New Build for poker(HELP)!!!

poorbarman

Looking to build a rig for playing poker mainly.No gaming and just the general internet browsing,nothing too intense.This post explains the apps being used and with I not having a clue I was hoping that someone could give me some advice as to what components etc are required.The budget is not huge ,maybe €500.It has to be able to support 2 monitors.All advice gratefully received!!


Originally Posted by RedJoker View Post
I ordered a new desktop over the weekend for poker. I'm going the self build route, it took a tonne of research because I'd never bought a computer before, let alone built one. Most of the stuff I'll recommend is going to be expensive since, if you're playing poker at anywhere above small stakes, you'll quickly recover the costs from not being stressed out due to your computer lagging or locking up. I know I get stressed out and tilted whenever it happens and I'm never able to put in long sessions, the improved hourly should easily cover the costs.

So here's some stuff you need to know:

Most computer enthusiasts are gaming enthusiasts, they're building computers to improve gaming performance. So if you ask a computer guy for recommendations they'll frequently recommend parts for an optimal gaming build that are bad for a poker build.

In a gaming pc the hard drive is the least important part of the computer, for poker it's the most important. I got two hard drives, the primary one is an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, this is pretty new technology. It doesn't have the moving parts that a normal hard drive does so there's less wear and tear. Which means that you can put as many hands into HEM as you like and it should never slow down. HEM is bottlenecked by the CPU but the SSD should still give you twice the speed of a regular hard drive. I'm going to put the O/S and HEM onto this drive and everything else onto my secondary hard drive. There's a 160GB version of the X25-M which has recently been released, if you really feel like splurging.

For the secondary hard drive I'm getting a Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB. If you don't want to shell out on the SSD then you could just get 1 of these or maybe a VelociRaptor or some 1TB hard drive.

For gaming the most you'd ever need would be 4GB of RAM, on a poker pc the more RAM the better. I got 8GB of RAM, two of the G.Skill 4GB DDR2 1000, although any generic RAM will do.

For gaming a dual core processor is better than a quad core, for poker a quad core helps a tonne with lag. I got the Q6600, which will overclock to about 3.6ghz to improve your HEM write speeds. If you really wanted to get it even higher you could get Core2Duo E8500 which will overclock to about 4.5ghz. However, the quad core is better for lag and multitasking. There's also a Q9550 but there's very little performance increase compared to the Q6600 and it doesn't overclock any better so save your money.

The cooler I got was a Noctua NH-U12P which has a really sick heatsink and should be able to handle anything you can throw at it.

For a gaming pc you're going to want the best graphics card you can find, which afaik is the ASUS EAH4870X2 at the moment. For poker all you need is the cheapest card with two Dual-link DVI outputs, supporting 2560 x 1600 resolution. I got the ASUS EAH3650.

The mouse mat I got was the Razor Exactmat/Exactrest. If this let's you play even 10 minutes more a day and you have a decent hourly it'll be worth the cost in no time. If you really wanted to shell out you could get a razor destructor as well and use it with the rest. I got a Logitech Illuminated Keyboard as well.

I got Vista 64bit for system builders. If you're using less than 4GB of RAM then a 32bit will do fine but over that you'll need 64bit.

The rest of the parts aren't a huge deal for a poker pc, you can get more expensive ones but the money is better spent on other stuff like improved hard drive, RAM, monitors, chair, etc. The motherboard I got was the Gigabyte EP43-DS3L, I got an Antec P182 case and a Corsair HX520 poker supply.

It's also worth getting an anti-static wrist band as well. The risk of blowing one of the parts is a bit exaggerated, just grounding yourself every now and then should be enough, but for the sake of a tenner at most you might as well get it.

For those who aren't familiar with buying computer parts, you'll frequently see things like Retail/Boxed vs. OEM/Tray. The OEM/Tray parts are generally cheaper but they have a much shorter warranty and don't come with instructions. The retail will usually be a fiver or so more expensive but have much longer warranties and have instructions. If you're an experienced system builder than you can probably go OEM on everything. If not then you should get retail hardware. For software, like Vista, you can just go OEM though.

As I found out to my frustration newegg don't deliver outside the US. I checked the Building and Upgrading subforum on boards. The main retailers that deliver to Ireland are

http://www3.hardwareversand.de/home.jsp?lid=2

http://www.dabs.ie/

http://www.komplett.ie/k/k.aspx

http://elara.ie/

http://itdirect.com/

http://www2.computeruniverse.net/

There's been a few horror stories about some of them, I suggest reading the stickies in the forum first.

After checking prices I found that hardwareversand.de had the best prices although a lot of the horror stories were about them. They have a flat fee of 30 euro which is pretty nice if you're getting a lot of stuff but you can't use credit cards, bank transfer only. They didn't have everything though, the hard drives and vista I got from computeruniverse.net.

Hopefully, everything will arrive soon enough and I'll let you know how it went. The whole system, including shipping, cost about 1400 euro fwiw.
Nice balanced system, RJ, just a couple of points to watch out for going forward:

1. As you say, SSD's are fairly new, and the technology isn't really 'nailed down' yet. They don't have moving parts, so are more reliable than traditional hard-drives in that way, but there is a limit to how many writes/erasures can be done to a particular block (something like 2 million cycles). I'm not sure how this will play out with poker DB's, but you should probably back up your important data regularly.

2. At 520W, that power supply is just about borderline for those specs, particularly if you're over-clocking that Q6600, although it's not a good idea to overclock it using that stock cooler anyway. If you find any weird unexplained shutdowns occuring, the PSU may be the cause. Just something to think about going forward.
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Formerly known as lenny_leonard...

Rex Manning

Been a while since i've built anything, but for poker, the only specialist stuff i'd have thought you'd need is a graphics card that can support dual monitors and may be extra ram. can't see why you'd need 2 hard drives.

If it was me, I'd keep the pc fairly basic and make sure I had a decent broadband connection - it's usually that causes disconnections and costs you money rather than hardware failure.

That said it's something I've never given much thought tho so i'd be interested to see what other people have to say.

poorbarman

Rex Manning wrote: »

Been a while since i've built anything, but for poker, the only specialist stuff i'd have thought you'd need is a graphics card that can support dual monitors and may be extra ram. can't see why you'd need 2 hard drives.

If it was me, I'd keep the pc fairly basic and make sure I had a decent broadband connection - it's usually that causes disconnections and costs you money rather than hardware failure.

That said it's something I've never given much thought tho so i'd be interested to see what other people have to say.

As far as I can see it eats hard drives,dont know why but I find they dont last.

PogMoThoin

SSD's have limited write operations as the flash memory will wear out, is it wise to use them for storing constantly updating databases?

Also for this reason it's rather important to disable the automatic defragmentation Windows does from time to time, SSD's do not need or like defragmenting

PogMoThoin

Rex Manning wrote: »

Been a while since i've built anything, but for poker, the only specialist stuff i'd have thought you'd need is a graphics card that can support dual monitors and may be extra ram. can't see why you'd need 2 hard drives.

If it was me, I'd keep the pc fairly basic and make sure I had a decent broadband connection - it's usually that causes disconnections and costs you money rather than hardware failure.

That said it's something I've never given much thought tho so i'd be interested to see what other people have to say.

Pro poker players use software to monitor the tables and play on many tables at the same time. The software constantly reads/writes to databases
http://www.holdemmanager.net/
http://www.pokertracker.com/

Solitaire

By modern standards you won't be bottlenecked by CPU nor need a good graphics card (even budget ones support two screens, HD3450 up to four in conjunction with a SB750 chipset), and PSU isn't that bad but it depends on the one remaining issue: storage.

Poker PCs need a large, fast and reliable storage array. Those three really don't go well together...

Consumer HDDs are reasonably quick, very cheap and give huge amounts of storage. But they're not lightning-fast nor very reliable.

A speed-oriented RAID setup works well, but a decent one would use a seperate PCIe RAID controller, not the pathetic excuse for RAID that's called the "Intel Matrix Storage System" and typically comes with thew motherboard. And as all it takes for it to come apart is for one HDD in the array to go nuclear you need to use server-grade HDDs. That's really not cheap...

SSD's are not really an option for all but the most expensive poker rigs, mostly for use as a gaint swapfile (they're much faster than traditional HDDs but have much more limited storage). Aside from their small capacity there's a big problem - most consumer SSDs on the market are based on MLC flash. MLC is slow and literally wears out from repeated writes. And the more expensive units use advanced controllers to boost the speed but write even more, killing life expectancy in heavy write-usage environments. So databases and thus poker is basically anathema to them

SLC flash drives have 10-20 times the resistance to wear from write operations. The catch is that they're relatively rare and stupendously expensive for a glorified swapfile

poorbarman

Put this together any comments or improvements welcome

mus3

Solitaire wrote: »

Aside from their small capacity there's a big problem - most consumer SSDs on the market are based on MLC flash. MLC is slow and literally wears out from repeated writes. And the more expensive units use advanced controllers to boost the speed but write even more, killing life expectancy in heavy write-usage environments. So databases and thus poker is basically anathema to them

Slow relative to SLCs, sure. But they are still many times faster than HDDs! And according to Intel, the X25M will last over 5 years with over 100GB of writes per DAY. But no one knows for sure yet since they are so new, so there is some risk there. Other SSDs may not have as long a life-span, but it's not something I'm worrying about.
But anyways, putting any sort of decent SSD in a €500 machine would be crazy

poorbarman wrote: »

Put this together any comments or improvements welcome

Maybe be better putting a more performance-orientated drive in there with lower seek-times and a higher RPM, rather than a green one?

uberpixie

poorbarman wrote: »

Put this together any comments or improvements welcome

go for a regular samsung 1 terabyte, skip the green ones: they have slower performance.

A regular samsung 1tb will be faster.

Other than that go for a quad. A q6600 will be better for mutli tasking a lot of different applications all at once Vs a dual core.

Solitaire

poorbarman, what site were you using there?

And mus, I'm not one of those barmy anti-SSD fanatics I just don't think it'll work in a budget build and besides, even a very pricey MLC drive (special controller for fast writes and I/O a la X25-M) aren't really suited for full-fledged database ops until the "durability" of flash in general is improved.

Anyway, some issues:

Get the newest southbridge you can, so long as its cheap. Much better RAID5 performance if you go that way. Avoid AMD mobos with the SB700 for that reason (no RAID5 at all)

Go for a cheap quad CPU. Especially if you go RAID (unless you spend hundreds on a RAID card with its own onboard processor then all mobo- or card-based RAID will run off the CPU).

If you do go RAID5 then 4*320GB drives >>>> 1 1TB drive. Of course you're talikng twice the price but if you really need I/O performance close to a SSD (but without the cost, capacity or lifespan issues) its the only way to go.

As for platform... if you have the money then go for AM3. Cheap quad, SB750 mobo Hybrid Crossfire'd to a discrete HD3450 (which costs peanuts... well, €25-ish peanuts ) and a bunch of small, cheap single-platter HDDs in RAID5 for a amateur/semi-pro poker build. If not then just put anything together for cheap and you'd still see a reasonable improvement

Might do a bit more research and then stick up a sample build later

Solitaire

On an aside: this build would probably border on overkill for the OP (unless they take their poker really seriously) but I wonder how good it would be to a big poker player and their mad database requirements (bear in mind it assumes a budget miles off i7 territory):



Decent quad CPU, some OC headroom if neccessary
Support for 2 primary monitors up to 2560*1600 plus two secondary monitors up to 1900*1200 via VGA.
RAID5 array for ~1TB storage and probably some fairly trippy I/O (I've heard SB750 can hit >90% scaling per drive on RAID5 with the right setup) with full parity-based data redundancy (nuked drive? Strip it out, sling in another and order the array to rebuild )

Hmm... given the number of poker builds I'm seeing some more research may come in handy...