Cheapish game development rig?

[DragonQ]

A friend of mine wants to get into gaming development using Unreal Engine and Blender but only has ~£800 to spend. I'm guessing this won't go very far but I'm not even sure what to focus on with such a build. I'm guessing more CPU cores and RAM are important for rendering but at the same time a decent GPU will be necessary to see the results? I know he's targetting the PS4/Xbox One ultimately but since those are being replaced next year I don't know if that helps much in terms of getting to the budget.

He has peripherals and monitors already but I think he needs everything else. Any ideas on this?

 

[DragonQ]

Thanks for the replies. I definitely agree about 32 GiB of RAM. I suppose the problem with buying new is that AMD offers more VRAM at each price point compared to nVidia - what specific issues would surface when choosing one over the other? Does either Blender or Unreal Engine prefer one over the other in terms of performance?

 

[DragonQ]

RDNA does look impressive for Blender and obviously the 5700 and 5700 XT have the 8 GiB VRAM which is nice. I just wonder if it's worth dropping to the 5700 (instead of the 5700 XT) in order to get a larger SSD and 32 GiB of VRAM. Particularly given 5700s can be flashed to 5700 XTs, although I haven't looked into the risks of this.

 

[DragonQ]

Yeah that basket looks very similar to what I had in mind. Prices have crept up a bit sadly. I'll ask my friend if he's happy to stretching to ~£900 and if so I think we have a winner.

One last thing I'm not sure about is disk space. I was thinking 1 TB because I assumed model files etc. would get quite large. Do you think 500 GB would be enough? That'd cut ~£50 off the price if so.

 

[DragonQ]

BB CODE
My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Patriot Viper Steel 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit (PVS432G320C6K)= £128.99
• 1 x Gigabyte B450M-DS3H AMD B450 (Socket AM4) DDR4 Micro-ATX Motherboard= £68.99
• 1 x Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 Gaming OC 8GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £325.00
• 1 x Bitfenix Formula Series 550W 80 Plus Gold Power Supply= £66.95
• 1 x WD Blue 3D NAND 500GB 2.5" SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive (WDS500G2B0A)= £52.99
• 1 x Kolink Citadel Micro-ATX Case - Black= £39.95
• 1 x AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 4.2GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail= £179.99

Total: £874.56 (includes shipping: £11.70)
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can flash XT Bios but need to get same card vendor BIOS from XT Seems some pricing had increased like ram and SSD - which now will increase with price

If I take this bundle and swap:

• SSD for an MX500
• GPU for PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 Red Dragon (dual BIOS so safer for flashing to XT)
• Motherboard for MSI B450 Tomahawk Max (just a solid board)
  
• RAM for 32GB Dominator Platinum RGB 3000CL15 (3000CL15 is the same bin as 3200CL16 I believe)

I can get it all for £866. I think it's worth it over a compromised build closer to £800, which'd probably have a weaker motherboard, slower RAM, a worse PSU and a smaller SSD.