Buying a new PC, what to get for best performance
TheFractalPrince
Join Date: 2012-12-28 Member: 176584Members
Join Date: 2012-12-28 Member: 176584Members
I'm buying a new PC and I could use some feedback on what hardware will run NS2 with the highest performance. I especially want to avoid the lag that happens when there are a lot of players on the screen or late-game.
For the video card, I'm leaning towards a Radeon 7970 but also considering a GeForce 680
For the CPU, I usually buy AMD, but would get an Intel if it performed much better. I'm guessing clock speed will matter more than multiple cores, right?
I'm planning to buy an SSD.
I have read that if you have a high end video card, then CPU can be the bottleneck when there is a lot of activity on the screen. Is this true?
Feedback much appreciated, especially from the devs.
thanks!
For the video card, I'm leaning towards a Radeon 7970 but also considering a GeForce 680
For the CPU, I usually buy AMD, but would get an Intel if it performed much better. I'm guessing clock speed will matter more than multiple cores, right?
I'm planning to buy an SSD.
I have read that if you have a high end video card, then CPU can be the bottleneck when there is a lot of activity on the screen. Is this true?
Feedback much appreciated, especially from the devs.
thanks!
Comments
i5 is usually recommended with 8 gig of ram and a vid card that can at least do 1k on 3D mark
This probably would of been perfect if the vid card was better:
<a href="http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/86520/dell-home-office-dell-inspiron-660-desktop-core-i5-3330-3ghz-8gb-ddr3-2tb-7200rpm-hdd-1gb-geforce-gt-620-wifi-n-windows-8" target="_blank">http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/86520/dell...ifi-n-windows-8</a>
G3D mark info on Geforce GT 620:
<a href="http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+620" target="_blank">http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+620</a>
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8 GB RAM- $45
Nvidia GTX 560Ti - $200
Any LGA 1155 mobo - $180
Corsair 600 Watt PSU - $70
1 TB 7200rpm HDD- $67
Large Case: $30
Total price: $807, great all-around, nearly top of the line PC.
You don't really need a CD drive anymore. Operating systems are free with Linux, or you can use your old Windows 7 installation disc (or download the trial version and crack it if you are a pirate scum). And yes, before I get a wisecrack "how are you supposed to install OS without a CD Drive" comment, you can rip your discs onto a USB stick on another computer, then install from USB.
For a cheaper build, just go with a cheaper GPU and CPU. I recommend taking a look at Tom's Hardware for "best bang for your buck" builds.
To run it at barely 30 FPS, you need a massively built rig, overclocked, SLI etc... and capable of running anything you throw at it for the next 4 years.
For the video card, I'm leaning towards a Radeon 7970 but also considering a GeForce 680
For the CPU, I usually buy AMD, but would get an Intel if it performed much better. I'm guessing clock speed will matter more than multiple cores, right?
I'm planning to buy an SSD.
I have read that if you have a high end video card, then CPU can be the bottleneck when there is a lot of activity on the screen. Is this true?
Feedback much appreciated, especially from the devs.
thanks!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm guessing you're not worrying too much about budget but, personally I chose to keep my i7 2600k since from benchmarks there is very little difference and the best you see on games as far as fps gain is about 2 fps or so. AMD processors are significantly slower but are much cheaper.
SSD's are great but I don't recommend them for storing games on since a decent 250gb one will cost you $200+ and that's not a lot of space. I myself use an SSD for system files and 2 2tb drives in raid 0 since it's pretty close to an SSD with a ton more storage for a way lower cost. Plus SSDs tend to get slower the more you read and write so if you have a lot of Steam games it's kind of a pain. Also if you're thinking that an SSD will make the game run faster it won't, it can load the level quicker that's for sure. I'm almost always the first one into a new map, but as far as keeping your fps up it doesn't do anything.
Having a CPU bottleneck isn't a bad thing, that just means your video card is waiting on your CPU before it can render more frames, most higher end video cards from nvidia use physx which takes some of the load off of the CPU for physics processing. This is a good thing usually, and works pretty well under SLI.
If you have the money I recommend 2 680's or a 690, or if you just want decent performance I'd go with a GTX 670 and add another one later if you want more. 670's are around $350 and gtx 680's are about $500, with the 690 being $1000. I haven't liked AMD for a long time since they have given me a lot of issues with several games in the past.
16gb of ram should be plenty but even 8gb will do just fine.
The most important thing to remember is cooling, if you can't keep things cool your system will throttle itself constantly and crash. Self contained liquid CPU coolers work great if you get a halfway decent one, but case size will really determine your airflow. I have a TheremalTake Level 10 GT Full Tower case which is amazing, so I recommend that. It's about $250 last I checked.
As far as OS, Windows 8 can do better or worse for gaming depending on the game. I stick with Windows 7 since it does great across the board, and I hate the Metro interface.
Unless you're made of money though I wouldn't go the route I went with the best possible parts since you won't be able to play everything on max settings. Even my rig can't play Farcry3 on max settings without some stuttering in spots.
The short version, an i7 2600k, 8gb of ram, a GTX 670, and any hard drive will play this game very easily.
I'm currently running a rig that was middle of the range when I got it 2 years ago: AMD Phenom 2 X6 1055T @ 2.8gGHz with a Radeon HD 5700 . I had to switch playing NS2 from 1280x1024 to 800x600 to get acceptable performance during a fight and even now the performance is not what I wish it was.
I'm planning to spend $1500 or so, which will get me a fairly high end PC at one of those configure-your-own-custom-pc sites.
PhysX sounds really interesting; maybe I should got an Nvidia card instead so I can take advantage of it.
To run it at barely 30 FPS, you need a massively built rig, overclocked, SLI etc... and capable of running anything you throw at it for the next 4 years.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Really depends on what resolution setting you plan to play at.
For me, I don't consider my setup a massively built rig but it holds 40+ fps at 1024x768 which is fine by me since I still have a cheap 19" lcd.
Now if I crank up the resolution that would be a different story...
i5-2500k @ 4.0GHz
8GB RAM
ATI HD4850 512MB (my bottle neck)
Win7 64bit
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/Zick/Junk/PC/ns2fps_zps93e54172.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=126490&view=findpost&p=2052362" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...t&p=2052362</a>
Dear lord mate, save yourself some money and build it yourself! $1500 is quite a bit, so you can definitely do some of that SLI/Crossfire nonsense. I recommend going cheaper, as $1500 is probably best for multi-monitor gaming or something ridiculous.
Plus, by building it yourself you can learn a bit about PC building. It really isn't hard, easier than putting LEGO pieces together.
i7 2600k @ 4.4ghz, Sapphire OC AMD 7850, Samsung 840 Pro 512GB.
Also, anything above 8GB of ram is useless to I'd say 100% of gamers and 90% of your average workstation user. I use more due to making use of virtual machines, but if you don't do that or say complex autocad objects, going above 8GB won't benefit you in any appreciable way.
Just a thing I like to point out when I see e.g. somebody sporting 24GB of ram. I ask what kind of ERP system or SQL backend for what medium sized website they are running, and what kind of SAN they have to go with it. If they don't know what any of that means, then they bought more ram than their current generation system will ever use.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=126490&view=findpost&p=2052362" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...t&p=2052362</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If you want to cut back on some money for that particular build, you can:
1) Ditch the DVD drive
2) Get a cheap keyboard (basic $10 keyboards work just fine imo)
3) CPUs should come with a fan and heatsink already, no need to buy another one
4) Great GPU, but you can make do with less if you wanted
5) SSD for a pure gaming machine does not really make sense. You won't get a lot of space, and once the game is loaded there is no performance difference whatsoever. Get more space for cheap!
6) Ugly but functional cases exist! (You will be laughed at at LAN parties though).
What kind of games are you storing on it? My games use up about 120GB of mine. Games are the most important thing next to your OS to run off of it.
RAID 0 HDD will never come close to bandwidth, iops, or latency of even the cheaper SSD's out there. Also, it's not a good idea to run SSD's in raid 0, even if you have TRIM support. Although you gain more bandwidth than a single SSD, your latency goes up due to even the more expensive RAID controllers having higher latency than most SSD's, which results in slower low queue depth operations, which are the vast majority of all operations on a desktop system.
The only practical purpose of RAID 0 SSD is for frequently transferring large files from one SSD array to another SSD array either over a 10Ge fiberchannel, FCoE or iSCSI, or within the same system. Since virtually no desktop user ever does that, and RAID 0 doesn't provide high availability that you'll ask for in such an environment where something like this is desirable (rather it does the opposite,) there's really no point in RAID 0 SSD's (except maybe to post high ATTO scores - though ATTO is a poor measuring stick for real world SSD performance.)
Get yourself a cheap 2500k and OC that mofo, or if you're lame, get a haswell based CPU
Pick up a GTX 670 for $360. Best bang for the buck by FAR. Also GET. AN. SDD. Don't listen to any naysayers, it's sooooooooooo worth it.
RAID 0 will never come close to bandwidth, iops, or latency of even the cheaper SSD's out there.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I have over 100 steam games many of which are 2gb+. My Steam folder alone is over 300gb, and when you consider that windows alone will usually end up eating up around at least 50gb that's a good chunk of your hard drive. I tend to keep all of my system files, drivers, etc... on my SSD and the rest on my raid drives. And yes I know SSD's are much faster for raw data, but you're only going to notice about 1 or 2 seconds difference loading a map in a game and that's really nothing. Personally I'd rather have 2tb at half the speed rather than a mere 250gb for the same price.
Back to the PhysX question, it works really well in SLI and kind of well without it. And it's mostly useful on specific engines where they take advantage of it. In SLI one GPU is uses to do physics calculations and both are still used for rendering. It's still used with a single card, but not to the same degree. I don't think NS2 uses PhysX at all but there are a ton of games that do such as Arkham City/Asylum, Bioshock, Borderlands 1/2. So if you intend to play a lot of the AAA titles it will definitely help.
And to more directly answer this, no you won't get any PhysX benefit but the game will run faster overall. Like I said get yourself a GTX 670 and pop another one in later on when you get the money.
I bought a new rig with an Intel i7-3770 CPU, 8GB ram and a GTX 660 with that. I hope I'll be able to play the game with at least 60 fps then, because having to play with only 30 fps with such a small screen size is pretty irritating to say the least. :p
2) Get a cheap keyboard (basic $10 keyboards work just fine imo)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If you like spongey rubber dome keyboards, by all means, but I would never get anything but a mechanical keyboard.
<!--quoteo(post=2052616:date=Dec 28 2012, 08:38 PM:name=Squishpoke)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Squishpoke @ Dec 28 2012, 08:38 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2052616"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->3) CPUs should come with a fan and heatsink already, no need to buy another one<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Unless you are overclocking or want less noise.
<!--quoteo(post=2052616:date=Dec 28 2012, 08:38 PM:name=Squishpoke)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Squishpoke @ Dec 28 2012, 08:38 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2052616"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->5) SSD for a pure gaming machine does not really make sense. You won't get a lot of space, and once the game is loaded there is no performance difference whatsoever. Get more space for cheap!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's the only thing that makes sense for a pure gaming machine. Loading times suck and in NS2 they are especially ridiculous. You don't need more space for gaming, why would you want to have 50 games installed at the same time?
1) Ditch the DVD drive
2) Get a cheap keyboard (basic $10 keyboards work just fine imo)
3) CPUs should come with a fan and heatsink already, no need to buy another one
4) Great GPU, but you can make do with less if you wanted
5) SSD for a pure gaming machine does not really make sense. You won't get a lot of space, and once the game is loaded there is no performance difference whatsoever. Get more space for cheap!
6) Ugly but functional cases exist! (You will be laughed at at LAN parties though).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
1) No.
2) Keyboard is either go big or go home. Spend $10 or $90+.
3) No. Get the 212+.
4) No.
5) No. Buy an SSD and HDD. Anyone who tells you SSDs don't make a difference don't have one. They don't increase FPS in most games but they dramatically speed up every task you do outside of the game.
6) Ugly cases rule.
For me, I don't consider my setup a massively built rig but it holds 40+ fps at 1024x768 which is fine by me since I still have a cheap 19" lcd.
Now if I crank up the resolution that would be a different story...
i5-2500k @ 4.0GHz
8GB RAM
ATI HD4850 512MB (my bottle neck)
Win7 64bit
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/Zick/Junk/PC/ns2fps_zps93e54172.png" border="0" class="linked-image" /><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't know about you, but I'd expect more than 40fps at 1024x768 on a 4ghz gen2 i5... Are you sure it's your gpu bottlenecking you not the cpu?
The most infuriating aspect of ns2 performance, imo, is how a 4ghz cpu is essentially required if you want an acceptable gaming experience at basically any resolution. Sure, you can be rocking a 680 gtx or 7950, but you'll still get the same fps dips as a 5770 or a 460 if your cpu isn't overclocked
The most infuriating aspect of ns2 performance, imo, is how a 4ghz cpu is essentially required if you want an acceptable gaming experience at basically any resolution. Sure, you can be rocking a 680 gtx or 7950, but you'll still get the same fps dips as a 5770 or a 460 if your cpu isn't overclocked<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
His GPU is bottlenecking him. The 4850 is a four year old card. Everything else about his computer is fine.
And thanks for the input. Ill be considering the suggestions.
For your GPU I'd suggest a Nvidia GTX 670 which is the best combination of performance and price at the moment. However a 7950 or 7970 will be fine as well. I play on a 7950 which performs alright for me.
I'd say for NS2 it makes more sense to get an i7 instead of an i5 than to get a GTX680. If money is no concern to you a i7+GTX680 will not hurt of course ;)
I really really suggest to install NS2 on a SSD. I had it on HDD before and lead times really were annoying. The first load took several minutes. On my SSD the load times are about 30sec for the first load and only a few seconds for mapchanges.
The most infuriating aspect of ns2 performance, imo, is how a 4ghz cpu is essentially required if you want an acceptable gaming experience at basically any resolution. Sure, you can be rocking a 680 gtx or 7950, but you'll still get the same fps dips as a 5770 or a 460 if your cpu isn't overclocked<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Actually for S&G, I tested at a higher resolution just to see what the difference might be and found it wasn't much. A little choppier but that could have been the server but it just now drops slighly under 40fps.
This is at 1024x768.
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/Zick/Junk/PC/ns2fps_zps93e54172.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
This is at 1152x864. Going to test even higher res later on.
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/Zick/Junk/PC/ns2fps1152x864_zps7b062c49.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
As for my GPU being the bottle neck, yes like others have said it's an old card w/ only 512MB and my waiting for GPU in game is always around +8ms.
But I have seen others post FPS that look better than mine with lesser CPU GHz but a better card.
And thanks for the input. Ill be considering the suggestions.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't see any list of what you planned.
And again for people with this unbelievable faith in SSD's being the end all be all of gaming... I just did a test took me 10 seconds from loading to in the game with 1 regular hard drive. And all of 9 seconds when I loaded the game from my SSD... The difference is 1 second... yipee isn't this exhilarating?
Here's the more important part, 5gb is a drop in the bucket when compared to 2tb of space and is about .25%, but 5gb is a whole 2% of my 250gb SSD. So you think it's best to sacrifice hours upon hours of the limited lifetime of an expensive SSD for 1 second less of load time... Yep you're technical experts alright.
Post #11
2) Keyboard is either go big or go home. Spend $10 or $90+.
3) No. Get the 212+.
4) No.
5) No. Buy an SSD and HDD. Anyone who tells you SSDs don't make a difference don't have one. They don't increase FPS in most games but they dramatically speed up every task you do outside of the game.
6) Ugly cases rule.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wow... Just stop with the advice please it's all terrible.
2) You don't need a fancy keyboard, I've played with $10 keyboards compared to my $200 G19, not much difference.
3) No don't buy a after market fan for your CPU, it's a waste of money. You will get probably about 5c less compared to the stock cooler but that's negated by the fact that the huge fan and heatsink will be blocking 90% of the airflow in your case. Stick with the stock fan, or spend $15 more and get a cheap liquid cooler that will keep your CPU under 30c.
5) Buy an SSD for your system files and drivers, about 120gb will do then get a nice big 1 or 2 tb drive, 2 if you want. The difference in loading times for games is about 1 second. Any fool who says otherwise just needs to go do some research or test it for themselves.
well... I tested it myself and loading times improved by ALOT. Can't imagine how your difference can be only 1sec. But then I dont think there are many people who have 10 sec loading time from a normal HDD...