New PC for Second Life - is it good?

[mvasil01]

Hello,

I need to configure PC for Second Life for other person who is playing 6-7h/day. As i never play the game could you please advice me about the computer spec? I have prepared 2 options, but don't know are they good.

 

The only thing i was told as reqierment was that the computer should be able to run few (up to 5 i supouse) instances of 3rd party viewer (and i have no idea the name of the viewer or it's specs.)

 

Option 1 - Intel

ASROCK Z87 EXTREME3 /LGA1150

I5-4670 /3.4G/6MB/BOX/LGA1150

2X4G DDR3 1600G ADATA XPG CL9

1T SG SATA 6G/7200/64M

POWER C AXR9 270 2GBD5-TDHE/OC

CM K280 W/ELITE 500W

LG GH24NSB0 DVD RW BLAC

 

Option 2 - AMD 

AMD FX-8350/4.2G/X8/BOX/AM3+

ASROCK 970 PRO3 /AMD970/AM3+

2X4G DDR3 1600G ADATA XPG CL9

POWER C AXR9 270X 2GBD5-PPDHE

CM K280 W/ELITE 500W

LG GH24NSB0 DVD RW BLACK

 

Thank you in advance.

[Sassy Romano]

You will also need a good graphics card, NOT an embedded Intel or similar and budget 2GB RAM per viewer instance, so if they want 5, then including OS overhead, I would be looking at a 16GB system minimum, assuming they may also want to do other things with the PC. An i7 processor may sit better too *shrugs*

 

Don't forget a good power supply.

[Qie Niangao]

Well, that "R9 270" is short for "Radeon R9 270" and that's a pretty good graphics card, although it's an ATI and historically nVidia's OpenGL drivers have been marginally less brain-damaged, so SL generally has fewer problems on nVidia cards. There are, however, plenty of folks successfully running SL on Radeon cards, so it's not make-or-break. Might check around for reports of trouble with the R9 270 model, and for driver versions with the least trouble.

I can't confirm whether the 500w power supply is good enough because I don't know the demands of this graphics card, but it's new enough that it may be happy with 500w.

[Sassy Romano]

Ah. I'm only on my phone so looking things up was beyond my interest level

[Kathmandu Gilman]

I have significantly better specs than either of these and getting more than 2 instances to run smoothly is a challenge, four is a slideshow and I've got 2 GTX 580's in SLI and 64gigs of memory. You're gonna need a GTX 780, 690 or Titan to run 5 instances unless you turn off all the eyecandy and AA filtering. I find Nvidia cards work a lot better with SL than AMD but others have different exeriences. The Intel i5 will probably run better since SL is lightly multithreaded and doesn't really benefit from lots of cores. A few really fast cores works better than a lot of moderatly fast cores. Turning off logical cores and overclocking will speed up SL a good bit in some cases, depends on the configuration.

SL loves ram, the more, the better. Due to memory leaks, the more memory you have, the longer you can usually stay in SL without crashing. I have a ram drive set up for SL and its cashe to speed loading times but I don't think it helps all that much except maybe  with the new cashe system.

Makes sure you have good cooling, SL will turn your computer into a space heater especially if you have the graphics turned up. I melted two GTX 8800's back in the day because of it. The HAF series of cases with the monster fans are almost a requirement.