View Full Version : PC : New one on order.
Budget is a little tighter than I'd have ideally hoped but I've been able to order a PC at last \o/
My initial attempts all revolved around ordering the components myself, but I hit up against an odd problem I never anticipated. Shipping... It's actually proving more cost effective to purchase a complete system rather than buy the additional packages due to the shipping cost differences, so I've bought a slightly customised machine from iBUYPOWER.
Depending on AMD sorting out their inability to provide parts, this is on route somepoint soon (5-10 days they estimate)
Nzxt Tempest EVO Gaming Tower Case
Intel® Core™ i5 750 Processor (4x 2.66GHz/8MB L3 Cache)
8 GB [2 GB X4] DDR3-1333 Memory Module - Corsair or Major Brand
ATI Radeon HD 5850 - 1GB - Single Card
1 TB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Single Drive
320 GB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Single Drive
22X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive - [Lightscribe Technology] Black
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (naturally it'll end up dual boot Linux/Win 7 shortly after arrival)
Probably geeky/sad but i figured out this last year has been the first time in about 17 years that I've not had a gaming PC around..
Stan_Lite
22-11-2009, 07:06
Nice spec. That should do whatever you need. Is hardware cheaper over there than here? I've always heard that it is.
Currently speccing up an uber gaming rig myself.
Base spec as follows:
Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard
Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) CPU
OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 2000MHz RAM
I already have HDDs and a PSU good enough to power the system on air. I also already have 2x HD4890 GFX cards which will be run in crossfire.
Initially, the system will be air cooled with a Noctua NH-U12P SE2 cooling the CPU but will eventually be watercooled (cost is a bit much to do all in one go). At this stage I will also be adding a third HD4890.
For the aircooled phase, it will be in a cheap but nice Coolermaster CM-690 Dominator Case but, when I do the water phase, it will be going in a Slverstone TJ07 with dual water loops - a dual rad for the CPU and a quad rad for the 3 4890s and the chipset.
Everything will, of course, be overclocked to the max :D
My rig is setting me back just over $1400 including delivery, prices aren't that different as best as I can tell. Would have been cheaper on the mainland as most places offer free delivery (but exclude Hawaii and Alaska in that deal.)
Spec should cover most of my needs, particularly some of the geeky things I experiment with under Linux.. and there is always room for another GFX card in the box should I fancy ;D
I actually haven't had an ATI graphics card for a while now primarily because their linux drivers have sucked. I'm kind of twitchy now but most comments I've seen on linux forums are positive about it, and it's about the best bang for the buck going right now.
I twigged earlier that it's the first time I've bought a complete system for myself since my very first 386 sx25 PC. Every time since then I've been upgrading a few components at a time (worst case being mobo, cpu and memory)!
Nice spec Garp - how are you planning to use the 2 disks?
Also looking good stan - but why only 3 dimms? I always thought 2 or 4 was the better setup?
i7 core is the exception to that rule. They're tri-channel. :)
Well, socket 1366 i7 is the exception, socket 1156 i7 use dual channel again don't they?
Intel like to keep things simple :D
Is there an S1156 i7, or is that just i5? I'm not sure. You're probably right.
The i7-860 and i7-870 are on S1156. Intel decided it was more sensible to call everything without hyperthreading i5 and everything with hyperthreading i7, rather than everything on S1156 i5 and everything on S1366 i7.
I'm obviously out of touch hardware wise!
Nice spec Garp - how are you planning to use the 2 disks?
Not entirely sure. I'm not really fussed about RAID stuff, hence the different sizes. Usually I've done something like this:
HDD1:
c: - 80Gb OS and base programs.
e: - 20Gb (same size as my MP3 player, and has all my ripped MP3s on it, may make it 40 this time)
d: - All the rest, including documents, user profiles etc.
HDD2:
f: - entire disk used for swap file and scheduled backups.
As I've got 1TB and I've never been one to rip large videos and media on to HDD, I'll probably set aside 200-300Gb for Linux on the first HDD.
I'm obviously out of touch hardware wise!
I really was too, it's just too much hard work keeping up with changes. I catch the major changes (e.g. release of i7, release of i5) and the advantages and performance of them, but I tottally miss stuff like what goes with which socket.
On Friday when I started to piece together an order for custom building the PC I suddenly found myself having to do a fair bit of catch up :D
LGA-1156 is what Intel is aiming at mainstream market. Cheaper chips, cheaper chipsets, a few less features such as lack of triple channel ram and no hyperthreading.
LGA-1366 is what Intel is aiming at the high performance market, and will see new CPU families first, before they make there way to LGA-1156.
Both sockets "will be around for a long while" (as if we haven't heard that before, and know it to be utter rubbish)
LGA-1156 is what Intel is aiming at mainstream market. Cheaper chips, cheaper chipsets, a few less features such as lack of triple channel ram and no hyperthreading.
LGA-1366 is what Intel is aiming at the high performance market, and will see new CPU families first, before they make there way to LGA-1156.
Hyperthreading is i7/i5 dependant, not socket. There are hyperthreading and non hyperthreading CPUs on 1156, currently 1366 all have hyperthreading.
Stan_Lite
23-11-2009, 05:53
Intel in confusing nomenclature non-shocker :rolleyes:
I was looking for information on the i7 920 and one of the Google links took me to an article about the Pentium D 920 :huh: (I think I still have one of those :D).
Admiral Huddy
23-11-2009, 13:16
I would personally go the 1366 route. The bandwidth is wasted on gaming but it'll come into it's own for video compression and other simular CPU high intensive tasks. The new breed of CPUs such as the gulftown and will work fine with an x58 chipset for some future upgrading.
The new Samsung 1TB F3's look pretty decent too. I might invest in some RAID'ing with these myself.
For me at the moment the 1366 is just silly extra money that I can't really afford, particularly the motherboard, and for very little benefit.
We're talking at least another year until we see 8 cores in CPUs and Intel confirm that you need that at least 6 before triple channel really begins to show any benefit. About the main time I imagine I'll push all 4 cores to their max is some of the stuff I do under Linux, other than that games are still not particularly wonderfully multi-threaded, which is where the Turbo feature of the chip comes into advantage, automatically speeding up cores on the chip if others aren't being utilised.
Video compression is increasingly offset to the GPU through CUDA/OpenCL (and decompression through VDPAU and similar.) With the DMI and PCIe links integral in the chips rather than Northbridge on the LGA1156 that's a boost in it's favour, plus video creation benchmarks for the i5-750 seem to leave it fairly even with the i7-920.
As far as I could see the pros of cheap and comparable performance to the i7-920 (whilst consuming less power) with only a few negatives against it for situations I'm not likely to be in for a fair while (P55 CrossFire/SLIs nicely but marginally slower than X58 based systems due to the on die PCIe controller sharing 16x bandwidth)
Benchmarks like these seem to suggest the only times the i5-950 starts to lose out to the i7-920 is where HyperThreading shows advantages (which isn't all that often), and will knock the i7-920 into a top hat when it comes to single threaded apps:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634
Very interesting debate here. I keep considering an upgrade and really don't know enough to decide whether to go i7 or i5 (was planning i7, but that was before i5 existed).
In the past, I discovered HT was a waste of time for multi-core/multi-CPU environments. Perhaps my choice of running SETI wasn't a good real-world example, but I found it saturated the memory bandwidth before HT got a look in.
This might not happen now with newer cores/bigger caches/faster memory. I just don't know.
Very interesting debate here. I keep considering an upgrade and really don't know enough to decide whether to go i7 or i5 (was planning i7, but that was before i5 existed).
In the past, I discovered HT was a waste of time for multi-core/multi-CPU environments. Perhaps my choice of running SETI wasn't a good real-world example, but I found it saturated the memory bandwidth before HT got a look in.
This might not happen now with newer cores/bigger caches/faster memory. I just don't know.
At one stage HyperThreading presented an additional disadvantage that meant it was best left disabled for most servers. I've no idea whether they've got around to fixing this or not:
Both threads operate on the same core and so use the same on-die cache. Regularly if a thread discovered the data it needed wasn't cached it would flush the cache and fetch it. In a fair number of cases the HT 'virtual CPU' would be handling something different from the primary CPU, resulting in a large waste of time purging CPU cache and refilling it. Depending on the task and the general work of a system HT could actually cause it to be slower!
I discovered that to be true even on dedicated MySQL boxes, which I assumed would be fine given the similarity of the task. For the most part the threads on the CPU would be doing totally different tasks with the data, and we'd see a boost from disabling HT.
I saw some benchmarks that showed HT causing performance drops. I can only imagine they did something stupid to manage that but i'm not personally convinced HT is all that useful. There isn't much an i5-750 won't monster through and the stuff it can't, I suspect more raw speed would be of more benefit than HT.
I honestly think 1366 i7 is now the domain of really hardcore users - people who want/need the fastest CPU they can get, or need a capability of X58 like tri SLI etc. 'Normal' people just don't need it.
I saw some benchmarks that showed HT causing performance drops. I can only imagine they did something stupid to manage that but i'm not personally convinced HT is all that useful. There isn't much an i5-750 won't monster through and the stuff it can't, I suspect more raw speed would be of more benefit than HT.
I hope to heck they've actually fixed the cache purging thing. That's been around since the earliest days of HT, and the particular study that got me investigating is probably around 4 - 5 years old now. That should be ample time in which to fix it.
I honestly think 1366 i7 is now the domain of really hardcore users - people who want/need the fastest CPU they can get, or need a capability of X58 like tri SLI etc. 'Normal' people just don't need it.
That was pretty much my view in the end. That and no doubt we'll be saying good bye to both within a year or two anyway. It seems to me that every time Intel (and AMD for that matter) release a new socket interface they proclaim that it'll last a long time and it rarely does.
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2009/11/intel-chart-2009-1.jpg
Engadget managed to get hold of a roadmap.
Once again Intel aiming with the confusing naming scheme at their high volume sales point. It reads almost like they're deliberately out to fox people, e.g an i5 651 will actually be worse than a i5 650, and will be $90 cheaper. Surely that's an arse about tit way to do it? You'd think a higher number full stop would be better.
You'd think a higher number full stop would be better.
Hasn't worked since the MHz days. I'm not familiar with the AMD roadmap, but I suspect it doesn't work there. Also doesn't work with GPUs from either main vendor.
The i5-6XX series are going to be dual cores still then, I don't see why they don't just make everything quad and save dual for the pentium/i3 names.
651 looks aimed at consumers and 650 looks aimed at business though, IMO. 651 with a faster GPU core but no hardware virtualisation.
All very confusing though.
Chuckles
29-11-2009, 22:56
Not entirely sure. I'm not really fussed about RAID stuff, hence the different sizes. Usually I've done something like this:
HDD1:
c: - 80Gb OS and base programs.
e: - 20Gb (same size as my MP3 player, and has all my ripped MP3s on it, may make it 40 this time)
d: - All the rest, including documents, user profiles etc.
HDD2:
f: - entire disk used for swap file and scheduled backups.
As I've got 1TB and I've never been one to rip large videos and media on to HDD, I'll probably set aside 200-300Gb for Linux on the first HDD.
I really was too, it's just too much hard work keeping up with changes. I catch the major changes (e.g. release of i7, release of i5) and the advantages and performance of them, but I tottally miss stuff like what goes with which socket.
On Friday when I started to piece together an order for custom building the PC I suddenly found myself having to do a fair bit of catch up :D
LGA-1156 is what Intel is aiming at mainstream market. Cheaper chips, cheaper chipsets, a few less features such as lack of triple channel ram and no hyperthreading.
LGA-1366 is what Intel is aiming at the high performance market, and will see new CPU families first, before they make there way to LGA-1156.
Both sockets "will be around for a long while" (as if we haven't heard that before, and know it to be utter rubbish)
If you're planning on doing an 80GB OS partition, would your budget stretch to a 64/80GB SSD? You'd notice a fairly big boost in performance.
If you're planning on doing an 80GB OS partition, would your budget stretch to a 64/80GB SSD? You'd notice a fairly big boost in performance.
Not for the moment. With Kari starting her masters course in January funds will be tight for a little bit. I'm waiting for the prices to drop a little bit more on SSDs. Considering how far they've already dropped prices should be quite interesting in <6 months on that front.
System arrived at last after fun with banks and debit cards..
GFX card seems to be D.O.A :(
Got the system booted using an old GeForce 6800 PCI graphics card (yes PCI not PCI-E).
Sucks but at least it's running until I can confirm it's the GFX card at work tomorrow hopefully.
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