Building the Ultimate Gaming Desktop

Alan writes "FiringSquad has just posted my Ultimate Gaming Desktop system building guide in which we take a no-budget but don't-waste-money approach. We even use an Athlon FX-57 in here. This is in fact only day one of a five-day series that will total over 32,000 words..." From the article: "Today's games aren't multithreaded. So, when designing a gaming system only one CPU core is needed. Therefore, the fastest individual core is going to be what's important for having the fastest frame rates and the fastest benchmarks. In real-life, when you're playing a game, your CPU still needs to spend time managing memory, the swap file, all while keeping your real-time anti-virus file scanner and firewall active. Everyone claims to run a clean system, but how many of us have been dropped out of a LAN game because we received an instant message?"

Comments

Hmmm

[Apreche]

The game itself would only run on one core, that is true. But there are lots of other OS and background processes also going on all the time. Wouldn't a dual-core system allow all those other extraneous processes to run on one core while the game gets another whole core to itself? I mean, that's how dual CPU machines tend to work, tell me if I'm wrong and dual-core systems are somehow different.

Even if it is as I would suspect, that doesn't necessarily mean that the dual core would be faster. If the single core has more power on its own than is lost to background processes then there is really never going to be a reason to get the dual core until the game is programmed for it explicity.

Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft?

[alvinrod]

All three of the console manufacturers offer some damned good products that can offer just as good of a gaming experience for a significantly lower price. In fact, I'm willing to bet all three next gen consoles could easily be purchased for much less than the best PC gaming rig someone could build.

First of all, AMD is making a profit on that fancy Athlon chip you're going to want to stick in your PC. Sony and Microsoft sell their consoles at a loss, and Nintendo has a pretty low price tag usually. This means greater value to the customer. This article about the Athlon 64 FX-57 posted on Slashdot earlier, and some of the reviews along with it, suggest that while you're playing 30% more for a top of the line CPU, you're only getting single digit increase in performance in some cases.

Console games are also designed for a hardware that will undergo minimal changes at worst. PC performance will increase dramatically over a relatively short period of time. First of all, this means that you don't have to worry about your console being out of date. The games made for it five years from now will still run on it perfectly fine. This is not very true with PCs, which have a somewhat shorter shelf-life. They're still viable, but they won't run the newest Doom or UT very well. Additionally, with a console you know that the software you buy for it will run at acceptible frame rates now, and not in 18 months when the hardware manages to catch up.

Graphically speaking, consoles will never be able to live up to what the latest and greaest PC can manage, but at their release time, consoles are about graphically on par with most computers. PCs also have the advantage of being for flexible in terms of what they can do. I can do a lot more on a PC (rant on /.) than I can do on a console. However, recently a lot of people have been working on getting Linux to run on consoles, so the advantages of a PC aren't as pronounced in this area any longer. However, on the whole, it's easier to do things related to the internet, word processing, etc. on a PC.

PCs and consoles generally do different types of games well. PCs are more favorable for FPS, RTS, and MMORPG games. Consoles are better for party games, multiplayer games (in the case where you don't have multipler computers and a LAN), and other situations like this. However, because the next generation consoles will be including HDs, USB ports, and other things that make them similar to a computer, consoles could be just as capable of having games like Warcraft 3 and EQ.

Essentially, consoles are becoming more and more like computers every generation. Some, like Nintendo, aren't following this approach as closely as Sony and Microsoft, but the overall trend seems to be in this direction. Yet because they are still consoles they have the simple advantage of "you insert the game and it plays." No installing, worrying if the hardware is good enough, or if you have other necessary things to get the game to run. Additionally, I've never seen a console give me a blue screen of death.

While a PC will always be able to deliver jaw dropping graphics, a console produces a more simplified gaming experience and at a much more reasonable price. Eventually, the only real advantage that the PC has, will amount to nothing when developers cannot figure out how to get the graphics to look any better or get them into a higher resolution.

This is my personal opinion, so take it how you will. For the record, no I don't hate PC gaming (I don't play as many PC games as I do console games, but I do still enjoy playing games like Starcraft, Civilization, and others on a PC.) so don't write me off as a hater. I'm just stating my views and hoping to inspire some intelligent discussion.

I'm saving this article...

[BTWR]

I just saved the HTML of this page (not bookmarked: I actually saved the actual HTML, so I can be sure I can open it up later), and I have just copied it to a CD, put it in a case, and tucked it away in my drawer. I will be opening this up sometime in 2015 (ten years from now) and I will post, most humorously, at 2005's "ultimate gaming machine." I remember purchasing the fastest computer around in june 1997: A Pentium II 266mHz machine. That thing blazed so fast. I wonder how this machine will stack up in a decade (check my site in 2015 if you're curious!)

Re:no-budget but don't waste money approach

[PhotoBoy]

I agree, I have two WD Raptors in RAID 0 and levels load up much faster than with a single disk, and when stuff is cached to the hard drive it's very fast at retrieving it.

Most HD benchmarks apparently show RAID 0 gives no improvement in speed, but I definitely see a massive difference, I originally had the Raptors in a non-RAID config and it was slower.

Re:Today's games aren't multithreaded.

[xenocide2]

You're already somewhat ahead of the game. However, generally speaking, you've got one, maybe two intensive threads.

And your threading for a FPS is going to be highly interdependent. The process is generally:
1. get new packet
2. get input
3. update world and do collision / motion / AI
4. render new screen
5. send data out

3 and 4 are the processor intensive ones, and they're highly related. In fact, one or the other is likely to monopolize the CPU in a game. From anecdotal evidence I've seen, it seems the only real second thread most games use is the sound thread, which is needed mostly for scheduling and managing the sounds to play. Sound is usually not very intensive on processor cycles, especially with modern sound cards carrying most of the work.

I challenge someone not at work to take a screenshot of the Windows System manager with the threads open tab, as a simple verification here. I suspect that ut2k4 and doom3 and bf2 will all have relatively low thread counts; I don't bother with this stuff often but it would also be neat if there's a tool out there to show how the cpu time is divided across threads.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

[Moraelin]

Yes, that would be good and fine, if it wasn't utterly false.

Let's take those in the paragraph you quote, because two are synchronous tasks, and one is a whole 0% to 1% CPU time.

1. The swap file. Do you understand how that works? It a process wants to read 1 byte from the memory location X, that process can't possibly proceed until that byte has been fetched. If that's in a page currently swapped out, it can't possibly proceed before it's finished loading back into RAM.

So offloading swap management solves... what? You wait for that page anyway, and wait exactly as much time anyway, because it's the HDD that's the bottleneck there. So offloading that to another CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit.

2. Your real time virus scanner. Another synchronous task: if your game is waiting (e.g., at a loading screen) for a block to be loaded and scanned by the real time AV scanner, that's it. That thread is stopped and waiting until the scanner is done with that block.

So, again, a second CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit there,

3. Your real time firewall. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, look at the CPU usage for that one. Oops it's at most 1%, most of the time less. Yeah, it sooo makes sense to buy a slower dual-CPU for that.

Here's just some simple maths: if you have a 2.8 GHz CPU and lose 1% of that to the firewall, it leaves you with some 2.77 GHz worth of power for your game. If you get a 2.4 GHz dual CPU so the second one can take care of the firewall, you're left with a 2.4 GHz CPU for your game. Ooops, so dualies are still a losing proposition after all.

So, no offense, all I see there is one aspect of why premature optimization (in this case, of hardware) based on false assumptions and lack of measurement is bad. That's just the problem: you end up dumping time and/or money and more often than not end up with something actually _slower_ than the straightforward solution. In this case you dump a bunch of cash on a l33t dual-core solution, based on false assumptions about what those processes do and how, and actually end up _slower_ than a cheaper one-core solution. Was it worth it?