Money no object VR PC

[DnFx91]

So i have been tasked with speccing a PC for VR purposes to go onto my fleet of hire machines, being a LTT viewer this is simply a chance to be a kid in a toyshop and fill a mid-tower with like £5000 worth of gear. Being a hire machine, it will pay for itself within 2 or 3 hires so money really is no object for this thing. My first thoughts are as follows.

 

Ryzen 1800x or 6900K

Nvme boot, maybe RAID 0

RAID 1 SSD array for local storage

GTX 1080ti SLI

32GB DDR4

 

this machine may also need an SDI 12G input/output, is SLI possible on top of a capture card in terms of PCIE lanes ? im sure the 6900k can feed all those lanes but havent really heard much about the number of lanes on Ryzen.

 

feel free to add any ludicrous ideas to this build.

[The Sloth]

7700k is the best gaming cpu, max you should go is 6 cores 6800k or 5820k.

7700k/5820k/6800k

x62/h100i for water cooling or dh15 or darkrock pro 3 air cooling 

x99/z170/z270

16/32 gb ram

1tb ssd or 2tb if you can/ 3tb for big games 

1080ti for gpu

600 watt psu

 

[grimreeper132]

if money is not an object then I suggest getting 2 or 3 1080tis and put them in SLI, it'll be a bitch to use in places, but it will give the best performance possible. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

I think you're going to end up spending more money than you need to if you go for a spec like this. 32GB is not needed, even if the PC is going to be streaming as well, it's not needed.

 

Why NVMe for boot? The benefits of NVMe drives come with sequential read/writes, not random access, which is what boot and OS need. Also, why RAID 0 and a RAID 1 array. You're negating any the redundancy of the storage array if your OS is on a RAID 0 array. As it's a hire PC, I assume reliability is a big concern, so if the RAID 0 craps out, the entire system is unusable. A RAID 1 SATA SSD array would be sense for boot and then RAID 1 SATA SSD for storage too. NVMe wouldn't pose any real benefit to a VR gaming system. 

 

If the system is going to be streaming, stick with the 1800X. If it's just purely for VR gaming, a 7700K will do fine, no need to waste money on more cores that won't be used. 

 

Finally, I would go for a single 1080Ti first and see how you do. SLI support is still not ideal and may actually end up with worse performance (maybe not from an FPS standpoint, but frametimes really matter with VR) than a single card. 

[DocSwag]

I'd say 6900k has Ryzen still is a lil behind in gaming.

2 minutes ago, grimreeper132 said:

if money is not an object then I suggest getting 2 or 3 1080tis and put them in SLI, it'll be a bitch to use in places, but it will give the best performance possible. 

You can't do 3 way sli with any 10 series GPU.

[DnFx91]

Just now, nerdslayer1 said:

7700k is the best gaming cpu, max you should go is 6 cores 6800k or 5820k.

7700k/5820k/6800k

x62/h100i for water cooling or dh15 or darkrock pro 3 air cooling 

x99/z170/z270

16/32 gb ram

1tb ssd or 2tb if you can/ 3tb for big games 

1080ti for gpu

600 watt psu

 

yeah man the CPU is a tough one, i know they will want higher core speeds so the Ryzen 5 or the Quad-core i7's make more sense, but i don't want them to throw a render job at it and have it take ages, watercooling is not an option being a hire machine that will be shipped all over the world, X99 makes sense, mass storage will be SSD as cost is no object, 1080ti SLI is a definite, and will probs just throw a supernova 1KW PSU in there cos why not.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

3 1080tis and put them in SLI

You can't. Nvidia has stopped support for greater than 2 way SLI in games. 

[grimreeper132]

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

You can't. Nvidia has stopped support for greater than 2 way SLI in games. 

 

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

I'd say 6900k has Ryzen still is a lil behind in gaming.

You can't do 3 way sli with any 10 series GPU.

oh, fair enough, I thought it was still possible but you got barely any benefit from it

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

You can't do 3 way sli with any 10 series GPU.

You can, but not for games. For a few overclocking and benchmarking software like 3DMark, 3 and 4 way SLI is still supported, mainly because Nvidia doesn't want to be taken off the top of the benchmark tables. 

[stealth80]

1 hour ago, grimreeper132 said:

if money is not an object then I suggest getting 2 or 3 1080tis and put them in SLI, it'll be a bitch to use in places, but it will give the best performance possible. 

Nvidia don't officially support 3x SLI anymore - As a hire machine this would be an absolute nightmare - people would want trouble free gaming, not messing around emailing NV and devs for non-official updates/drivers

[Oshino Shinobu]

2 minutes ago, grimreeper132 said:

 

oh, fair enough, I thought it was still possible but you got barely any benefit from it

It is possible to do 3 way and 4 way SLI, but not for games. For things like 3DMark, it is still supported. The issues with frametimes and deminishing returns from greater than 2 way would have a bigger negative impact on VR than slightly more FPS would anyway. 

 

EDIT: @stealth80 It is still supported, but not for games. Mainly for overclocking and benchmarking. 

[DnFx91]

4 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I think you're going to end up spending more money than you need to if you go for a spec like this. 32GB is not needed, even if the PC is going to be streaming as well, it's not needed.

 

Why NVMe for boot? The benefits of NVMe drives come with sequential read/writes, not random access, which is what boot and OS need. Also, why RAID 0 and a RAID 1 array. You're negating any the redundancy of the storage array if your OS is on a RAID 0 array. As it's a hire PC, I assume reliability is a big concern, so if the RAID 0 craps out, the entire system is unusable. A RAID 1 SATA SSD array would be sense for boot and then RAID 1 SATA SSD for storage too. NVMe wouldn't pose any real benefit to a VR gaming system. 

 

If the system is going to be streaming, stick with the 1800X. If it's just purely for VR gaming, a 7700K will do fine, no need to waste money on more cores that won't be used. 

 

Finally, I would go for a single 1080Ti first and see how you do. SLI support is still not ideal and may actually end up with worse performance (maybe not from an FPS standpoint, but frametimes really matter with VR) than a single card. 

we image our fleet so i can risk running boot from NVMe, i already run 20 precisions with RAID0 M.2, and the clients can't get enough of how snappy the systems are on NVMe

i hear you on RAM, will probs stick to 16

good shout on the 7700K, im still leaning toward it from hearing that it's still the single core king.

And SLI does scare me, but i want to give it a try, and i will never again get a chance to buy 2 of them

 

cheers

 

[grimreeper132]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

It is possible to do 3 way and 4 way SLI, but not for games. The issues with frametimes and deminishing returns from greater than 2 way would have a bigger negative impact on VR than slightly more FPS would anyway. 

yea fair enough, I was more saying it was possible than they should do it

 

[DocSwag]

31 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

You can, but not for games. For a few overclocking and benchmarking software like 3DMark, 3 and 4 way SLI is still supported, mainly because Nvidia doesn't want to be taken off the top of the benchmark tables. 

Yeah, so it's essentially useless for gaming. Only extreme overclockers looking to top world records should look into it.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, DocSwag said:

Yeah, so it's essentially useless for gaming. Only extreme overclockers looking to top world records should look into it.

Not even essentially, it is pointless (:

 

Just clearing up that 3 and 4 way SLI is still possible, for specific applications. 

[Damascus]

Are you going to run this with a custom Loop?

[DnFx91]

2 minutes ago, Damascus said:

Are you going to run this with a custom Loop?

as stated multiple times, it's a hire machine. watercooling is not an option

[stealth80]

1 hour ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

It is possible to do 3 way and 4 way SLI, but not for games. For things like 3DMark, it is still supported. The issues with frametimes and deminishing returns from greater than 2 way would have a bigger negative impact on VR than slightly more FPS would anyway. 

 

EDIT: @stealth80 It is still supported, but not for games. Mainly for overclocking and benchmarking. 

exactly, but not for gaming or VR gaming which is the purpose of this machine

[Oshino Shinobu]

2 minutes ago, stealth80 said:

exactly, but not for gaming or VR gaming which is the purpose of this machine

Yes. My point was to prevent people assuming it just doesn't work flat out, that's how misinformation spreading starts. 

[DnFx91]

feel like i have started a bit of a heated debate, but some good advice here. If the machine gets past the beancounters at work i'll come back to this topic for updates on what i end up building, cheers chaps