Custom-building a computer to run Celestia

[SimonFTB]

Hi all

For a couple of years now I've been using Celestia very successfully during lecture work with children and adults here in the UK. The problem is, my 1.7GHz Pentium-powered laptop (with its ATI Mobility Radeon X300 graphics card with 64MB of VRAM) can be a bit clunky at times.

What I really want is silky smooth Celestia to give maximum wow-factor to people I'm speaking to. I'm thinking of finding someone to build me a non-laptop computer specifically with Celestia in mind that I can then cart around for my lectures. I don't have an unlimited budget (far from it!) and it would have to be Windows-based as I'd want to multitask use of Powerpoint whilst Celestia is running (I'm on XP SP2 at the moment, but I fear I'd be obliged to go for Vista, unless you think I can get away without it?!). The system would be linked to a 1280x768 resolution digital projector, so the graphics card would have to be happy outputting simultaneously through an external VGA port.

Could anyone be so kind as to suggest what graphics card(s) I should look at buying? How much VRAM should I have allocated? What is considered a sensible minimum RAM level these days? Clock speed? I'm guessing that the graphics card is the most important factor in all this, though please correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't pretend to be very competent when it comes to the innards of computers (hence wanting to get someone to build the machine for me), so please word your suggestions as simply as possible so I can understand you!

Many, many thanks in anticipation.

Best regards

Simon

[SimonFTB]

Additional!

I should clarify that I have already looked through the FAQ's section on graphics cards, but when I search for things like Nvidia 5000 (and above) graphics cards on Google, the stuff that comes up is really complex and (for me at least!) confusing. Are these Nvidia cards the same as GeForce, for example? I'm hoping that I can get some baby-language help to wade through the graphics card minefield!!

Delving deeper, I discover that there's an Nvidia 8800 series card that sounds very good and presumably is one of the better choices. However, there are umpteen variants of it - a GT, a GTS, a GTX and goodness-knows how many others! Can anyone out there give me some guidance?!

[ANDREA]

Hello Simon, I'll try to give you some ideas, based upon my personal experience and a lot of suggestions from much more expert people.
First of all, the graphic card: the nvidia based cards were the only suggested ones, but now the problems with ATI cards have been (almost?) solved. Personally I prefer nvidia, and among the great number of different models, actually the nvidia 8800GTX 768 MB looks the best one for price/characteristics balance.
For the processor, the best one (always considering price/characteristics) is the INTEL core 2 quad Q6600 G0 (pay attention to this last G0 code, it's regarding the CPUs that can very easily be overclocked without problems. As you see below I use the 2.4 GHz at 3.6 GHz, and that's not the maximum possible).
Memory: if you prefer Windows XP 32bit or VISTA 32bit, even if the maximum usable by 32 bit OS is 3.5 GB RAM, I suggest you to have 4 GB of 800 MHz RAM.
If you'll use VISTA 64 the maximum allowable will be 128 GB, and there are already on the market 2GB single chips, so you could have up to 8GB RAM.
Considering the actually very low price, I suggest you to buy the maximum allowed by your budget.
Then, the HD: following Fridger's suggestion, I bought a 300 GB SATA II HD 300Mbytes/s, and was so satisfied that I bought another one. I strongly suggest you this type of HD.
Then, the motherboard.
It is compelled by the processor you'll buy, but I suggest you to buy a very good and recent one, but I cannot suggest you any, there are a lot of brands and models, just give a look in hardware forums, as I did.
And now the dress, i.e. the case: all the stuff I suggested is at the top as performance, energy needs and temperature levels, so just chose a very performing, filled with fans, and with at least 600W power (not less) case, middle or (better!) full tower. As useful addition, I suggest a better cooler for the CPU.
Hope not to rise a flame on the subject.
Bye

Andrea

[Johaen]

What follows is in my opinion and is in no way intended to flame anyone else's opinion on the matter.

What Andrea is suggesting would be one of the best machines you could be build, but it is quite unnecessary for what Celestia needs. Note that you will get better performance with his layout, but it would cost quite a bit, and more than I think is necessary for what you need.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo, somewhere in the 2.4 to 2.6 GHz range. (around $200)
Video Card: Either the 8800GTS (320 MB is fine, 512 MB is better but not on newegg anymore), or the new 9600GT ($150 - $180)
RAM: IMO, 2 GB is fine. DDR2 is still the norm as far as I can tell. (No more than $50, which depresses me considering I paid $220 for my 2GB of DDR about 1 1/2 yrs ago.
OS: You can still by XP online if that's what you prefer. Vista is not a bad OS either though. ($90 - $150 depending on version)
Hard Drive: When I built my PC, 320GB was the best price:size ratio. Now 500GB is. ($100 - $140) Honestly though, if all this machine is truely ever going to be used for is Celestia, then you don't need anywhere near that much space. 160GB HDDs are around $45, but the price:size ratio isn't as good.
Power Supply (Something Andrea missed (Edit: Ah, he didn't miss it, he just included it in the case. IMO, it's better to buy the PSU seperate, just so you know what you're getting) ) : 350 - 400 watts is plenty for this set-up. You have alot of leeway here though. Really, the more you spend, the fancier the PSU. (anywhere from $30 - $130 depending on the fanciness)
Motherboard: Whatever you get, make sure it supports the Core2 Duo, accepts DDR2 RAM, and has at least 1 PCI-Express slot. Again, the more you spend, the fancier the mobo. ($65+)
Case: This is really up to you. Should include at least one fan on the back of the case, and have enough space for what you need. I recommend mid-tower, just so you have enough room to work on the inside of it. As usually, more $$$ = fancier. ($50 - $150+)

[ANDREA]

What Andrea is suggesting would be one of the best machines you could be build, but it is quite unnecessary for what Celestia needs. Note that you will get better performance with his layout, but it would cost quite a bit, and more than I think is necessary for what you need.......

Johaen, I absolutely agree on what you say, but I have to add that what I suggested is in expectation of future releases of Celestia that, as you know, is much demanding if you want use it at its best, and this always increases from one release to the other, due to the increasing possibilities offered by Celestia.
Moreover the card and the CPU I suggest have been considerably reduced in price recently, due to the issue of new stuff (that moreover is not so more performing than these, as the price difference could suggest).
IMHO I think that spending some more money now (but not so much more) will allow Simon to use this PC for a longer time.
Just a thought.
Bye

Andrea

[selden]

Simon,

One of the problems with a made-yourself system is that it has no overall warranty. If it breaks, you have to figure out what's wrong and negotiate the return of non-functioning parts. If you don't have much experience with computer hardware, you'll find it's easy to damage things during assembly.

If you look at the prices that Johaen listed, you'll find that the system will cost about $1000 U.S., plus display.

In other words, I'd suggest purchasing a comparably priced packaged system which includes a plugin Nvidia graphics card.

e.g. A Dell XPS630 with XP or Vista and an Nvidia 8800 GT lists for about $1300, without display. HP and Lenovo have comparable systems at similar or lower prices.

[t00fri]

Simon,

One of the problems with a made-yourself system is that it has no overall warranty. If it breaks, you have to figure out what's wrong and negotiate the return of non-functioning parts. If you don't have much experience with computer hardware, you'll find it's easy to damage things during assembly.

I have never bought a packaged desktop computer, and can strongly recommend custom-made machines. However, the warranty issue is a valid point. Yet there are MANY dealers these days (including mine), who build your computer while you can watch, precisely to your specifications, with the parts you like! Since the dealer builds the machine, customers get a /full warranty of 2years/, say. That's what I always did because of the warranty issue, although building these computers myself, would be peanuts for me. I have much better warranty terms in fact, but that's a different story.

F.

[SimonFTB]

Hi guys

I really appreciate all your detailed replies - I feel things becoming much clearer now, thanks to you!

The reason I was wondering whether it was better to stick with XP over Vista is that I believe Vista would be much more memory-intensive. Ergo, this means the performance of Celestia would be reduced - or am I wrong? I was assuming that using a less demanding OS would mean that the computer's resources could be used by applications instead.

Incidentally, with all these wonderful high-end components running, how loud does the computer get?! I'm thinking in terms of all the cooling fans, really. I'm suddenly worrying that it might be really noisy and, in the confined space of my mobile planetarium, such a lovely computer might be annoyingly loud! Having never seen a fancy computer, I really don't know how loud they are. Maybe they're not?!

Thanks again

Simon

[ANDREA]

Hi guys I really appreciate all your detailed replies - I feel things becoming much clearer now, thanks to you!

You are welcome, Simon.

The reason I was wondering whether it was better to stick with XP over Vista is that I believe Vista would be much more memory-intensive. Ergo, this means the performance of Celestia would be reduced - or am I wrong? I was assuming that using a less demanding OS would mean that the computer's resources could be used by applications instead.

This is the reason why I was suggesting to install more than 4GB RAM under VISTA: it needs 1 GB RAM to work, much more than XP, and even if you put OFF some of the graphic stuff (e.g. "Aero", suggestive but useless, IMO), it still sucks lots of RAM.

Incidentally, with all these wonderful high-end components running, how loud does the computer get?! I'm thinking in terms of all the cooling fans, really. I'm suddenly worrying that it might be really noisy and, in the confined space of my mobile planetarium, such a lovely computer might be annoyingly loud! Having never seen a fancy computer, I really don't know how loud they are. Maybe they're not?!

This is mostly up to you.
I mean that the case quality (and price, obviously, from about 50 to much more than 200 US$) is very important.
There are many different types, and among them you can easily find one with sufficiently low noise.
In public shows and school lessons I use my PC , with a middle quality tower case (about 130 US$ price) and I never had any trouble due to excessive noise from the PC fans (I have a lot of them, e.g. 2x120 mm and 2x80 mm fans in the case, 1x80 mm for the CPU, 1x80 mm for HD and 2x60 mm for the video card).
Moreover, I suppose that like me you use music and voice during shows, so this will eliminate most of noise influence on the public.
But NOT ALL the noise, obviously.
MY little cent.
Bye

Andrea

[Guckytos]

Hi Simon,

concerning the loudness of the computer that you want to build.

Watch out for the graphics card! Those are the ones that make the most noise when run in full blast 3D mode. Best thing, once you know which graphics chip 7950 GTS ... 8800 GTX, GS, ... you want to have, is to take a look at an (actual) computer game magazine and see if there are buy recommendations in it or best of and if there is the loudness of the type of cards you want to buy mentionend.
There are some cards out, that reach with active cooling less than 1 Sone and that is very quiet.

That's how I built my system, and I must say, it is not much louder than my old system (Athlon 800).

Another source of noise is always the CPU cooler, so you should also watch out there to buy a good one, that is real quiet. Same goes for the case coolers, there it is normally better to buy big ones, that rotate slowly and are actively controlled by the motherboard or a cooling system. 120mm ones are good, as andrea said.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Guckytos

[Boux]

My 2 cents here as I know a little bit about this stuff.
Let's have a look at the requirements for a good Celestia machine.
First, what are the requirements for Celestia itself:
- Celestia is not a graphic rendering challenge at all
- Celestia does not need huge GPU processing power as the graphics card will spend most of its time waiting for the CPU sending data to it
- Celestia is a memory hog if one wants to run a lot of big addons (models and textures)
- Celestia needs a lot of video memory to keep large textures on board and not trash
- Celestia needs CPU power to do all the math in real time
So what would be a very decent mid-range and cost/performance spec?
I would say:
- A Q6600 CPU for the math horsepower, as Andrea suggested. Best currently available performance/price CPU. Easy to overclock. Allows to do other concurrent tasks.
- As much memory as possible.
This means a 64bit OS (either Vista 64 or Linux x64) to handle 8GB memory to load that huge number of textures and addons you want to enjoy without Celestia crashing. Memory is dirt cheap these days.
- A graphics card with at least 500MB memory.
I would not go with anything less than a GeForce 8/9/600.
There are lots of options in with the Nvidia 86xx and 96xx series.
If you are in the Linux business, Nvidia is by far the right choice.
- Regarding the hard drive(s), any current 500 GB Sata II drive(s) will do the trick. Make sure you pick up a 32 MB buffer memory model for fast caching of many small chunks (your typical Celestia requirement).
- For a better Celestia experience, you will want a 24" LCD display or a 1080p full HDTV. Prices are very low now. A 88xx or 98xx Geforce will have the power to drive such high resolutions with all eye-candy turned on.
The other components - PSU, cooling, etc. - are more a matter of fine-tuning the rig, personal taste and budget.

[BobHegwood]

Just FYI...

I bought my machine off the shelf at a national retail store chain outlet (which shall remain nameless) and I have had absolutely NO problems with Celestia. No loud fans, no warranty troubles, no problems except getting familiar with Vista. I am stuck with this operating system because my machine was built specifically for Vista. See my signature below for details.

Whoever said that Vista is memory-intensive is also correct though. This thing is running 64 processes when I'm simply staring at my Windows desktop, so as much RAM as you can get (for both the PC and the graphics card) is recommended. By the way, I think I paid about $1200 U.S. for this thing. I'm happy though.

One more point too... I WAS using a Gateway which I bought in 1994. It had NONE of the graphics capabilities of my new machine, and virtually no RAM. Celestia ran just fine on that machine too. The only difference was that I couldn't see a lot of the neat planetary graphics because of its limitations.

So simple advice? Get a machine with as much RAM as you can get.

Good Luck, Bob

[Boux]

Yep, Bob, memory, memory and as much memory as possible.

[SimonFTB]

Hi again, all

Sorry not to have logged on recently - I've been away for a couple of weeks (nowhere very exotic, alas!).

Just to say, once again, many thanks for spending your time considering my questions and offering your advice. I sincerely appreciate your kindness in doing so and I look forward to putting your advice to good use in the coming months. I've found what seems to be a well-respected company which custom-builds machines for a seemingly reasonable price (with the reassurance of a 3-year warranty!) and I may well ask them to build me a machine, in light of your comments.

Many thanks, once again!

Take care,

Simon

[ANDREA]

You are welcome, Simon.
Bye and good luck for your new PC.

Andrea