What specs for a solid, modern computer?

[SouthernLion]

Unfortunately, some idiots thugs decided to break some cars for Halloween while I was at my climbing gym, including mine ; they broke a window, stole my car's id, and killed its radiator so I cannot even drive to go to work for now...

WTF! What a bunch of... wow.

[Sandro]

If you're not already, I suggest plugging your parts list into pcpartpicker.com as they will figure out which stores have the best prices for individual parts and which parts are compatible with each other.

I checked the website (thanks for the advice by the way), and it seems interesting indeed about compatibility.
However I have serious concerns about ordering stuff using the stores it mentions. Mostly it's Amazon sellers, or low-prices suspicious sites from which I can't be sure if it can be trusted or if I really will receive my items once money's sent. Sure the prices are obviously attractive, but ethically speaking I don't like it much.

WTF! What a bunch of... wow.

It happens every day here. Guess it's the same for most cities around the world anyway. Sometimes you just have to be unlucky.

[R4L]

I just built a rig for a friend of mine for about $810. He was going to buy an HP Omen at Best Buy for $1100, but I talked him into building a PC instead because that number is just crazy. With my help, he built a rig that plays everything he wants (PUBG, Fortnite, Runescape) on High at 60FPS at 1080p, and he can do streaming and video production thanks to the 6c/12t Ryzen 2600x. The Omen he had his eyes on has an i5-7400 processor, which is 4c/4t, is enough to play and stream maybe, and it is better for gaming, but definitely not video production. That single core performance is still very much a huge factor, and Intel crushes that compared to AMD for gaming. However, there is zero FPS drop so far in any of the games listed earlier with the Ryzen. The Omen comes with a GTX 1060 3GB graphics card, but he was able to snag a 1050ti 4GB on Newegg or Amazon for $160!

Here's his rig:

---

AMD Ryzen 2600x - 6c/12t
ASUS Strix B350 Gaming motherboard
G.Skill RipJaw V - 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4-2400MHz
GTX 1050ti 4GB superclocked
Cooler Master 212 air cooler
EVGA 80+ Gold Fully Modular 650w PSU
250GB WD Blue SSD - for his OS
3TB WD HDD - for everything else
TP-Link dual band Wi-Fi card

My rig that I built for around $850 2 years ago (and even then it was still very outdated):

---

Intel i5-3570k @ 4.2GHz 4c/4t CPU
16GB (2x8GB) Kingston Hyper Fury-X DDR3-1800MHz
ASUS RoG Strix RX470 4GB GPU
ASRock Extreme mobo
Cooler Master Hyper T4 air cooler
250GB Silicon Power SSD - for OS
3TB Toshiba HDD - Storage
Rosewill Performance non-modular 700w PSU
TP-Link Dual Band Wi-Fi card

[Blue Shadow]

In case people want to know why this was locked:

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=62854

[Caligari87]

Post unlocked after admin discussion. Everyone keep it civil and on-topic, please.

[Get Phobo]

Why was my first post in this thread moved along with all the others? It did not contain any offensive stuff and was fully on-topic.

[wildweasel]

Why was my first post in this thread moved along with all the others? It did not contain any offensive stuff and was fully on-topic.

It had devolved into arguments. Don't continue them, please.

[Get Phobo]

Well, let's see. My advice is this.

In order to get a solid, modern computer suitable for playing Doom 4 and GTA 5 without any issues in high to ultra settings at Full HD, and being able to use fancy GZDoom features, I recommend an absolute minimum of 12GB RAM (with normally 16GB being the choice), a ~4 GHz core i5, i7, i9, or equivalent, with a good single thread performance rating, a ~500GB SSD (any kind, even the lousiest SATA drive will do the trick), and an overclocked GTX 1050 Ti 4GB or better (or an equivalent) -- but I strongly recommend getting a 6GB card (GTX 1060, or the like). I absolutely do not recommend getting a 3GB card because that will unnecessarily limit things the GPU could otherwise cope with without issues.

As an alternative, buying an Intel Core i7-8809G APU with integrated AMD Vega M GH graphics would be a thing since that one is about as fast as a similar i7 with a 1060 MaxQ, all without the need for a graphics card, but the mainboards for those chips tend to be quite expensive (around 300 to 400 euros), so that probably won't be the money-saver one might think it to be.

[Caligari87]

Just in my own experience, new hardware isn't necessarily a requirement. For a long time I was using a n i3-2120 and a GTX 460, both of which are rather old and mid-range at best, but GZDoom and 90% of what I wanted to do worked fine. I recently upgraded to an i7-3770 (several years out of date but super-cheap used), and a GTX 1070 (also super-cheap used because people are dumping their one-year-old cards to get the new RTX model). Overall my system is an ancient hodgepodge from mostly (aside from the GPU) second-hand 2014-era components and it works like a dream.

[Get Phobo]

Yeah. Getting almost-new hardware from the rich kids is the way to go if you are on the lower end of the income scale or just want to keep your money for other things.

[R4L]

Just in my own experience, new hardware isn't necessarily a requirement. For a long time I was using a n i3-2120 and a GTX 460, both of which are rather old and mid-range at best, but GZDoom and 90% of what I wanted to do worked fine. I recently upgraded to an i7-3770 (several years out of date but super-cheap used), and a GTX 1070 (also super-cheap used because people are dumping their one-year-old cards to get the new RTX model). Overall my system is an ancient hodgepodge from mostly (aside from the GPU) second-hand 2014-era components and it works like a dream.

I just got a machine with an i5-3570k inside for free today!

[Graf Zahl]

I recently upgraded to an i7-3770 (several years out of date but super-cheap used),

I have the same, bought in 2012. Why should I upgrade? It's not like 10 years ago when a more recent system often was twice as fast as the previous one. Ionly replaced the graphics card earlier this yer so I think this one can serve me another few years.

[wildweasel]

I stuck with the same AMD Phenom II X4 955 chip for nearly a decade. It wasn't brand new when I got it, of course, but that thing held out like a champ. The only reason I upgraded was because it was the bottleneck holding back my GeForce 1060 (in certain games). Ironically, I played through all of Doom 2016 on that setup with no noticeable performance drop, but a replay of Wolfenstein The New Order had so many minor hangs that it was nearly unplayable before the upgrade.

[leileilol]

Wolf TNO's slowness mostly came from forcing that 'detail upscale' hack (read - it's Lanczos with noise) on the megatexture cache inherited from Rage, while locking all the cvars down hard to the point that the console becomes useless as Bethesda assumes anyone who needs to change a setting is a filthy filthy achievement cheater

It's not too dissimilar from the reckless upscaling the GZdoom complainers do when they expect smooth games from HQ4X'ing a HD texture pack for a placebo of having all the detail in the world from it.

[Get Phobo]

It's not too dissimilar from the reckless upscaling the GZdoom complainers do when they expect smooth games from HQ4X'ing a HD texture pack for a placebo of having all the detail in the world from it.

No, the game is lacking certain features to really make proper use of HD. See this explanation by Graf Zahl.

Namely, a lot of that slowliness comes from the fact that GZDoom's precache feature doesn't really work the way one might expect, instead loading enormous amounts of data on demand -- because filling RAM and VRAM in advance is somehow a no-no. Thus, upon entering a room, the game starts loading stuff into video memory. In case of HD, this can be several hundred MB that need to be loaded at once. Not even the fastest NVMe, hell, not even a RAM disk, can sometimes keep up with the demands.

This has nothing to do with a too-slow GPU or CPU not being able to handle the stuff that is already loaded and is set to be scaled up, anti-aliased, or whatever.