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[Armagetz]

I'm  in the process of putting together a computer together that will be an entertainment hub.

TV DVR with lots of movies on the HD on top of that, which is streamed on my network via the household as well as being a gaming hub.

I even toyed around with the idea of having two upper end non-SLI video cards to drive two different displays (monitor and TV) each playing an independant game. However control issues with such a set up proved that to be impossible.

I already know I'm going to put at least a 3770k in there, in spite of the complaints from some that it is pointless for gaming, the i5s suit that better. The high degree of multitasking this rig will do compensates this nature as far as I am concerned.

Two questions though:

1)Can I play with settings so as to dedicate a core to the dwarf fortress thread?

OS and other things can hyper thread the other three if they want, but I want to feed that CPU hogging monster to stave off FPS death


2)Due to the heavy CPU load that dwarf fortress requires, especially compared to most games, is there any argument for significant performance improvement by upping that 3770k to a 3930k with all of the perks that come with an X79 chipset

[miauw62]

This should either be in Life Advice or DF: General, I think. You can move it yourself, the buttons saying "Move Topic" and "Lock Topic" at the... I think bottom right of your screen.

[foil]

If you are putting it in a htpc case then you wont need a "k" series overclocking chip as you cant really overclock much in a tiny case without adding huge loud fans, especially annoying if its going under the tv.

Dwarf fortress not supporting multicore would make adding a 6 core cpu to the pc pointless and a waste of money, it would probably be even slower with the higher core count due to running at a slower speed and then not overclock as far due to more heat from extra cores.

Even on my i5 gaming/shares machine has never struggled with lack of cpu power and thats playing loads of new multicore games while sharing and sometimes running a linux VM at same time.  The pc also never struggles if i remote desktop into a 2nd account from ancient laptop for docs work while someones gaming at the keyboard and thats with it opening 2x user sessions and 2x users apps on the machine at same time.

What other parts are you buying as you could probably save a few 100$ without it making any difference to gaming or shares.

[Armagetz]

It's going in a full tower.

And the extra cores come in handy for the multitasking aspect this computer will be subject to. I won't be going less than a 3770k. I don't want a TV on the other side to house to stutter because of not being enough available threads while I'm doing something else.

I know dwarf fortress can't use the extra cores, but that isn't the only difference. Significantly larger caches and speedier everything thanks to the X79 chipset. I don't know how sensitive DF is to having more cache and faster RAM bus, or is it just a function of clock speed

[mnjiman]

This should either be in Life Advice or DF: General, I think. You can move it yourself, the buttons saying "Move Topic" and "Lock Topic" at the... I think bottom right of your screen.

Seeing other people attempt to moderate OTHER threads is REALLY annoying.

[Sigulbard]

Couldn't you just build a normal gaming PC?

[RenoFox]

Couldn't you just build a normal gaming PC?

The problem with modern gaming pc:s is that they have many cores for games that use multithreading. DF doesn't use it, so a quadcore may well be worse for it than an older dualcore.

I'm looking to update my pc too, and need advice as well.

[vjek]

My recommendations, and my narrow biased opinons: (none of this is meant as a personal attack, just 25+ years of PC experience talking)

Intel Desktop board. (as in, Intel brand, not a clone board) something like a DZ77BH-55K or newer
Fastest RAM you can afford without overclocking.
Fastest i3 CPU you can afford. (i3 2130/3240 or similar)
Intel 520 SSD, in whatever size you can afford.

The only thing an i5 or i7 is going to get you is 6MB or 8MB of CPU cache, instead of 3MB you get with the i3.  Yes, it will help, but not significantly enough to warrant the price jump, imho.

There's no point in have 5 or 7 CPU cores idling while you play DF.  Just a waste of money and electricity.

Also, context switching will reduce DF performance.  Once you get over 50 processes, DPC/ISR latency alone may be enough to introduce human-noticeable latency, depending on your hardware.
In other words, you'll be better off buying an Inspiron 15 model 3521 i3 Dell Laptop for $380 and replacing the HD with an SSD ($100) and dedicating it to DF, rather than having a computer running 70+ processes at once.

For reference, WinXP requires as few as 12-14 "operating system" processes to run any game you'd care to play, today.  Similarly, Windows 7 can be run with as few as 24-28 "operating system" processes and perform the same role.  If you restart your system, login, wait 5 minutes, and look at your current list of processes from all users on your current computer, and it's over 20 on XP or over 30 on Win7, your system is not tuned for gaming.  It's tuned to be slow.

A properly configured SSD gaming machine, running win7, since Jan 2012, should start up from cold power on to login screen in 6-10 seconds.  Even if your current HD based PC takes longer than 60 seconds to boot up, you should educate yourself on how to fix that before you go spending money on new hardware.  Nothing worse than seeing good hardware go to waste!