Budget Build Advice

[martin-w 3,235]

Greetings chaps.

 

I know a young man (his dad works with my daughter) who 's doing a game dev course and needs a PC. Trouble is he has a very tight budget. £700 is the budget.

I'm thinking at such a low budget Ryzen 5 might be the way to go. Personally I'm an Intel guy and have no experience of Ryzen. 

So what do you guys think? what can you come up with for this young lad with a budget of £700? That's just for the tower.

Edited August 27, 2019 by martin-w

[Bob Scott 7,721]

Without knowing any more about what he will need to do with it, I'd surmise that most focus in a game development class is going to be on the GPU side of things, and that cutting-edge performance isn't needed for educational development work.  So cutting corners with a cheap AMD CPU may make sense in that application.  The GPU selection may be more critical, depending on whether the coursework covers cutting-edge contemporary material like ray tracing, which could drive the range of GPU choices.

 

[martin-w 3,235]

I believe he will be running Unreal Bob, I presume Unreal 4. 

I've just learnt his budget has gone up to £1000, so shouldn't be any difficulty building a decent rig.

The organisers of his course haven't specified any particular requirements. Don't think he will be doing anything too advanced at the moment. So just best bang for his buck for both CPU and GPU.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 27, 2019 by martin-w

[Charlatan 68]

If he's not simming, I'd go Ryzen 2600.  Can be had for about £120 here in the UK, B450 Motherboard. Usual sundries and then whatever graphics card is left in the budget.  Can drop a 3700x or similar in a couple of years if needs be.

If he is simming, 9600k and the usual sundries

[martin-w 3,235]

No, hes's not a simmer.

 

Currently I'm thinking...

Ryzen 2700X

Strix 470-I Gaming Mini ITX

GSkill Flare X 3200 MHz. 

860 Evo 500 GB

EVGA RTX 260 SC Ultra Gaming 6 GB

Phanteks Evolv ITX

EVGA Supernova G1 650 watt.

 

Comes to a tad over £1000. He specified a small form factor.  

[Harold_Finch 29]

I'm an active game developer using UE 4.   It performs remarkably using most modern GPUs so he is definitely good to go to start with.  The main difference for the requirements between average gamer and a developer is the additional  overhead incurred by the editor (CPU load).  The Ryzen 2700 should be more than up to the task, I started the current project using an i7-6700K running at 4.3 Ghz and had absolutely no problems.  I would suggest that if he intends to have a 3D modeling app like Blender, 3Ds Max or Maya open at the same time as the UE editor then he would spec at least 16 GB of system RAM.  I often have both the UE editor and a 3D modeling app open in order to streamline content development iterations.   My project usually occupies 12 GB system RAM usage and it is not a particularly high poly game due to art style.  

The heaviest  CPU load will be at the packaging stage where all the compiling, lighting, and other assets are prepared for the end user version. The editor and packaging processes are core aware and will take advantage of additional cores.  This decreases packaging time, but the game will compile fine with less cores, it just takes longer.  I package my project daily so as to make sure that any modifications that break the process can be caught early and dealt with.  

Edited August 28, 2019 by Harold_Finch
grammar correction

[martin-w 3,235]

Harold... thank you so much for that reply. 🙂 Much appreciated!

 

Quote

I'm an active game developer using UE 4.   It performs remarkably using most modern GPUs so he is definitely good to go to start with.

 

It was the graphics card i was worried about, so that's great news. 

I have indeed specified 16 Gb of RAM. 3200 MHz. 

 

Quote

The heaviest  CPU load will be at the packaging stage where all the compiling, lighting, and other assets are prepared for the end user version. The editor and packaging processes are core aware and will take advantage of additional cores.  This decreases packaging time, but the game will compile fine with less cores, it just takes longer.  I package my project daily so as to make sure that any modifications that break the process can be caught early and dealt with.  

 

"Take advantage of additional cores". What about hyper-threading? Are the additional threads advantageous? For example if I switched to an Intel 9600K with just 6 cores and no HT, would that be significantly less desirable? 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2019 by martin-w

[Harold_Finch 29]

I upgraded from the i7-6700K to the i9-9900K and it definitely took advantage of hyper threading,  but how much is dependent on individual game assets and CPU caching.   Compiling is hard on CPU cache hits so the larger, the more effective those extra threads will be.     I haven't enough experience or access to enough data to make anything more than that generalized statement. I have zero experience with Ryzen's real world performance with regards to this so I prefer to not even speculate.   But once again, we are just talking more time, not a crash. 

Again, a i7-6700k was sufficient.    The only reason was to build an entirely new rig to allow my project to include RTX ray tracing.   Now I can test on the i7-6700 with GTX 1080ti as well as the new rig with a i9-9900k and RTX 2080ti.    This kind of redundancy is not needed for most developers.   It just worked out for me since I gifted the older rig to my wife (whose computer had just finally died,)    I was totally happy with the i7-6700K on the 1080ti platform.

[martin-w 3,235]

Thanks. 🙂