CPU for VR

[Cap'n Danelord]

Commanders,

I'm planning on buying a new computer which will run VR in Elite Dangerous well. I've decided to go for a GTX1070 for the GPU but I'm extremely confused about CPU. I get the impression bigger numbers don't necessarily mean better CPU. I'd like a CPU which I won't need to upgrade for the next 5 years. I don't really want anything I can overclock, I'd be worried I might somehow set fire to it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

 

[dutchy2000]

Budget? Its always about the budget. I recently build a new system, with a skylake i7 6700k, which appears to be a cpu that will last a while.

 

[Erroll]

Take a look at the i5-6600K (skylake). Its the most recent i5 and will give good game performance when paired with a 1070.

If you want more then look at the i7 skylake options.

Worry more about getting a good motherboard.

 

[shadragon]

Worry more about getting a good motherboard.

This. RAM, Mobo, CPU and GPU are all equal players in the VR game. Don't skimp on any of them. Personally, I'd spent a little extra and get a 1080 for the extra grunt.

New AMD Zen chips are coming out soon (Q3 or 4). If you want something now, then an eight-core 4.7 GHz AMD FX-9590 can be had on Amazon for $221. If you want Intel a decent i7 is recommended.

It all comes down to budget.

 

[Cap'n Danelord]

Thanks for the help.

I'm hoping I can keep the budget around £1000 ($1440), already got the hdd so I can take that out of the equation. It looks possible with an i5 6600K, although I'm not sure how much the GTX1070 will cost. It's tempting to go for the 1080 and I7 6700K but I don't want the price to start rocketing. I wasn't aware of the AND zen chips so I'll keep an eye on them, Q3 or 4 wouldn't be a problem, I'm aiming to get something sorted by October this year.

Does this motherboard seem ok? -Gigabyte Z170 Motherboard SLI

Not got much knowledge of building new computers so I'm a bit out of my depth.

Also, would 16GB ram be adequate for a good VR experience?

 

[HeavyGroovez]

i5 6600k overclocks like a boss. Ive got mine running at 4.5GHz with a Corsair H100 AIO water cooler and its rock solid. Temperatures are really low and its quiet as a mouse.

Im using 8GB of DDR4 clocked at 3000MHz on my Skylake board and it never gets anywhere near 100% usage when gaming with the Rift - its more than enough.

Currently running a 970 but my 1080 turns up tommorow !

Bottom line, Z170 board + i5 6600k is awesome for a VR rig.

 

[PIXEL]

Thanks for the help.

I'm hoping I can keep the budget around £1000 ($1440), already got the hdd so I can take that out of the equation. It looks possible with an i5 6600K, although I'm not sure how much the GTX1070 will cost. It's tempting to go for the 1080 and I7 6700K but I don't want the price to start rocketing. I wasn't aware of the AND zen chips so I'll keep an eye on them, Q3 or 4 wouldn't be a problem, I'm aiming to get something sorted by October this year.

Does this motherboard seem ok? -Gigabyte Z170 Motherboard SLI

seems good:
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/86606-gigabyte-z170xp-sli/?page=7

there's a few other links and help in this thread also (-:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=241086

 

[shadragon]

The Mobo will be dictated by your CPU choice. Intel or AMD will have different form factors that are not interchangable. I always go with ASUS because of the features you get.

Republic of Gamer (RoG) Mobos have a lot of stuff (audio, network, USB 3.0, etc.) built in and are reasonably cheap. https://www.asus.com/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/Motherboards-Products/

You can filter by features. Go to Amazon with model numbers for pricing. You can find the odd deal.

My hardware is in my sig block. That runs VR in High with ultra settings and 1.5 SS. Use that for comparison.

Get an SSD for the OS and regular drives for data. You'll see a terrific boost with Windows on SSD. I boot to Win7 login screen in 7 secs.

 

[Filmgeek47]

Thanks for the help.

I'm hoping I can keep the budget around £1000 ($1440), already got the hdd so I can take that out of the equation. It looks possible with an i5 6600K, although I'm not sure how much the GTX1070 will cost. It's tempting to go for the 1080 and I7 6700K but I don't want the price to start rocketing. I wasn't aware of the AND zen chips so I'll keep an eye on them, Q3 or 4 wouldn't be a problem, I'm aiming to get something sorted by October this year.

Does this motherboard seem ok? -Gigabyte Z170 Motherboard SLI

Not got much knowledge of building new computers so I'm a bit out of my depth.

Also, would 16GB ram be adequate for a good VR experience?

I'll add my two cents here. Generally speaking, you want to get the best quad core CPU in your budget, as opposed to a six or eight core. I'm not sure about elite specifically, but most software (especially games) aren't optimized to use more than two or four cores, so much of an eight core chip is often wasted.

This advice depends on your other uses (if any) for your machine. For a good general purpose/gaming pc, an i5 like the 6600k is a great CPU that will last you years. For reference, I just upgraded my system from a 5 year old midrange i5 chip that served me well in gaming for all of that time.

I haven't read up on AMDs latest, but in the past few years the trend has been that AMD offers cheaper CPUs that conversely wont be nearly as powerful, so you'd have to upgrade again sooner. Not necessarily true of their latest chips, but that's been the trend.

If you go with a skylake chip I'd say that motherboard is a great choice. Personally, I stick to Gigabyte or Asus for all my motherboards.

16GB of ram should be plenty for a while.

Hope that helps!

 

[shadragon]

FilmGeek is correct. I run a lot of Virtual Machines which I can dedicate cores to so I need as many as I can get. I also have 32GB RAM. The new rig I'm building later this year will have 64GB - 128GB to handle some large databases we carry.

Each PC build is different as all peoples needs vary wildly.

Multi-cores are getting used more and more as people adapt. My motto is it's better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.

 

[dutchy2000]

Yes make sure you get an SSD for the OS. I splurged and got 2 m2e SSD for my mobo. Which I have in raid now. On sequential reads I am pushing 900M/s. The longest time it take for my boot cycle is the BIOS screen. Between the first win logo and the login screen. 2 seconds tops.

 

[Cap'n Danelord]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

HeavyGroovez, good luck with the 1080 tomorrow. Exciting times!

 

[Beachlight7]

Doesn't it depend on the VR quality which needs to be determined first and then the hardware to support it?
In the next 5 years there will be various higher spec VR devices than what are currently on sale now. AMD have said they are targeting VR at 144hz and 16k resolution per eye, and have been testing recently 120hz and 4k per eye.
What cpu can cope with this level of VR pace for 5 years? Maybe the practical thing to do is buy moderately and ugrade often? It's even what the consoles manufacturers are having to do now.
I expect Rift 2 and Vive 2 will be out next year. So maybe best not to set things out in stone for a 5 year stint.

 

[shadragon]

You can wait for these dream machines to appear on the market, but by then they'll be working on 64K resolution per eye @ 3200 Hz

At some point you have to buy in. Today's tech is by no means perfect, but lord it is good and well worth the money IMHO. The grass will always be greener if you wait, but don't wait forever.

 

[Filmgeek47]

Doesn't it depend on the VR quality which needs to be determined first and then the hardware to support it?
In the next 5 years there will be various higher spec VR devices than what are currently on sale now. AMD have said they are targeting VR at 144hz and 16k resolution per eye, and have been testing recently 120hz and 4k per eye.
What cpu can cope with this level of VR pace for 5 years? Maybe the practical thing to do is buy moderately and ugrade often? It's even what the consoles manufacturers are having to do now.
I expect Rift 2 and Vive 2 will be out next year. So maybe best not to set things out in stone for a 5 year stint.

To be clear, I wasn't guaranteeing that buying a mid level i5 is going to guarantee you 5 years of optimum performance. That's just been my experience in the past.

That said, if you look at CPU performance gains over the last decade, each successive generation has offered less of a performance boost than the one before it did. Unless there's a dramatic shift into using additional cores in the next five years (which is certainly possible, but I wouldn't assume it to be so due to the programming challenges associated with parallel processing) I'd guess that a good processor purchased today will still be usable (if not optimal) in five years.

 

[Beachlight7]

Personally I think the future of VR is optimisation over 8 cores. Depending on the developer of course. Frontier will be putting a lot of resources into making Elite run on 1.6ghz 8 cores on the PS4 for VR at 120fps (60fps native).

 

[Filmgeek47]

Personally I think the future of VR is optimisation over 8 cores. Depending on the developer of course. Frontier will be putting a lot of resources into making Elite run on 1.6ghz 8 cores on the PS4 for VR at 120fps (60fps native).

You may well be right. Long term, I think the future of computing as a whole is gonna have to be multicore optimization. The problem though as I understand it is that many of the underlying processes in applications don't split well into multiple threads, complicating programming significantly. I'm guessing that's also the reason that so many games still either don't support SLI/crossfire, or have major issues with multi-GPU systems.

 

[shadragon]

To be clear, I wasn't guaranteeing that buying a mid level i5 is going to guarantee you 5 years of optimum performance. That's just been my experience in the past.

That mid-level i5 (or any CPU for that matter) will give consistent performance for five years only if the demands on that processor stay the same. Each patch, Windows update, game release, NVIDIA patch, background task, etc. will demand more of that CPU as time goes by. The CPU is a static value in a dynamically changing environment.

Games demand a lot from CPU's and will keep driving them hearder with each software iteration. The better the CPU you can buy today, the longer it will see you in good stead as time goes by. If you truly want a CPU to last five years without an upgrade, get a top end i7. Alternately you can get a motherboard that can handle upcoming CPU's and retrofit as needed. I suspect the i7 option is cheaper long term rather than replacing a series of mid-level i5's every 18 months unless you can do the work yourself.

Here's a list from 2011 with the list of "best gaming CPU's." Does anyone still have one of these chips five years on?

 

[Filmgeek47]

That mid-level i5 (or any CPU for that matter) will give consistent performance for five years only if the demands on that processor stay the same. Each patch, Windows update, game release, NVIDIA patch, background task, etc. will demand more of that CPU as time goes by. The CPU is a static value in a dynamically changing environment.

Games demand a lot from CPU's and will keep driving them hearder with each software iteration. The better the CPU you can buy today, the longer it will see you in good stead as time goes by. If you truly want a CPU to last five years without an upgrade, get a top end i7. Alternately you can get a motherboard that can handle upcoming CPU's and retrofit as needed. I suspect the i7 option is cheaper long term rather than replacing a series of mid-level i5's every 18 months unless you can do the work yourself.

Here's a list from 2011 with the list of "best gaming CPU's." Does anyone still have one of these chips five years on?

Actually, yeah. The 2500k is the chip I just replaced. But I only use my pc for gaming, so many of the more processor intensive workloads are irrelevant to me.

ultimately, it's going to depend on how CPU intensive VR rendering becomes as it evolves. Based on how stagnant processor development is becoming though, I'd guess they'll either offload the bulk of the load to gpus, or they'll start making use of 8 core chips. Time will tell!

As for the OP, shadragon is correct overall, in that the better your hardware is now, the longer it will last you. Personally, I'd argue an i5 is good enough for a gaming only pc for at least 3 years, and possibly longer.

 

[dogbite]

Actually, yeah. The 2500k is the chip I just replaced. But I only use my pc for gaming, so many of the more processor intensive workloads are irrelevant to me.

ultimately, it's going to depend on how CPU intensive VR rendering becomes as it evolves. Based on how stagnant processor development is becoming though, I'd guess they'll either offload the bulk of the load to gpus, or they'll start making use of 8 core chips. Time will tell!

As for the OP, shadragon is correct overall, in that the better your hardware is now, the longer it will last you. Personally, I'd argue an i5 is good enough for a gaming only pc for at least 3 years, and possibly longer.

The I5 2500k is a decent cpu for vr right now. For example:
The Firestrike part of 3Dmark's benchmark is part or their new VRMark tests coming this month. According to Futuremark, Firestrike is a pretty good indicator of VR requirements. Oculus and Vive minimum hardware is used to give a 9271 base score.
My rig is an I5 2550K and an MSI GTX980 Gamer
At 3.4 Ghz I score 10713 or just under16% faster
At 4.2 Ghz overclock I score 10950 or just under 19% faster
As the base card for VR is a GTX 970 which is around 18 to 20% slower than a 980 this would suggest the cpu is about baseline for VR and that the GPU is the major factor in VR.

This is not to say that a newer cpu won't give a little headroom, (especially as I could see 3 or 4% moving to PCIe3) but that a good gpu makes a big difference. I would upgrade to a GTX 1080 before I toss my cpu if I could only do one or the other.

On a side note for those who care Iracing is putting out it's CV1 update in a few days. Can't wait for my Rift.