How to build the Ultimate Mod Machine?

[Dante76737]

So I recently joined the PC Master Race and I'm looking forward to some SERIOUS modding (way beyond that Xbox crap).

 

My PC is a Lenovo Legion Y520. I'll post a link to the specs below. My question is this: What would you recommend I tweak in order to maximize my gameplay potential, especially with some good graphics overhauls? Thank in advance for the input!

 

Specs: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops-and-all-in-ones/legion-desktops/legion-y-series-desktops/Legion-Y520-Desktop/p/90JB005FUS?gclid=CjwKCAjwzenbBRB3EiwAItS-u_s4R73V8he1_UXYOs8qrwHqsil5ypOiXEGOdbPZMrPC2Q_Rwy5GIBoCpvUQAvD_BwE&cid=us:sem%7Cse%7Cgoogle%7Cshopping%7C90JB005FUS&CAWELAID=120030930000081458&s_kwcid=AL!4030!3!261899498314!!!g!455460318234!&ef_id=WdRelwAAAOr0F4Re:20180820202406:s

 

 

[markyrocks]

Idk if I would personally recommend a prebuilt system. But on that particular machine the first thing that is by far the best bang for the buck is a Samsung evo ssd. That will make any computer exponential faster, games load faster, faster startup, faster file transfers ect. Very useful. 2nd the 1050ti is kinda on the low end.. probably be fine for 1080p gaming but will probably crash and burn anything higher. Might get your foot in the door for vr but its going to be mediocre at best, probably have to play on low settings always. What else, speaking of vr that machine only has 4 usb ports in the back so again that might barely be enough, probably go vive if that all you have. My oculus with 4x sensors uses 5 not to mention the xbox controller uses 1, bluetooth dongles ect. So I need a few, the more the merrier. The cpu should probably be decent its probably not going to break any records but that being said with zero research. I just know with gaming single threaded speed is #1, it doesn't matter how many cores it has it only going to be as good (at gaming) as the fastest single thread but anything Intel is going to be decent. 8 GB of memory should probably get the average user by, no mention of its speed, most likely generic but as long as it doesn't break differences in ram speed are pretty insignificant. That's my opinion, but I have way too much loot invested in my rig. I'd say what you're looking at is a decent place to start. Give it some time and you'll be ready to drop a grand on the latest and greatest graphics card.

[Dante76737]

Some good advice to be sure, I'll look into the Samsung. It's worth mentioning though that I have zero interest in VR, so I'd just be hooking it up to my TV. That's basically the setup I'm looking to optimize. Basically (besides some good graphics overhauls) I'm basically wanting it to run Xbox smooth but with more mods/mod space than the Xbox would allow.

 

I don't have the room for VR though, and it doesn't really interest me anyway, so that should help as far as scooting by on relatively lower specs.

[fftfan]

Custom build is always the way to go. I strongly second the Samsung EVO SSD. I view it as absolutely mandatory for Bethesda games as otherwise on an HDD you will most likely have a huge portion of time in game just be loading screens, potentially up to 50% of the time after you mod the game. With Load Accelerator & the SSD I usually get under 10 second load screens on Fallout 4 with a very heavy load order and more than 80GB of packed mesh/texture files being loaded.

GPU: I would say 1060 6GB is a pretty decent general sweet spot, so with the new Nvidia Turing based RTX 2000 series you may be able to use a GPU like RTX 2050 or RTX 2060 depending on how those GPUs are configured in terms of the VRAM. I would say that 4GB VRAM is a baseline level in order to have pretty good freedom to mod the game, without having to choose the lower end option on modpages or pass outright on some mods solely due to performance. For 1080p resolution the GTX 1050 Ti does okay as long as you're careful/thoughtful about what you install & GTX 1060 6GB does pretty good while allowing you to mod a bit more. I don't recommend the 1060 3GB or the 1050 2GB, some users had reported texture issues that had turned out to be due to VRAM running out making the game use lower quality LOD style textures(Really bad looking). RTX 2080 & 2080 Ti release on September 20th & it sounds like the other cards may be a bit later, likely in October or November. So you can either choose to wait and get one of the new ones or if you can't wait get a Pascal GTX like the 1060 6GB or 1050 Ti 4GB. I think some AMDs can do okay like RX 580 8GB. A key point to really be sure of things is to view many reviews and save images of the benchmarks into a folder. I did this and spent time viewing a large quantity of them to get a good sense of relatively where each GPU falls and what I can generally be able to expect for them. Same for CPUs though I didn't do this for them as I simply just went i7 for best performance with stuff like 3D applications, I only determined that I would benefit from hyperthreading but probably did not need overclocking.

CPU: If you go Intel it should be i5 or i7. i7-8700k for best, i5-8600k or i5-8600. If you wait there's the 9000 series Intels on the way but it's uncertain when they'll launch. I am not knowledgeable on AMD side of things but I have heard a lot of good things about Ryzen. Ryzen 7 2700X / 2700 seem very good and it does sound like at the mid tier levels they may be superior to Intel.

RAM: Standard recommendation is 16GB and my testing suggests to me this is true. RAM Speed doesn't hugely matter although Ryzen is said to scale with RAM speeds and benefit from the faster RAM. Very low speed can cause stutters but if you get anything DDR4 it will be fast enough that this shouldn't happen, it mostly would only happen on low end DDR3. It's mainly a matter of simply having enough RAM so that the PC won't need to also use the very slow Page File for memory when running games.

 

My PC is a Lenovo Legion Y520. I'll post a link to the specs below. My question is this: What would you recommend I tweak in order to maximize my gameplay potential, especially with some good graphics overhauls? Thank in advance for the input!

So you've already bought it? Definitely can be upgraded but some things to keep in mind are the Power Supply to make sure upgrades don't surpass what the PSU can safely output and motherboard for compatibility, if you upgrade CPU it must be an Intel Coffee Lake 8000 series otherwise you will also need to buy a compatible motherboard. Case size might be a factor, if that's a small form factor(I have full ATX but I can't remember mine's exact measurements) as high end GPUs like 1080, 1080 Ti or Titan can be big. Case size can be a hassle if it is the very small form factor Micro ITX which are like console sized.

Specs

I clicked "View Models" and only one came up, maybe the others are sold out or something? The one build is 1050 Ti 4GB, i5-8400 2.8 Ghz, 8.0GB DDR4 UDIMM 2666MHz. I was going to say this would be a minimally adequate build but I can strongly say from personal experience that 8GB of system RAM is wholly inadequate at least when I played Fallout 4. I had one module be dead and the shipping would be unreasonably expensive to RMA the RAM(Plus on the off chance that the replacer was also dead, I would have to pay shipping again) so I purchased an identical model of 2x8GB RAM to make my system 24GB. You will experience more performance issues & general stability issues with only 8GB system RAM as the game handles it very poorly when RAM is running out. I may have been able to semi get away with it for some time because I have GTX 1080 8GB and on Fallout 4 the BA2 archive format will mainly utilize VRAM which would have helped mitigate RAM issues on my game. Other new titles like Tomb Raider need 10-12 GB of RAM so I would also say that an 8GB system would generally limit your options.

8GB of memory should probably get the average user by, no mention of its speed, most likely generic but as long as it doesn't break differences in ram speed are pretty insignificant. That's my opinion, but I have way too much loot invested in my rig. I'd say what you're looking at is a decent place to start. Give it some time and you'll be ready to drop a grand on the latest and greatest graphics card.

I personally found 8GB to work somewhat okay but only if I had the game relatively unmodded.

 

If you can't upgrade to 16GB RAM, I strongly suggest Witcher 3 as they've done a phenomenal job of optimizing the game. Even when I still had 8GB, I experienced no issues when playing Witcher 3. They've done well enough with it to the point that perhaps Dante76737 can run it on 1080p high settings(No HairWorks). At least Medium should be totally doable with steady 60fps. 1080p Ultra including HairWorks shows up as 40FPS, I usually aim for 60fps but losing HairWorks should get you most of the way there.

[QuagaarWarrior]

Just wanted to say dont write off prebuilt machines. If you are new to pc gaming and are not confident building a pc it may be worth buying prebuilt as it takes the stress out of it plus if it doesn't work you can return it to the shop who should troubleshoot it for you.

If you shop around you should be able to find some prebuilt machines that dont cost much more than buying the items separately.

When I started in pc gaming I wasnt confident enough to build my own. However when I needed to upgrade the graphics card and wanted an additional hard drive I did those myself and it gave me the confidence to build my own pc further down the line