Which of these PC's are better for Modded Minecraft

[NunoAgapito]

That's actually wrong, for minecraft you don't need more than 2 or 3 gigs of ram, so with 4 gigs he could start playing modded without a problem if he is using windows 7

Well, if you have 4 Gigs and minecraft uses 3, you leave 1Gig for the OS... A current updated windows 7 will use at least 2Gb of memory, so you will be having memory problems and using the page file and that hurts performance a LOT!

Good and fast ram is worthless if your processor can't keep up.

Any current mid tier CPU is way faster processing then memory giving him the instructions to process... so...yes, the better the RAM the better the performance. Currently, CPU's pass most of their time idling waiting for memory query results!

Getting the best motherboard usually involves having more sata, PciEx16 and ram slots

A good board is not about having more slots and interfaces. A good board is about the quality of the assemblage. If the board is a cheap one, it will be more susceptible to interferences and memory corruption. CPU asks for data to process, idles a good time waiting for it and when it receives the data, it is corrupted and needs to be queried again... What a waste of time! So, yes, quality is important! For some reason you have boards that cost hundreds of buckets and have the same number of interfaces of cheaper ones! Usually, good boards have less stuff in them so the circuits can have better protection to interferences. Its the bad ones that come jammed with stuff, so the user that doesnt understand shit will buy them thinking they are awesome!

As for what you said about the slowest thing in a computer is ram, you are completely wrong. The slowest thing there is in today worlds is HDD's. ... hasn't grown in the last 5 decades

Yes, HDD's are the slowest but for MC... once all is loaded, its all about CPU and memory. The only HDD access is to save/load chunks and on a good machine that is negligible!

Unless you spend a fuck ton of money on an SSD (which only amplifies files access speed, which would speed up booting of the system or games, but has no impact in actual gameplay) you will have something that hasn't grown in the last 5 decades

SSD's are not so expensive... and 5 decades ago... man... no HDD's at that time

Also, DDR3 Ram is relatively new and it's perfectly fit for today's gaming.

If by 7 years old you mean new.... You really dont understand how this works! But I never said to not use DDR3, since that is the current standard! But... you have different access speeds on DDR3 memory. While DDR, in rough terms, define the memory bus speed, you also have the CAS latency which affects a lot the memory speed! You can deliver the information fast, but if it takes a lot of time to query it, there is no much gain in delivering it fast. And the difference from a DDR3 memory with good and bad CAS latency is something like 10 bucks

The actual thing that is keeping us back is GPU's and CPU's, CPU's because there is a limit at which we cannot miniaturize more than we already do, and GPU's because visual information is seriously more heavy to process. CPU's speed hasn't grown as you said, what has grown is the memory, but the clock speed pretty much is in a stalemate, with increments of only 5 to 10% every year..

You totally messed up here! I never said CPU speed never increased, pretty the opposite! CPU speed didnt increased vertically(cpu clock speed) but it increased horizontally(number of cores)! Memory speed is stale for the last 7 years as you agree and disagree on the same sentence! Also, if they are the limitign factor, why buy some low-mid tier CPU?

Also, for the GPU, im running Direwolf20 1.7 with a x64 texture pack (no shaders, I don't like them) perfectly with just a GeForce EVGA Gt520, which is seriously bad, minecraft doesn't need a good GPU if you are not planning on recording it..

So again,while denying me you totally agree with me. GPU is not important and a good cheap mid tier GPU is enough!

What you said about the SSD is seriously wrong.

Care to explain why? You said the most slow component on a machine is the HDD and an SDD is usually 300% faster at reading/writing and a LOT faster at seeking(since it does not need to seek on the disk). So, giving a huge boost to the slowest component in the machine is not important?

So yeah, please dude, if you are going to "help" someone, please try to understand what you are talking about

Well, gladly, I totally know what I'm talking about, that is why I posted! The biggest problem gaming technology is facing lately is bad programming skills. No one cares how the memory is organized and what a huge boost it can give to the game performance if the memory instructions are store sequentially in RAM, so the CPU doesnt have to wait for the next instruction since it is already on the CPU memory cache. (when you read a chunck of memory from RAM, the CPU also gets the other surrounding memory chunks and stores it on the cache. If the next instruction is in one of these extra chunks, the processing is almost immediate instead of querying the RAM again. you can read more about it here http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/data-locality.html Sadly, Java memory management doesnt allow this level of control over memory...)

So... in the end its all about processing speed and memory access! To guarantee that you need a good CPU, fast query memory a reliable motherboard that does not corrupt the data...
Sadly, the pre build computers are usually build with low-end quality materials and sold for the price of an high end machine! The board is the crappiest one costing 30 bucks, they only say the CPU speed and later you discover you bought an i3 for the price of an i5(clock speed might be the same but the performance will not be!). They sell you memory with a very bad CL and usually when you buy 8GB of RAM you get 2x 4Gb or 4x 2GB(if the board has 4 slots) denying you free slots to get more RAM later... You can see how this goes!
You endup spending 600 bucks on a machine that is worth 300 and with the same 600 you could buy a machine that non-technical users think it costs more then 1000....

 

[wolfsilver00]

Snip

When I said minecraft doesn't use more than 2 or 3 gigs of memory I was giving the max size you should give to it for java to work correctly, I'm yet to see an instance of minecraft with 2 gigs of ram in use.

Nope, Ram's are keeping up. Get your facts straight. One of the best CPU's right now:
http://ark.intel.com/products/82931#@specifications
As you can see, it supports UP TO 2133Mhz in memory.. Just google for some ram and you will find more than enough rams that get up to 2400Mhz. So yeah, get your fact's straight please. Right now, Ram's are more capable than CPU's.

You can get the usual protections (they aren't going to sell you something that is going shortcut on the first boot up) on your motherboard with just an asrock or gigabyte if you are going safe.. The price on motherboards is usually because of it's brand and some times because they use parts that are older (But are as efficient as the new ones, a transistor is a transistor, I don't (and science doesn't either) give a fuck if it's a transistor made yesterday or 5 years ago, they are going to be equally good even if they don't use the same patent.) and are cheaper to buy. Also there is a chipset, which comes with royalties, which explains why an intel motherboard is more expensive than a motherboard with AMD chipsets, because royalties.

HDD's been in this world since 1960. That's more than 5 decades if you ask me. They had a quick advance in the technologies used until 1970 with WD creating the now used spinning disks with the actuator always in the same place. So yeah, get you'r facts straight.

That was a typo or maybe unconscious habit, I was obviously referring to ddr4.

Seems you don't understand the difference between memory and speed. I said: ". CPU's speed hasn't grown as you said, what has grown is the memory" so please learn to understand what people are telling you, CPU's speed hasn't grown, it's memory what has grown. First try to understand the difference and then try to correct me.
Also, that vertically-horizontally bs is actually making my point, we aren't making faster cpu's, we are just putting a bunch of cores together and as I said, there is a limit (Which we are almost reaching) at how much we can miniaturize it. Also, for minecraft, having 6 cores is not going to help our sorry not multi-threading asses, so yeah, no luck on that.
I never told him to buy a mid tier CPU, I said that if you are going to buy a CPU you have to decide on it by first deciding on RAM, which is the highest thing we could buy.

I said: "Also, for the GPU, im running Direwolf20 1.7 with a x64 texture pack (no shaders, I don't like them) perfectly with just a GeForce EVGA Gt520, which is seriously bad, minecraft doesn't need a good GPU if you are not planning on recording it.. So yeah, I'd recommend something like that or above for the Op" Emphasis on "For the Op" That sentence wasn't mean for you, I was saying you were right and recommending to buy something like that or better for optimal results.

"What you said about the ssd is completely wrong" Part refers to "Ohhh... almost forgot... get an SSD! It might even be more important then the GPU!"
Which is pretty wrong, almost ignorant. I can't even list why that is complete BS, there might even be reason I dont yet know, but the main reason is:
SSD has an access and write speed increase, it DOESNT give you ANY ADVANTAGE while using the pc, ONLY WHILE SAVING OR OPENING FILES. People NEED to understand this, SSD are not the saints of a new era and it's definetely not worth it to spend twice the money in an SSD with lower capacity instead of an HDD. And it's definitely less important than the GPU.
And while giving a boost to the slowest component in a PC is important (Wait, didn't you say ram is the slowest? Please dude, if you are talking, do your investigations before, I can almost feel you googling shit), having a faster boot time for the pc or applications is not worth the money you can spend in a better gpu/ram/cpu.

For the last bit, you are right, poorly programmed stuff is keeping us back more than any hardware, and java is an absolute platform, which you can use almost on every device, but that comes at the price that they are not keeping up with hardware. And again, there is already a ram that would have to wait for the processor (which doesn't happen, the bios will modify the ram frequency to match the cpu frequency, so yeah, buying a 2400mhz ram is not going to change anything as you are bound to the cpu frequency which, again, is the one that's making us wait.)

So yeah..

 

[NunoAgapito]

You have your point of view about RAM/CPU, I have mine...

But keep in mind, clock speed is the number of operations, is not the time it takes to gather the information... The speed at which the info travels is a limiting factor and believe me, CPU's do sit idle waiting for information! RAM never waits for the processor coz RAM doesn't depend on the CPU, RAM receives 'orders', it doesnt send 'orders' so yeah, its supposed to be idle when nothing is requested from her

And, yes, SSD's are more expensive, but I would like to ear the first person(except you, but seems you dont own one to notice the difference) that says he regretted spending the price of a 1T HDD on a 120GB SDD. And again, if a low-mid GPU is enough, instead of buying a great GPU, use the money to buy a SSD. Whole PC experience will benefit, not only MC...

This is a question of opinions... again, you have yours, I have mine.

Now... MC not using 2Gb of RAM!? Are you playing vanilla? Then you must be on the wrong forum! DW20 just eats 2GB easily! FTB Monster equally! Any 1.7.10 kitchen sink packs are using 3GB easily!
Almost every pack uses between 2 and 3 Gb of memory....

Also, MC actually uses multiple cores! The shock! Java optimizes the process to use multiple cores, that is, when the code launches threads, they will be run on another cores! Garbage collection is also run on different cores! The huge optimization that 1.8 has is the fact that world generation and world loading are being done on separate threads when on previous versions they were not! Its not like MC 1.8 now supports multi-core, its more like some parts of it finally got correctly implemented!

 

[Hambeau]

For MC, get the best CPU/Motherboard combination you can afford! Then enough RAM, 8 or 16 but be sure you get good and fast RAM! Sometimes, saving some bucks on RAM just kills the whole machine, since the RAM will be slower. And in today's world, the slowest thing a computer has is RAM speed. It kinda didnt evolved much on the last decade, compared to CPU speed... No point having a ultra fast CPU if he has to wait long times for the memory... (The cache size of the CPU is very important because of this)
Lastly, get some good but no need to be a top of the line GPU. Unless you plan to use heavy resource packs or shaders, MC barely uses the GPU, so a mid tier cheap graphic card is more than enough!

That being said, I would not buy any of the two PC's you suggested since they seem to have low mid-tier CPU's, typical for pre-built computers.... All components seem to be the low-mid tier that are usually put on pre-built machines and then sold for the price of a high-mid tier machine... In other words, you probably will get robbed!

Ohhh... almost forgot... get an SSD! It might even be more important then the GPU!

I disagree. The slowest component in a computer these days is not RAM speed, it's whatever mass storage you have...

I found these numbers on the web. I'll try to find an "official" comparison later:

Storage | Read/Write speed | Access time
--------| -----------------|------------
   RAM  |        100 GB/s  | 50.00 ns
   SSD  |        500 MB/s  |  0.05 ms
   HDD  |        100 MB/s  |  5.00 ms

If these numbers are close, Ram can read/write 100GB in the same time a SSD can read/write about 1/2 GB.

[Edit] That's 200 times faster, BTW.

For the metrically challenged:

Prefix | Symbol | Factor |  Numerically  | Name
-------|--------|--------|---------------|-----
giga   |    G   | 109    | 1,000,000,000 | billion
mega   |    M   | 106    | 1,000,000     | million
kilo   |    k   | 103    | 1,000         | thousand
centi  |    c   | 10^-2  | 0.01          | hundredth
milli  |    m   | 10^-3  | 0.001         | thousandth
micro  |    μ   | 10^-6  | 0.000 001     | millionth
nano   |    n   | 10^-9  | 0.000 000 001 | billionth

 

[Hambeau]

I think all these technical replies and discussions may have put the OP off of computers forever...

 

[NunoAgapito]

Ok... Seems I was not explicit.

I mean that when the CPU is doing calculations, on the basis of just going to RAM to fetch the next batch of instructions and processing them, the bottleneck is on the RAM and not on the CPU since the request has to travel, information needs to be retrieved and go back to the CPU. Its called Latency! The memory speed is not important, its like the internet, you can have 1Gbit internet, but it always take time to request something on the other side of the world plus the time it takes for the server to serve you the content.The first is the bus latency, the second is the memory latency. This Latency values are so high that the CPU will set idle while waiting (it can sit idle for a cycle or two while waiting for instructions to arrive... 1 in millions per second might not seem much but if it happens every 100 cycles, its 1% of CPU power...). If the returned result is corrupted, even more time waiting. That is why I said to get a good board and good ram, to prevent errors and latency, both on board and ram, coz this happens, a LOT! Get cheaper RAM\board and the great CPU you just bought will not be so great!

Of course, if you take in account every pheripheral on the PC, then yes RAM is fast and the slowest one is not even the HDD, its the DVD-Roms!!(I think, not sure, dont flame me if I was wrong...)

 

[InThayne]

So it seems the bus speed is the bottleneck...that makes the CPU less important than the motherboard with RAM being RAM.

This thread sooo needs a TL&DR for the OP.

• Get a top of the line CPU from a couple of years ago (good price break and plenty of functionality for whatever you need to do).
• RAM- get a bunch (java/minecraft gobble it up) its dirt cheap.
• Strive for a rather nice MB.
• GPU- get a nice one (If you play anthing other than minecraft, you will need it and it certainly doesn't hurt for eye candy).
• any extra funds- SSD (you will love it)

 

[glepet1962]

I think all these technical replies and discussions may have put the OP off of computers forever...

I think the OP made his choice, purchased it, set it up and is now playing minecraft while everyone here is still talking about it.

 

[ThatOneSlowking]

So it seems the bus speed is the bottleneck...that makes the CPU less important than the motherboard with RAM being RAM.

This thread sooo needs a TL&DR for the OP.

• Get a top of the line CPU from a couple of years ago (good price break and plenty of functionality for whatever you need to do).
• RAM- get a bunch (java/minecraft gobble it up) its dirt cheap.
• Strive for a rather nice MB.
• GPU- get a nice one (If you play anthing other than minecraft, you will need it and it certainly doesn't hurt for eye candy).
• any extra funds- SSD (you will love it)

You forot the OS

fuck windows, linux master race.

 

[egor66]

If I can build stable PC's any one can....

Google, buy the best you can with current budget & forget the bleeding edge technology.

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

PC bottlenecks

1. Moving disk media
2. Mass storage
3. CPU
4. GPU
5. RAM

For an MC computer

1. NA
2. Get an ssd or run off a RAM disk
3. Buy the best CPU you can afford, clock speed matters here due to single thread nature of MC more than no of cores, quad is plenty.
4. Any non integrated GPU will help, no need to go crazy MC doesn't use much of the GPU
5. 8 gigs of the cheapest RAM you can buy, match the clock speeds to your CPU. "performance" RAM is completely worthless except if u overclock.

That's how u build a dedicated MC computer, for anything else recommendations will change massively

 

[wolfsilver00]

Ok... Seems I was not explicit.

I mean that when the CPU is doing calculations, on the basis of just going to RAM to fetch the next batch of instructions and processing them, the bottleneck is on the RAM and not on the CPU since the request has to travel, information needs to be retrieved and go back to the CPU. Its called Latency! The memory speed is not important, its like the internet, you can have 1Gbit internet, but it always take time to request something on the other side of the world plus the time it takes for the server to serve you the content.The first is the bus latency, the second is the memory latency. This Latency values are so high that the CPU will set idle while waiting (it can sit idle for a cycle or two while waiting for instructions to arrive... 1 in millions per second might not seem much but if it happens every 100 cycles, its 1% of CPU power...). If the returned result is corrupted, even more time waiting. That is why I said to get a good board and good ram, to prevent errors and latency, both on board and ram, coz this happens, a LOT! Get cheaper RAM\board and the great CPU you just bought will not be so great!

Of course, if you take in account every pheripheral on the PC, then yes RAM is fast and the slowest one is not even the HDD, its the DVD-Roms!!(I think, not sure, dont flame me if I was wrong...)

http://www.corsair.com/en/dominator...ram-2400mhz-c14-memory-kit-cmd64gx4m8a2400c14

The latency for the first word on that ram is 15 cycles.
Now let's get a CPU that runs at 3,5 Ghz, thats 3500Mhz. Now, that RAM is DDR which means it transfers information twice each cycle, so let's make it simple and say it runs at 4800MHZ for ease of calculation. Now, we know that MHZ is a way to measure how much cycles there is in a second, right? Ok, then this means that there is:

4800000000 cycles (with only one piece of information) per second in the ram. Now, in each second there is 1000000000 nanoseconds. So basically, there is 4,8 cycles each nanosecond. CPU does this at 3,5 cycles each nanosecond. there is a difference of 1,3 cycles in each nanosecond. So basically the CPU processes information slower than the CPU, Now, if it takes that ram 15 cycles to get to the needed data, we can still count the 1300MHZ that are there, in vain, bcause of a slow CPU. 1300MHZ means 1300000000 cycles per second, divide that for 15 and we get that the ram would be able to look for information 86.666.666 times each second before it lags behind the CPU. And you would need to transfer information at astonishing rates for that to happen.
The CPU cache is bound to be filled before the CPU can process everything the ram has thrown to it, even after waiting 15 cycles for the ram to send information, what really happens is that the RAM will have to wait 25% more than that doing nothing until the cpu finishes processing what it has and sends another request to the RAM, at the end of the second, the ram would have waited more for the cpu to finish processing to make a new request than the cpu waiting for the cpu to fill it's request.

Edit: Also, 100 is not 1% of 3,5billions (modern CPU cycles per second)...

 

[wolfsilver00]

PC bottlenecks

1. Moving disk media
2. Mass storage
3. CPU
4. GPU
5. RAM

For an MC computer

1. NA
2. Get an ssd or run off a RAM disk
3. Buy the best CPU you can afford, clock speed matters here due to single thread nature of MC more than no of cores, quad is plenty.
4. Any non integrated GPU will help, no need to go crazy MC doesn't use much of the GPU
5. 8 gigs of the cheapest RAM you can buy, match the clock speeds to your CPU. "performance" RAM is completely worthless except if u overclock.

That's how u build a dedicated MC computer, for anything else recommendations will change massively

I had no performance impact using a RAM disk for minecraft, it loaded faster than in my SSD, which surprised me quite a bit, but that's all, I think it would be better to just use the SSD for the OS, to not use a ram disk and run minecraft in a normal HDD, and save up the ram for the ram disk so the OS doesn't take ram out of your other processes.. Besides that, what you said is perfect.. Just as a side note, performance ram is completely worthless, it's advantage is less latency, but at the cost of frequency, so in this case the CPU doesn't have to wait that much (commonly there is a 30% improvement in latency in performance) but the ram may not be able to keep up with the data rate if you have a seriously good CPU.. That's why you have to overclock them, in which case the latency WILL suffer some cycles drop.. you are better off buying a cheap ram with a higher frequency and 5 or 6 more cycles of latency, which will be cheaper than performance and the difference in latency at the end of the day will be merely 2 or 3 cycles.. Of course if you are doing video or image editing performance rams are the best pick, but for minecraft? Neh... I seriously don't understand why companies even waste time making performance rams, such a waste of money and development space..

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

I had no performance impact using a RAM disk for minecraft, it loaded faster than in my SSD, which surprised me quite a bit, but that's all, I think it would be better to just use the SSD for the OS, to not use a ram disk and run minecraft in a normal HDD, and save up the ram for the ram disk so the OS doesn't take ram out of your other processes.. SNIP Neh... I seriously don't understand why companies even waste time making performance rams, such a waste of money and development space..

A RAMDisk is a lot faster than an SSD, however something else usually throttles performance before u hit the SSD limit. A RAMDisk is however cheaper than an SSD so is a better option if you have an HDD but looking for a boost, personally I just use a RAMdisk to save write operations on my SSD cos I'm anal like that.

They make "performance" RAM cos people buy it at 2/3/4x the price of regular stuff

 

[wolfsilver00]

A RAMDisk is a lot faster than an SSD, however something else usually throttles performance before u hit the SSD limit. A RAMDisk is however cheaper than an SSD so is a better option if you have an HDD but looking for a boost, personally I just use a RAMdisk to save write operations on my SSD cos I'm anal like that.

They make "performance" RAM cos people buy it at 2/3/4x the price of regular stuff

Indeed, just a rip off, damn companies trying to trick us xD.. I use my SSD for OS and Skyrim (Modded, 100 gigas of mods.. so yeah, slow as fuck loading speed for it) so I can't save operations xD Had it for almost a year now, but no performance issues yet, hope it keeps that way e.e

 

[Sawney]

First you guys are way smarter than me so I bow to you and offer no arguments.

For perspective however I'll throw out what I can play any modpack at 70-80 fps on. An HP I bought at best buy for like 700 bucks 2 years ago
Amd A8-5500 3.2 ghz with 6 gigs of whatever crappy ram they put in there that I threw a gtx650 into i bought on sale.

That makes me think minecraft isn't too hard to run.

 

[ThatOneSlowking]

First you guys are way smarter than me so I bow to you and offer no arguments.

For perspective however I'll throw out what I can play any modpack at 70-80 fps on. An HP I bought at best buy for like 700 bucks 2 years ago
Amd A8-5500 3.2 ghz with 6 gigs of whatever crappy ram they put in there that I threw a gtx650 into i bought on sale.

That makes me think minecraft isn't too hard to run.

Minecraft isn't too hard to run

Unless you are playing heavy modded and late-game.

 

[ThePredatorZ]

OMG Guys! You guys are like computer scientists! I appreciate all your feedback on this issue of mine and it was all taken into consideration (even if it did take like an hour for me to read all of it and for my little mind to comprehend and process all of that information) when buying a build. I realize i have not been as active on the thread as I should have been because of unavoidable matters and I apologize. Thanks again!

*UPDATE*
After testing the PC the build runs FTBLite2 at full maxed out settings (without OptiFine, OptiLeaves and the like) at around 70-80 FPS while generating a world. Thanks again for your feedback! <3