16GB? i7 vs i5? People with first hand with rebirth?

[hericopterpirate]

Upgrading my PC.

I know there is an underyling issue with performance that is in the software.....That being said, I am running a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram... so time to upgrade anyway I guess.

Replacing CPU/Mem/Motherboard. Graphics card is GTX 590, so just going to leave it for now.

Question is where is money better spent?

16GB vs 8GB? - Normall I would think 8 would be fine but Bernd commented on 6 not being enough for good performance... so will it run better with 16?

or

i5 vs i7(haswell on both)? -Heard most games don't take advantage of HT in i7 so in general i5 is better choice? ie 3.4GZ is better than a 3.2 i7 for gaming?

or

SSD?

Anyone have great/poor performance with 8GB?

[bumpinthenight]

I haven't seen the game eat more then 1.6GB of system memory, I think 8 is enough but fill your boots, 16 is still pretty cheap and you can do amusing things like make ram disks to stuff games into and things.

If you're just doing gaming an i5 has like 95% of the capacility for 66% of the price of the i7s, hyperthreading is still a niche feature that only really comes out to play a positive role under certain conditions. I have a 2600K for instance and I just leave hyper threading disabled, the majority of what I do with my computer can cope with only seeing the 4 real cores.

For Rebirth specifically I've yet to see the thing chew more then a quarter of the total horse power available and its been mostly churning on just two of the four cores, again an i5 is just fine.

Both will also OC to roughly the same height so base clock speed doesn't mean much as long as you get the K variant that lets you OC.

Ahh but do make sure you have an SSD and make sure its from the sata3 generation (specs say stuff like 500+ read/write), those are by far the most revolutionary things to come into the PC world in a very long time.

[Ratez]

It is really more about your budget. I went with the i7 simply because it was only a bit more expensive than the i5 I was looking at.

8gb should be fine, especially if all you run is the game itself.

However you will still experience lag which is unavoidable at certain points of the game. Usually restarting the game fixes it.

SSD - definitely. Be sure to only install your OS on SSD and having a secondary disc for your games though.

I am on 8gb DDR3 with average clock (forgot exactly which because I bought it for my old PC and transferred over). The game runs fine, but as I said sometimes you will experience lag but nothing major.

[hericopterpirate]

Would you see more performance gain from a Ram Disk than a SSD?

[SyberSmoke]

Upgrading my PC.

I know there is an underyling issue with performance that is in the software.....That being said, I am running a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram... so time to upgrade anyway I guess.

Replacing CPU/Mem/Motherboard. Graphics card is GTX 590, so just going to leave it for now.

Question is where is money better spent?

16GB vs 8GB? - Normall I would think 8 would be fine but Bernd commented on 6 not being enough for good performance... so will it run better with 16?

or

i5 vs i7(haswell on both)? -Heard most games don't take advantage of HT in i7 so in general i5 is better choice? ie 3.4GZ is better than a 3.2 i7 for gaming?

or

SSD?

Anyone have great/poor performance with 8GB?

(Scratching Head) This is neither a bug nor an issue with the game. So this should be in the Rebirth Universe should it not?

As for Specs, you can never go wrong with more memory so 16gig tends to be my recommendation. With the added memory you can also use a RAMDisk, a virtual drive made out of your system memory...very fast.

Processor: It depends on how much your willing to pay for the added mhz. Intel adds other features to further delineate the processor types and it can be confusing, there are better sites that have a full breakdown of the benefits...should probably look for them. But typically if you do not wish to pay the premium for .2Mhz per core...then go with the lesser one...bets are you will not even notice a difference.

As for an SSD...do your research first. They are excelent drives, BUT are not meant for document storage just because of how they work. You need to make sure setting are done right and that the OS is also properly configured...like not having your page file on the SSD...it will kill the SSD. They are good, but you should know how they work and how to optimize their use and lifespan. ArsTechnica has done several articles about their underlying tech and how best to set them up.

[bumpinthenight]

SSD - definitely. Be sure to only install your OS on SSD and having a secondary disc for your games though.

Really? I'd advise the opposite and here's the logic: Once your OS is loaded into your 8/16 GB of memory its rarely being read or written to (apart from the swapfile but you move that any ways). So sure you boot quite a bit faster but if all your apps (games) are on a regular old spinny drive you don't get any benefits from the SSD. Unless you're in the habit of rebooting your system *alot* its a waste of the SSD.

Personally I put both the OS and the apps on the SSD and leave the bulk storage of stuff like movies or porn^h^h^h^h...linux ISOs on the cheap big disks.

[bumpinthenight]

Would you see more performance gain from a Ram Disk than a SSD?

My 1600Mhz dualchannel memory creates ramdisks that can read/write at 9000MB/sec, vs my raid0 of SSDs' doing about 950MB/sec that's ridiculously faster. Meanwhile its annoying to setup and the net gains aren't that much higher vs those SSDs, the last time I did it my Skyrim loads went from 3 seconds to 1 second, wooo. SSD is enough, ramdisks are for 'why not' land, especially if you went with a quad channel based system.

[SunofVich]

I have an i7 3.44ghz with 16GB of Ram and a GTX590.

I used to get frame rate drops all over then I set the xrebirth.exe on Nvidia control panel to single GPU use (because 590 is two GPU's on one board) Frames are now stable and smooth although some zones in Omicron Lyrae are still choppy.

[Ratez]

SSD - definitely. Be sure to only install your OS on SSD and having a secondary disc for your games though.

Really? I'd advise the opposite and here's the logic: Once your OS is loaded into your 8/16 GB of memory its rarely being read or written to (apart from the swapfile but you move that any ways). So sure you boot quite a bit faster but if all your apps (games) are on a regular old spinny drive you don't get any benefits from the SSD. Unless you're in the habit of rebooting your system *alot* its a waste of the SSD.

Personally I put both the OS and the apps on the SSD and leave the bulk storage of stuff like movies or porn^h^h^h^h...linux ISOs on the cheap big disks.

Yeah you're right, I forget about the big SSDs. The only game I have been playing lately is moba League of Legends which I can care less as its only benefit would be loading into the one map.

Also my SSD wouldn't be able to fit my steam folder . If I had one game that I play a lot and does utilise SSD such as Planetside 2 I chuck it on my SSD.

[hericopterpirate]

I have an i7 3.44ghz with 16GB of Ram and a GTX590.

I used to get frame rate drops all over then I set the xrebirth.exe on Nvidia control panel to single GPU use (because 590 is two GPU's on one board) Frames are now stable and smooth although some zones in Omicron Lyrae are still choppy.

Nice I was looking for some feedback from guys with those specs, thanks.


As far as SSD stuff.

From what I've seen, it looks like the best option is to basically get a bunch of RAM(16GB+) then turn off the page file so that everything is cached into ram. Anyone else seen this?

Edit: mmm looks like that works in some cases and does not in others since the pagefile is more than an overflow area.

anyone have any experience with this in rebirth?

[bumpinthenight]

Nice I was looking for some feedback from guys with those specs, thanks.

As far as SSD stuff.

From what I've seen, it looks like the best option is to basically get a bunch of RAM(16GB+) then turn off the page file so that everything is cached into ram. Anyone else seen this?

That's been my plan as well, with 16GB I see typically 2GB 'free' as per the performance monitor, as in its using about 3 for OS & apps, 11 for caching and growth and it just flat out leaves about 2 completely untouched but ready to go. I'd still go for an SSD, they are excellent performance boosters for everything your computer does.

Thinking about it some more I'd definitely force single GPU mode first and see how Rebirth performs for yourself. I'm not sure I'd do a whole board/CPU/memory upgrade for Rebirth yet, the game performs like ass for everyone and its barely using your components that you've already got. I'd wait a few performance related patches in and watch where the dust settles. Traditionally Egosoft isn't very good with SLI and in the end you might take that cash and dump it onto a much faster single GPU like a GTX770 or 780 instead to net the best hike in Rebirth's performance.

But I could be wrong (hope I am this time) and Egosoft suddenly learns how to use multiple CPU cores and GPUs way better then they have with any of the previous years of X games in the next few weeks. *crosses fingers but doesn't hold breath*

[hericopterpirate]

Awesome, thanks for the breakdown.

As for upgrading, my proc is old, and the mem for my mb is more expensive then current gen..

So while I don't think an upgrade will help too much with rebirth(till they figure out the bottleneck). I need to upgrade it anyway for Star Citizen, bannerloard, etc.

Will need a new GPU eventually, but system I'm still at least hitting most recommended specs with that, while my cpu is not in the ball park anymore.


As for your memory usage, is that while rebirth is active? ie rebirth uses 2.5GB, is that wrapped up into the 3GB for application OS?

[bumpinthenight]

Welcome That 3GB is without Rebirth (I blame Firefox + Ghostery chewing up 1.2GB plus some other idle but bloated apps). I think the upgrade from Wolfdale to Sandybridge was amazing for me still, was absolutely floored with how gracefully this puppy ramps up to 4.5Ghz of quadcore monstrosity vs the wolfdale that maxed out at about 4Ghz.

Other games will make sweet use of a new I7 and a lot of memory and usually both sides of your 590 card.

[Chips]

Memory? As long as you've got 64bit OS...

Also, with most mobo's capable of handling a significant amount, you could just get 8Gb and upgrade it with another stick down the line?

[hericopterpirate]

Awesome, thanks for the reply, good on 8GB stick.

[bumpinthenight]

You'll want pairs, DDR means Dual Data Rate and it only works at half speed if its not twinned up (two sticks = one pair = full speed, one stick = half rate = half speed). There's also triple channel and quad channel chipsets but you mentioned Haswell and its still just dual.

Now fortunately almost every board under the sun has four slots meaning you can stick two pairs into them so if you bought a 2x4 kit and then wanted to put another 2x4 kit in you're good to go.

[BugMeister]

Memory? As long as you've got 64bit OS...

Also, with most mobo's capable of handling a significant amount, you could just get 8Gb and upgrade it with another stick down the line?

deffo agree - 64-Bit
- and check your hardware..

- my board does triples, so I'm at 12Gig RAM wiv me 6 Crucial Dominators..

[pjknibbs]

You'll want pairs, DDR means Dual Data Rate and it only works at half speed if its not twinned up

You're right in that memory access is halved if you don't double up the SIMMs, but that has nothing to do with DDR--DDR means the memory can return two chunks of data in every clock tick, rather than the one that SDR memory returns. However, memory access speed is very rarely the bottleneck when playing a game--the speed of transferring stuff over the PCI-e bus to the graphics card will generally be the limiting factor there. No reason *not* to get dual SIMMs, of course, because they'll probably be cheaper than buying a single SIMM with the same capacity as the pair, but it won't make the machine half as fast if you don't do that!

[bumpinthenight]

You're right in that memory access is halved if you don't double up the SIMMs, but that has nothing to do with DDR--DDR means the memory can return two chunks of data in every clock tick, rather than the one that SDR memory returns. However, memory access speed is very rarely the bottleneck when playing a game--the speed of transferring stuff over the PCI-e bus to the graphics card will generally be the limiting factor there. No reason *not* to get dual SIMMs, of course, because they'll probably be cheaper than buying a single SIMM with the same capacity as the pair, but it won't make the machine half as fast if you don't do that!

At the start and stop of each cycle eh...well then consider myself learned But I have to insist that running a computer in single channel mode has a distinct sluggishness to it and I still assert the memory is running at half rate , with the OCs within DDR3 reaching towards 2Ghz it ain't so apparent anymore but back in DDR & DDR2 days wow where they ever noticeable if someone put them in mismatching slots or a stick had died.

[Samuel Creshal]

You're still mixing things up.

There's four factors determining transfer speed:

• How many bits a lane can transfer each clock tick: As mentioned, DDR means two bits per tick. Older RAM only had one, but that's over ten years ago by now.
• Clock speed: Well, duh.
• Memory channel width: How many lanes there are in each channel, that's the maximum you can squeeze out of each channel per clock tick. This is currently 64 bits for almost all applications (both on CPUs and graphics chips). If you only have one memory module, this is the maximum width.
• Number of memory channels: This is where it gets interesting and this is what you meant. Memory controllers can have more than one memory channel, allowing them to access multiple memory modules at the same time. "Two modules" does not automatically mean dual channel, the channels are hardwired, and you have to plug the modules into the correct slots to utilize dual channel mode (giving you 128 bits per tick). Additionally, not all CPUs have dual channel architecture. The first Athlon 64 had single channel DDR RAM, for example; some enthusiast and server CPUs have triple or even quadruple channel architecture, giving them 192/256 bits bandwidth, if you have 3 (or 4) modules installed (in the correct slots!). Meanwhile, graphics cards laugh at both and are currently operating with up to eight channels, i.e. 512 bits width.