Ryzen for Quake Champions

With the news of Quake Champions on the horizon (and the beta a few weeks away) I've been really considering building a new PC. Due to time constraints I may not be able to build it myself. But the quote system here on PCSpecialist may give me the PC I need to play Quake Champions and other games.

I've been swayed by the news of AMD new Ryzen CPUs and with the recent partnership between AMD and Bethesda, it makes sense to be part of it.

This is the spec of PC I've gone for, wondering if it might be overkill.

Case
InWIN G7 BRUSHED EFFECT DARK GREY CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Eight Core CPU (3.6GHz-4.0GHz/20MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard
ASUS® CROSSHAIR VI HERO (DDR4, 6Gb/s, CrossFireX/SLI) - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB HyperX FURY DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
8GB AMD RADEON™ RX 480 - HDMI, 3 x DP - DX® 12
1st Hard Disk
250GB Samsung 850 2.5" EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk
500GB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 16MB CACHE
M.2 SSD Drive
128GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3100MB/R, 700MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
12x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW
Power Supply
CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
CoolerMaster Hyper 212X (120mm) Fan CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Extra Case Fans
2x 120mm Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof)
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
DVD Recovery Media
Windows 10 (64-bit) Home DVD with paper sleeve
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Monitor
BENQ ZOWIE XL2730 27" E-SPORTS MONITOR
Warranty
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)

Vega is on the horizon so the above specs should be suitable when things have settled.

The major concern at the moment is the motherboard and cpu supplies. Hearing that their are shortages (currently) so not sure if I should order now or wait until supplies come in.

What are your thoughts?

Max budget? No price on spec you've put up but I assume with an 1800x it will be pretty pricey which, for a 480 gpu system, is not going to be a sensible balance of £:gaming performance.

SlimCini said:

Max budget? No price on spec you've put up but I assume with an 1800x it will be pretty pricey which, for a 480 gpu system, is not going to be a sensible balance of £:gaming performance.

Click to expand...

I was expecting to pay around £2000 and this build is slightly over by about £20 which is fine. I'm looking to have a high spec PC that shouldn't need an upgrade right away and last a fair while. Granted this is new tech and I am playing the caution card for now.

I've always gone with Intel so this would be a first for me to have AMD instead. I've eagerly watched youtube channels and gathered as much info as I can just to be sure. Whilst Ryzen is still pretty new tech there is plenty of positive hype - hence the reason I'm looking AMDs way this time.

One thing I forgot to mention, official specs for Quake Champions have not been released, but one of the PCs at Pax East 2017 had the following specs:

Ryzen 7 1800x CPU, an XFX RX 480 GPU (8GB), 16GB RAM, and an Aorus GA-AX370 motherboard

and according to PCGamer journalist 'ran like butter' so I am hopeful that this set up will work, but if I can scale it back to save a bit I'll gladly do that,

£2k for a PC with a 480 is crazy imbalanced when you could a 1080 build. Unless Quake is somehow going to be massively reliant on CPU only which I doubt (but correct me if i'm wrong).

Case
InWIN 503 MID TOWER GAMING CASE (WHITE)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-7700k (4.2GHz) 8MB Cache
FREE VR Game Bundle with select INTEL® CPUs!
Motherboard
ASUS® PRIME Z270-P: ATX, LG1151, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 - DVI, HDMI, 3x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
FREE FOR HONOR or GHOST RECON: WILDLANDS with select GTX 10 Series GPUs!
1st Hard Disk
1TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
M.2 SSD Drive
128GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3100MB/R, 700MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply
CORSAIR 650W CS SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Super Quiet Titan DragonFly Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365
Anti-Virus
BullGuard™ Internet Security - Free 90 Day License inc. Gamer Mode
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Monitor
BENQ ZOWIE XL2720 27" E-SPORTS MONITOR
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 6 to 8 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,980.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z270-pc/FxQ564bR2A/

Initially that was my consideration. I was looking to build an Intel based system and was certainly looking at a 1080 or something similar. I have been swayed by Ryzen and the partnership between AMD and Bethesda (the team involved with Quake Champions). Especially as Doom 2016 was given Vulcan support and I would assume that Quake Champions would also get that support to. A 480 was used in the spec at Pax East which is my reasoning for including it here, but with Vega around the corner I thought it might be better to stick to an all AMD based system. The Crosshair Motherboard does support SLI so I have not ruled out the 1080 entirely.

The 1800x Ryzen is a bonkers choice for a gaming computer IMO, especially when paired with a 480. It shouldn't matter a jot about the partnerships when comparing the difference in performance between the cards, regardless of optimisations.

If you are absolutely set on Ryzen then I would go with a 1700, there's no need for the 8 cores in a gaming system.

No doubt my choice would be an overclocked 7700k in your shoes, I just can't follow your logic.

You're probably right, I've not seen any specs yet to confirm what would be ideal for running Quake Champions - hence my caution for the moment.

I refer back to the specs I saw on PC Gamers site:

Ryzen 7 1800x CPU, an XFX RX 480 GPU (8GB), 16GB RAM, and an Aorus GA-AX370 motherboard

Which are my reasons for looking at this spec. But I have not made a final decision yet so I have noted all the comments and will reconsider before making a final decision.

Personally I am not a fan of overclocking, but may consider in this in a future build.

This is the build I'm currently considering....

This doesn't include your monitor selection but I think everyhting else is in place. Some things to note....

The core CPU speed is 20% faster, this WILL make a difference if the game makes good use of the CPU. The fact that the Ryzen has 8 cores is VERY unlikely to make any difference in almost any game (Simulators may be the exception).

The RAM is night and day faster, this will make a difference in some games where the memory processes are nicely streamlined.

There is no compromise on the motherboard, it has a fantastic feature set (2 x M2 slots, Wifi, etc)

The GPU is the best single card solution you can get as far as I know. There is no way a 480 is going to compare IMO, even in an optimised game. In non-optimised games it's simply a no-contest. It'll blow most completely out of the water.

The PSU and the Cooling solutions are just my ideal options. Money can be saved here but I personally wouldn't scrimp in these areas.

With your budget and usage in mind the below is definitely what I would be looking at. I know the ti is a complete luxury but I couldn't live with spending all that cash on the 1080 without going that little bit further for the monster Ti

Case
FRACTAL DEFINE R5 BLACK QUIET MID-TOWER CASE
Overclocked CPU
Overclocked Intel® Core™i7-7700k Quad Core (4.20GHz @ up to 4.8GHz)
Motherboard
ASUS® ROG STRIX Z270E GAMING: LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GB, Wi-Fi - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti - HDMI, 3x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1st Hard Disk
NOT REQUIRED
M.2 SSD Drive
256GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3100MB/R, 1400MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 850W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Corsair H100i V2 Hydro Cooler w/ PCS Liquid Series Ultra Quiet Fans
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 6 to 8 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,946.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z270-overclocked/sd4HJwGwf7/

Thank you both for the specs and advice. I will bear both of these in mind before making a decision.

Just to add to the above about Ryzen for gaming. With regards to official demos, well, beware of official demos - as Gamers Nexus puts it:

At this point, you might be left feeling disillusioned when considering AMD’s tech demos. Keep in mind that most of the charts leaked and created by AMD revolved around Cinebench, which is not a gaming workload. When there were gaming workloads, AMD inflated their numbers by doing a few things:

In the Sniper Elite demo, AMD frequently looked at the skybox when reloading, and often kept more of the skybox in the frustum than on the side-by-side Intel processor. A skybox has no geometry, which is what loads a CPU with draw calls, and so it’ll inflate the framerate by nature of testing with chaotically conducted methodology. As for the Battlefield 1 benchmarks, AMD also conducted using chaotic methods wherein the AMD CPU would zoom / look at different intervals than the Intel CPU, making it effectively impossible to compare the two head-to-head.

And, most importantly, all of these demos were run at 4K resolution. That creates a GPU bottleneck, meaning we are no longer observing true CPU performance. The analog would be to benchmark all GPUs at 720p, then declare they are equal (by way of tester-created CPU bottlenecks). There’s an argument to be made that low-end performance doesn’t matter if you’re stuck on the GPU, but that’s a bad argument: You don’t buy a worse-performing product for more money, especially when GPU upgrades will eventually out those limitations as bottlenecks external to the CPU vanish.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreview...review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks/page-7

Click to expand...

Even in DOOM (Bethesda), which runs very well on just about anything and is supposed to be very well optimised and is used ad nauseum by AMD Radeon graphics fans to argue that Vulkan is the future, there's no reason to spend more on an R7 1800x rather than an i7 7700k:

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-ryzen-7-review/5/
https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-1700-test/4/#diagramm-doom-vulkan-fps

While in Fallout 4 (also Bethesda, using a pretty old engine here), an R7 1800x wouldn't be the smart choice:


I've posted a slightly longer list of concerns about the statements AMD received in support from certain games developers: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...et-Ryzen-Build&p=385611&viewfull=1#post385611 The TL;DR is that those developers (Oxide with Ashes of the Singularity, Creative Assembly with Total War titles, and Bethesda with DOOM but also with Fallout 4) aren't automatic reasons to get excited about the future of Ryzen. I think patience and frankly caution will be required to see what happens.

Also for partnerships, Civ 6 is partnered with AMD Radeon and still runs better on Nvidia even in DX12 afaik (even my GTX 970 PC benefits from DX12 last I measured...). And I think Shadow of Mordor is partnered with Nvidia but iirc always ran a bit better on AMD cards. So even then partnership isn't everything.

While it's not like Ryzen can't run most games, it doesn't seem to make sense to get it for gaming compared to Intel unless you're primarily using the PC for other things where you really want those lovely 8C/16T.

Hi,

The extra cores aren't going to be used for gaming as others have said but for those that want to game and chat and stream all at the same time, might mean the extra cores makes sense. The Ryzen R5 chips are more likely to be the popular choice with gamers, because they are likely to offer 4 cores, 8 threads and higher clock speeds. I don't know if a release date has been announced yet so it's difficult to say if waiting for it is an option.

Certainly if you want to do many things whilst you game an 8 core CPU might be the right one for you. If you are planning to keep the PC for many years then maybe 8 cores will be utilised for gaming in the future and perhaps an 8 core system offers longevity but your guess is as good as mine on that one. Certainly for now fewer cores and higher clock speed seem to make more sense.

Let us know what you decide.

Frank100

It seems highly unlikely that the Ryzen quad cores will outperform the Intel ones in gaming (especially with the SMT issues as they stand). They may be competitive against the i3/ possibly lower i5 end of the market. Since the R7 1800x is significantly more expensive than the i7 7700k I don't think budget is a reason for this user to have to hold off. The 7700k's direct price competitor for Ryzen, the R7 1700, is already out and benched in games and just doesn't cut it though for a production environment it looks amazing.

Perhaps the Hexacore R5 will be a good option for people who would be looking at an R5 due to cost but also want to stream. I'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out actually.

If the OP did want to stream an OCed Intel 6-core may be the better choice. For recording gameplay, using Shadowplay would mean there would be no CPU performance impact.

As for games using more cores, I can't see much happening there for a few years. It's not like multicore CPU's don't exist and aren't popular e.g. AMD FX range, with which the Creative Assembly even gave away copies of their flagship title. They are one of the developers issuing a supporting statement to AMD for Ryzen. However, I'd think we're extremely unlikely to see the situation actually change in the Total War series for some time, for reasons outlined in my other post (i.e. they have an engine, it basically works, and they seem to be building 3 more titles at least on it - just like Bethesda squeezing out FO4 on the old and now damn tired gamebryo based engine).

Even Ashes of the Singularity, one of the few games where the 8-core Intel CPUs outshine their quad core counterparts (in the game's dedicated CPU-test benchmark at least) sees Ryzen's R7 1800x barely compete with the i7 7700k if you switch off the 7700k's hyperthreading :/ If you let the i7 have its hyperthreading, it's not even close. http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreview...review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks/page-7

So while we need a crystal ball to be sure, one would be braver or richer than I am to bet on Ryzen for gaming over the next few years.

Edit: R5 to launch on 11th April apparently https://videocardz.com/67342/amd-ryzen-5-to-launch-on-april-11th
Though it seems the quad cores don't have stock frequencies as high and the 8 and 6 core ones...

It seems playing the waiting game seems to be the only thing to do. I'm certainly hearing positive things about Ryzen 5 for gaming, but it all comes down to time cost and support. So far no news on Quake Champions release or even details of the beta have been revealed except that it will enter a closed beta in the next few weeks which will be small. So it could be a couple of months before we actually know.

Then there is the situation with the new Radeon 500 series and Vega cards on the horizon. With little or no knowledge on what to expect or how the support will be at the start.

While there are positive things being said (by AMD's press videos https://videocardz.com/67408/amd-demos-ryzen-5-1600x-performance ) about Ryzen 5, it's positive in the context of going up against an Intel i5 (and the more expensive i3s at the lower end of the R5 scale. I expect it will do well against Intel's i5s, especially the slower ones e.g. i5 7400, with the extra cores and threads possibly helping smooth out minimum FPS in some games better than the i5, while potentially giving similar averages.

But if you can afford an R7 (and therefore an i7 7700k) and were indeed poised to buy one, there's not much point going for an R5 unless the objective is to own the Ryzen that offers best value for gaming, rather than the CPU offering best performance in your budget.

I am quite desperate for Vega to deliver...