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(reasonably) high end i7 920 general purpose build
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06-10-2009 10:42pm#1So here’s what I have.
total budget will be between 1000-1500 euro, but it's more important to me that i get a decent rig than the cheapest tbh. so it's not set in stone although i think 1500 total is going to be my absolute upper limit before i buy the video card.
I’ve already got a spare ATX case (Antec Sonata) and various drives for storage and the usual dvd burners and stuff that can be transplanted from other rigs.
I DO plan on getting back into overclocking, hence the water cooling but since it will be my first non-air cooled rig, so i wanted to start out with the training wheels on.
So, I'm basically fed up of having an old crappy PC so this is a birthday treat to myself.
I want something that’ll be a good workhorse for everyday use, some video encoding, dvd burning, rar’ing, playing games, media/file server and all the other usual stuff.
it'll be running win7 and ubuntu dual booted.
I'm not sure how it happened, but a few years ago I turned from a keen self builder always looking for the next best thing, into a scavenger, building crappy pc’s out of freebies and second hand parts. i guess a lack of budget but a need for tech that was the main reason.
Well, the times they are a changin’ and it’s time to do something about it.
CPU – Intel i7 920 socket 1366 - €239.00
Motherboard – Asus Rampage II Extreme Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 - €293.00
Memory Either Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 2000MHz 6GB - €299.00
Or - Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 1866MHz 6GB - €259
PSU – Corsair HX 850W ATX Modular SLI Compliant Power Supply - €149.00
CPU Cooling – Corsair H50 Hydro Series CPU Cooler - €75.00
Video card – Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card – approx. €350 (not available yet)
Dual SSD Hard Drives (RAID0) - Corsair Extreme X32 32GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive – 2x €121 = €242
TOTAL = €1297 (w/out Video card)
I'm going to buy it in 2 or 3 batches (thanks to a lack of room on the credit card) and I'm hoping by the time I get to the last buy that the ATI 5870 is going to be in stock at Komplett, but if not, I have a temporary video card that I can use in the mean time until they do become available.
I chose Komplett out of convenience as I work in the business park next to their Blanch pickup point and it’s on my way home, I also don’t want to wait (so no hardwareversand.de) and Overclockers.co.uk worked out about the same once I’d factored in multiple shipping costs.
i think i've done okay with the build, but the one thing i'm really not sure about is the RAM. i've done a bit of digging and i'm still not sure exactly what memory the board will or won't take and if it would really make that much difference.
is it worth spending a bit more on the ram? does the rest of the build look okay or have i gone the wrong way?
i went for the i7 over the i5 partly because of the possibility of upgrading to the cpu to a gulftown next year maybe. was that a good choice?
sorry, big post and lots of questions. 0
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maybe, but you know how it is. i think it was just a poor excuse to go for the i7 instead of the i5!
how does it look apart from that?
the memory is the only thing i'm really unsure of though. no point paying extra for faster ram if it can't make use of it
think i'll be biting the bullet today being as it's my birthday. also found another credit card with some room on it, so that's good, will be able to get more bits in one go. 0 -
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I'm going to buy it in 2 or 3 batches (thanks to a lack of room on the credit card)
I chose Komplett out of convenience as I work in the business park next to their Blanch pickup point and it’s on my way home, I also don’t want to wait (so no hardwareversand.de) and Overclockers.co.uk worked out about the same once I’d factored in multiple shipping costs.
Hey just a thought if you have to get it in batches then if you think about it Hardwareversand.de would prob be faster!
You see when you buy from hardwareversand.de you pay with a bank transfer(no credit card limits) Therefore you could just get it all in one shipment and it'd all arrive at your door in a little over 2 weeks(order everything in stock)
In terms of money if you're still not convinced of going with hrwd.de then maybe check out aria.co.uk, lamda-tek.co.uk, even pixmania would offer better value for money...
Oh yeah and don't get your 5870 at komplett.ie They a bunch of ******.. I mean they're charging around 100 euro plus
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=498840
But if you're really really ignorant you might even buy it for over €500 for it
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=498845 0 -
i knew this would happen. i thought i knew what i wanted, but now i know less than when i started out.
what's wrong with the h50 cooler? all the reviews i've seen put it alongside or above the best air coolers and the couple of reviews i read of the thor cooler said it was a bit of a letdown.
thanks for the advice on the motherboard though, they have a pretty good rep, but if there's a duff batch doing the rounds i think i'll go for something else.
i was actually looking at the evga boards so maybe thats the way to go, although i don't think i'll need the 3sli one.
again the one thing that convcerns me though is the memory speeds. the whole thing between frequency versus latency baffles the crap out of me and i have no idea what's going to be faster or even how much of a difference it would make either way.
thanks for the tip about raid on the x32's too, i was half thinking about a pair of x64's anyway as they're a little faster anyway. or did you mean raid was going to be flaky on any of that range of ssd's?
too much to think about, i'm sitting here with the credit cards and still no idea what i'm going to go for, so i think i'll have to sleep on it (again). i'm far too much of a procrastinator.
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Well, ive had a h50 in work his week, and i find it very very poor. But then im yet to find a really good all in one watercooling setup for that kind of price. CoolIT do some pelt cooled watercoolers too pricey, and still pretty meh. As for the board, usually a good brand, but in the last while ive seen nothign but them
As for the memory, with ddr3 ram speed is less useful then with ddr2, so latency would be the more prominent to look at. The x64's seem fine for raid, im not sure whats with the x32's tho, probably the onboard jmicron chip which is gettign bad reports.
But still, im not a fan of ssd's yeah they are fast, but not THAT much faster then normal sata drives, and even less now that Sata3.0 drives are being supported on newer mobo's. If it was my money, i'd be getting a DFI boards, as eveyone ive owned has been amazing.0 -
Join Date:Posts: 33520
But still, im not a fan of ssd's yeah they are fast, but not THAT much faster then normal sata drives, and even less now that Sata3.0 drives are being supported on newer mobo's. If it was my money, i'd be getting a DFI boards, as eveyone ive owned has been amazing.
But no HDD can exceed the speed of sata 2.0 so sata 3.0 won't make a difference to a traditional HDD. Plus with ssds you have near instantaneous access times. 0 -
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1 SSD = really fast. 2 SSD's = much faster.Slutmonkey57b wrote: »1) RAID is unnecessary with SSD's. Hard drives get raided either for speed or redundancy. SSD's need neither. Intel's Raid drivers currently compromise SSD performance in Win 7 anyway. The whole advantage of SSD is not just throughput, it's access latency. Get a single SSD for boot drive and shadow copy it onto a 1tb mechanical storage drive for backup.
i've heard/read plenty of good things about the OCZ summits in RAID0 with the Intel ICH10R controller. it's a quick and easy way to improve overall system performance at a reasonable cost and reduce what would otherwise STILL be a performance bottleneck so why not?
I don't know, you tell me. RAM was the one thing I'm unsure about so I went for what looked like the best available, but if you can tell me why it isn't a good choice other than price i'm all ears. if it does give out blowjobs i'll be sure to let everyone know, i'm sure it'll be a lot more popular.Slutmonkey57b wrote: »2) €300 for 6 gigs of ram? Does this ram hand out blowjobs? is it made of diamonds or something?
€6000 buys a monster. 1500 buys a decent (reasonably) high end i7 920.Slutmonkey57b wrote: »3) €1500 should buy you a monster, not a "decent" rig.
thanks for the offer tony, but only if you can give me a VAT receipt and take credit cards.Hi,
I have a Patriot Viper pc3-12800 6gb kit here never opened open to offers? 0 -
2 Raided SSD's = Throughput and IOPS you don't need unless you're into computational physics. More important for SSD's is controller logic - the Summits don't support trim, and the Samsung controller isn't reliable at keeping the drive in good housekeeping order - and you can't defrag an SSD. The more you use an SSD, the quicker its performance degrades.
So if you're thrashing the crap out of an SSD raid setup for a benchmarktastic 500-600MB/s sequential read speed, you're also destroying your drive's ability to recover, and you'll have to constantly (ie every 2 days) blank the thing using a low level DOS formatter to restore it to almost new condition.
Short answer: 1 Intel is better than 2 samsungs any day of the week, unless you like reformatting and reinstalling every week.
RAM:
Recently the more you pay for "performance" DDR3 kits means the greater likelihood that you'll get duff merchandise:
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3596
The batch problems should be solved by now, but why take the chance?
Especially since 2000+ kits run at voltages that are warranty busters for i7 (yes overclocking gets rid of your warrenty, but why fry your processor for no good reason?)
Not to mention the massively diminishing returns on going above 1600 or 1800 for anything other than synthetic benchmarks.
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3589&p=13
Or the fact that spending the same (or less) on 12 or 16GB of slower ram will benefit the only memory-hungry applications that appreciate 2000+ kits just the same.
Or more fundamentally that the i7 architecture means that the the quality of your individual processor matters much more than the ram you're using.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3502&p=2
But sure, if it ends up handing out blowjobs, then it's a worthwile investment. I'll leave the first "waving a dick at a corsair dominator fan" experiment to you, though.
Tell you what, you give me the €1,500, spend the remaining €4,500 yourself, and we'll compare benchmarks afterward. 0 -
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i don't really NEED an i7, or an ATI 5000 series video card, or 6gb of RAM, or any of it really. but I do WANT them. faster = better. that and i'm treating myself to shiny gadgets.Slutmonkey57b wrote: »2 Raided SSD's = Throughput and IOPS you don't need unless you're into computational physics. More important for SSD's is controller logic - the Summits don't support trim, and the Samsung controller isn't reliable at keeping the drive in good housekeeping order - and you can't defrag an SSD. The more you use an SSD, the quicker its performance degrades.
i'll be taking daily backups of the boot volume anyway so degradation is irrelevant. if i see performance dropping it's just a matter of formatting and starting again.
you know i'm going to give it a go just on the off-chance.Slutmonkey57b wrote: »But sure, if it ends up handing out blowjobs, then it's a worthwile investment. I'll leave the first "waving a dick at a corsair dominator fan" experiment to you, though.
i don't have €6,000 to spend, that's why i'm only spending €1,500.Slutmonkey57b wrote: »Tell you what, you give me the €1,500, spend the remaining €4,500 yourself, and we'll compare benchmarks afterward.
thanks for the advice about the RAM, it's the one thing that always confuses me. do you have a specific recommendation on what would be the best RAM to get given the other components in the system?
yeah, but then I'd only have one.You could give me one of those SSDs for it. 0 -
@SlutMonkey (and apologies to hijack vibe) but the raid0 performance of 2 intel ssds is awesome from my own reading.
I've 2*x-25m (second gen) waiting at home for raid0 so is it worthwhile?
Nyeeeeh - it's not that you won't see a massive speed increase, it's that the difference you'd see between a mechanical drive and an SSD is already so great that the "added value" of a raid setup isn't really necessary. Besides, you'd need a specialist RAID controller to get the benefit of 600MB sequential write speed.
If you want it, go for it, but RAID became popular to solve an architectural problem with mechanical drives. SSD's are a different (and better) solution to the same problem.i don't really NEED an i7, or an ATI 5000 series video card, or 6gb of RAM, or any of it really. but I do WANT them. faster = better. that and i'm treating myself to shiny gadgets.
i'll be taking daily backups of the boot volume anyway so degradation is irrelevant. if i see performance dropping it's just a matter of formatting and starting again.
MMm shiny gadgets. Have to say I think you'd get tired of reformatting every 3rd day. And you have to remember that you can't use Windows or standard DOS formatters, or a ghosting utility to get the performance back - there's an ancient Intel DOS utility that does the job, forget the name of it, or the Indilinx drives can get a utility called wiper.exe to do the same job.thanks for the advice about the RAM, it's the one thing that always confuses me. do you have a specific recommendation on what would be the best RAM to get given the other components in the system?
Whenever I'm confused, I go with anandtech's conclusions, as they're very well researched and based on independently verified facts and tests. From the testing done, any reasonably low latency (CAS 8 or 9) 1600 or 1800 kit should do fine, and you should be able to get 12-16GB for the same money.0 -
you really think it would be every few days?
i've read a few different forum posts on it and people who've done is have reported huge performance gains over a single SSD using the Intel ICH10R controller and nobody has even mentioned having to do a low level format every few days.
if i do have any issues with it or it's not worth doing, i've a laptop or my ps3 that i could use the 2nd one in anyway, i just want to try it.
i'm still procrastinating over the final spec anyway, so it'll probably be a while before I buy and i'm leaning towards overclockers now too after someone pointed out how much komplett want to ream you over an ATI 5000 series video card, not to mention that the £/€ exchange rate is going up and up in favour of the euro pretty much daily which will cheapen the total cost even more if i decide to shop with overclockers. 0 -
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