Hardware & Technical PC hardware upgrade help for Elite

Currently I have a (10 +- 1) year pre-built PC, gaming mostly. I don't feel like it's obsolete yet since I haven't encountered a game I couldn't run. I'm not very demanding in sense that all settings have to be maxed out and that games should to run at 60fps, 30fps and medium is just fine sometimes. Atm I can play elite on low with no FPS and loading problems, medium drops my fps sometimes a little when on surface with other players and high is ok as long as I don't encounter more than 2-3 other ships or do planetary landings. Ultra is only good for screenshots and will crash every jump.


My most played game right now, and for a good while now, is Elite dangerous and if I chose to go through with this upgrade I would want this game to run on ultra and maybe handle some game recording, latter is very optional..


My current rig:
CPUIntel(R) Core(TM) i5 750@2.67GHz
MotherboardGigabyte H55M-USB3
Video CardAMD Radeon HD 5700 series
MonitorSamsung SyncMaster p2350 (no 4k support)






I found this build on this reddit, The Annihilator(https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterRace/wiki/builds):
CPUAMD - Ryzen 5 2600 3.4GHz 6-Core
MotherboardGigabyte - B450M DS3H Micro ATX AM4
Video CardEVGA - GeForce GTX 1070 8GB SC GAMING ACX 3.0 Black Edition

Would this, Annihilator, upgrade be able to run Elite on ultra settings ? My spending budget is ~700€+-100€. This build falls in at ~600€, is it worth the money? Would you recommend a different upgrade to improve my Elite Dangerous experience ?

I have no experience with pc building and more info I try to find on this topic, less I feel I know in the end. I'm sorry if I forgot to add any additional information due to my ignorance on the subject.

cmdr Aw.=w
o7
 
The more memory you can add to the PC the better (as it will allow the O/S to work more quickly, as it does not have to swap things between memory and HDD). My own PC has got 32GB RAM (mind you, I built it from scratch specifically as a gaming rig). I would get that rig to 16GB minimum, otherwise the spec does look good.
 
The usual answer to this question if I encounter it on Yahoo! Answers is to check out PCPartpicker. Since you write in €, there's also a possibiity that you can read German, so I'd also throw in c't as a computer magazine that regularly brings very reasonable build suggestions, complete with instructional videos (usually in time for Christmas).

So, if you want to get serious, the first question would be: which screen resolution and which frame rate (fps) do you want to play? Full HD (1080p) is much less demanding than 4k, which is less damending than virtual reality (VR).
Second question: do you need to include a display into this price bracket?

Regarding build suggestions on websites: very often, these just handle the box hardware. What they often don't include is the operating system and peripherals - mouse, keyboard, game controllers of any kind.
For ED, you'll need Windows as the only realistic option for an operating system, and a Windows 10 license will cost you ~100 €. There are cheaper ways (buy a used OEM Win 8 license off eBay, then upgrade to Win 10), but those are risky (not all Win 8 licenses offered on eBay are legit, for starters) and will require at least some research (and time) on your side.
For peripherals, it's your choice - you can get a cheap kb+m for 20 € and play with that, or you can pay high triple figures for a HOTAS, or anything inbetween. I like wireless, and prefer Logitech or Microsoft (they sell decent hardware peripherals).

AMD or Intel for the CPU? If you want to mainly stay with ED, I'd still give a slight preference to Intel. AMD has the advantage for raw power, but they pay for this by getting that power from an insane amount of cores - and a high electrical power consumption. Intel still has the upper hand in absolute computational power for single cores. And electricity may just come out of the wall socket, but every watt you pull from the socket you'll have to get rid of as heat from your rig, and when you go above ~500 watts total power, that becomes either noisy or tedious.

SSD or HDD? That will depend on what you actually want to do with your rig. Just for playing ED, a 240 GB SSD will be enough. If you want to do anything else, you'll want a larger boot disk than that (since Windows still has the nasty habit of wanting to store everything on the boot disk, and it can be difficult to convince it ootherwise, especially for programs). Depending on your budget, you'll then have to decide whether you should go for a larger SSD or just use a HDD instead. You can add a HDD for data storage, but unless you actually have significant amounts of data (like pictures, movies or audio), that won't be worth it.

One thing though: if you want to use your machine for anything else besides a gaming rig, you really should give some thoughts to a backup strategy. The two easier solutions would be an online backup (which, if you actually need some appreciable data space, costs money) or another couple of HDDs and a hot swap cage (that lets you slot in one of your backup drives at a time directly from the front panel).

Oh, and I'd like to see how you could get "The Annihilator" at 600€ :). Just taking the USD price and running it through a currency converter doesn't work, you'll have to actually check out the European prices for these components - and those are usually calculated by taking an exchange rate of 1:1 and then rounding up to the nearest smooth number. The difference being European VAT and warranty rules/return policies.
 
I found this build on this reddit, The Annihilator(https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterRace/wiki/builds):
CPUAMD - Ryzen 5 2600 3.4GHz 6-Core
MotherboardGigabyte - B450M DS3H Micro ATX AM4
Video CardEVGA - GeForce GTX 1070 8GB SC GAMING ACX 3.0 Black Edition

Would this, Annihilator, upgrade be able to run Elite on ultra settings ? My spending budget is ~700€+-100€. This build falls in at ~600€, is it worth the money? Would you recommend a different upgrade to improve my Elite Dangerous experience ?

I have no experience with pc building and more info I try to find on this topic, less I feel I know in the end. I'm sorry if I forgot to add any additional information due to my ignorance on the subject.

cmdr Aw.=w
o7
Assuming you're running E: D in "Full HD" aka 1080p (= 1920*1080 pixels) resolution, the answer in a word is: yes.
 
Assuming you're running E: D in "Full HD" aka 1080p (= 1920*1080 pixels) resolution, the answer in a word is: yes.

Looks fine to me, but you need at least 8 and possibly 16gb of RAM and the RAM from your old computer won't fit. And, as it's a Ryzen processor, sumsay you need to think about getting at least 3Ghz RAM. I've clocked mine down a little from 3Ghz to 2.4Ghz and not noticed a stonking difference, but faster RAM isn't that pricey so you may as well.

As far as Storage goes - get an SSD. One option potentially open to you is to get a small (128gb) SSD and a larger magnetic drive. AMD make some trick software available that'll allow you to treat both drives as a single drive and it'll shuffle files between the two so the most-frequently used files go on the SSD and the large (or serially-accessed) drive on Magnetic.

I have an RX470 and run Elite just fine on High and, with very slight stutteryness on jumps, on Ultra. I run it on high as basically couldn't tell the difference between High and Ultra on a 27" monitor at 1080p... The GTX1070 should manage slightly better than the RX470 does, so you'll be fine on Ultra.
 
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The short answer is yes (with caveats).

Mine isn't the same as you are proposing but very close. [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Tahoma,Calibri,Geneva,sans-serif]https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/al_ski/saved/#view=3m28YJ. There are no overclocks on this at all. I run it with a Rift and according to the reports following a game session, its usually running at a capped 90fps dropping to a capped 45fps in stations/planets, but the caps are how the Rift works.

Prior to the upgrade, https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/al_ski/saved/#view=ngdVYJ it could almost run the rift, but 45fps was max and it was struggling to keep up with head movements. However before getting the rift, I would run it in 2x1080p as a single display i.e. 3840x1080, and it could manage this at 60fps, dropping to 30-40fps in stations/surface.

Hope this helps.
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The pricing there is a bit of a pipe dream and probably only achievable in the USA itself without looking at the second hand market for GPU and RAM.

You can make savings however. For example, depending on condition you could reuse your case, drives and PSU (if it's the same age as the rest of the system I'd err on the side of caution and replace the PSU mind). At 1080p there would be little point in adding a GTX 1070 (at least not until the 20 series drops) a 1060 should handle Ultra just fine and save you at least 100 EUR.

Windows 10 can also be found cheaply, even on Amazon (sometime for less than a couple of pints down the pub).

The other option would be to upgrade to the higher end 1st gen i7's (or Xeons) nd add a new GPU. The results won't be as impressive but may be a lot cheaper in the short term.
 
My two cents:

Your budget is the overriding factor when deciding how to build your new gaming PC. Decide on a budget and spend your entire budget to build the best PC you can for your money.

I cannot find any reviews of your builder "PC Master Race" and so I am leery of them. Have you looked on EBay? Search "customized gaming PC" and you can filter by "highest rated".

That being said, trying to build a decent gaming PC for 800 Euros is a little unrealistic.
 
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Thanks for feedback. I would like to add that I'm not planning on a full new build from scratch. My main goal is to upgrade cpu and graphics. My MB is rather old and to my knowledge I couldn't find a 'decent' better GPU so I'm sort of forced to replace it. I'll be keeping my old case, HDD, OS, powersupply (if strong enough of course).

I have asked for opinions about this build on different sources as well and quite a few responses came up that I could get away with GTX 1050 with no problems as well, take note to what monitor I'm using and that I can not view 4k content anyway. I will likely redesign my setup to take this into account
 
Thanks for feedback. I would like to add that I'm not planning on a full new build from scratch. My main goal is to upgrade cpu and graphics. My MB is rather old and to my knowledge I couldn't find a 'decent' better GPU so I'm sort of forced to replace it. I'll be keeping my old case, HDD, OS, powersupply (if strong enough of course).

I have asked for opinions about this build on different sources as well and quite a few responses came up that I could get away with GTX 1050 with no problems as well, take note to what monitor I'm using and that I can not view 4k content anyway. I will likely redesign my setup to take this into account

Personally, I'd go for the 1050ti or 1060 over a vanilla 1050, 2GB VRAM is simply too small for games like ED. The 1050ti isn't even that much of a premium over it either and uses around the same amount of power.
 
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