My first PC in a looong time

[Jetman]

Hi Everyone

I've been following progress of Elite Dangerous for a while now, reading forum posts and watching loads of YouTube videos and have to say I'm extremely excited about the game. So much so that I'm coming out of gaming retirement to grab myself the standard beta.

This means though, that I'm going to have to buy a PC and I have to admit that I have no idea whatsoever about how to choose and buy one. I've looked up and read some previous posts on this forum and it seems that a lot of people on here are really clued up on this sort of thing so I'm hoping that I can get opinion on what I was thinking of buying.

I've seen Chillblast mentioned in this forum before as a good company to use, so I've been checking out their site and am thinking of buying the Chillblast Fusion Slipstream Z97 Haswell Gaming PC, with upgrades to...

Intel Core i5 4690K Haswell Refresh Processor 3.50 GHz (Overclocked to up to 4.3GHz)

300Mbps 802.11n Wireless PCIe Adaptor (for Wireless networks)

...which comes in at £769. I'm hoping that this will run the game pretty well at a decent resolution as the game looks fantastic. I'd appreciate some advice around this before I go ahead and buy it. Hopefully it will do the job well and I'll be able to see you in game soon. :smilie:

 

[Teemo]

The 760 should be plenty good for this game. 770 if you have a bit more to splurge.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

I have the GTX 770 graphics card and I can run Elite with max settings no problem. The 760, as Teemo mentioned, should be just fine too.

Although I'm not sure the £155 difference in the two cards will be worth the upgrade.

I would say that if you're going to upgrade the graphics card go for something that will open the door to a whole new Elite Dangerous experience via Oculus Rift. Elite and OR seem to be a match made in heaven and from all reports will take your gaming experience to a whole new level. Doing so you will need a much better card though. The 770 may be borderline adequate. I plan on upgrading it just for OR in the near future.

Like you I pretty much gave up on gaming prior to hearing about Elite. I've gone from having my eye on a just about adequate £650 laptop to play it on, to ripping up that plan and getting myself a grands worth of PC, £100 joystick, and an Oculus Rift DK 2 on order! The thought "sod it, just go for it" got the better of me

After playing beta I don't regret a thing - now I can't wait for the Oculus DK2 to arrive! I may retire from life and live inside the world Braben has built.


If you're not interested in experiencing Elite in the Rift then that Chilliblast will be just fine in my opinion Although I would go for at least a 600W PSU and not the 500W one as if you do ever upgrade to a better card in the future a 600W PSU will give you more flexibility in what you go for. Don't underestimate the importance of a good PSU!

 

[Aleksej]

As ED easily uses 8 threads an i7 4790K might be a good idea.

 

[NoirWolf]

As ED easily uses 8 threads an i7 4790K might be a good idea.

Actually asked CS after narrowing down my budget build and a 7850k and a R9 270x should run the game at 1080p on full easily. Also the i7 you mentioned has 8 threads and 4 cores...what little I know of parallel computing states that once you tax the 4 physical ones fully the 4 logical ones aren't gonna be as strong so having 4 physical cores may end up being better ergo an i5 or top of the range kaveri or FX should be plenty.

 

[Zieman]

Hi Everyone

I've been following progress of Elite Dangerous for a while now, reading forum posts and watching loads of YouTube videos and have to say I'm extremely excited about the game. So much so that I'm coming out of gaming retirement to grab myself the standard beta.

This means though, that I'm going to have to buy a PC and I have to admit that I have no idea whatsoever about how to choose and buy one. I've looked up and read some previous posts on this forum and it seems that a lot of people on here are really clued up on this sort of thing so I'm hoping that I can get opinion on what I was thinking of buying.

I've seen Chillblast mentioned in this forum before as a good company to use, so I've been checking out their site and am thinking of buying the Chillblast Fusion Slipstream Z97 Haswell Gaming PC, with upgrades to...

Intel Core i5 4690K Haswell Refresh Processor 3.50 GHz (Overclocked to up to 4.3GHz)

300Mbps 802.11n Wireless PCIe Adaptor (for Wireless networks)

...which comes in at £769. I'm hoping that this will run the game pretty well at a decent resolution as the game looks fantastic. I'd appreciate some advice around this before I go ahead and buy it. Hopefully it will do the job well and I'll be able to see you in game soon. :smilie:

If you're going for the overclocked version, I'd invest a bit in better PSU & better cooling if I was you.

+ Cooler one step beefier (recommended by the site: Akasa Nero Quiet CPU Cooler)
+ Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste
+ Additional Cooling Fans Upgrade Pack
+ Asus GeForce GTX 760 2048MB DirectCU II Edition Video Card (comes with much better cooling than the Chillblast one)
+ Corsair Ultra Low Noise 600W PSU (at least, preferably Corsair CX 750W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified PSU to keep the PC cool and quiet & to give some headroom for future GPU upgrade)

The price goes up to £887 - well spent extra £118 IMHO.

 

[Jetman]

I'm pushing the boat out as it is so I think the I7 or 770 is going to be more that I can stretch to. I'll take the advice about the PSU though and upgrade that. An extra 20 quid still keeps it under £800 so I should be okay with that.

Speaking of the OR, I've been looking at that with interest as well but it's way out of range for me at the moment. Having you mention that has reminded me that I'm going to need a display to go with this PC though. Are bog standard HDTVs okay for this, or will I need to get a specific type of monitor? I don't really know the difference. Was thinking about getting a 32" HDTV which can be picked for a couple of hundred quid, but monitors seem to jump up considerably in price over 27". I'll want to use it for watching films as well (through my new PC :smilie, so do I really need to accept a smaller screen for the sake of having a monitor?

btw, I've already pre-ordered a Saitek X-55 to go with it :smilie:.

After playing beta I don't regret a thing - now I can't wait for the Oculus DK2 to arrive! I may retire from life and live inside the world Braben has built.

That already happened to me with Frontier and FFE and I have a feeling that this is about to happen again. Although I had the original Elite on the speccy, I was a bit too young to understand it properly so at least Braben didn't take over my entire childhood. :smilie:

 

[Aleksej]

Actually asked CS after narrowing down my budget build and a 7850k and a R9 270x should run the game at 1080p on full easily. Also the i7 you mentioned has 8 threads and 4 cores...what little I know of parallel computing states that once you tax the 4 physical ones fully the 4 logical ones aren't gonna be as strong so having 4 physical cores may end up being better ergo an i5 or top of the range kaveri or FX should be plenty.

During Alpha 3 I have used Factions to test the performance HT ON and HT OFF. I had +10-15FPS with HT ON in comparison to HT OFF. So i7 is much better than i5 for ED. Also 4 cores of i5 were on par or slightly better than 8 cores of FX8350, which means that 4 cores and 8 threads of i7 are better than 8 physical cores of FX8350 by quite a margin.

A3 was not optimized so I had 85-90% CPU usage in Faction HT OFF and 60-65% CPU usage HT ON.

 

[NoirWolf]

During Alpha 3 I have used Factions to test the performance HT ON and HT OFF. I had +10-15FPS with HT ON in comparison to HT OFF. So i7 is much better than i5 for ED. Also 4 cores of i5 were on par or slightly better than 8 cores of FX8350, which means that 4 cores and 8 threads of i7 are better than 8 physical cores of FX8350 by quite a margin.

A3 was not optimized so I had 85-90% CPU usage in Faction HT OFF and 60-65% CPU usage HT ON.

2 assumptions does not prove a right and we aren't counting your initial one ( A3 as optimized as it gets for parallel) or your last one ( that an i7 will be the best choice come release ).

If you want to trumpet Intel's superiority in general go right ahead but do not jump to conclusions so much based on woefully incomplete data.

 

[mid_gen]

You really don't need to be splitting hairs over CPU performance. GPU is what matters.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

Speaking of the OR, I've been looking at that with interest as well but it's way out of range for me at the moment. Having you mention that has reminded me that I'm going to need a display to go with this PC though. Are bog standard HDTVs okay for this, or will I need to get a specific type of monitor? I don't really know the difference. Was thinking about getting a 32" HDTV which can be picked for a couple of hundred quid, but monitors seem to jump up considerably in price over 27". I'll want to use it for watching films as well (through my new PC :smilie, so do I really need to accept a smaller screen for the sake of having a monitor?

I wouldn't know what to suggest in regards to HDTVs or a standard monitor. I went for a standard £100 22" monitor to tide me over until OR arrives as I thought it pointless me buying something overly expensive when most of the time I'll be playing games with the OR instead. Guess it depends on what you want to do - although I wouldn't get anything that your GTX 760 would struggle with, its worth checking that out.

In regards to an I5 or I7, almost all the advice I got last year when looking at new systems was that an I5 was the better choice. Apparently the increase in performance between an I5 and I7 wasn't worth the exponential increase in cost.

 

[Vergoth]

You really don't need to be splitting hairs over CPU performance. GPU is what matters.

You don't want one to bottleneck the other.

However, if you don't have a pc and are willing to be spending £769 on just a base unit you can buy EVERYTHING for under £1000

I would recommend :

i5 4590 cpu
Gigabyte h97-hd3 mobo
Crucial ballistix sport 8gb 1600mhz ram
Corsair carbide 200r case
Seagate barracuda 1tb hdd
Zalman lq310 cpu cooler
Nvidia Gtx 770 2gb gpu
Silverstone strider essential 500w psu
Viewsonic vx2370smh monitor
Ozone strike pro keyboard
Shogun bros ballista mk-1 mouse
Plantronics gamecom 780 headset

All of that (if you build it yourself) should run you under £1k and is future proof for the next couple of years as the mobo is compatible with the next gen cpus coming out next year.

Get yourself an EDtracker for £25, combined with your x-55 you'll have an elite setup fit for a king.

Getting an i7 instead of the i5 will up your minimum Fps in games but by how much varies from game to game.

I have an i7 4770k and is noticeably faster than my old i5 2600k but I couldn't speak for current gen i5's.

And if you can stretch to an SSD, I would recommend it. It's possibly the biggest (noticeable) performance upgrade I've had for a pc.

 

[Aleksej]

2 assumptions does not prove a right and we aren't counting your initial one ( A3 as optimized as it gets for parallel) or your last one ( that an i7 will be the best choice come release ).

If you want to trumpet Intel's superiority in general go right ahead but do not jump to conclusions so much based on woefully incomplete data.

These are not assumptions but statistics collected during Alpha 3 testing:
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=15588

Intel's better performance was clearly seen according to data collected in that thread. As well as the test performed with HT ON/OFF showed performance increase with HT ON. And these facts cannot be ignored.

 

[Jetman]

Thanks everyone for the advice, it's certainly been helpful. I think I've settled on the system now.

There seems to be a bit of a disagreement over the value of an i7 over an i5, but for me this is a bit of a moot point as the price difference means that I can't go for it. I will though invest in the 600W PSU, the Asaka CPU cooler and the premium thermal paste. I really can't stretch to all of the cooling suggestions, but noted advice over the overclocked CPU, so will have better cooling for that. I'm also going to switch to the 200R case as I think I'll prefer a discreet case over the default with lights and windows.

Takes it to £830 which is a little over what I was hoping to pay but close enough.

Just need to suss out what display to get now, but have a bit if time to figure that out while the PC is being built.

 

[NoirWolf]

These are not assumptions but statistics collected during Alpha 3 testing:
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=15588

Intel's better performance was clearly seen according to data collected in that thread. As well as the test performed with HT ON/OFF showed performance increase with HT ON. And these facts cannot be ignored.

Re-read what I said.

 

[Aleksej]

Re-read what I said.

Still ED uses 8+ cores/threads so CPU with 8+ core/threads is preferable for ED.

Intel CPUs are better than AMD's according to all reviews, however, more affordable price is AMD's advantage. If money is not an issue then Intel CPUs are the best choice.

 

[Ref Minor]

If going for a TV check the refresh rate. A gaming monitor will have a 5ms or less refresh rate whereas a TV will be higher. This means action can happen in the gap between the signal hitting the TV and the screen refreshing. ie the bullet hits you before you see it coming.

 

[NoirWolf]

Still ED uses 8+ cores/threads so CPU with 8+ core/threads is preferable for ED.

Intel CPUs are better than AMD's according to all reviews, however, more affordable price is AMD's advantage. If money is not an issue then Intel CPUs are the best choice.

And in this case it is and unless he is going for a Haswell R the octo FX is cheaper and for elite just as good as the i5 but for x32 games and apps not so much.

 

[Vergoth]

Arguing isn't really helpful, and the op has decided on a system already...

... But if your strapped for Cash an i5 is your best bet, if you have money it's the i7

 

[scrufferpops]

During Alpha 3 I have used Factions to test the performance HT ON and HT OFF. I had +10-15FPS with HT ON in comparison to HT OFF. So i7 is much better than i5 for ED. Also 4 cores of i5 were on par or slightly better than 8 cores of FX8350, which means that 4 cores and 8 threads of i7 are better than 8 physical cores of FX8350 by quite a margin.

A3 was not optimized so I had 85-90% CPU usage in Faction HT OFF and 60-65% CPU usage HT ON.

Nice to hear as I have i7 3770k quadcore with hyperthreading