One of the main things that most players who play Sims 3 complain about is the incessant lag that happens when routing issues and script issues that plagued EA's great "life simulation" game ends up eating up the majority of excess random access memory in the system. Eventually it gets to the point where you click on a Sim, go grab a coffee from your Brewmaster or Keurig and come back and you find that the command menu popped up...FINALLY!!!. The delay or lag between punching your mouse button and the menu appearing can be quite noticeable. And if your screen fps stutters like it's an Edsel with a alternator problem, you will find yourself frustrated to the point where you want to pitch the system out the nearest available window. Unless you have a completely empty house with nothing in it except for the bare essentials of Sim life you will have routing issues and the resulting lag that goes along with it. Put two doors in the house (one front door, one rear door), your Sim will get confused as to which door to use and inevitably use the front door to go out to swim in the backyard swimming pool unless you have a fence across the entire front of your yard intersected only by the front facing wall of your house. And sadly, I'm just as confused in real life as my Simself is in The Sims 3.
But enough about my mental cognitive difficulties and back to the topic at hand, which is how to build a computer that should take care of the majority of the problem issues with regards to graphics. The other part of the equation is that I work from home as a photographer and do a bit of video editing on the side, so. I need a machines (built preferably as inexpensively as possible) that will be able to run everything that I do with it, preferably with the option of using three monitors (which I say will be used for photo/video editing) but we all know what will happen; don't we?) It just so happens that I am addicted to games like FSX and DCS as well as TS3 and I have been thinking about getting Cities:Skylines the direct competitor to EA's SimCity franchise which got royal borked up with the last iteration. Same with TS4 which is a whole 'nother rant. I may get it just for shits and giggles.
I don't particularly want to get TS4, but to have an objective opinion on it, I figure I may just have to lay out the cash for it, just for the excessively stupid ability to resize objects to the point of sheer ludicrousness (note that it is not spelled Ludacris but ludicrous) - 1000 foot tall toilet while your sims are being sad panda because they can't take an angry poop.
As you can see, I play an excessive amount of TS3 and I can barely pull my integrated graphics card on the laptop out of minimal graphics capability. Which means that my graphics on my screencaps are barely tolerable.
To get realistic graphics in the rendering of my game (whether it's rendering buildings, vehicles or the reflections and texture of the water), I'd probably have to have a much better graphics card than the integrated piece of cow-dung I have in my computer right now which is a ATI Radeon R5.
Now going to PC Part Picker I have tried to keep the build UNDER $2000.00DCDN - that's including all parts including a 4TB SATA HDD. 32GB of RAM (for video editing. A GTX-1060 for the ability to be able to attach three monitors (essential for photography editing as well as gaming.) In fact, I'm seriously thinking of attaching three RCA 34" TVs to the setup via HDMI splitter and hopefully making it able to run at full HD. The major question on the system is how many parts I can cannibalize from my old PC with regards to the SD/CF card reader and perhaps my CD-ROM drives - I'd love to upgrade to a Blu-Ray Writer, but I'll figure out that I can cannibalize my CD-Writer for the time being, it may bring the build price down about $50-$100.
So here goes, down the list. When I went through this list of wants, I wanted to take the previous list which came out at over $4500 Canuck bucks and knock it down to less than $2K Canadian. Now this isn't a top-level build other than the CPU which I did as a i7-6700K which was the best Skylake CPU for the longest time. Unfortunately, I cannot justify spending a metric crap-ton on an Xeon processor because I don't need 12 cores. If I was doing video-editing as a full-time job other than just for my own enjoyment, I'd probably have to get a Xeon, but since I'm not I guess I don't have to. Yay, me.
For the first part of my build, I've decided that I'm going to go with a Thermaltake S71 ATX Full-size tower. Fullsize tower because I want to make darn sure that there is air circulation in my build. Too many components jam-packed together makes for a nasty heat situation and when you're ultimately using an 850-1000W power supply to run everything - yes, I go ridiculously overpowered because I want there to be energy to spare, you need to have space inside your case for air to circulate and that in itself in conjunction to the cooling system will keep your system cool. I want the CPU to be at maximum 65-70 degrees operating temperature and if the interior of the case is jam-packed and the CPU cooling fan is not applying cool internal air onto the CPU then you're going to get over-heating issues. The cool thing about the Thermaltake S71 is that it also has a HDD dock so that you can make back-ups of your images on the fly whether they're your latest photography expedition stills or your hundreds of TS3 game screencaps. I do both. As much as the Corsair 900D interested me, the idea of a $400+ case was just not sitting right with me and the plus with the Thermaltake S71 is the ability to upgrade and the HDD dock which means that I can backup DIRECTLY to my case chassis and not have to worry about the USB connection causing an interface problem.which I have had before.
I would NOT go down on my initial pick for a CPU and the reason why is that 4.0Ghz overclockable to 4.2GHz, when video editing is concerned is worth the money for it. I want the ability to have raw computing processing power in my desktop. I want it to be able to take 45 minutes of uncompressed HD1080 and render it inside of 2 hrs. I want my games to run with little to no screen lag. I want to have 60 windows of RAW files open while doing a 150 image block edit in the background while I go off to do some other stuff: be it surf on the web or work with Premiere on yet another project. That's the reason why I went for a 6700K. It doesn't matter if AMD's Ryzen has 6 cores and runs TS3 beautifully if it has problems dealing with Adobe Lightroom which for me is a killer. For me, the computer HAS to be able to run my suites of photo/video editing software AS WELL as running TS3 and other graphics-intensive simulators without missing a beat.
Matched with that CPU is the MSI - Z270 GAMING M3 ATX LGA1151 motherboard. Yes, I went cheap on the motherboard because I excessively spent on the CPU, but I wanted something that was rated as a gaming motherboard as well as was highly rated despite it's economical price. MSI is considered one of the top motherboard manufacturers in the world. and is well known for it's attention to gamer's needs. So naturally I gravitated towards the MSI Z270. It also has 7th generation compatability which will allow me to utilize a Kaby Lake processor in the future should I need to upgrade to a CPU with more cores and for $191.00 CDN, well...it was a no-brainer.
I decided to go all-out and put 32GB of DDR4 Dual Channel RAM in the machine (Crucial - 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2133). You know...just because. Well actually not really "just because" because if you are rendering video, your Ready Access Memory will get sucked dry like a heat-stroke victim needing water. Ideally it would be nice to get 64GB of RAM but y'know what. I don't want to blow over $600.00CDN on memory. As it is, it's almost $380 if you want put G.Skill Ripjaws in there or some other fancy brand-name. I decided to go with Crucial because they were roughly $100.00 cheaper than the rest of the memory packages out there. 32GB of RAM will come in handy whether you're playing TS3 or whether you're rendering a Youtube Video of ducks swimming in the pond and a photo-hike, showing just how much better your bad day is behind the viewfinder is than a good day inside a cubicle. Why do you think I didn't become a cubicle rat?
My build included a "bequiet" (read that as "Shut UP stupid Fan!") PURE ROCK 51.7 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler considering some of the noisy little bastards I've had to put up with for the past while in my previously pre-built computers I bought from your lovely little big box retailers. And considering that my hearing is probably one of the things that I'd like to preserve since I enjoy listening to classical music; I decided to go for the "be quiet" CPU fan. Not only is it $10.00 cheaper than the nearest low profile CPU fan, it is rated as near-silent in its operation and the heatsink baffles will dissipate heat relatively efficiently, not to mention the plus-side of not going deaf.
As I said before, I believe in ridiculously overpowered, so I picked out an XFS 1000W Pro Series Power Supply that should provide enough wattage to power ANYTHING that I throw at it including several new hard drives, a Blu-Ray drive, card readers including an XQD card reader (when I upgrade to whatever Nikon camera uses that form of memory card format) I don't want to have to do the math and go..."oh oh...I don't have enough power...to run this...I'm gonna have to buy a new power supply."
I do an obscene amount of photography and would love to have as much capacity on a drive as I possibly can as well as be able to back it up with very little problems. So hence the reason why I went with a high-capacity drive. The WD Re 4TB Datacenter Capacity Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 inch WD4000FYYZ was one of the ones that combined value with capacity and allowed me to make certain that I am able to store all my photography images as well as any screen-caps from the games which I run.
Last but not least, the graphics card that I plan to utilize in this machine is a MSI - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB 6GT OC and that thing is more than capable of handling TS3 with 6GB of onboard graphics memory to boot. That card has the capability of handling three monitors (or two TVs and a monitor) for display purposes. You can hook up two TVs with a dual HDMI cable splitter.
I'm sure with 4TB and a dock built into the case, I would more than likely have enough capacity to be able to deal with any photographic or video situation that comes up and the CPU and RAM should be able to play any computer simulation that I have or will obtain down the road. Computers have always been a royal pain in my household: essentially Murphy's law reigns over any computer system that I may possess - whatever can go wrong will go wrong. In pursuing the preperatory stages of this build by creating a quote from PC Part Picker Canada, I initially built a "dream system build" which came out to a whopping $4665.12 which is staggering by ANY stretch of the imagination. My Monster System Build Quote That was throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the equation.
My current Value Build came out to less than $2000K which is still pricey by my books, but it ticks off most of the things that I need to currently run my photography suites with room to grow. My Value Build
And saving money makes this techno troglodyte happy. And that money left over can go towards getting lenses or other items that are necessary to produce high-quality images or I can acquire some games: (probably would be a wiser choice to go for the lenses and filters) Cities:Skylines, DCS, FSX and others namely:
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