EVE General Discussion

Have you considered:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Long_abacus.jpg

?

No, but the 3d processor is fabulous. Just like real life.

If all you need it to do is run Eve and the internet, you can use a low end prebuilt like this one:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/cyberpowerpc-gamer-ultra-desktop-amd-fx-series-8gb-memory-1tb-hard-drive-black-blue/4593000.p?id=1219775850518&skuId=4593000

You could probably get by with less in terms of processor power and GPU, if you don't play on highest settings.

By comparison, I normally run about 4 clients at 60fps with no lag on a 6 year old HP with a GeForce 440 and 8 GB of RAM, so the above unit should be fine.

You might want to try some google & youtube searches - for build guides. While you may NOT want to actually build a computer yourself, they can be good, educational resources for understanding how to squeeze the most performance from limited resources when you have a shop do it for you.

In particular, - searches similar to: "500$ Computer build guide" or '20## Christmas Computer build guide for 500, 1000, 1500$' or similar types of searches can give you some ideas / things to look at.

Honestly it tends to be difficult to find a good all in one, pre-built computer at a reasonable price. 'Mind it can be done with a bit of luck and a keen eye. Asus is prone to configuring some decent, modestly priced machines. Yet even there, you need to be cautious. I mean, buying a type writer that will check email and 'surf' the web is easy, at a reasonable price.

One thing to consider is that the i3-6100 is faster for single core processing (which is the case that best matches up with Eve) than the i5 series. I'd suggest considering putting that money into the GPU instead and put the money into a 960, or even a 970, if Eve if your primary use case for the system.

The i5, of course, being quad- rather than dual-core, would be a better choice if you're planning to do other work with the computer like video encoding that benefits from multithreaded processing.

(Thanks to CCP Saviour and CCP Sledgehammer for providing the benefit of their long hours in our test lab to help inform this advice.)

Edit: Also, there are new generations of graphics cards coming available in the next month or so from AMD and Nvidia that may allow you to get more for less. I can't speak to their availability, and it might not be possible to have a system ready for June 30th that uses such a card. However, might be worth starting with a super-cheap alternative GPU (or even the GPU you already have) and swapping out for a new one in a month or two if you do the research and feel that's the way to go.

I'd also suggest the TI-88 or TI-89. Some real spiffy cutting edge hardware there :)
The 89 even features a titanium build..

The Eve client is certainly multithreaded. However, the bulk of the CPU usage of the client is in the Python interpreter, which is restricted to working on one thread at a time by Python's Global Interpreter Lock. Multithreading in Python speeds things up a great deal when many threads are waiting on I/O (such as rendering with the GPU or reading from or writing to disk or the network), but not so much when things are CPU-bound.

Python processes are completely independent of each other, so yes, if you're running multiple instances of the client, you might benefit from more cores depending on what you're doing with each client instance. (If one client is CPU-bound and the others are mostly idle, it won't help much.)

OP, For what its worth it may be worth waiting a little while. The new polaris GPU's are around the corner (3-4 weeks) and look capable of offering some danm good power for $200. I'm not sure about CPU's but again the new AMD chips are coming in the next few months, So if you were to go for a current AMD cpu it'll be pretty danm obsolete within the next 6 months.

I don't know what the timeframe for xp discontinuation is off my head, But could I advise the devs to maybe look at holding it off until the next major Chip releases are done so people don't buy some almost obsolete stuff for similar prices to what the new stuff will probably release at.

Maybe put this in the requirements? Not only what is needed but what you should look for: more cores or more clock. On GPUs it's quite simple: more or better MORE power. But with CPU it's good to know which way to look.

I use to by prebuilt store PCs and i found them extremely lacking in performance unless you spend close to $900-$1000. The would barely run windows and another program, were often slow, and had a lot of things i didnt need on them while lacking things i did need.

So i started having HP custom build my PCs and have done so for the last 12 years. I ended up with better PCs to fit in my budget with features that were important to me and less extras i didnt care about. It also allowed me to maximize areas up to my max budget. For example If i had a $600 budget and was happy with the PC at $500, i could upgrade the processor and graphics card until i reached $600.

http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/towers-349501--1/pavilion-desktop-349512--1#!

I am not a fan of AMD processors. I personally found them to overheat easily and run terribly under a load. I havent used on in over a decade so the may not be as bad now. The i series from intel is a great line of processors. I run an older i7 and it runs awesomely even at 5 years old. I like nvidia for graphics but that more personal taste as i had a bad experience with an ATI card and never went back.