New PC for a budget £2100

[Kenneth_Bishop]

Hi folks,

I am planning to build a PC mainly for DCS World,  some Autodesk and 3D productivity and look forward to run VR as if Reverb G3 releases ^_SoonTM

Given I am currently staying in Japan, hence my budget will be converted into around ~£2100, and the parts tended to be ~5% cheaper than US Amazon listing.

here's my own list:

 

CPU: i7 - 13700K / KF

MB: Any recommended ASUS/MSI Z790 ?

RAM: Any recommended DDR5 32~64GB ?

GPU: Could be a RTX4070Ti ?

SSD: WD Black SN850X 1TB ?

FAN: Any recommended AIO 360mm ?

CASE: Anything that can mount a 360mm on-top ?

PSU: Any quality PCIe 5.0 supported power unit?

 

PS: both ASUS and MSI provides excellent warranty service in Asia, it would be nice to always have them.

Thanks

 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Kenneth_Bishop
topping the budget

[BitMaster]

Two things Kenneth,

1. AMD Ryzen 7000X3D release comes in a few weeks. They may top Intel's 13th gen, maybe not - but I'd wait and see.

2. 32GB is too little for DCS. Get a 64GB kit right away

 

 

 

[Kenneth_Bishop]

7 hours ago, BitMaster said:

Two things Kenneth,

1. AMD Ryzen 7000X3D release comes in a few weeks. They may top Intel's 13th gen, maybe not - but I'd wait and see.

2. 32GB is too little for DCS. Get a 64GB kit right away

 

 

 

I have heard rumours regarding the game is not well-optimized in ultizing multicore processor?  still will definitely keep a close eye on AMD.

I totally agree that 32GB is quiet insufficient when flying MP missions, especially in Tomcats. But I always wonder that could be the game has a memory leak issues?

 

[LucShep]

20 hours ago, Kenneth_Bishop said:

I totally agree that 32GB is quiet insufficient when flying MP missions, especially in Tomcats. But I always wonder that could be the game has a memory leak issues?

That happens for some reasons, and memory leak issues could well be one of them.

But one of the reasons is certainly the absurd size and format of textures, which are humongous.
It's 4K (4096 pixels x 4096 pixels) on pretty much everything, skins of aircraft, missiles, bombs, trucks, tanks, and...  I really mean everything. Sometimes even 8K (8192x8192 pixels). And it's not just in Diffuse, but also in Specular and Bump maps (contrary to what is seen for most games, which usually are half and even quarter size). Now most textures are also 32-bit, and DXT5 DDS file formats used on textures with no transparencies at all (could have been DXT1 and 8-bit, multiple times smaller and no difference visually in-game to 99% of users). Too many textures now surpass 22MB each (there's hundreds , if not thousands of them), and a number of them actually surpass 100MB (again, that's for each texture file).

Multiply that to the number of objects, terrain and etc (which are always growing in number for each new or upgrade model, and new module, filling your game installation), how it affects VRAM and the huge files loading on and off (and on RAM, from the drive as well), and yeah....

That's why 64GB of RAM has been prefered for a while. It somewhat disguises the problem.

Add all that, and now there's also one reason to why the game takes longer to load the scenary.   Huge game instalation size with gazillions of big files loading...
Then the exaggerated "Preload Radius" settings (makes no sense to use it over 50000) that some ramp up to the max unknowingly, and it gets even worse for RAM.

DCS eats VRAM from GPUs very easily (FWIW, at 4K screen resolution, I see over 10GB all the time, and over 15GB quite often - used, not allocated). Most people don't have GPUs with more than 10GB, so once the game has no more VRAM to eat, it's the RAM that gets used next (which is much, much slower as well). And then 32GB of RAM get to be fully used, then the pagefile (which needs to be 32GB+ because of this) is the next victim, and that one is even slower (even if that's on a good NVME drive).

I have 64GB of RAM for a long time now and, while it helped a lot, the occasional stuttering issues only really seemed to stop when I also got an RTX3090 (24GB of VRAM).
It shouldn't be this necessary.

BTW, about the F-14 Tomcat...
IMHO, these are really mandatory for the F-14B:  HB F-14B External Texture Optimization - Part 1 and also HB F-14B External Texture Optimization - Part 2
And for VR Users probably this one as well: F-14 VR Ultimate Xperience (F14VUX)
Unfortunately, these can not be used online on servers with "pure textures" enabled. 

Still, the F-14 Tomcat at least had users doing optimizations freely on their own, to assist a problem regarding performance related to file sizes. But on most modules (and non-usable aircraft and vehicles) that probably will never happen, and issues will always occur. 

As long as texture artists get so inlove with their own work, that they completely forget about the issues that overkill detail and consequent bigger file size does create, we'll all have these problems, regardless of hardware - it's just far more or less pronounced, depending of it. 

Edited February 18, 2023 by LucShep

[LucShep]

On 2/17/2023 at 1:38 PM, Kenneth_Bishop said:

Hi folks,

I am planning to build a PC mainly for DCS World,  some Autodesk and 3D productivity and look forward to run VR as if Reverb G3 releases ^_SoonTM

Given I am currently staying in Japan, hence my budget will be converted into around ~£2100, and the parts tended to be ~5% cheaper than US Amazon listing.

here's my own list:

 

CPU: i7 - 13700K / KF

MB: Any recommended ASUS/MSI Z790 ?

RAM: Any recommended DDR5 32~64GB ?

GPU: Could be a RTX4070Ti ?

SSD: WD Black SN850X 1TB ?

FAN: Any recommended AIO 360mm ?

CASE: Anything that can mount a 360mm on-top ?

PSU: Any quality PCIe 5.0 supported power unit?

 

PS: both ASUS and MSI provides excellent warranty service in Asia, it would be nice to always have them.

Thanks

 

 

Have a look mate, maybe it can help:
 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by LucShep