Hardware & Technical Computer Build to run Elite Dangerous

[AaronTee]

New rig

I'm really excited to say I'll running elite on this system, albeit incomplete:

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition MB
Intel i7-4960X CPU
64GB G.Skill Trident X RAM
2x nVidia 2GB GTX 760 gfx

I think that should be enough to run the beta test. I'm hoping it will be finished when the beta release is out

 

[Zieman]

I'm really excited to say I'll running elite on this system, albeit incomplete:

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition MB
Intel i7-4960X CPU
64GB G.Skill Trident X RAM
2x nVidia 2GB GTX 760 gfx

I think that should be enough to run the beta test. I'm hoping it will be finished when the beta release is out

Whoa! You should be able to run Alpha, Beta1, Beta2 & Gamma tests simultaneously with that rig!
BTW, with that kind of (limitless?) budget, I would have picked 2 GTX 780s or 780tis...

 

[Kinderman]

I'm really excited to say I'll running elite on this system, albeit incomplete:

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition MB
Intel i7-4960X CPU
64GB G.Skill Trident X RAM
2x nVidia 2GB GTX 760 gfx

I think that should be enough to run the beta test. I'm hoping it will be finished when the beta release is out

whoa - sweet rig - I hope you have a 3D monitor to take advantage of in ED

 

[Asp Explorer]

I'm really excited to say I'll running elite on this system, albeit incomplete:

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition MB
Intel i7-4960X CPU
64GB G.Skill Trident X RAM
2x nVidia 2GB GTX 760 gfx

I think that should be enough to run the beta test. I'm hoping it will be finished when the beta release is out

Nice!

Will be nice to see some benchmarks when the time comes. A lot of us have put a lot of money into our rigs, it will be interesting to see how they perform

 

[tsh]

Thanks for all your helpful advice, Though there are a few conflicting opinions and I left a little confused by this.

A couple of points to help you weigh the opinions of the forum. First, the majority are very familiar working with computers, and quite a lot are very successful in making a living doing this. We've been building computers since before the first PCs became mainstream, and actually understand how they work too. This is a feature of the Elite community.
Second, we have no incentive to encourage you to spend what disposable income you have but are happy to share the knowledge we have for free. This isn't true of most computer 'experts' you have access to.

 

[The Space Pirate]

Are we going to need an i7 level system to play then? Better get upgrading if that's the case...

 

[Pyros]

Are we going to need an i7 level system to play then? Better get upgrading if that's the case...

No. Comparable I7 systems have little advantage in gaming over i5 systems. Same goes to hexacore i7 compared to regular i7s.

Typically, the CPU is the choke point.

 

[The Space Pirate]

No. Comparable I7 systems have little advantage in gaming over i5 systems. Same goes to hexacore i7 compared to regular i7s.

Typically, the CPU is the choke point.

Interesting; I'm going to upgrade soon anyway, buying the best CPU I can afford - is the price hike for the i7 over the i5 not worth it then? If I'm going to upgrade, I want to futureproof for a few years - would an i5 do that job?

 

[Stolpskott]

Bearing in mind that the alpha and beta stages will probably be running with a ton of debug code in them, my personal expectations are that the game will not be as smooth as would be expected for a AAA title on day of release (Do I win today's award in the "Statement of the Obvious" competition?), so at the moment it will be mostly running on my old HP laptop, a dv8-1080ea.
Once I have a better idea of the requirements, I can see a nice shiny new rig based around a Core i7 4770K or later, and a pair of GTX 770's.

 

[Pyros]

Interesting; I'm going to upgrade soon anyway, buying the best CPU I can afford - is the price hike for the i7 over the i5 not worth it then? If I'm going to upgrade, I want to futureproof for a few years - would an i5 do that job?

For gaming, so far the impact of having a i7 versus a i5 (everything else being equal and balanced) is typically well under 5% with sub 2% being common.

The differences of a i7-4770k and i5-4670k are the hyper threading and a bit of extra cache. Very few games use even 4 cores, and when/if they do so in the next few years, the virtual cores of hyper threading may not be adequate (they aren't for ED - it must be real cores).
The impact of the extra cache is usually limited, although it can make some impact in a specific game/config, but that may be a bit rare.

Edit: I found an online comparison. Their conclusion was that on high definition gaming (GPU bound, the typical situation) the advantage of stock clocked i7 4770k was 0.17% over a i5 4670k. Overclocked to 4.5ghz, 0.8%.

 

[Squicker]

Interesting; I'm going to upgrade soon anyway, buying the best CPU I can afford - is the price hike for the i7 over the i5 not worth it then? If I'm going to upgrade, I want to futureproof for a few years - would an i5 do that job?

For gaming an i7 is superfluous compared to an i5. I do other stuff, so I get benefit from an i7, but I'd not bother purely for games.

http://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_4670K_and_i7_4770K_Comparison/8.html

 

[Greeboski]

For gaming an i7 is superfluous compared to an i5. I do other stuff, so I get benefit from an i7, but I'd not bother purely for games.

http://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_4670K_and_i7_4770K_Comparison/8.html

so from that link , for two idenitcal frequency cpu's in a multi-threaded game the i7 is 25% faster (in terms of frame rate) than an i5.

and ED is multi-threaded requiring a min of 4 cores.

 

[Squicker]

so from that link , for two idenitcal frequency cpu's in a multi-threaded game the i7 is 25% faster (in terms of frame rate) than an i5.

and ED is multi-threaded requiring a min of 4 cores.

Only in one specific test case is it quicker. Whilst it could be better for ED it seems unlikely based on usual cases. We would only know from a real life test.

Generally it's really not the case IME. However, it's not exactly a massive amount more money to go i7, so some might consider it future proofing perhaps.

 

[Abysinth]

Reading through this started a thought process. What do people consider as, or when, considering future proofing.

For me, it is choosing a socket architecture so that I do not need to upgrade more than one component at a time.

But as this concept really only concerns the motherboard/CPU pairing I wondered if others had other definitions

 

[Pyros]

so from that link , for two idenitcal frequency cpu's in a multi-threaded game the i7 is 25% faster (in terms of frame rate) than an i5.

and ED is multi-threaded requiring a min of 4 cores.

The i7 is not a real 8 core CPU, but a 4 core one with 4 extra "virtual" cores (hyperthreaded cores) (except for the "expensive edition", that are hexacores). ED does not use those last 4 cores, so I'd expect the performance of a i7 to be pretty similar (<5% diff) to a same clocked i5.

 

[Squicker]

The i7 is not a real 8 core CPU, but a 4 core one with 4 extra "virtual" cores (hyperthreaded cores) (except for the "expensive edition", that are hexacores). ED does not use those last 4 cores, so I'd expect the performance of a i7 to be pretty similar (<5% diff) to a same clocked i5.

Agreed. I'm wondering if a genuine hex core would be better, how many real cores will ED consume?

 

[Greeboski]

The i7 is not a real 8 core CPU, but a 4 core one with 4 extra "virtual" cores (hyperthreaded cores) (except for the "expensive edition", that are hexacores). ED does not use those last 4 cores, so I'd expect the performance of a i7 to be pretty similar (<5% diff) to a same clocked i5.

i never clamed any quantity of cores , other than the number needed to run ED which is 4 cores not 2

 

[Squicker]

i never clamed any quantity of cores , other than the number needed to run ED which is 4 cores not 2

So yes, will be fine on i5. Is it clear whether ED will scale to over four cores?

 

[Pyros]

i never clamed any quantity of cores , other than the number needed to run ED which is 4 cores not 2

No, but as the discussion was centered in the comparison between i5 and i7, and the multithread quote was a about a specific scenario where the i7 was clearly superior, I thought a clarification about the usefulness (or lack of it) of the i7 "extra cores" for ED could be useful.


About that 4 core requirement... actually, unless there is a SW hardlock, there is no reason for a 2 core CPU not to run ED (or any other SW), even if they state 4 core as a minimal requirement. So I take it more as "the game is heavily threaded and uses extensively real cores, so a 4 core CPU is highly desirable". The impact of having 8 (real) cores instead of 4 in fact depends on the threading level, but ED has interestingly been a bit vague on that "loaded question".

 

[Adept]

I think I'm at the shallow end of the pool. Q6600 quad core OCed to 3.2 GHz. 8gigs of 800 MHz DDR2 and a 560 Ti card. If it doesn't run nicely it's time to upgrade to a 4770k finally.