I’m looking to buy a small windows PC because my macbook pro can’t cope with anything intensive and I really want to play some decent steam games and potentially experiment with unreal engine or lumberyard again, so I’m looking for some advice. Getting an eGPU is out the question, I just don’t like the cons
-high cost
-performance loss from thunderbolt connection
-limited to macbook cpu (won’t this still get hot)
-high cost for enclosure + cost of GPU
-Need to install windows bootcamp and my 128SSD is already almost full
So my only other options are to get the nuc hades box or build a custom PC
Now, I really, really like the small form factor and apparently you can play decent games on the nuc and even VR but a small part of me wants to experiment with RTX ray tracing (2080Ti) and sacrifice smallness for a more long term machine.
I’m thinking about trading in my old mac mini for some extra dosh.
The build I’m looking at is…
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Eight Core CPU (3.6GHz-4.4GHz/36MB CACHE/AM4) (not sure if intel is better)
16-32 GB ram
Nvidia RTX 2080Ti (got to be Nvidia)
240GB SSD
Water cooling or fan (not sure)
What do you think, will I be happy with the NUC or a custom build (lasting 10years for next upgrade)
Neither. Ten years is a completely unrealistic time frame to expect one machine to last. Eight years ago the top of the line graphics card would have been a GTX 480. According to benchmarks a GTX 480 wouldn’t even be able to achieve 30 FPS in Skyrim SE. Modern games wouldn’t even see half of that frame rate.
Only purchase this if you want a highly portable machine without having it be a laptop. Everything else about that machine is just trash. Quad core processors are right on the border of being completely worthless for modern games and the AMD Vega M GPU is only slightly faster than that eight year old GTX 480.
This computer is very unbalanced. If you have money to afford an RTX 2080 Ti then you have money to afford a far better processor and solid state drive. I wouldn’t pair anything less than a 3900X with that GPU, and I would have at least a 1TB NVMe SSD. If that’s too expensive then you shouldn’t buy an RTX 2080 Ti.
Realistically a machine can only last about six years before it’s completely surpassed by mainstream hardware and once you’re past eight years a budget machine will be superior. Upgrading every four to five years is my recommendation.
Damn, I was really keen on the nuc, like really keen, they pitched it as being able to play the latest AAA games and VR, yeah I realise 10 years is probably a little optimistic.
So you would go for a better cpu and a 1TB, what would be your choices from here.
My recommendation is to replace or upgrade the machine every four to five years. We’re currently one year away from the release of a new console that will have 8 cores and 16 threads. A 3700X is the lowest I would buy for a machine expecting to last that long. A 3900X has a significant advantage in development thanks to the huge cache.
If you’re willing to open the machine up and replace the GPU yourself (it’s seriously easy to do and there are tons of videos showing the steps involved) I would purchase an RTX 2070 SUPER and upgrade the generation after the next generation of cards which should be approximately three years from now.
If you’re not willing to do any of that just buy an RTX 2080 Ti and ride it out for the life of the machine. It will hold up for traditional rendering for that lifespan but I’m not confident the raytracing will be hold up beyond a couple generations.
If it were up to me I would pair it all with an Intel 660p 2TB NVMe. I’m not completely sold on the idea that Unity is capable of taking advantage of a high end NVMe. Capacity is far more important to me and the drive can very easily be taken from one machine to the next. It’s own lifetime will far exceed that of any one computer.
I’ve already read reviews of the machine from back when it first arrived, and it looks like this one is roughly on par with the other reviews For the past year Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been a popular choice for hardware reviewers because it’s reasonably heavy on performance.
Check out the frame time graph that they show. Over a period of one minute there are multiple drops in performance for the NUC with it only having good performance for a very brief period of time before being awful again. You won’t enjoy that experience.
Yeah I get side tracked with small form factors and stuff that shouldn’t matter so I get ‘tunnel vision.’
I guess I’ll have to ditch the idea of the nuc. But damn, this is going to be expensive lol. Do you think the 2080Ti is worth getting or is something better around the corner?
Trouble with building a custom PC you’re always waiting because you might miss the next big milestone, that’s why when I had a PC last time I didn’t upgrade for years and years.
Unless you’re going for the highest quality available 4K gaming today, I think the 2080 ti is a waste of money. Right now, as implemented in games so far, ray tracing is little more than a bit of eye candy at the cost of half your frame rate. It has all the appearance of a half baked solution. Assuming it ends up with widespread adoption in games down the road, you can be pretty certain you’ll need a later generation card by then.
So if you’re not doing 4K gaming then the card is a bit overkill. There’s various cards at half the price or less which will work fantastic at 1440 or 1080 and hold up for a few years.
Truth be told the raytracing didn’t catch my attention for just for gaming, it was more for dev inside either unity or unreal, you know side step the horrors of baking. . . (but obviously it is just going to be for me or anyone else with an RTX card)
Actually, the more I ponder it, I wonder if it is just going to be a ‘fad’ that I’ll get bored of soon, blender’s eevee does a respectable job without an RTX card even on my macbook! Huh.
My current setup was state of the art in 2014 and it’s still going perfectly fine for me. I did have to mess about with the PSU as one would expect after that amount of time and a mechanical drive failed. Finally, the GPU decided to give up the ghost, however the manufacturer replaced it with a slightly better one. The fan was changed but more for personal pref than anything else.
But the SSD I got back then is still going strong as well as the rest including CPU etc.
In short, it’s entirely realistic some bits will survive but expect to have a bit of fixing up before 10 years go by.
Oh, and don’t bother with overclocking. That’s not great for longevity, even if it’s safe. Simple things like bioses being wiped or the odd heatwave can throw a spanner in the works. Budget for the face value.
I don’t know how well GPU baking does compared to CPU (haven’t tried it). Is it exponentially faster? Because you could go with an RTX 2070 Super and upgrade to a 3950x CPU and still save money compared to the 2080 ti. 16 cores / 32 threads probably does just fine with CPU light baking, and the 2070 super will certainly allow you to experiment with RTX tech.
Just my guess, as I don’t personally own any of this.