Greetings fellow gamers. I am under the impression that i already posted a topic on this issue, but i can't find it, maybe i didn't post it after all.
Also, i am not sure which board would be more appropriate for this topic, so i just posted here because of higher traffic. If the mods think there might be a more appropriate board, i would thank him if he could move this topic there.
Yesterday my 3 year old notebook has entered a stage of disrepair that i think it will be hard to fix. I will proceed to purchase a desktop, and i want some advice on how to build a new one. However, i propose that the priority of this topic should be about builds that can support ridiculous games of DF, such as playing a 200 dorf fort on a 8x8 embark with contaminants and rocks everywhere and acceptable fps. Or maybe even a game of df that does not autocrash when you try a 16x16 embark.
CPU: i am an amateur when it comes to computer engineering, but since df is a single thread application, it makes sense to maximize the minimum clock rate of the components. A rule of thumb i still remember is that high cpu clock means little if the
clock multiplier is large. A high multiplier means the
bus frequency is lower, and can be a bottleneck.
In this regard, i am amazed to find intel's i7s have lower bus frequencies than the cheaper amd phenom ii. from wikipedia:
the
Intel's i7 Westmere gulftown are six cores ranging from 3.2 to 3.47 GHz, but with a bus clock of 133MHz.
On the other hand, [urlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors#.22Thuban.22_.28E0.2C_45_nm.2C_Hexa-core.29]AMD's phenom II Thuban[/url] are a cheaper series of six cores ranging from 2.6 to 3.3 GHz, but with a bus clock of 200 MHz.
In all honesty, i am sure there is more to computer performance than cpu and bus clock, especially when programmers take advantage of multiple cores with multithreading and parallel processing. Concepts like
HyperTransport and Intel's
uncore and
Quickpath interconnect further complicate the issue.
Regardless, we are aware Toady has yet to implement multithreading on DF, which means all these new technologies are probably not being taken into account. Choosing a setup with a higher bus frequency sounds like a more robust solution to me, even when considering how Westmere has 12MB of L3 cache compared to Thuban's 6MB (though Thuban has 6x512KB of L2 cache compared to Westmere's 6x256KB). Additionaly, the fact that amds are cheaper than intels make it pretty clear to me that i should choose amd.
Motherboard: asus. There are gazillions of mb suppliers, some of them quite shady. It's not like asus is a guarantee of quality, but they've been on the business for quite some time and i think that makes them a safe choice. The models i'm aiming for come with an onboard radeon 4250, which is not something you can play crysis 2 with, but is well suited for a retro-indie gamer like me.
RAM: 4x 4GB kingston ddr3 1333MHz. I don't know about you guys, but on Brazil is almost impossible to find RAM other than kingston's. Also, it is hideously expensive to go above ddr3 1333MHz, so that's where i stay.
As for DF, I don't know if there's a limit to how much memory it can effectively use. From my experience on my notebook with 4GB of RAM, Windows starts complaining about df when it reaches the 700MB mark, and df becomes unstable with larger embarks that baloon the allocated memory to 1.5 or more GBs. Having 16 GBs of RAM means Windows should have no problem allocating the maximum 4GB of memory allowed to a x86 application such as DF. I'm just not sure if DF can handle that maximum. Which is why maybe 16GB is overkill.
Author
Topic: Desktop building thread with a focus on playing ridiculous df embarks (Read 1937 times)