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[DFWife]

Preface

My husband loves Dwarf Fortress, but his laptop is err... behind the times at best. It's just not capable of playing the game for very long without bogging down and becoming too clunky to be fun for him. So he steals my laptop or complains (with good reason, mind you) about how his desktop is in the garage until we get the house sold. There just wasn't room for both PCs in the office we have without making the room look small and crowded. Since my desktop has all of our financials and important paperwork I couldn't afford to store it indefinitely (I did offer to rip out its brains and frankenstein them into his computer, but that was a no-go).

Here's the big reason I want to do something special for him - we have a baby due in December and he feels really left out of the gifting this year because everything is for little one. I've always been generous with his gifts in the past because he never had a good Christmas/Birthday until he met my family (seriously - his family may have been poor, but there was an honest lack of effort as well). Bottom line is that I want something that will wow him and make up for the fact that I'm completely useless for several months pre-and-post birth.

What we're Upgrading

His current configuration is a Gen 1 Core i7 (1366/X58) with a mid-range Gigabyte mobo, 2gb DDR2 NVIDIA graphics card, 1TB WD Black HD, and 16gb x 1600 DDR3 Corsair RAM. He's got a huge 1000W PSU in a HAF 832 case. We don't overclock so it's all standard cooling at this time. This system was built just after the launch of the first core i7 - so four years or five?

My Questions to the Forum

-Processor - Ivy Bridge-E (2011/X79) or Haswell (1150/Z87)? We like intel, I've never had a problem - wouldn't know what to do with an AMD besides use it as a hat.
-Mobo - ASUS or Gigabyte or someone entirely different? I've used the both and had success, but if there's a newer, better company clue me in! It's been a while since we've built and I haven't been keeping up like I should have. I'm feeling a bit lost here!
-HD set up - Is SSD the shizz or should I still be using a standard HD? Are SSDs harder to install, causing any issues, etc?
-Case - the HAF has to go! As much as I love it but it's a gargantuan beast that is really freakin' loud. With a baby on the way I need something quiet that still maintains the airflow as I just can't see us liquid cooling anytime soon. Now extra heatsinks and fans... sure, I'm game.
-RAM - do I need to upgrade his RAM? Is there something significantly better? Should I just purchase more to upgrade him to 32gb or go whole hog and get him all new?
-PSU - I think I'm set with 1000W, right? This isn't going to be something that needs more than that?
-Graphics card - How graphics intensive is DF? I'd like to upgrade him to a DDR3 card, but will I need two or just one really good one? Any suggestions? NVIDIA or AMD? When we purchased I was told NVIDIA held the field, but I don't know if that's changed.

Budget

Don't have one. Seriously. I'm willing to bleed a little to make him feel special with this. Let's not go for a second mortgage, but I really do want something nice!

I know I'm forgetting things as I'm trying to type this before he wakes up. Most of all, I want this to be a surprise!

[HFS]

I don't know that much about building computers, but I'm pretty sure 32gb of RAM is ridiculous overkill. Hell, I only have 10gb and I've literally never had problems, outside of programs hitting whatever limit that they/the OS sets.

[sjm9876]

I have 4gb RAM and I can run DF to a playable extent.....
The only thing I can think of that could make it unplayable would be other programs / the OS running in the background.

[DFWife]

His desktop isn't the problem. It's in storage so he doesn't have access to it at the moment. It can run DF just fine, same with most other games. The laptop that he has access to (because I'm OCD about mine and he eats at his computer) is something like 6 or 7 years old and just doesn't have the capability to run DF very well. Heck, even minecraft challenges it on a good day. It was a cheaper (maybe $500) laptop to begin with so I'm not angry with the lifespan or anything. Really this rig is a "sorry that I'm dead useless around the house because I'm pregnant and I'm busy sleeping and puking when I'm not at my sucky job and oh yeah happy birthday/anniversary/Christmas" gift.

basically I want this ting to make Crysis 3 look like easy mode. I want future-proof because I'm not sure when the next time I'll get to do something like this might be. I very much understand that soon we'll have other priorities and I want to get this out of the way.

[Trif]

The most important thing is fast RAM. You have to get as little latency as possible because DF uses RAM for every creature and every tile in every single frame - it's a huge amount of calculations, and RAM is the bottleneck.
The amount of RAM that you get isn't that important, DF can use at most 3 GB (on Windows), but it has to have low latency for high framerates.

[Arni]

Compleatly agree with Trif on the RAM. Furthermore it's not multithreaded as far as I know. So a processor that has fewer cores but greater speed with every core is better.
(That at least in theory)

-HD set up - Is SSD the shizz or should I still be using a standard HD? Are SSDs harder to install, causing any issues, etc?

I've got a SSD as my OS-disk. So my computer, using Windows 7, starts in 15 seconds or so. Loving it.
For having games on it... I dont know. I'm happy with a WesternDigital-Black HDD.
Whatever you do, you should keep the old HDD. Such a tower can hold quite a few drives and it's allways nice to have some extra storage

[jaass]

Buy the biggest single core CPU you can find with about 6 gigs of memory. You can buy  DDR3 1600Mhz or samsung DDR3 green edition. You can overclock the samsung  RAM to 2400MHz but beware of CPU bottleneck. Also remeber df is programmed for 32 bit systems which mean it can only take about 2GB of memory but you tweak windows so it can go to 3GBs.

[Mullet Master]

The most important thing is fast RAM. You have to get as little latency as possible because DF uses RAM for every creature and every tile in every single frame - it's a huge amount of calculations, and RAM is the bottleneck.
The amount of RAM that you get isn't that important, DF can use at most 3 GB (on Windows), but it has to have low latency for high framerates.

I can confirm this. I have a low end laptop that I put fast ram in, and it can run pretty much the same FPS as my otherwise extremely powerful gaming desktop.

[Tellemurius]

Gen3 Ivy Bridge Intel chips have the fastest single thread processing (i would recommend Haswell but that chip is stupid expensive and not enough performance to buck), definite improvement over the old bloomfield chips.

You want the best environment ever for dwarf fortress? Create a ramdisk and watch your I/O speeds fly

[Sensei]

Like others said, for DF, you want fast RAM and a fast clock processor- DF will only use one core.

You might be able to squeeze some extra efficiency out by dedicating one core entirely to DF in a multi-core processor.

[Tellemurius]

Like others said, for DF, you want fast RAM and a fast clock processor- DF will only use one core.

You might be able to squeeze some extra efficiency out by dedicating one core entirely to DF in a multi-core processor.

actually there was some testing done on the forums, the way how Intel manages single thread tasks it alternates to each core so its actually bad if you lock it to a single core

[Putnam]

Buy the biggest single core CPU you can find with about 6 gigs of memory.

No no no no no no no don't do that.

You will never, ever find a single-core CPU that is faster in its one core than modern multi-core CPUs except for some extreme specialist purposes, if even then.

[Thief^]

Like others said, for DF, you want fast RAM and a fast clock processor- DF will only use one core.

You might be able to squeeze some extra efficiency out by dedicating one core entirely to DF in a multi-core processor.

DF is actually two-threaded at least, though one thread massively eclipses the other in the amount of time it takes, you still gain at least a little bit by letting it use more than one core.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

You will never, ever find a single-core CPU that is faster in its one core than modern multi-core CPUs except for some extreme specialist purposes, if even then.

Optimized Desktop for Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress, which is not multithreaded in a real sense. A modern not-junk-for-stock-pc dual core will run DF better than a quad core, unless you can find me a quad where each core is individually stronger than the strongest dual and single cores out there. Because they're very typically not.

[Tellemurius]

You will never, ever find a single-core CPU that is faster in its one core than modern multi-core CPUs except for some extreme specialist purposes, if even then.

Optimized Desktop for Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress, which is not multithreaded in a real sense. A modern not-junk-for-stock-pc dual core will run DF better than a quad core, unless you can find me a quad where each core is individually stronger than the strongest dual and single cores out there. Because they're very typically not.

You guys are starting to confuse cpu speeds and archs.

The way how windows work with multicore processors is by distributing cpu time on each core which is planned out for each cpu workload assigned. By forcing the program to use one core it actually confuses the os and puts in more work to make sure its forced to use one core. Silly as it sounds it does slow the process and its been proven here before (i dont have the time to look in the DF discussion for the thread but it exists).