Wondering if this would do the job!

[Henry Pritchard]

Hi all,

before I built myself a gaming pc, around 4 years ago now the only thing I remember was a low spec i5 and not much else. I would love a new pc for loading large cad models, large google sketch up models and running games like ARMA 3 at around 60fps at medium/high settings. i would like the total cost to be below £1000, for pc, screen everything.

Case NZXT S340 MID TOWER GAMING CASE (BLACK/BLUE)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-7400 (3.0GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard Gigabyte Z270P-D3: ATX, LG1151, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM) 8GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card 1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 730 - DVI, HDMI, VGA
1st Hard Disk 1TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply CORSAIR 350W VS SERIES™ VS-350 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable 1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling Super Quiet Titan DragonFly Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking WIRELESS 802.11 AC1200 867Mbps/5GHz, 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD


what do you think?

Obviously this setup isn't anywhere near £1000 but I'm taking into account screen, speakers, mouse, keyboard etc.

 

[Oussebon]

The GT 730 will barely be better than the CPU's integrated graphics (possibly worse) making anything other than low settings unlikely.

Something like this would be a better option:

Case
NZXT S340 MID TOWER GAMING CASE (BLACK/BLUE)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-7600 (3.5GHz) 6MB Cache

FREE Halo Wars 2 with select INTEL® CPUs!
Motherboard
ASUS® H110M-R: Micro-ATX, DDR4, LG1151, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM)
8GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
4GB AMD RADEON™ RX 480 - HDMI, 3 x DP - DX® 12

FREE DOOM with AMD RX 480 Series GPUs!
1[SUP]st[/SUP] Hard Disk
1TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Super Quiet Titan DragonFly Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
WIRELESS 802.11 AC1200 867Mbps/5GHz, 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD
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
ASUS VE248HR 24" LED DISPLAY
Keyboard & Mouse
PCS S300 USB MEDIA KEYBOARD
Mouse
PCS S300 USB OPTICAL MOUSE
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 7 to 9 working days
Quantity
1

Price £995.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-home-office-pc/fQD0bHf7u8/

You may want to give some thought to stretching the budget for 16gb RAM for your non-gaming uses, if those may benefit from more RAM.

 

[Henry Pritchard]

Thank you so much I didn't even think to consider AMD graphics card, I love the sound of that spec. I think for now 8gb would be fine and if I struggle I could always add another 4gb into the system?

Thanks

 

[Oussebon]

I think for now 8gb would be fine and if I struggle I could always add another 4gb into the system?

The motherboard only has 2 slots for the RAM, both of which would be occupied by the 2x4gb sticks. You could easily replace the RAM with 2x8gb (or even 2x16gb if your CAD work benefits from so much, as the motherboard does support 32gb). It would likely work out cheaper to have just bought the desired RAM quantity in the first place, rather than buying 8gb now and then replacing it with 2x8gb later. Though you can always ebay your spare RAM to recoup some of the cost.

For gaming, 8gb is fine:
http://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page3.html
http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=3
The differences between 8gb and 16gb are minimal, even at very high settings and 1440p resolution in most cases.

If you want 16gb now, you could either just pay the extra ~£60 above budget / save up until you are able to do so.

If that's not an option, you could drop the case to the InWin G7 and the GPU to the RX 470. That will free up enough £ such that then increasing the RAM to 16gb would make the spec £1004.

 

[Henry Pritchard]

Thank that's really helpful I'll have a think, my idea is to upgrade as I go along and eventually have something really powerful that can just do whatever I need to, and doing some research CAD can be quick thirty, my current Mac has an i5 and 4gb of ram I think and it can struggle on larger models, so taking the extra money for the 2x 8gb seems a good idea, thanks

 

[Oussebon]

CAD is also quite demanding on the CPU afaik. I'm not sure what mac you have, but anything sold paired with 4gb RAM is presumably quite old and/or low spec. Also some i5s that you find in macbooks and certain laptops are only dual cores, rather than desktop i5s which are quad cores. Thus buying a modern desktop i5 may well prove a substantial upgrade.

One other thing to note is that AMD are releasing their Ryzen R5 lineup on 11th April. These will include 6-core 12-thread CPUs which will substantially outperform the i5 in multithreaded tasks (lower IPC and possibly frequencies, but more cores plus hyperthreading). I probably should have mentioned before so apologies, I keep forgetting that it's only a couple of weeks off now.

AutoCAD may still prefer the i5s anyway, as it seems to prefer Kaby Lake to Ryzen's top end R7 already released: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-9.html I gather because it's quite single-threaded.

AutoCAD only supports multi-core technology in specific areas of the product, including:
•2D regeneration
•MentalRay rendering
To fully benefit from multi-core processors, you need to use multi-threaded software; AutoCAD is predominantly a single-threaded application.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/supp...t-for-multi-core-processors-with-AutoCAD.html

However, if you're not in a rush to buy you might as well wait for 11th April for the benchmarks to come out (I assume the embargo lifts on release day) and make a choice then.

 

[Wozza63]

I don't know much about those workloads, but it's certainly worth looking at Ryzen, if those applications are multi-threaded, a new Ryzen 5 when they are released would win by a mile over an i5. ARMA 3 is quite CPU intensive as well, so it may benefit from the more cores and threads on Ryzen.

 

[Oussebon]

I'm not sure how CPU intensive, in the sense of multi-threading, Arma is. CPU-bound probably, but it may prefer stronger per-core performance, possibly being quite single threaded.

The benches I've seen have shown R7 losing out to the i3 7350k in Arma (unlike obviously most games where the R7 is a good deal better)


http://pclab.pl/art72996-13.html
http://www.techspot.com/review/1348-amd-ryzen-gaming-performance/page4.html

But worth waiting and seeing. I don't see Arma benches very often actually, so it was good to see them with R7. Hopefully R5 will get them too.

Techspot did a simulated R5 vs i5 and i3 bench here: http://www.techspot.com/review/1360-amd-ryzen-5-1600x-1500x-gaming/
Games that hate Ryzen still hate Ryzen (Far Cry Primal), others show some lower average FPS, but higher minimums. A surprise to exactly nobody.

 

[Wozza63]

Ouch that hurts, for such a CPU intensive game, I expected better than that. Though the i3 beating out the 6900k is also noteworthy, even though it's not a gaming chip, it should still destroy an i3 on any game from the last 5 years. Looks like the devs really need to sort that out.

Far Cry Primal is an interesting one as well, identical scores when removing cores shows that it must literally be designed for 4 cores or 8 threads only and nothing more. Most games have at least some ability to scale across more cores these days, even if its not done well.

 

[Oussebon]

Arma III, Far Cry Primal, Fallout 4, and some of the older MMOs like WoW (presumably) do all seem to really like their single-threaded performance.

Arma III, FC Primal, and - we can assume - the older MMOs are all agnostic about Ryzen or Broadwell-E. They seem to dislike the 6900k about as much the R7 1800x. Dislike ofc being a relative term, since 60fps+ is still very playable

Fallout 4, which in my experience will use as many cores and threads as it can get its hands on but still seems to be ultimately limited by the performance of a single thread, is a lot happier with multicore Intels than with Ryzen.

FO4 is not just intensive on the CPU, it's a brute. It's also bizarre. Granted there are other games where the 6900k seems to outperform the R7s, (e.g. Watch Dogs 2 according to Gamers Nexus), but I think FO4 is the only one that I know to be CPU intensive (benefitting from multi-core Intel CPUs almost as much as from the 7700k's speed and IPC) and strongly reliant on single threaded performance, where the 6900k really outperforms the i3 7350k, but the i3 also outperforms Ryzen (for average FPS anyway), due to the game's apparent reliance on a single thread.

Apologies to the OP for the digression.