Buying a new PC

It is overkill for your schooling. You won't need anything near that expensive. You could probably get a used laptop that's four or five years old and it would also be enough for your years of school.

If your goal is to play games, yes, it should keep you gaming all the hot and popular games for the next 3 years no problem. For gaming you might want a bigger drive than the 1TB that comes with it, just because so many games are several hundred gigabytes these days, but that has nothing to do with your schoolwork.

@frob Thanks for your feedback although I already have a laptop (without gpu) which I will take to class. In my room I would prefer a desktop (with GPU).

Why do you say a Ryzen 5 and an RTX 5060 are overkill?

RandomPantoffel said:
Why do you say a Ryzen 5 and an RTX 5060 are overkill?

I think he's saying you don't need to spend that much for a computer you'll use for a college game dev course.

RandomPantoffel wrote:

Why do you say a Ryzen 5 and an RTX 5060 are overkill?

Most of what you're doing doesn't require a modern machine at all.

The vast majority of the coursework on computer science proper, topics of theory, algorithms, and data structures, compiler design, assembly language, and more, could likely be just fine on machines from the 1980s. You wouldn't use them because newer machines are available, but you could use them. For most theory, even a machine from the 1970s could likely work.

You could be taught on a PDP-11 or Wicat 150, machines likely retired several decades ago, the theory, algorithms, data structures, and similar all apply just as well, in addition to teaching you more about the variety of computers in the world instead of just the x86 family. Too many young developers have never worked on ANYTHING other than an x86 processor, some only have experience with x86 and a few have some experience with Apple's M-series. That's in contrast with people who grew up with programming decades before where college courses typically required students to learn on 3 or 4 different types of computers. Personally I had used not just the x86 machines that were at the Pentium chips at the time, but also school-provided PDP-11, Wicat, AS-400, TI's TMS-9900, SGI O2 and Indy machines, NeXT workstations, macs, plus my own experiences on the Apple 2, PC's from the IBM XT (8088) and AT (80286), the Commodore 64 and Atari 800, and even played with microcontrollers from Parallax. So 13 extremely different hardware and software environments. Learning that kind of diversity of hardware helps teach that what hardware does and what theory does have both powerful intersections and also emulations for compilers. Since then I have also developed ARMv4, XScale, MIPS, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and assorted other hardware. Thinking on it, ALL the various processors over the years could handle the bulk of the computer science side of the education, because the science is independent of processors.

When you're actually working on game development content using modern engines, the most cutting-edge hardware you're likely to actually need for course topics were available in 2018 (seven years ago), with the RTX 2060's shader changes used by Nanite in Unreal and HDPR's mesh shaders in Unity, but both have fallback methods that work for cards going back about 20 years. A laptop from 2022 or 2021 would have that kind of graphics card, even Intel's integrated graphics has support for that functionality.

The Ryzen 5 and the 5060 aren't required even for today's top high-end games, that usually set 2060 as a min spec because of the meshlet functionality, and 4070 or 4080 for high spec, they may have settings targeting 50x0 with all the extra eye candy turned on, the particles and reflection depth and other non-essential graphics features cranked up to their highest settings not because it is needed but because the processing power happens to be available. It will probably be considered mid-spec in 2028 through 2030, and minimum requirements around 2032 or so, but maybe not even until the subsequent hardware generation in 2034. While the functionality is great for playing games, nothing you are creating in undergrad coursework is going to require it.

If you went on to graduate studies (a masters degree or doctorate) and also you had an emphasis on computer graphics, there is a chance you'd be working on new, cutting edge shaders or whatever is their equivalent, but that would be available in the graphics lab in the school where you'd also be working, and not something you'd need your own equipment for. Basically they are school owned computers, you'd be employed by the school in the lab working under the supervision of your advisor, and it would effectively be a work-issued computer.

LOL I knew this thread would trigger people. Me included. Think about what you want to do with the PC. Do you want to play AAA slop games that come out in the future? Or do you want to have something that is good for getting work done (including gamedev)? If you want to play AAA slop, then you will need a good dGPU. For doing your own gamedev or playing old games, an iGPU is sufficient. Honestly, having a tower PC is just a hassle, especially if you're going to university. Constantly moving project files from laptop to tower PC and vice versa, it's just annoying. And anything you work on has to run on your laptop as well, anyway, and you'll be working with your laptop a lot. At some point, I just stopped using my old tower PC, and turned it into a home server with a good HDD. I now use my laptop for everything, and I never found it lacking for any task. Been doing that for 6 years now or something.

I haven't used a tower PC for years, and only been using iGPUs in ~500–800€ lenovo laptops. Recently had to switch to a 500€ one because the old one's SSD died and I had to get a new one within a few hours, and that was all that I could get at the local PC shop. At least it doesn't have E-cores. Even on a recent 500€ laptop, I don't have any problems. The CPU is fast, the iGPU is also good enough for the types of games I play, although I also don't play much because I'm just not interested in what AAA is pumping out over the last decade.

Really, just get something with 16 GiB of RAM, with 4×2 cores (real cores, not E-cores), and can go up to 4GHz in performance mode. I don't know what you would ever realistically need more power or memory for, except playing AAA games.

And anything you make yourself will definitely not have enough manpower behind it to ever have enough content at a high-enough fidelity to overwhelm a laptop. Also, if you make a game that only runs on high end tower PCs, then you also massively limit the target audience to those people who have gaming rigs capable of running AAA games. So then the question is, can you compete with AAA? If not, why would you make something that only runs on those people's machines who have access to AAA?

Anyway, if you got money to throw around and can afford the electricity in the future, go buy a high end PC, I can't stop you. My laptop consumes less than 65 Watts total during charging, so I assume it consumes somewhere around 30 Watts max for running, and maybe 30 Watts for charging, idk. The CPU & iGPU combined chip only consumes 15 Watts, anyway, no idea what the monitor etc. consume.

If you are a student and not making your own money, having a power-hungry beast running all day will hurt your finances. Desktop computers with dGPUs have already turned into a luxury item IMO. I personally feel no inclination towards ever owning a tower again or having a dGPU ever again. My target audience are people with ~500€ laptops with iGPUs and 6-8 hyperthreads on their CPU.

Also, I don't think going to university is worth the money, but if your parents pay for it and that's the only way that you don't have to get a real job, then go for it, I guess. But don't waste your time on the studies, and use it to actually develop your own skills. Once you have to go work a real job, you won't have much time or energy left over for personal development or hobby projects.

Here's my system specs (500€ retail price a few months back), a lenovo V15:

• 512GiB SSD
• 16GiB RAM
• AMD Ryzen 5 7520U (4 cores, 8 hyperthreads, 2.7GHz balanced, 4.3GHz performance)
• iGPU: Radeon Graphics (RDNA2), no VRAM

I use a regular mouse and keyboard and one additional external monitor. It feels just as snappy as my tower PC did back then. It's quiet, doesn't produce much heat, and keeps my bills low.

For basic programming classes, sure, almost anything runs. But game development courses usually include Unity, Unreal, Blender, Substance, and light baking. Those tools can easily eat RAM and GPU.

A 9600X + 32GB RAM is a reasonable baseline today. I would not recommend less than 32GB if someone plans to run Unreal and Blender side by side. I have seen students hit memory limits fast with 16GB.

The only part I would reconsider is the RTX 5060. If the price gap is small, stepping up one tier helps with viewport performance, light builds, and GPU rendering. That upgrade will matter more than the CPU in most game dev workflows.

So yes, that machine should comfortably last through a 3-year program. The bigger risk is running out of GPU or storage, not CPU.

Wow. Around 10-15 years ago, I could run firefox, CoD4, and VLC player at once without a problem on a 4GiB machine. Now you can't even run a browser and a text editor simultaneously on 4GiB. Actually, you can't even run a browser at all on 4GiB. But to make someone run out of 16GiB with just 2 programs is nuts. All the people programming these tools should be ashamed of squandering the end-user's hardware like that.

Also with how RAM prices are currently, buying 32GiB of RAM and then also a high end GPU with lots of VRAM is completely insane. That money would much better be kept piled up for emergencies or for when times get better again. Also, if you can't even boot an engine and a model editor with 16GiB of RAM, who is supposed to be able to even launch your game when it's finished? Also, do people even bake light anymore at all? Afaik, especially Unreal is all about semi-real-time lighting with lumen nowadays.

I wish we could return to the level of software workmanship and quality where having 4GiB is considered a lot, and 1.5–2GiB is sufficient for everything. Also, an era where just having the PC running for a day wouldn't produce 3–4GiB of disk writes even when you don't do anything.

RmbRT wrote:

Actually, you can't even run a browser at all on 4GiB.

I can. My VM has 4GB and i have dozens of tabs open. (Running Win7, though)

RmbRT wrote:

But to make someone run out of 16GiB with just 2 programs is nuts. All the people programming these tools should be ashamed of squandering the end-user's hardware like that.

It's not end-user SW but production tools, eventually baking gigabytes of data so end users don't have to.

RmbRT wrote:

Also with how RAM prices are currently, buying 32GiB of RAM and then also a high end GPU with lots of VRAM is completely insane.

Yes. The question is not: 'is my system sufficient for the next 3 years?',
but actually 'will the PC platform be still alive in 3 years?', of course.
I would never pay this much for a gaming PC.

RmbRT wrote:

Also, do people even bake light anymore at all? Afaik, especially Unreal is all about semi-real-time lighting with lumen nowadays.

There is always potential stuff we might wanna bake or generate offline, and powerful HW makes it possible.
Nothing wrong with that i would say.
Ofc., you don't necessarily need a workstation to dev a game. But i remember when they said 'your kid needs an 8GB laptop for our IT school', and then they did run multiple VMs in parallel, forcing us to buy a new laptop mid school.

RmbRT wrote:

I wish we could return to the level of software workmanship and quality where having 4GiB is considered a lot

Impossible, because Windows already needs those 4GB for itself.
Idk what exactly it does with all that ram. But i'm sure i did not ask for any of those useless features.
Nobody did. But MS always thinks they would know what people want.

JoeJ said:
I can. My VM has 4GB and i have dozens of tabs open. (Running Win7, though)

Impressive. Is it a 32-bit build? What browser is it? Is it a recent browser version? On my old 4GiB ubuntu laptop, I ran out of memory with just sublime text & firefox and a few tabs open. At this point, linux is just as bloated as windows…

JoeJ said:
Impossible, because Windows already needs those 4GB for itself.

Ok, it's not that bloated yet, haha. I guess it just caught up with where windows was a few years back, but windows just can't stop bloating itself.

JoeJ said:
It's not end-user SW but production tools, eventually baking gigabytes of data so end users don't have to.

Still, you should be able to bake that stuff in smaller steps, too. Or how did people bake their levels when computers didn't have that much RAM & VRAM? Also, shipping a 100+GiB game is rude.

JoeJ said:
Ofc., you don't necessarily need a workstation to dev a game. But i remember when they said 'your kid needs an 8GB laptop for our IT school', and then they did run multiple VMs in parallel, forcing us to buy a new laptop mid school.

Running multiple VMs on a laptop at once… wow. Also, if the school says 8GiB is needed, then they should not be able to demand that you have more than that. And if it doesn't work with 8, it's their fault, and they should be held accountable. Is nobody thinking of poor people anymore? Just making everyone buy two laptops, that school should be ashamed and whoever was responsible for that blunder should be fired immediately. “Haha, just a mistake… why don't you just take out a loan? hahaha. Or just drop out if you're too poor. No refunds, btw.”

RmbRT wrote:

Impressive. Is it a 32-bit build? What browser is it? Is it a recent browser version?

64 bit, Chrome 109 (they stopped supporting Win7 maybe a year ago, so no more updates since then)
I have disabled some Widnows services for more ram (Update, file indexing), but only because previously i used only 2 GB ram for the VM, which worked as well.

Actually i hate Microsoft since C64 for its slow Basic interpreter. Win 3.11 was a joke compared to Mac, Amiga or Atari which did proper GUI S years before.
But Win 95 was good then. Everybody praises Win XP because it was so lightweight, but i used Win 2000 instead which could do the same things at only half of RAM. The next good was Win 7, which was MSs best OS imo.
I would still use Win 7 on the host too, if they would not force me to upgrade for DirectX.

RmbRT wrote:

At this point, linux is just as bloated as windows…

Sounds bad. I thought you would be joking about 4GB issues. : (

RmbRT wrote:

I guess it just caught up with where windows was a few years back

When i was trying Linux VMs i saw install iso disc sizes grew significantly with newer versions.
So probably yes. But i guess you can strip down manually with some work.
On Win10 i can no longer disable 'useless' services, for example.

RmbRT wrote:

Still, you should be able to bake that stuff in smaller steps, too.

Yeah, but eventually it becomes tediously slow.
I mean, you can use Godot instead U engines, which is tiny in comparison.
But in college you have to run what teachers propose, and that's probably (and so far also ideally) U engines.
Starting up small UE5 project with 16gb ram was very slow to me.
But my reason to upgrade to 64gb was actually my own preprocessing tools, thus my defense.

RmbRT wrote:

Is nobody thinking of poor people anymore?

They will think of this only when they realize it's them who actually feed them, but then it's already too late.
(not talking about teachers, though ; )

Damn the replies are beefier then I could have imagined!!

go for it it's more than your requirements

JoeJ wrote:

64 bit, Chrome 109 (they stopped supporting Win7 maybe a year ago, so no more updates since then) I have disabled some Widnows services for more ram (Update, file indexing), but only because previously i used only 2 GB ram for the VM, which worked as well.

You can go further by using something like Pale Moon, K-Meleon or Lynx (at which point you're, though, giving up on seeing any interactive elements or images).

To OP: Ultimately it depends on what you want to do/work with the machine and how much money are you willing to burn at it. Universities have computers where you can do university related work. A lot of people grabs better PC and work on projects and home and such (but that's not required).

One thing to consider and a hint from me - grab lighter laptop - especially if you're going to carry it around on uni, campus, home, etc. This is mainly for comfort - and pretty much any such laptop is going to be performant enough for everything you need to do at scholl.

And yes, it can run Unity and it can run UE ... they and their tools are going to be slow (but they're pita, with bad interactivity and infinite "compiling shaders" everywhere + abyssimal build times, extremely heavy/poor to thread CES, etc. ... it's a cost one pays for them being too generic and too bloated) ... yes, this includes my work machine wth 128GB RAM machine with one of the higher Ryzens and RX 7900.

Good luck with your studies! 🎮

its more than good my friend , good luck with college

So, a couple of irrelevant replies later and triggering some people with a simple question (who apperantly get excited in 2026 by running older Windows versions on 4GB of RAM, with all due respect for a mans passion) - I bought a new computer (with more than 4GB of RAM) - the one I originally asked my question about.

I understood the hardware (9600X, 32GB and an RTX 5060) might be overkill but that's fine. I rather have some flexibility in the future instead of buying some older stuff and having issues later down the road.

For anyone interested, I received the system and it runs like a dream. It has been build with attention to detail and has no extra bullshit software on the clean install of Windows.
The cables are well managed and it is very quiet, even while gaming. Contact with the staff was very personal and any troubles (hopefully there are none) in the future will be handled swiftly by them as they swap all the parts immediately.

Thanks to @fernandodev34peru @Alan Voren (PlayServ) @Emma-jane for providing a 'normal' answer.

@frob and @RmbRT I appreciate the passion you both have when it comes to hardware en coding. But I didn't feel like any part of the comments was relevant to my question. I'm just buying a new computer, relax.

@khawk

RmbRT wrote:

@khawk

For some reason my post dissapears. I tried replying 3 times now, as you can see.

Not to derail this thread, but first post went into the moderation queue (along with the duplicates). Notifications incorrectly sent before anything was approved.

Will be pushing an update with improved messages when posts require approval, along with not sending notifications to others in the thread until posts have been approved.

As for why the post went into the moderation queue - as a newer user with a lower "trust score" your posts are under more scrutiny across a series of checks. The system is currently configured to be very strict. As it's a newer system, I'm monitoring activity and slowly adjusting the configuration to find the right balance. So far it's working extremely well for filtering spam, but it does catch quite a bit of valid posts and content (blogs, projects, portfolios, news, comments, etc).

Anyway, apologize for the disruption, but carry on..