building a computer for games developement

petegavin

starting gaming in college need to build a new pc for the first time i picked out these because the amd possessor is allot cheaper for the power

PCU: OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W Modular

CPU: AMD FX-4170 Zambezi 4.2GHz (4.3GHz Turbo)

Memory: 16GB (2 x 8GB)

motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3 ATX AMD Motherboard 6Gb/s

that's gonna cost me 312euro so far. i have drives and everything else i left out.

but the thing is when trying to pick out a graphics card i read allot of reviews and i keep getting stuck i figured i'd go for a readon since they work in duel with the prosesser and motherboard. One that stood out was:
HIS iCooler H777F1G2M Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16

now i'm in a problem that needs a pci 3 slot and i cant find a amd motherboard to work with it. do you think i should hold out to save money so that i can get a motherboard with pci express 3. will i have to replace my motherboard in a year?

i'm completely new to all of this been trying to get as much info as i can over the last few days
i have a total of 600 euro to spend on a new system and want it to be ok for updating

Ape X

PCIe 3.0 is backwards compatible, so that card will work in a PCIe 2.0 slot no bother, but some of the more knowledgeable lads will be able to look at your budget and give recommendatons on an entire spec

petegavin

oh really that's great news :D:D i didn't know that it would work in a PCIe 2 slot i guess it will be fine to buy these then thanks for help. and yea if anyone has any other advice on a an other alternative build or any info that will help me i'd really appreciate it

frozenfrozen

Don't choose AMD. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/overclocked_cpus.html

Since you're doing games design I presume there will be a lot of 3d modelling and A LOT of particles, so a CUDA capable nvidia card should be your first choice.

You should wait until you start your course and see if you will actually need any of this because I'm sure the computers in your college will be more than capable of doing the work you will need to do.

You may also want to save up a bit more money, a 600 euro system would be fine but rendering times will be the death of you and you won't want to waste time proxying every texture

petegavin

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Don't choose AMD. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/overclocked_cpus.html

Since you're doing games design I presume there will be a lot of 3d modelling and A LOT of particles, so a CUDA capable nvidia card should be your first choice.

You should wait until you start your course and see if you will actually need any of this because I'm sure the computers in your college will be more than capable of doing the work you will need to do.

You may also want to save up a bit more money, a 600 euro system would be fine but rendering times will be the death of you and you won't want to waste time proxying every texture

the reason i was going for the amd fx 1470 was becasue it has 4.2GHz and is only 92 euro compared to intel which is really expensive. is there some other factor i'm missing? all i know about processors is that GHz is good haha i'm clueless

Monotype

That passmark chart is a load of crap. There's several CPUs obviously in the wrong place.
Nevertheless, it's true - Intel CPUs are more powerful than AMD at the moment, if you have the money.

The phenom 965 and FX 8120 are good value at the moment from AMD and would be better choices than most of their other CPUs. You can't equate clock speed between different CPUs as there's different architectures and generations. You can only compare them from the same series.

Where are these items being picked out.

petegavin

well i was using newegg.com to pick them out i found it helpfull that each component has a feedback section. but as i said i dont really know much i never build a pc before. i thought that the website passmark.com was better so i may rethink the entire system. i can see that processer is way down in the list i'm thinking a rebuild with an intel i'll update the thread when i have a better idea

but was thinking this
Intel Core i7-3770 Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770
226 euro in amazon
performance link

Ape X

If you're looking for benchmarks to compare, Anand's would be more useful.

Monotype

Newegg won't deliver here.

Is that amazon.com? They won't deliver PC hardware here.
Even if they did, you'd have to face import duties.

First of all, as I said, passmark is not reliable. Secondly, that's an expensive enough CPU - it has hyperthreading which gives it an additional 4 virtual cores. It's useful in some applications but not in most. Given that this would be half of your budget, I would think very carefully as to whether you were going to make use of it. If you were to go down that road, you'd have essentially no money for a graphics card which is most likely one of those most important components for your build. You won't even be able run games without a good graphics - not to even think about developing them.

Have you got the programs that you'll be working with?

Regarding shops that I'd recommend -
Most people go with hardwareversand.de, a German site and one of the most popular around here. Easiest way to pay with them is bank transfer as they don't go in for credit cards much in Germany.
Another good one is scan.co.uk - some good deals, but it depends on the build. Delivery costs can add up.
Komplett.ie are good for a few items and more local but can be lacking in a few areas.
dabs.ie are a British group - some good stuff but you'll often find that for full builds, HWV or scan are better.
memoryc.com - RAM and flash memory prices here are good.

If you get back to me with the programs that you'll be using, I'll see if I can help you figure out where to allocate your funds best.

petegavin

well i'll be using unity, blender, autodesk maya, photshop, c++ coding, and perhaps UDK .

and basically the reason i've decided to make my own this time is based on budget. and the fact that i now hate dell

i have a hard drive to use, 2 dvd drives, and a moniter from a pc i got not to long from dell that is completely dead but i'm gonna use those to save on cash rather then getting a prebuilt system

Monotype

Unity:

System Requirements for Unity Authoring
Windows: XP SP2 or later; Mac OS X: Intel CPU & "Leopard" 10.5 or later. Note that Unity was not tested on server versions of Windows and OS X.
Graphics card with DirectX 9 level (shader model 2.0) capabilities. Any card made since 2004 should work.
Using Occlusion Culling requires GPU with Occlusion Query support (some Intel GPUs do not support that).
The rest only depends on the complexity of your projects!.

http://unity3d.com/unity/system-requirements.html

Blender

General information

Blender 2.6x works on nearly all operating systems. It runs out of the box, you don't even have to install it. Just unpack the archive you find in the Download section and start Blender!

Graphics card note: Blender runs on all Open GL compliant cards, although there are some issues with cheap onboard cards (Intel, Via). We therefore can't officially support and guarantee that Blender works fine on those systems.

Operating Systems
Windows XP, Vista or 7
Mac OS X 10.5 and later
Linux
FreeBSD

Minimal specs for Hardware
1 GHZ Single Core CPU
512 MB RAM
1024 x 768 px Display with 16 bit color
3 Button Mouse
Open GL Graphics Card with 64 MB RAM

Good specs for Hardware
2 GHZ Quad Core CPU
4 GB RAM
Full HD Display with 24 bit color
3 Button Mouse
Open GL Graphics Card with 1 GB RAM

Production specs for Hardware
Multi Core CPU
8-16 GB RAM
Two times Full HD Display with 24 bit color
3 Button Mouse + tablet
Open GL Graphics Card with 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX or Quadro, or AMD FireGL

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/requirements/

For 64-Bit Autodesk Maya 2013
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (SP1), Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (SP2), Apple® Mac OS® X 10.7.x, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 6.0 WS, or Fedora™ 14 operating system
Windows and Linux: Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon processor with SSE3 instruction set support (or higher)
Macintosh® computer: Macintosh computer with Intel-based 64-bit processor
4 GB RAM
10 GB free hard drive space
Certified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
3-button mouse with mouse driver software
DVD-ROM drive
Internet Explorer 8 or higher, Safari, or Firefox web browser

http://usa.autodesk.com/maya/system-requirements/

Minimum PC Requirements for Users

Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only)
2.0+ GHz processor
2 GB system RAM
A graphics card with shader model 3.0 support.

Minimum PC Hardware Requirements for Developers

Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only) with DirectX 9.0c
2GHz or better CPU
2+ GB RAM
A graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, such as nVidia GeForce 7800

NOTE: Windows 7 64bit is currently the mainstream development environment.


Recommended PC Hardware Specs for Developers

Windows 7 64-bit
2.0+ GHz multi-core processor
8 GB System RAM
NVIDIA 8000 series or higher graphics card
Plenty of HDD space

PC Hardware Spec Used by Epic Games

HW Spec for Epic's Programmers

Lenovo ThinkStation D20 (Model 4158-C95)
Windows 7 64-bit
Dual Quad-Core Xeon Nehalem Processors (3.17GHz)
24 GB DDR3 RAM
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB DDR3)
3x500 GB Hard Drives (1x OS Drive, 2x Data Drives in a RAID 0 configuration)


HW Spec for Epic's Level Designers

Dell Precision Workstation T7400
Windows 7 64-bit
Dual Quad-Core Xeon Processors (3.0GHz)
16 GB DDR2 RAM
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB DDR3)
3x500 GB Hard Drives (1x OS Drive, 2x Data Drives in a RAID 0 configuration)

HW Spec for Epic's Artists (same specs as L.D.)

Dell Precision Workstation T7400
Windows 7 64-bit
Dual Quad-Core Xeon Processors (3.0GHz)
16 GB DDR2 RAM
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB DDR3)
3x500 GB Hard Drives (1x OS Drive, 2x Data Drives in a RAID 0 configuration)

HW Spec for Epic's Testers

Custom built PC's with
Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core2Extreme Quad Core Processor - Q6800 - 2.93 GHz
4 GB DDR2 RAM
nVidia GeForce 8800 (768 MB GDDR3)
1x320 GB Hard Drive (OS Drive), 1x500 GB Hard Drive (Data Drive)

HW Spec for Swarm Farm Servers

IBM BladeCenter HS22 [7870AC1] (14 Nodes)
Spec for one node:
Dual Quad Core Xeon Processors (2.53 GHz)
24 GB DDR3 RAM
73GB SAS Drive

Graphics Card Drivers

For NVIDIA cards we currently recommend using the officially released ForceWare 191.07 drivers. Download here.

For ATI we currently recommend using the officially released Catalyst 9.8 drivers. Download here.

Performance Notes

VTune can be an extremely useful tool for finding performance problems, but only works on Intel CPUs.
To help with hitting the NextGen Game asset wall, we do the following
All machines have 16 GB or more RAM.
All machines have a RAID 0 (Striped) drive where the game is located.
We have a companywide defrag process that runs on everyone's machine over night: Perfect Disk 8.0 by RaxCo.
Easy Centralized Management to install on remote machines, schedule runs, upgrade, etc.
Supported XP, Vista64.

Basically, the bottleneck is I/O so getting a RAID 0 and lots of RAM can help out a lot.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UE3MinSpecs.html


Well all of those recommended specs can easily be met aside from the professional level cards which are very steep in price and the dual socket motherboards.
I think that the 16GB RAM seems like a good idea and you would want to be looking at investing €200 in the graphics card anyway. A 7850 or GTX 650/660. The 650 and 660 are due for release next week so it might be worth looking at because, as frozenfrozen said, CUDA could be useful. Some mid cards last generation didn't support CUDA, so we'll see if the new cards are worth it.
16GB of RAM will cost you the most of €80.

How old is your hard drive? -What model?
Do you need Windows?
You can probably use your DVD drive alright if it's from a reasonably recent PC.

petegavin

thanks very much for all your help i have much better idea now thanks for all the info your a legend i'll check up on those cards and yea i love how cheap ram has gotten these days

my hard drive is a SATA it's 500gb it will do untill i have more money saved
i'm not sure what kind of connection the dvd drives have but they are sony ND-3570a

i'm gonna go buy windows 7 of Ebay or try find a friend to borrow from. i seen an irish seller on ebay selling for 10 euro yesterday

Monotype

Be careful as there's a lot of pirated copies of windows floating around and at that price, I'd be extremely suspicious.

If you're doing a computing course, the chances are high that the university will provide you with a free or heavily discounted copy of windows. I'd check this first before you look elsewhere. Normally you can buy windows 7 Professional for €55 from software4students.ie since you're a student, but they're out of stock recently.

It looks like the drive is NEC, not Sony, or maybe you have both but I think it's SATA so you'll be able to use it fine.

For RAM, maybe something like this:
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/1600+Low+Voltage/56816/16GB-Kit+G.Skill+Ares+PC3-12800U+CL10-10-10-30.article
One pair. So you'll still have room for upgrade.

Excluding windows, that'll leave ~€300 in your budget for PSU, motherboard, CPU and case.
PSU - Superflower amazon 550W. You may be able to get away with 450W. A 7850 would be fine with that and most likely new nvidia cards will be too.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/500+-+600+Watts/30069/Super-Flower+Amazon+80Plus+550W.article

Case - Bitfenix Merc Beta is a good on for the price.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/Midi/50576/BitFenix+Merc+Beta.article

OK, we're down to €215 for the CPU and motherboard.
Your options that I see are this:

• Cheap Intel motherboard and Core i3. (You might be able to squeeze in an i5 quad core.)
  Advantage - the i3 will perform well in games as it offers better performance per core. It's a dual core with hyperthreading and very efficient.
  
• Cheap Intel CPU and expensive motherboard. If you invest in a good quality motherboard now (one that overclocks), you could buy a better CPU (that's overclockable) and get a better system in the long term. For the moment, you could still fit an i3 into the budget with it.
  
• AMD system. AMD are good in the value segment with two CPUs especially at the moment. The phenom 965 and the FX 8120 are quite good value. The 965 is a quad core and the 8120 is a sort of octo-core. Performance per core isn't as good as Intel and you'll see many situations where a dual core i3 will outperform the AMD quad cores because the additional cores aren't of use to the programs. If you have the money, the best Intel CPUs will easily beat AMD's but you have to consider what's going to fit into the budget. To be fair, these AMD CPUs do offer enough CPU power for games as most games' needs will focus on graphics cards. Perhaps your programs will make full use of the cores. You can also overclock a bit, although the power requirements of the FX CPUs can climb speedily with overclocking.

petegavin

nice, feels like i'm getting somewhere, it looks great, i think it's probably better to get a good motherboard and an i3 i'll stretch the budget a little if i need to for the i3. i mean i'd prefer to be able to update it then be left with an obsolete system in a year or two. how do i know if a motherboard is capable of overclocking it doesn't seem to state that on them

petegavin

Update:
reading up on the graphics cards sept 13th for the 650/660 as you said. i'll have to wait untill next week to see what they're like. the 660ti looks like an animal for the price. hope the 660 and 650 turn out to be good

Monotype

Z77 is the chipset that allows overclocking. Z75 is a step lower and can overclock too, iirc, but you don't see many of those around.
You can also overclock with Z68 and P67, but these are older and not much better priced, so you'd be best off getting a Z77.

The lower boards that can't overclock are H61, H67, B75 and H77.

The Z77s start at about €90. There's a few crappy ones around that range which can't change the voltage on the CPU so they wouldn't be great to go for. They don't usually tell you this, but you'd find out by reading reviews. The Asrock Pro3 is a popular one to go for and it's also one of the cheapest. If you wanted dual graphics cards down the line, you'd need to spend an extra €30.

Now all of those boards are the same socket - 1155. They'll all support the same CPUs so one of them won't be obsolete before another. However, the overclocking does give you a huge margin of advantage as you can easily enough add an extra third to the performance and be in the same position as their top of the line CPUs.
As for the future of this socket, we might get a few more CPUs as 'refreshes' but after mid next year, it's end of the line for it and Intel will be changing the socket again.

For AMD, we're expecting at least two more generations of CPU for the AM3+ socket. They're a bit behind Intel at the moment so maybe they might catch up to Intel's current ones in two generations, I don't know.

If you had an overclockable Intel CPU, it should last you a long time anyway, hopefully you'd only need to change a graphics card when you find your system slowing.

Now as for which Intel CPUs are overclockable - only the ones with 'K'. The main one that you'd be considering is the 3570K (€200 upgrade in the future). If you got an i3 for now, you can't overclock it.

petegavin

ah i understand now, thanks allot. i'll make sure to post pics here when i get it all done. you saved me hours of research

petegavin

ok so picking out a motherboard comes down to makin sure it's overclockable, cheching the ram capabilities and that it suports duel graphics. yea i'll go 30 euro up for that, save me allot in the long run and i'll just go for an i3. graphics card i should try get one with CUDA for the rendering times, we'll see about the 650 and 660. and the rest you've post links to so just wait till next week.

Monotype

Be careful with motherboards that may seem like they're good for two graphics cards - often the second slot is running at much lower bandwidth - i.e., x4 instead of x8 (or x16).

I'll save myself the effort of typing it again and just quote a post from a week or two ago.

Monotype wrote: »

So you've got two physical size x16 slots in that board - in other words, two graphics cards will fit in there.

With a further look, the main slot has PCI-E 3 with x16 bandwidth while the second one has just PCI-E 2 with x4 bandwidth.

PCI-Express 2 and 3 are fully backwards and forwards compatible with graphics cards. The main things you get from it are approximately double the bandwidth and more power to the slot (not sure about the second one there actually, I'll have to check it out).
So a PCI-E 3 x4 slot would have equivalent bandwidth to a PCI-E 2 x8 slot.

So back to the pro3 with PCI-E 3 x16 in the first and the second one with PCI-E 2 x4. The second slot has only one eighth of the bandwidth in comparison to the first slot!

All this means is that the card won't be able to communicate with the rest of the system as fast. This makes no difference with a low end card or something like a wireless card where not as much information is passed through.
So where does this become limiting? There's a good article and I can dig it out for you which tests out modern high end cards. They found that PCI-E 2 x4 held back the cards just a little. Therefore, if I was looking at a board for two graphics cards, I would be making sure that the second slot is PCI-E 2 x8 or PCI-E 3 x4, or greater, of course, but I don't think they do

Cheapest board that I know about that will properly support two GPUs is the Z77MA-G45.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/57135/MSI+Z77MA-G45%2C+Intel+Z77%2C+mATX%2C+DDR3.article

The main issue here though is that you'll probably end up with no other slots if you need upgrades.

You'd be as well off with the full size G45.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/57133/MSI+Z77A-G45%2C+Intel+Z77%2C+ATX%2C+DDR3.article

Also, you may need a higher rated PSU if you wanted two cards. You'll have to wait to see the power consumption of the cards that you finally decide upon.

Applications that you are using might not benefit at all from multiple cards.