>> As far as the PC you found did you see how big the PS was? Usually pre-built systems come with 300Watt power supplies.
yes, this is a concern. i may end up having to build my own for maximum value, or buy more than just a cheap case with a 6th gen i7 in it.
IIRC Dell's 8900 series has a 460 watt power supply and every now and then you can get a coupon on them that saves you a good amount of cash.
There are quite a few other options but you could check here: http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/
edit - BTW at cyberpower click customize... its like building your own machine.
>> IIRC Dell's 8900 series has a 460 watt power supply and every now and then you can get a coupon on them that saves you a good amount of cash.
so far, i've seen some gtx cards that recommend 600w, and some boxes with 500w, but no 600w.
odds are i'll end up with a PNY GTX 970. i've had a number of PNY GTX cards in the past and have always been pleased with them.
but it seems there are more fundamental questions to be resolved first. such as does a given title even require an "average PC". not all games are skyrim.
Why does it really matter, so long as your development PC is sufficient for the specific game *you* are building?but it seems there are more fundamental questions to be resolved first. such as does a given title even require an "average PC". not all games are skyrim.
I am not officially payed from my time (this should hopefully change in a few months) but I treat my time as if I was, any time wasted is simply lost profit. I use a high end machine running enthusiast level parts for my personal projects because of this. I don't like to waste time waiting for compilation, rendering or any other performance intensive tasks. For example if I spend 30 minutes a day 5 days a week rendering then that is 2.5 hours every week that I waste. After a year that is 130 hours of productivity lost, if I employed an artists at for $40 (Not actually sure how much an artist is worth) an hour that is $5200 a year for some one to sit on their behind and do nothing. Lets say that I spent an additional $300 on the system and that cut the rendering time in half that saved me $2300 for the first year then $2600 each subsequent year If I was paying someone (or my own personal time.)
From that alone it makes much more sense to buy a system that has a more performance than is necessary. You also have to deal with poorly optimized builds of your game during development so you will need more performance than what your target market would have.
My current gaming/workstation rig is what I consider as reasonable for for game development. (I may be a bit biased on this as I am a PC hardware enthusiast as well.)
Intel i7-5820k 6C/12T
Corsair 32GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM
Nvidia GTX 980 GPU
4x 480GB Intel 730 Series SSDs in RAID 10 for fast redundant storage for OS as well as workstation applications such as Visual Studio, Blender, Perforce client, ect.
1x 3TB Seagate HDD bulk storage. (I never put any of my code or assets on here as thats what my NAS is for).
10Gb Intel X540 T2 NIC with a direct connection to same NIC in my Server.
i was surprised to find the 1080 wasn't that much faster with today's games - then again, they aren't designed for it.
The GTX 1080 is probably one of the biggest leaps in performance that I have seen for GPU's. This is especially true when you factor in cost. I payed nearly the same as the launch price of the GTX 1080 for my GTX 980....the 1080 more or less doubles the performance of my card. It has around 20% more performance than the Titan X at $400 cheaper(at board partner price). They still have to release the Pascal Titan and 1080 ti (assuming that they make those cards but I think its very probable if they stick with their previous trends.) These cards also run much cooler and use less power than the last generation so the possibility of overclocking is much greater as well. This was demonstrated at their launch event with a core clock of 2.1GHz. To put that in perspective my card is OC'd to just over 1500Mhz.
TL;DR GTX 1080 kicks the sh*t out of 9xx series GPU's.
Athlon II X3 450.
Reality check: Atoms, Celerons and Pentiums do exist, they still get manufactured and they're still being sold. When you're talking about customers you should be talking about those.
Rant: last time I worked on my game it was about 20% of a single 800Mhz AMD K10 core.
I see no point in "tragic" configurations making few sense.
If you are heavily involved in rendering , Xeon E5 is better option otherwise Intel Extreme CPUs are good way to waste money.
If you don't have need for extra horsepower, I'd recommend Xeon E3 v3 series which is still steal imo, it's a reasonably priced Haswell processor (giving i7 non-K performance with fraction of cost) that can be used with any (preferably H97) mainboard. Actually it was so good, Intel no longer allows new Xeon E3 v5 s with common hardware but requires C232/C236 chipset
And on my own, I always target X60 version of latest Nvidia family (960 for now, 1060 for soon)
I see no point in "tragic" configurations making few sense.
If you are heavily involved in rendering , Xeon E5 is better option otherwise Intel Extreme CPUs are good way to waste money.
If you don't have need for extra horsepower, I'd recommend Xeon E3 v3 series which is still steal imo, it's a reasonably priced Haswell processor (giving i7 non-K performance with fraction of cost) that can be used with any (preferably H97) mainboard. Actually it was so good, Intel no longer allows new Xeon E3 v5 s with common hardware but requires C232/C236 chipset
And on my own, I always target X60 version of latest Nvidia family (960 for now, 1060 for soon)
The i7-5820k sadly isn't the extreme edition as the i7-5960x holds that title. Anyways for the cheapest LGA 2011-3 Xeon E5 you would spend $210 USD for 6 cores non hyperthread processor at 1.7GHz with no turbo. This provides about a third of the performance and around half of the price of the 5820k which is the cheapest consumer LGA 2011-3 socket processor available. For a comparable Xeon E5 it would the 2620v3 which costs about $40 more than the 5820k, not to mention the higher cost for a board with the C612 chipset or an X99 WS board. Really a Xeon E5 would only make sense if you have a substantial budget.
As far as the Xeon E3v3 processors go I agree that you can fantastic value out of them especially the 1231v3 which mirrors an i7 at about half the price.
All I am really stating in my previous post is that time should be highly valued, and if that means spending extra on the system its most likely worth it up until a point. I probably should of left out my SSD array as that is very much overkill for what most people need as well as the GPU and the NIC as the CPU and RAM are by far the biggest bottlenecks for game development.
