Building a dev PC, what would you buy?

I'm currently building a dev machine for PS4, Vita, PC development. I have a macbook pro mac mini for mobile development.

I've not build a PC in a while as I've been using Macs so I'm a bit out of touch.

Here's my list so far, just wondering if any of you would suggest anything different or see any potential issues?

Money isn't really an issue but I want to get a good bang for my buck.

Thanks

Intel Core i7 4770 3.40GHz Socket 1150 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
Cost £210.59

Gigabyte GA-B85-HD3 Socket 1150 VGA DVI HDMI 7.1 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard
Cost £66.22

Cooler Master N-Series N400 - USB 3.0 ATX Case
Cost £41.98

PowerCool X-Viper 650W Semi Modular 80+ Bronze Power Supply
Cost £47.98

Corsair Vengeance Performance Memory modules 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Unbuffered DIMM Quad Channel Memory for 2nd and 3rd Generation Intel Core Processor platforms
Cost £230.46

Palit GTX 760 2GB Jetstream GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics card
Cost £199.98

WatchDogs Nvidia Download Coupon
Cost £0.00

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 Socket 775, 1150, 1156, 1155, 1366, AM2, AM3 Heatpipe CPU Cooler
Cost £17.01

Total £814.22

 

Get at least a 850 watt power supply. More power is always better then having to replace it if you add more things.
I think there is a slightly better video card but it is also in the 700 series.
Ssd drive? At least for the os and unity plus whatever modeling programs etc. Then at least one or two 1 tb hd for storage.
Totally up to you but I would really change the power supple. I have a corsair in mine and my sons. Runs without any issues.

 

You don't need any high wattage power supplies if you have one GPU setup.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7492/59709.png

You don't need 32 gigs of memory. 16 gigs is enough.

 

Seconded. Make sure you get a big enough SSD instead.

 

Thanks for the input. So shave 16gb ram off and use that money for an SSD? Upgrade the PSU yes or no? The PSU is always an after thought for me, even though it's pretty important.

 

If money isn't issue, get a dual Xeon setup, having 2x CPU's could come useful for baking light and stuff.
Better yet, just get a fully built workstation.

 

Samsung 840 Evo - 500gb minimum. I've got the 1TB version. 500 is cheap enough. This alone, is the single biggest productivity boost. Put your OS, work folder, the Sony stuff and Unity on it. Boom, 5-8 secs and it's on device and I'm playtesting.

As these are the tools of the trade, you need fastest possible build times so you're on device, you're testing and working, not waiting.

 

Upgrade the PSU. You don't want to have to rewire the whole PC in two years when you want to run SLI. It's cheap, just do it. If you have to money get a better motherboard, you want to make sure your core components are good. Switching a CPU or GPU is easy, a motherboard is not.

 

True, I'll add an Evo to the mix.

Money isn't an issue but I don't want to spend it for the sake of it on stuff that's a bit overkill.

Thanks. Any recommendation for PSU and motherboards?

 

I envy you rest of the world who doesn't pay extremely high taxes

 

I second better mobo(Asus), bigger/better PSU(750+), 16GB ram and Samsung SSD.

Another thing you should consider is noise levels, a noisy PC can cloud your head and make you lose focus.
So I recommend you make it silence with Antec P280 case, CPU watercooling kit, 120mm fans only and Asus FanXpert(part of Asus mobo). That's what I got. My PC is almost dead silence and still runs really cool.

 

An SSD drive is definitely a great idea for every system. However, I strongly recommend the Samsung 840 Pro instead of the Evo. The Evo costs less, but it will wear out much sooner. Compare the P/E cycles of both drives. The Pro series has three times the P/E cycles compared to the Evo series. Here is an article about endurance of the different SSD drives.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand

 

I'm too poor to shop for new PC, ad least until after I replace all my light bulbs with LED light bulbs and my couch... :-(

...but if it's possible I'd look at one that supports DX12 and OGL4

 

You're spending > 500 for a CPU and memory and < 50 for the PSU that prevents deadly power surges.

I'd start in this range. Believe it or not, a good PSU is worthwhile to invest in, and keeping a good spacer between the current and max load will reduce the chance of blowing caps.

 

Guys are you sure 16 gb ram is enough? What about when working with several programs at a time? Including photoshop?

 

I would never settle for 16GB of RAM, but I can understand why some people would choose to since it is easy enough to add more RAM later.

 

If you aren't using this site already, check out http://pcpartpicker.com/ helps a lot with compatibility and sometimes price,

 

I run with 8gb of ram and never have a problem. Close the damn applications you haven't used in an hour and you're fine.

 

Just built this literally last night, pretty happy with it although in hindsight I probably should have gone bigger on the SSD.

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/tiggus/saved/4vCU

 

6 gb works fine for me, with lots of big apps open.
4 gb is too tight though ...

 

If you do art there is no such thing as too much RAM, i have 10gb and its not enough, if i had 32gb it wouldnt be enough, get as much ram as your motherboard likes, it's cheap as hell anyways

Why people are not mentioning your GPU choice is beyond me

Unless something significant changed, the 760 suffers from deliberately crippled compute ability - A bunch of cuda cores are deliberately disabled and the cuda architecture has changed since the pre 600 series, into an actual weaker equivalent, but with more cores relatively. I've read that Nvidia says this is good but everyone else ive read has said 'wtf'

If you're planning to see the state of the art in games, i wouldnt recommend that card. I got a 580 for more or less the same price minus a few dozen pounds and has equivalent performance, more VRAM, better compute ability and given this late stage, the MSI flavour i got has amazing cooling so it's quiet as a whisper even when taxed, and never runs hot (Which is giving me ideas to finally oc my cpu as the overall case temp is lower

I only got the 580 for CUDA though, and these days i'd invest in OpenCL. AMD is also sporting Mantle too which is ace-looking and driving improvements in both directx and opengl AND its vastly more powerful in compute terms on equivalent pricing. You can shop and read around on this.

Assuming you are making games for the new gen of consoles, watch trailers/gameplay videos of games like The Division and The Order. It's a fun game of 'spot the gpu compute' effect. This is important, so buy towards it, it's only going to get more important. In the most well known vid of The District i'd say there are 3 easily recognisable GPU based effects in a few minutes and they're quite profound in their evocation of the atmosphere. Don't even get me started on ANY Unreal 4 promotional vids

 

Personally I would at least bump up the video card. I would get a GTX 770 4gb edition for that extra power and ram and it will last you longer.

 

I wasn't aware of that site. Excellent. Thanks.

 

Haven't read up that card but do know the 760 with 4gb was a bit of a waste of time, it didnt have the power to move that kind of information around

You'd have to check about the compute situ on the card too

 

Go cheap on your video card until HW DX12 cards are for sale:

http://hardware-360.com/directx-12-requires-new-graphics-cards-to-utilize-all-features/

 

Fully agree. Also, to totally disagree with a couple guys here, you don't need to spend $350 on a graphics card. You can get one plenty good enough for half that. That may not be true though if you're making an AAA game for XBox or something like that. If you're doing less demanding platforms, then sure, you need nothing more than a $150 video card. Also, what was said about the power supply is spot on. And make sure you get a big tall fan for the CPU as well. Those quad-cores can be a problem with out it. I'd consider getting solid state drive as well too.

 

At 500gb, that'll be well over a decade. I'm not sure it matters. By then everything will be 10x faster and cheaper, In fact anyone will upgrade long before the usage of an SSD becomes an issue.

 

Yeah the target platform is the PS4 and eventually Xbox One, as well as all the other platforms like Vita mobile, although I have my macbook pro my Mac mini for the Apple side of things. Although I don't plan to immediately be pushing the graphics to the limit, I do want to make sure I have enough GPU power for when I do.

 

Even though you already have all the Apple stuff to deal with the Apple stuff, might I recommend a Mac Pro? It's definitely pricey but from what it seems you're really accustomed to Macs and what not.

Otherwise I definitely recommend a graphics card among the lines of a 770 - 780.

One last thing, are you planning on gaming with this PC as well?

 

You mean like install Windows on the Mac? I need to use Windows for Developing on Sony platforms, so would need to install Windows. I figured building a PC would be better value than the Mac Pro route.

I plan on playing some games on PC but I'm not much of a PC gamer, I have all the console that I use but enjoy some driving/racing simulators on PC.

 

I didn't see which OS you'll be using, be aware;

On Windows7 Home, you can only use 16gb RAM.

Win8 lifted those restrictions. (I also recommend Win8 > Win7).

 

Thanks, I'm using Windows 8.1 Pro

 

Yeah, building(or buying) a windows PC is likely to be a better deal, at least in the beginning. The "true value" depends as well on other factors, including how old your current mac equipment is(if you have any). Remember that you can easily install windows on a Mac, though the other way around isn't so easy(and breaks licenses too).

 

If you use Windows 7 Pro (or Enterprise or Ultimate), the memory limit is 192GB. Windows 7 Home Basic was limited to 8GB, and Windows 7 Home Premium was limited to 16GB.

With Windows 8 (or 8.1), you are limited to 128GB of memory unless you get the Pro or Enterprise version and then the limit is 512GB.

 

Home Basic is only for emerging markets which doesn't apply here. And the other versions limit aren't realistically achievable on personal computers neither it is for his mobo; Gigabyte GA-B85-HD3 (32gb max support).

So it's pretty much moot. Just sticking to "no limit" unless with Win7 Home Premium is simpler.

 

This is what I have so far, think I'm going to order this today unless anyone has any further suggestions?

CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (£224.99 @ Aria PC)

CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 Heatpipe CPU Cooler (£15.95 @ Amazon UK)

Motherboard: Asus Z87-K ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£89.84 @ Scan.co.uk)

Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory (£124.99 @ Scan.co.uk)

Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory (£124.99 @ Scan.co.uk)

Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£183.99 @ Amazon UK)

Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 4GB WINDFORCE Video Card (£296.92 @ CCL Computers)

Case: Fractal Design Define R4 w/Window (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case (£79.99 @ Amazon UK)

Power Supply: Corsair CS 750W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£79.98 @ eBuyer UK)

Total: £1210.60

 

In some places it seems overkill in others it would be better to future proof, here is our office standard setup:

Corsair RM850 PSU 80 Gold plus: £115.58
Gigabyte GA-B75-D3V Intel Socket 1155 Motherboard: £61.82
Intel Core i7-3770 3.4GHz Socket 1155 Quad Core £221.15
4 x Kingston HyperX 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel £219.28
Palit NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB Graphics Card £491.16
NZXT Source 530 Gaming Black Full Tower Case £66.00
Samsung 840 EVO Basic 2.5" 500GB SATA III SSD £192.32

Total: £1367.31

I don't think I have ever maxed out or come close to maxing out the CPU, we used Geforce 760's or Radeon 7850's and they were always causing us trouble in some areas.. It's fine once everything is in and culled etc. but until then they were a pain.

We have an account with CCL, so I gather you can get stuff cheaper than that if you search about. 780Ti's are awesome .