I got recommended to go for a FX-6300, as it apparently gives a good performance, but i don’t know if it’s the best long-term choice.

Lastly, the motherboard. I don’t really know how it affects game development, but i was planning on buying a 970A-UD3P.

To clear things up, my budget is not extremely high, ranging from 400€ to maybe 700€ at most.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

2

You are probably better off getting an 8 core AMD processor, like the AMD FX-8350. The extra cores will really help with baking lightmaps. Try to get 16GB of ram with room to upgrade to 32GB, that motherboard does support 32GB of ram. I really suggest trying to get even a budget SSD, they are a huge time saver.

3

Thank you for replying. I’ve seen that the processor you suggested is quite good, but i saw that the FX-8320 has almost the same specs but is a bit cheaper. Would you still recommend me to go for the 8350 or maybe go for the 8320? Also, is it really necessary to have 32GB of ram? ATM i have 8GB, and i think that maybe with 16 i’ll be good for a while, just to not eat all the budget.

4

Either processor is fine. Most people don’t need 32 GB of ram, but I always like to have room to upgrade, you never know what you’ll need in 2 years.

5

Allright. By the way, what do you recommend regarding gpu? Do you see the ones i mentioned to be good enough or should i go for something else?

6

Get this if You must buy now:

Good 990’ chipset motherboard with radiators on power phase section.
AMD FX 8320 or 8350
Good CPU cooler
Sapphire/Asus/MSI R9 390 (non X, X isn’t worth extra price if we’re talking about performance per $).
Get 32gb of RAM
And be sure that You have good PSU.

Why? 8350 overclocks like a dream. I’ve had one and pushed to 4.7GHz on Air-cooling without problem. Extra performance for single core is always welcome, since AMD has many “cores/modules” but they’re not powerful alone.

But…
With GPU you might wait for Polaris. They should be soon (Q2 probably). You will buy Polaris-based GPU and before end of the year AMD Zen-based platform.
I don’t recommend buying and AMD-based desktop right now, since Q3/Q4 AMD ZEN cpu’s will be released, and before them Polaris GPU’s. This might be turn on a market share and pricing. And ZEN will be finally using PCI-E 3.0 + DDR4 memory (16gb per stick). New chipset for Zen = motherboard that will support few more CPU generations in future.

7

So i think i will wait until Polaris and ZEN cpu’s come out. I did not really need to buy right now, but maybe waiting for the new gen of AMD products will benefit me more long-term.
Many thanks!