Recommended PC set up

[Kwafo Acquaah Arhin]

Dear community.

 

I only play simple games on my PC. Pillars of Eternity is an exeption. I notice long load times and this hinders the fun to play.

 

I would like to upgrade my pc but I do not know what upgrades are needed to speed up the loading times in Pillars of Eternity. The graphics are fine.

 

I run a desktop PC with the folowing specifications:

 

• OS: Windows 10 64 bit
• MB: asus p6t Deluxe v2
• GPU:  Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 TI (3GB mem)
• CPU: Intel I7 920 (2,67GHz)
• MEM: Kingston Hyper X 2000Mhz - 3 banks of 2GB problably one defect, only registering 4096MB
• HD: 7200 RPM harddrive (MoBo does not support SSD)

ps. it could be possible that my motherboard is old, could that hinder performance?

 

 

[Kwafo Acquaah Arhin]

Thank you for your reply. Our systems are indeed similar. 

 

You are right about the memory, not that expensive, I will change them.

 

And if SSD speed things up that mucn, I will certainly buy one because I like Pillars of Eternity but the load times are killing me.

 

I will put this topic on solved )

[haveahappy]

Most likely the hard drive is the bottleneck.

 

Are you sure your motherboard can't use SSD? The connector is the same isn't it? I thought the OS and SSD's own firmware handled all the SSD specific stuff.

[AndreaColombo]

Indeed if loading times are your main concern, you're going to need to install the game on a SSD. It will speed them up considerably.

[Kwafo Acquaah Arhin]

Oké. I thought an SSD would be hinderd by the SATA 2.0 ports, but when I look online, the do say it would speeld things up never the less.

 

I'll go investigate futher ) 

[Nicholas Steel]

SSD would be hindered by SATA2, but it will still be a gargantuan improvement over a mechanical HDD (more than 10x faster random read/write performance?). SSD's can be connected to a SATA 2 or 3 port without issues via an adapter I believe. Old SSD's are designed for SATA connectivity.

 

Very recent motherboards come equipped with a native connector for new SSD's, avoiding the need for a SATA adapter and this method of connectivity will use the performance of up to 4x PCI-E instead of SATA 2 or 3 HDD controller performance.

 

If you think one of your sticks of RAM is defective you should consider replacing all your RAM with a single 8GB stick (Or 2x8GB) as DDR3 RAM is ridiculously cheap these days and this will avoid potential software issues caused by faulty RAM. I had 3x2GB sticks of DDR3 and one of them would intermittently fail to be detected by the BIOS and Windows when I turned the PC on (A reboot usually fixes it though) and I was getting various software issues, I replaced it several years later with an 8GB stick and the problems vanished, making me wish I did it sooner. You can see in my signature that the specifications of my PC are pretty similar to yours surprisingly.

 

I also had a faulty Thermaltake Toughpower Power Supply that was causing other issues (Issues that persisted and got worse over 3~ years), like intermittent computer deadlocks and video card TDR errors, the problem eventually became so bad the computer would very often deadlock before finishing loading Windows. I discovered that the problem lessened when plugging a less power hungry video card in to the computer, this led me to believe that the PSU was faulty and that it probably wasn't the Motherboard or CPU that was faulty (The rest of the hardware was replaced over the years which meant they couldn't be the source of the issue). I replaced it with an expensive as heck Corsair AX760 power supply earlier this year and the computer has been performing rock solid since.

 

Oh and I discovered that plugging my video card in to the first PCI-E slot makes the computer very unstable for unknown reasons so I assume that PCI-E slot is faulty, thankfully the 2nd slot is perfectly fine and also runs at PCI-E 16x in a single video card configuration.

 

I'm prolly gonna upgrade my computer early next year, replace the Motherboard, CPU and RAM and will upgrade the video card when the next generation of Nvidia video cards are released.

 

For me, I'm looking at these upgrades:

 

Intel i7 6700 (maybe 6700k)

ASUS Sabertooth Z170

16GB of whatever DDR4 RAM (2800MHZ)

Maybe an SSD

Edited December 14, 2015 by Nicholas Steel

[Nicholas Steel]

You'll likely notice a bigger difference having Windows installed to the SSD than having a game installed to the SSD to be honest, I mean you'll still get an improvement for the game but not many games these days continuously load from the HDD (Except maybe MMO games). Most games load everything they need to RAM (Because it's a effective way of mitigating the slow performance of mechanical HDD's) and have specific triggers that cause new data to get loaded to RAM (Like transitioning from outdoors to indoors and vice versa in Fallout games for example).

 

Saving your progress will be notably more speedy if the game saves to My Documents and you leave that located on a SSD.

Edited December 16, 2015 by Nicholas Steel

[Kwafo Acquaah Arhin]

Do you think I can safely instal one 8GB ram, the motherboard specification only talks about 2x4 or 3x2 or 3x4 or 6x2 etcetera. 

[Nicholas Steel]

Yeah you should be fine. The worst that can happen is the computer simply won't display any graphics, no permanent harm can happen (Unless something is seriously wrong). If the intermittent RAM issue persists it might be a faulty RAM Slot on the motherboard, moving it to another slot should resolve that issue.

 

Make sure to perform a Memtestx86 to verify the new RAM isn't faulty, also make sure it is configured correctly in the BIOS before testing it (for obvious reasons). Let it pass every test at least twice and there should be 0 errors during the tests if the RAM is okay.

Edited December 16, 2015 by Nicholas Steel

[Kwafo Acquaah Arhin]

Yeah I did the RAM test, so i suspect a faulty slot. So 1 ram module should solve that

[Justinian]

SSD does speed up the load times noticeably, but forget trying to build a PC around Pillars - you won't get smooth performance on even the highest end hardware. I'm running an i7 6700 and GTX 980 Ti and the game still drops frames like crazy. It's just an incredibly unoptimized game.

[Kwafo Acquaah Arhin]

Thnx, I did the updates, new ram andere ssd, the load time is less then before and an improvement but I agree that the game is not optimised. To bad. But I don't regret the improvement for my PC.

[Nicholas Steel]

If you haven't yet, you should do another memtestx86 after installing the new RAM to ensure it is fine.