Engineers New PC build for ED

[GG7]

CPU use percentage of course depends on what CPU you are running with, but I wouldn't consider ED to be a CPU heavy game. GTA5 on the other hand is a VERY CPU heavy game mainly because of all the physics that go on in that game pretty much constantly.

I use an Intel Skylake i7 6700k overclocked to 4.6Ghz and my usage never gets above 40% with ED Horizons. But my GPU usage can go as high as 90% at times when on planets with my overclocked 980ti. My Boost clock maxes out at just under 1400Mhz. But with a well ventilated case like the Corsair 760t that I use, you can keep the temps of both under 50C using an all in one water cooler for the CPU and just the air cooler on the GPU. (Mine is an ASUS Strix 980ti OC)

Another component to consider is the type of hard drive you use. I run with a Samsung 512GB 950 PRO which is an M.2 NVMe drive. I have Windows 10 and all my currently active games installed on this same drive. Unlike SATA SSDs, the NVMes are much faster, and this is especially true of the 950 PRO. Intel has just come out with some new drives in this class which are cheaper than the Samsung, and Samsung has also just released the new 960 PRO which is even faster than my drive.

My Galaxy Map load time is basically ZERO seconds as in instantaneous, and my System Map tends to load in under 2 seconds depending on the size of the system. Often times, that map also pops up instantly.

 

[fitch]

Guide for Building a pc http://pc4u.org/guide-for-building-a-cheap-gaming-pc-with-a-rx480/

 

[Elprez]

AMD's Zen CPUs are just around the corner - offering significantly improved IPC compared to Bulldozer / Excavator and 8 true cores with simultaneous multi-threading (analogous to Intel's Hyper-Threading).

I plan to use an 8C/16T Zen in my next build (if its performance lives up to the leaks so far).

Currently running an FX-8350 / RX 480 / 32GB / 990FX build (that the basis of is quite some age now) and it's giving up to 60FPS at 2560x1440 Ultra.

Interesting....I might wait on this too. My current build is a few years old AMD....AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition, probably about 4 years old. The only thing I have upgraded over the years is the video card which now is a GTX 750I about 18 months old. I have begun to see a little jitter but see others complain so am wondering if it is a software issue or my outdated build.

 

[XW_Ziggy]

Elite seems to want a quad-core (i5 or i7). I had an Nvidia GTX970 running it at 2560x1440 just fine, but it crashed quite a lot before horizons came out (sound would start to stutter and the the graphics card would throw an error and drop to desktop). I had known problems with the Nvidia drivers for a couple of other games too, so decided to try AMD instead.

I bought a freesync 144Hz gaming monitor, so I also changed to an RX480 and the improvement in smoothness was noticeable. Crashes have stopped too, though I'm not sure if that was the change of graphics card, or just a game bug being fixed at about the same time.

There aren't vast performance differences between Sandy Bridge and Skylake for gaming, so there's nothing wrong with saving some money to get a Haswell board and processor. I'm using a Haswell i7 and I can comfortably hit 144fps at 1080p. One suggestion that probably helps is to make sure Elite is installed on an SSD as it helps to significantly speed up mode switching and startup.

Zen is already late, having been originally scheduled for Q3 2016 (July-Sept) and the word from AMD now is "early 2017". Given the vagueness of that date rather than a specific quarter, we can probably presume it won't be until the spring. Zen is going to make AMD competitive again, hopefully but don't expect it to outperform skylake or be substantially lower-price. The leaked benchmarks show that it's competitive with Broadwell (Intel's last generation) when all the cores are fully used, but the IPC that games such as Elite care about is at Sandy Bridge levels (Intel launched Sandy Bridge processors six years ago!)

If you're on a moderate budget right now I would probably spend £350 on an i5-6500 (£190) with 16GB DDR4 (£90) in a Gigabyte DDR4 B150 motherboard (£70). That's 4 Skylake cores at 3.2GHz and a cheap motherboard from a company that offers good quality even in their budget boards (unlike Asus who have fantastic high-end boards but really phone in their cheaper stuff). Whether you pick an Nvidia or AMD card doesn't matter too much but I would probably say you need a GTX1060 3GB or an RX470 4GB to hit 100fps at 1080p.

 

[Stressfest]

I built my PC shortly after Beta, on a budget and it's still going strong. The only thing I've recently done is updated the graphics from an R9 290 to MSI RX 480 8GB... coupled with an AMD 4350+, Hyperx ram etc etc. 60 fps easy and plays all the latest games without issue.