Hayulp! Which of these systems is best for ED VR?

[Dr Wookie]

Hi guys,
having lost my password for ages, I've not been on the forums for a while. I actually posted something similar a year or so ago, but that is well out of date, so here goes.

I've been looking for a new pc at scan.co.uk, and saw these two similarly priced options

1) 3XS Vengeance, Overclocked Intel Core i7 6700K, 16GB Corsair DDR4, 8GB EVGA GTX 1070 SC, 250GB SSD, 1TB HDD, Win 10; the CPU is overclocked to 4.6GHz, with water cooling, and the memory is at 3000 MHz

2) 3XS Gamer 1080, Intel Core i5 6600 Quad Core, 16GB Corsair DDR4, EVGA 8GB GTX1080, 256GB PCIe SSD, 1TB HDD, Win 10; CPU not overclocked (3.3 GHz, up to 3.9 with boosting of some kind), air cooling , and the memory is at 2133 MHz

Does either look conspicuously better suited for ED VR than the other? Or do neither look good enough? The other specs look very similar; option 1 has a SATA SSD, while option 2 has a M2.PCIe SSD, but I have no idea what that means for performance

Both are about 1500 GBP. I know they would be cheaper in the USA, but I'm not there despite my forum location. Also, I have no interest in picking and building my own PC, thanks . I appreciate that a lot of people enjoy doing that, but that's not for me.

I get the feeling that Option 1 is more rounded, but can I expect the buffs elsewhere to offset the difference between a 1070 and 1080?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

 

[Alec Turner]

Interesting, verrrry interesting: i7 + 1070 vs. i5 + 1080

I don't really have an answer for you (although I'll be following this with interest).

The only thing I can say is that I have an i5 4690k overclocked to 4.something with an Asus ROG Strix 1080 and, although it runs ED brilliantly, I have noticed that the VRMark benchmark scores I get don't seem quite as good as some other people's systems that have an i7. I suspect (and this has been kinda confirmed by the RoadToVR article I linked in the VRMark thread a while back) that my CPU is the bottleneck. This is backed up by the fact that overclocking my 1080 makes no apparent difference to my score.
Note: that's only for the VRMark tool and doesn't necessarily speak for ED's particular demands.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/267897-Futuremark-VRMARK

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

For me there's no question - option 2 is the winner. Whilst option 1 is the "nicer" system overall, a more powerful GPU is always better when it comes to VR so that you can turn up some of the graphics settings and still attempt to maintain 90 FPS or close to. And now the disclaimer: I don't know the precise performance differential between those two specific cards, but I am making the assumption that the 1080 will trump the OC'd 1070.

EDIT: I wouldn't concern yourself too much re SATA/M.2 SSD - for gaming purposes you won't notice a huge difference.

 

[evilscoop]

the 1080 wins if you can for vive

But think of other games, the 1070 does vive happily on high settings

 

[StiTch]

Does it have a better GPU?

If so then yes, it is better for VR

 

[Soda Popinski]

Oculus Rift or Vive? With the Rift you can get away with a lower end card. Still, I'd expect with VR, it's GPU constrained and not CPU. So I'd still vote for the 1080, but it may be diminishing returns at this point. I've got a 1080 and will still go to ASW when I hit planet surfaces with my settings.

 

[Dr Wookie]

Thanks for the responses so far!

I've not got either HMD yet, but am planning to get the Rift. My current PC, which I bought for testing the ED alpha 3 years ago is struggling, as I think I might have long term over-cooked it, shoving a 970 into a small case (Alienware X51 R2). As a result, it will sometimes just die, and it takes sbstantial tinkering to get it back on its feet.

The 1080 does look like the obvious choice, but is it the right one? Hmm... Whenever I've looked at the CPU loads while playing ED, I've noticed all 4 cores of my i7 4770 being used. So I guess I'd want to know whether a faster CPU could clear the way for faster frame updates.

I'll have to think some more

 

[StiTch]

Oculus Rift or Vive? With the Rift you can get away with a lower end card. Still, I'd expect with VR, it's GPU constrained and not CPU. So I'd still vote for the 1080, but it may be diminishing returns at this point. I've got a 1080 and will still go to ASW when I hit planet surfaces with my settings.

Yup. CPU is always helpful and you don't exactly want to skimp if possible, but GPU all the way for VR. Every bit of power counts.

 

[Gortron]

I'm really not sure about this one. You definitely don't need 16gb for VR but I can't think of a good reason not to get 16gb (other than not actually needing it). You can bottleneck a CPU driving a 1080, so the CPU does matter. Given the options you have provided I'd go for opinion 2 I think.

 

[dogbite]

For ED I would go with #2. You will get more mileage out of the 1080 in VR. That being said, as a DCS player, I would lean toward #1.

 

[Zeeman]

Op - are you semi capable with your hands? build your own and you'll probably get the i7/1080 at the same sort of price.

Personally, I'd be inclined to go for a 6600K, overclocked to 4.x Ghz, and a 1080 I think, but really, the specs don't state which motherboard.

My own rig is:

i5 6600K, Asus Gene VIII, 16GB Gskill ripjaws (3200), Intel P6 256GB SSD (That was not such a great choice, but anyway, for my purposes it makes no difference...), and Gigabyte GTX1080 G1 gaming, because I have a Corsair Air 240 case, and have height limits.

Having said that, both my CPU and GPU went pop a couple of days back. No issues, as both are covered under warranty, I just picked up my replacement GPU, and Intel are organising my CPU replacement, but this can happen whether your roll your own, or have someone build it for you.

Currently playing on my i5 4690K, Ranger VII and GTX970. I have not tried VR with that rig, but may give it a go tonight, just to do a back to back 1080 vs 970 test...

edit -
Perhaps see if you can upgrade the 6600 to a 6700? Non K version is cheaper, and better bet for long term...
Z...

 

[the100thmonkey]

The i5 6600 will bottleneck a GTX 1080 in DX11 at higher resolutions such as 4K or at very high refresh rates. VR tends to run high refresh rates and high resolution, but I don't know if a game that is as light on resources as E:D will be significantly affected. Overclocking the CPU will help, regardless.

Ideally, you'd get the OCed i7 and the 1080. While Scan prebuilds are generally good value, I'm a bit confused by their choices here - it's like they deliberately gimped the current most powerful consumer GPU that's available...

 

[Dr Wookie]

The i5 6600 will bottleneck a GTX 1080 in DX11 at higher resolutions such as 4K or at very high refresh rates. VR tends to run high refresh rates and high resolution, but I don't know if a game that is as light on resources as E:D will be significantly affected. Overclocking the CPU will help, regardless.

Ideally, you'd get the OCed i7 and the 1080. While Scan prebuilds are generally good value, I'm a bit confused by their choices here - it's like they deliberately gimped the current most powerful consumer GPU that's available...

Damn it, I was all ready to go for Option 2 ! I saw a video from Linustechtips demonstrating that changing memory speed from 800 MHz to 2400 MHz with the same hardware had negligible effect on game performance; they suggested that higher speeds are more beneficial to servers. I also saw something that suggested that the i5 would be all I really needed so long as I wasn't streaming.

Of course Scan sells the 1080 with the I7, it just costs a fair amount more ! The two options I gave are about the same price.

Zeeman, as I said at the top, I don't really want to build my own. My flaky PC that I have right now has led me to take it apart almost completely, but I really don't want to be messing with the CPU as I am pretty clumsy. When I looked buying from Scan a year or so ago, I saw that while the individual parts were cheaper than elsewhere, around £200 went into assembly and warranty. I would be more comfortable paying a professional to build my PC for me

 

[the100thmonkey]

Well, like I said, I don't know how much of a bottleneck an i5 6600 (not K?) will be; VR resolutions are still smaller than 4K resolutions, but games work the silicon hard at 4K - I know of only a couple of AAA games that will run 4K/ultra/60fps on a single card. The issue is that you need 50% more frames per second than that for an impeccable experience in VR at 2160x1200/90fps. You'll be able to run the game set to VR high or VR medium at 90Hz I'm sure, but that's not what you buy a 1080 for!

You could wait a month or so for the new line of AMD chips -- Ryzen -- to drop. They look to be very good and seem to compare favourably favourably in benchmarks to Intel chips twice the price (admittedly at AMD marketing events.)

The chips will have 8 cores with two threads per core, significantly improved instructions-per-clock over current AMD chips, dynamic auto-overclocking with real-time temperature monitoring and clockspeeds in the 3-4GHz range, and will retail for less than Intel equivalents. On paper they look brilliant. If the hype is delivered on, I'll regret my i7-6700K purchase immediately.

 

[Zeeman]

Damn it, I was all ready to go for Option 2 ! I saw a video from Linustechtips demonstrating that changing memory speed from 800 MHz to 2400 MHz with the same hardware had negligible effect on game performance; they suggested that higher speeds are more beneficial to servers. I also saw something that suggested that the i5 would be all I really needed so long as I wasn't streaming.

Of course Scan sells the 1080 with the I7, it just costs a fair amount more ! The two options I gave are about the same price.

Zeeman, as I said at the top, I don't really want to build my own. My flaky PC that I have right now has led me to take it apart almost completely, but I really don't want to be messing with the CPU as I am pretty clumsy. When I looked buying from Scan a year or so ago, I saw that while the individual parts were cheaper than elsewhere, around £200 went into assembly and warranty. I would be more comfortable paying a professional to build my PC for me

That's fair enough, some folk are up for it, some are not - this is why we have companies to do stuff for us!

I'd still be curious re which motherboard, as perhaps a mid range motherboard (B150 or H170 chipset) may work out better price wise, combined with an i7 6700 (non K) should result in an i7 build with a GTX1080 card for about the same cash.

Z...

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

OP can you provide links to these systems? Would be interesting to see which motherboard and which PSU they are offering. Knowing scan it won't be anything shabby (usually a Corsair PSU by default) but always best to check.

 

[Dr Wookie]

OP can you provide links to these systems? Would be interesting to see which motherboard and which PSU they are offering. Knowing scan it won't be anything shabby (usually a Corsair PSU by default) but always best to check.

Gah! I was just in the middle of making the links when my pc crapped out again! The 1070 machine has an Asus Z170 Pro motherboard, and liquid cooling, while the 1080 machine has an H170 board and air cooling. Both machines are prebuilt, but I might be able to configure something with a non over clocked 6700 and the H170 and air cooling

ETA: Here is a link to a mixture between the two systems... based on a completely different build in the configurator. Does this look reasonable?

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

ETA: Here is a link to a mixture between the two systems... based on a completely different build in the configurator. Does this look reasonable?

Looks fine to me. Personally I'd probably go for a slightly more efficient PSU and maybe an extra 100W just to allow for future expansion (even though it probably won't be necessary unless you go 2xTitan X for example) but it's perfectly adequate as is.

 

[Zeeman]

I'd ditch the 1TB blue drive, and spend that on the 6700 - though I have no clue about your storage needs. I'd also be inclined to get a 212x cooler - excellent value for money.

Z...

 

[dape]

looks good. I am not sure if 6700 is too much if you don't do anything else but gaming.

I run a 6600K @4.2GHz with an aircooler. I have monitored temps and utilization during game play. Max temps 62 and max utilization about 65%. So there still is lot's of headroom.
Running a 980GTX, dunno if in combination with a 1080 those values would change. I don't think so.