EVE Technology Lab

Hi all,

Sometime over the next couple of weeks I will be buying/building a new PC. I am somewhat out of date with hardware though, by a few years. I used to be in the know, but I'm more of a software guy now.

Anyway, I am looking for advice on what to buy/build for a great Eve experience. I currently have a Dell XPS 420 which is about 3 years old now and can't run eve too well.

I have a budget of around £1,500 ($3,400).

Cheers

Now the GTX 560 is a great card, but a generation old already so if you are looking to upgrade I would wait just a bit more for either the 660 line or go for the Gtx 670 that got released in the wild last week (in norway, and we aren't normaly first to get these)


(googles what 3500$ would be,Hmm, I'm not getting 3400 usd for 1500 GBP, but 2500 usd, nit-picking I know)
Honestly with that big a budget I would consider the GTX 680 (if not two), and the more GPU RAM you have, the more clients you can run :)

I put together a personal shopping list for fun last month and think it had something like an i7, 12 gig RAM, 120Gig SSD, 4TB storage, GTX 680 (only single card), etc etc for about 2500 USD.

Cheers guys.

I have no problem putting it together myself. I just didn't keep up to date with processers/graphics the last few years so I haven't a clue with what is good atm.

Thanks for the advice!

Well, he was looking at spending max 3500 usd, so figured getting something together that would hit that almost figure, was the best way to go.

You can always downgrade some stuff, or you know, use it for stuff OTHER than EVE ;)

You can buy from anywhere in Europe, aslong as it's a country that is in EU - and get cheap shipping.

I usually buy most of my non-critical hardware in Germany, since i can get it ~20-30 EUR cheaper there, than here in Denmark.
Others i know buy their stuff in Poland, and save even more.

And only downside is a day extra shipping, just make sure that the waranty for the things you buy, actually allows you to send it to the manufacturer, otherwise you might get royally screwed in the ass, by where you bought it, if you ever have to RMA it. lol

Small hint on the memory, since often this is simply stated wrongly. Normal 32bit applications cant and wont use more than 2GB of ram, do to software/windows limitations. So u need a 64bit compiled and correctly flagged program to be able to even utilize more than 2GB on a single application. Keep in mind, that many games are still 32bit applications and even if they are 64bit compiled wont make use of the extra RAM, since the game still has to run "well" on 32bit systems.

So the actual math with 4GB ram and even a 32bit windows is this: from the 4GB, windows can only use around 3.2-3.6GB since the GPU hardware also reserves some for mapping. Than Win7 needs around 150MB for itself, which leaves us at around 3GB while keeping some Windows Cache intact. Now u have 1GB left for Firefox and other applications and still have 2GB max. useable RAM for one EveClient. Actually 2GB is enough to run 3 clients simultaneously.

So if u don't plan to simultaneously quadruple with 4+ clients at around 600-700MB per client or have photoshop and 3dsMax open while u play, anything over 4GB is simply wasted and unused RAM. Ofc at your price point this might not be your biggest concern regarding RAM prices :)

bye Andy

Even on a 32 bit application, more ram helps. if it's accessing the disk, for example. Ram that's not actively in use, should be being used by the disk cache. which should help.

Yeah the logic for years was simply: more = better and cheap more ram = also better.

If u would have read my entire post, in the last section i specifically noted that u need more ram, if u want to run multiple clients. So yes your 8GB PC allows u to run 6 clients simultaneously and wow u even run WoT and heck u run ton's of other ****.

I simply question the actual case of how many "gamers" run 2 games at the same time or even 7 like u, state as a valid reasoning for owning more ram.



I also stated that u still have 100-200MB left for cache even "if" Eve would actually use all the 2GB ram, since thats not the case u even end up with several hundred MB for caching. Also simply throwing more ram for caching wont increase disk&game performance linear, u may see a speedup from 4MB cache to 128MB cache, but going from 512MB to 4GB makes no difference.
Also the cache pages are often flushed and the way games access there data is very specific and complex, so the cache wont do "wonders" here.



Try research how windows actually allocates its memory and what is actual allocated and "used" memory, what is virtual memory and what is reserved for cache. Now also research what memory type is used for what and for what reason.


I also noted since ram is this cheep the more = better thinking is a valid point, i just don't like the "vague" assumptions what more ram actually does. So feel free to e-peen your PC as much as u like :p

My point is simply, if u would build 2 exactly same PC where one has 4GB Ram/Win32 and the other 8GB ram/Win64, u than start a webbrowser + skype and start one EveClient u wont notice any difference. If u add more clients simultaneously and a lot of other applications u will reach the 3.4GB limit eventually.



bye Andy


PS: If u actually want some real extra worth from your 64bit OS and all your RAM, consider setting up a ramdisk and copy eve to it, this ofc wont make a huge impact if u already own a fast SSD.

If u insist so, last time i checked application memory is allocated by the application and not by windows. Also u still confuse commited and physically used memory.

Btw here is a good article of many other articles and benchmarks, that all show similar trends and conclusions. Upgrading from 4GB to 8GB wont net any FPS gain and only increase the loading performance on none SSD systems or very heavy multi-tasked environments.
SSD or 8 GB of Memory: Researching Reasonable Upgrade Options.


bye Andy

PS:


This ofc depends on the GPU memory size, since this determines the "lost" use-able memory on the 32bit os, but simply regarding sheer application performance, yes a 32bit compiled Application on a 4GB, 32bit Windows will always perform better or at least the same, than on a 4GB 64bit windows. This is because the 32bit compiled application cant use any of the 64bit register benefits and also the 64bit OS has to-do more expansive context switches between its 64 and 32 bit processes.