need feedback on my build

[balaguru]

I am not a gamer. I am planning a build to run iracing with simxperience motion and VR. It's possible I may run other car simulation titles in the future. Here's what I was thinking:

cpu i5-8400
mb MSI Z370 pro-a
corsair veng ddr4 lpx 8bg single stick (not sure if this is an appropriate clock speed for mb+cpu above)
gtx 1080ti at standard clock speed
600w power supply
likely htc vive pro
and all the other misc stuff to make it go
will likely get built in 3 to 6 months

 

[whm1974]

Looks fine to me aside from using only one stick of memory and only 8GB at that. Get another 8GB stick to improve performance. Also what are you planning for storage devices, HDD or SSD?

 

[UsandThem]

Since you aren't a gamer, your component selections are pretty unbalanced. My observations:

-You want 16GB of RAM (DDR4 3000 - 3200).

-You probably should get a CPU like the i7-8700 (moar! cores/threads). But the 8400 should be ok as well if you don't do a lot of multi-tasking on your PC.

-Since it doesn't appear you will not overclock, you can get a cheaper H370 motherboard.

-Do you need a GTX 1080ti for a game that doesn't need anything close to that (it only requires a Nvidia 2xx series GPU)?

 

[balaguru]

I currently run iracing on an A8 7600 with 8bg without latency but understandably at reduced graphics settings; hence, why I was going to keep with a single stick of 8gb. It is easy to add another stick if I seem to start swapping. No plans to overclock if I can help it. I want to avoid the expense and complexity of extravagant cooling systems. The i5 8400 comes with its own cooling included and appears to be decent. Thank you for the suggestion on the H370. I will take a look at it since I have no plans to overclock. The 1080ti was chosen to make sure I have no problems running the htc vive pro at full tilt. The cpu/memory just need to fast enough not to bottleneck the video. I will prob just run a 250gb ssd as iracing only needs 10gb and the computer wont be used for anything else. Since I have a very specific application I am trying to save where I can and spend where needed to run the game at max audio/video/motion.

 

[UsandThem]

I currently run iracing on an A8 7600 with 8bg without latency but understandably at reduced graphics settings; hence, why I was going to keep with a single stick of 8gb. It is easy to add another stick if I seem to start swapping. No plans to overclock if I can help it. I want to avoid the expense and complexity of extravagant cooling systems. The i5 8400 comes with its own cooling included and appears to be decent. Thank you for the suggestion on the H370. I will take a look at it since I have no plans to overclock. The 1080ti was chosen to make sure I have no problems running the htc vive pro at full tilt. The cpu/memory just need to fast enough not to bottleneck the video. I will prob just run a 250gb ssd as iracing only needs 10gb and the computer wont be used for anything else. Since I have a very specific application I am trying to save where I can and spend where needed to run the game at max audio/video/motion.

You'll lose performance by not running two sticks of RAM (dual channel vs single). Really just about any power user / gamer / content creation user wants 16GB of RAM. Also, just a FYI, all consumer Intel CPUs come with a CPU cooler (outside of the 'K' processors). So the i7-8700 comes with a cooler as well.

 

[balaguru]

You'll lose performance by not running two sticks of RAM (dual channel vs single). Really just about any power user / gamer / content creation user wants 16GB of RAM. Also, just a FYI, all consumer Intel CPUs come with a CPU cooler (outside of the 'K' processors). So the i7-8700 comes with a cooler as well.

Thanks for the feedback. Will look at the i7 8700 and adding a stick of mem. While I no longer work in the field my original degree was in comp sci in the late 90's. It blows my mind that I pretty much do the same as I did then (surf the web, deal with email and work with documents) and things don't seem much faster than before given how far hardware has come since then. I chalk it up to lazy programming. Hitting ok on a modern dialog is probably 30 frames deep on the stack. But gaming software is much more efficient it seems. I wrote an android HUD that connected to iracing. I was glad to see that C was still alive. Sorry to digress.

 

[fastamdman]

I will second swapping over to the 8700 and going to dual channel memory. Running 2x8gb is much much better than a single 8gb stick. Performance increases for dual channel are significant depending on the application at hand. Your GPU is way over kill even for VR. Personally I would save the extra cash and go with the GTX 1080 (That is what I run and it works perfectly for VR gaming and sims). Also, not all power supplies are equal. So saying a 600 watt psu, means absolutely nothing. Ensure that it's a named brand power supply, something from corsair or seasonic would be my recommendation.

Hardware has gotten much quicker over the years, but software has changed drastically. Coding has gotten extremely lazy in some aspects. But not only that, there are such a wide array of different platforms now compared to the 90s, that things have to be codded a bit differently to ensure they run on every machine. There have been significant jumps in the last few years. I would say one of the biggest increases we've seen recently was the sandy bridge line from Intel. That was such a massive jump from the previous line up.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy your new hardware!