Quiet & Cool but High Performance gaming

scamalert

Dr_Teeth congrats on going for the best vga out there,but water cooling on 5i is waste of money,same as blu ray cdrom,2tb hdd and windows.For that money you could saved for i7 cpu and proper cooler on it,maybe extra ssd drive for raid 0.As dvd rom costs pennys now same as couple silent coolers and few sheets of noise isolating rubber,as most noise comes from vga.But its your money and your choice you made,so looking forward to see some pics how it comes together

Skylinehead

scamalert wrote: »

Dr_Teeth congrats on going for the best vga out there,but water cooling on 5i is waste of money,same as blu ray cdrom,2tb hdd and windows.For that money you could saved for i7 cpu and proper cooler on it,maybe extra ssd drive for raid 0.As dvd rom costs pennys now same as couple silent coolers and few sheets of noise isolating rubber,as most noise comes from vga.But its your money and your choice you made,so looking forward to see some pics how it comes together

i7 doesn't add anything other than hyperthreading, so for gaming it's useless - only useful for rendering and the likes. And I fail to see how a 2TB drive is pointless, we'll all have to add storage capacity eventually.

scamalert

Skylinehead wrote: »

i7 doesn't add anything other than hyperthreading, so for gaming it's useless - only useful for rendering and the likes. And I fail to see how a 2TB drive is pointless, we'll all have to add storage capacity eventually.

and games arent rendered ? must be never seen a character in pixels before its rendered.As for hdd it doesn't work well with ssd as if there are files on it eventually lags develop between two of them,might not be noticable on internal hardrive but external ones do slow pc quite a lot especially if they arent used for a while because due to energy saving and other options they tend to go into sleep mode or power saving mode which takes at least couple seconds to access files.

Eboggles

scamalert wrote: »

and games arent rendered ? must be never seen a character in pixels before its rendered.As for hdd it doesn't work well with ssd as if there are files on it eventually lags develop between two of them,might not be noticable on internal hardrive but external ones do slow pc quite a lot especially if they arent used for a while because due to energy saving and other options they tend to go into sleep mode or power saving mode which takes at least couple seconds to access files.

Right, show me actual proof that the i7 is in fact better than the i5 by a decent margin.

It was a trick question; it isn't. There are no benefits of getting an i7 over an i5 if you're gaming.

Dr_Teeth

Hi Scam, in the end I went with a cheapo DVD drive instead of the BD. The 2TB drive I think is pretty standard these days, I've got about 1TB of data on my current machine to move across before I sell it, so some room for expansion is always good. I was tempted by RAID 0 SSDs, but I didn't like the lack of trim support or the expense! I don't do data-heavy stuff - just games and some hobby development stuff.

ZeroThreat

I'm currently waiting for all the parts for my own build to arrive.
The cooler looks ever bigger here than I thought...

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1234230&mpage=1

Monotype

scamalert wrote: »

As for hdd it doesn't work well with ssd as if there are files on it eventually lags develop between two of them,might not be noticable on internal hardrive but external ones do slow pc quite a lot especially if they arent used for a while because due to energy saving and other options they tend to go into sleep mode or power saving mode which takes at least couple seconds to access files.

What on earth do you mean that HDD and SSD don't work well together and that lag develops between the two?
Are you saying that a hard drive is slower than SSD?

Yes, HDDs go to sleep after a while with energy savings. You can usually switch off power saving features if you want to maximise performance. However, it's a good thing, in my opinion, and allows HDDs to keep an average power consumption lower than many SSDs as they can almost completely shut themselves off.

What would you propose instead? Four 512GB SSDs?

I think that SSD + HDD combination is an excellent way to balance speed with storage. It would be nice to have large SSDs for all your needs but you have to be realistic with regard to cost. It also wouldn't be wise to over-invest in a technology that's falling rapidly in price!

ZeroThreat wrote: »

I'm currently waiting for all the parts for my own build to arrive.
The cooler looks ever bigger here than I thought...

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1234230&mpage=1

Apparently it's quite hard to install too but the results are rewarding.
It might be no harm to get an extra pair of hands to save you some trouble. Some heatsinks can be a right pain to put together by yourself.

Procrastastudy

Just curious as to why its not worth RAID - 0 with a couple of SSDs if performance is the goal over value?

TIA

Fluffy88

With an SSD there is three states the flash memory can be in.
Unused - has never been written to
Used - Currently has data stored in it
Empty - Previously contained data but has been deleted so it's ready to be written to again.

There is a performance difference between Unused and Empty, an SSD is much quicker to write to an Unused piece of flash as it can just directly write the data to it whereas when an SSD wants to write to a piece of flash marked as Empty it first reads the data that is in that piece of flash then writes the new data to the flash.

TRIM goes through your SSD looking for all those nasty pieces of flash that are marked Empty and converts the flash to Unused again. This helps keeps SSDs running closer to their rated performance while they are being used. So if you put SSDs into RAID and they lose TRIM they degrade in performance quite quickly.

I don't have the terminology correct but you should get the idea, hopefully
Here is an article that goes gives some info on the RAID situation, it's very long and it's not all about RAID but still an interesting read
http://techreport.com/articles.x/22358/1

Procrastastudy

Ah I see now - Long story short SSDs are essentially little RAID arrays themselves - putting them in raid does almost nothing.

Great Article Thanks!

Monotype

Thanks, might give that a read later. Intel said that they were working on RAID+TRIM a while ago.

Fluffy88

Monotype wrote: »

Thanks, might give that a read later. Intel said that they were working on RAID+TRIM a while ago.

Yeah I think there is a few RAID controller people (sorry don't know the name of any of the companies) working on it so hopefully in the future we will have ridiculously fast SSD RAID setups.

Although, from that same site, apparently the SATA standard has fulfilled what it set-out to do. I definitely don't have all these facts right here but SATA was originally designed for HDDs and CD-ROMs and stuff like that and so with a 6Gb/s interface it now can accommodate any HDD so the standard body isn't working on a new higher bandwidth revision. So the next gen of SSDs might actually be PCIe based.

I listen to the TechReport podcast and find it very good, the guys that do it seem to know what they are talking about, most of the time. Nice way to spend your journey home, learning about tech :P

Monotype

Yeah, it's pretty funny that we are nearing the 6Gbps limit so early in its life. Kind of poor that Intel is still dragging their heals by having a limited number of ports.
We'll need PCI-E 4 to handle SSDs if they keep going at this rate.

Edit: Actually forgot how much bandwidth PCI-E 3 has. It's 1GBps per lane. So 16GBps for x16. That's Bytes. Yeah, I think we'd be OK with that for a while.

scamalert

Monotype what i meant if you have lets say a 5gb game and half of its files end up on hdd other half on ssd,youd have glitches then in game in some parts of it,especially if the hdd was like 1tb full of random stuff,Unless im wrong.As for cpu i dont have a chart which compares performance versus price i5-i7 cpusas prices vary on each from couple hundred to thousand or so.
for the guy with large cooler that looks awesome like 911 tower how much did the cooler set you aside ??

Procrastastudy

scamalert wrote: »

Monotype what i meant if you have lets say a 5gb game and half of its files end up on hdd other half on ssd,youd have glitches then in game in some parts of it,especially if the hdd was like 1tb full of random stuff,Unless im wrong.As for cpu i dont have a chart which compares performance versus price i5-i7 cpusas prices vary on each from couple hundred to thousand or so.
for the guy with large cooler that looks awesome like 911 tower how much did the cooler set you aside ??

Very little of that make any sense. I think what you are describing is Intel RST which apparently works really well. If you're talking about installing half a game on one drive and half on another manually I'm yet to see that done.

Xenoronin

Can you even do that? I really don't think you can install something across two hard drives... unless it's some raid format, but those are usually using the same type of hard drive and it is done in such a way that it isn't slower.... it (unless you are just mirroring) should speed it up :P

Back on topic, i love seeing threads like these where someone is getting just an amazing PC. Any news on it?

Dr_Teeth

The parts I listed in Post #19 have shipped! How long to deliveries from Hardwareversand usually take? I haven't got a shipping confirmation for the Catleap monitor yet.

Xenoronin

From reading around, it seems like they take around 5 working days

Monotype

scamalert wrote: »

Monotype what i meant if you have lets say a 5gb game and half of its files end up on hdd other half on ssd,youd have glitches then in game in some parts of it,especially if the hdd was like 1tb full of random stuff,Unless im wrong.As for cpu i dont have a chart which compares performance versus price i5-i7 cpusas prices vary on each from couple hundred to thousand or so.
for the guy with large cooler that looks awesome like 911 tower how much did the cooler set you aside ??

GCDLawstudent wrote: »

Very little of that make any sense. I think what you are describing is Intel RST which apparently works really well. If you're talking about installing half a game on one drive and half on another manually I'm yet to see that done.

That could happen if you moved say a particular steam game to the SSD but it relied on other parts. Most of the time it's irrelevant as you're not going to be splitting games. You're not going to experience sudden lags and glitches - That's what RAM is for! When the game is loaded, it should have near the same speeds. It's the loading that makes the difference. It can be the case where a game is poorly written for PC and designed for low quantities of RAM in consoles - you could end up with more accessing from the drive then. Finally, if the drive was full of random stuff, data could be scattered around - but that's what we have defragmentation for!

All in all, it's just nitpicking with small 'if's that could happen and there's no good solution apart from bucket-loads of cash.

Dr_Teeth

The parts arrived and I'm in the process of putting it together at the moment. A few notes:

This Fractal Design case doesn't have enough room at the top to fit the Corsair H100 radiator and fans correctly. I had to offset the radiator a couple of cm from the vents which looks a little ugly but still works.

The case comes with only 4 floppy mounting screws so I use just two for the SSD and two for the optical drive.

I had to pick up a power lead (the PSU comes with a euro one) and an extra SATA cable (the motherboard only comes with two).

Question - should I mount the PSU upside down so that its fan faces the vent on the bottom of the case?

Skylinehead

Dr_Teeth wrote: »

The parts arrived and I'm in the process of putting it together at the moment. A few notes:

This Fractal Design case doesn't have enough room at the top to fit the Corsair H100 radiator and fans correctly. I had to offset the radiator a couple of cm from the vents which looks a little ugly but still works.

The case comes with only 4 floppy mounting screws so I use just two for the SSD and two for the optical drive.

I had to pick up a power lead (the PSU comes with a euro one) and an extra SATA cable (the motherboard only comes with two).

Question - should I mount the PSU upside down so that its fan faces the vent on the bottom of the case?

If the case has a dust filter on the bottom I'd say yes.

Dr_Teeth

Hey guys, thought I'd do another update:

1. The H100 is making a loud buzzing noise. From looking online this has been an issue since at least the beginning of the year so I'm really annoyed that they're still shipping units with this problem.

I tried this quick fix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJjhDgKZHdU

but that only made the buzzing intermittent instead of constant, so I'll have to send it back to Corsair. At least I have the stock fan that came with the CPU to use for now. Be warned guys, this issue seems to be very common.

2. I included a copy of MS Office in my order, not realising that it was the German language version! They don't seem to sell the English version, very annoying. I installed it anyway and downloaded the English language pack. MS will try and charge you 27 euros for the pack, but there is no DRM / licence for the pack so just find a download link somewhere for it if you're in the same situation.

3. Don't install the utilities / software suite that come with the ASRock motherboard (you need the drivers obviously), it's all a load of crap - it took me a while to figure out which of them was automatically putting Zynga icons on my desktop, taskbar and start menu every time I rebooted!

Other than that, the machine posted first time and Windows installed very quickly. I'm really liking the SSD, boot time is very quick. Now to install some games.

RustySpoon

And use Steam Mover app to move games between storage and SSD drives for speed when playing and to keep your precious SSD space free.

For better performance on SSD here are some tips that I found useful, although have not done all of them myself:

• Set BIOS to AHCI for performance if not already done automatically.
• Disable system restore - should give you space back if currently on
• Disable drive indexing on SSD drive
• Turn off any defrag on SSD
• If you have a decent bit of RAM disable the pagefile or move it to the slower storage disc if you have one.
• Turn off hibernation - you won't need it with a SSD
• Disable pre fetch and super fetch in registry
• Disable the windows search & superfetch services in services.msc
• Use MSconfig to enable no GUI boot to knock a few seconds off your boot time (as if it ain't fast enough for ya!)
• Disable recycle bin (if you dare) or set to a smaller size to reclaim space

Monotype

Dr_Teeth wrote: »

2. I included a copy of MS Office in my order, not realising that it was the German language version! They don't seem to sell the English version, very annoying. I installed it anyway and downloaded the English language pack. MS will try and charge you 27 euros for the pack, but there is no DRM / licence for the pack so just find a download link somewhere for it if you're in the same situation.

You could probably download the English trial, then enter your German key.

RustySpoon wrote: »

[*]Set BIOS to AHCI for performance if not already done automatically.

This will bluescreen a windows installation unless you change it in the registry first.

[*]Disable system restore - should give you space back if currently on

Unless you want the option to restore... I think it's off by default.

[*]Turn off any defrag on SSD

Off by default, but don't disable it for for HDDs.

[*]If you have a decent bit of RAM disable the pagefile or move it to the slower storage disc if you have one.

A better idea is to just reduce the page file size. The idea is that you'll have random pieces of data that could be called at any time. SSDs are better at this. Reducing the page file will save you the space, while still give you the speed in the event that any program demands a page file or as an additional buffer if you were to overflow the RAM.

[*]Turn off hibernation - you won't need it with a SSD

A good way to save space alright. Most people don't use it but it is handy if you want to save the state that you're in. With a 256GB drive, space isn't a massive priority. More RAM usually means bigger hibernation file, so 16GB would be quite a bit.

[*]Disable pre fetch and super fetch in registry
[*]Disable the windows search & superfetch services in services.msc

Why would you do this? It makes better use of your RAM. Far too many people are recommending this without good reason.

[*]Use MSconfig to enable no GUI boot to knock a few seconds off your boot time (as if it ain't fast enough for ya!)

I've checked this out before. Savings is less than half a second. That was with an older SSD, it's probably even less with the Samsung 830!

[*]Disable recycle bin (if you dare) or set to a smaller size to reclaim space

Does that save any space at all? I'll have to check this one out.

Edit: No, disabling the recycle bin is just silly advice unless you never use it.

IMO - forget all of those points except the first. If you didn't enable AHCI in the BIOS before installing, enable it in the windows registry and then enable it in the BIOS/UEFI.
http://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-enable-ahci-in-windows-7-rc-after-installation/

If you want to chase after extra space, then disable hibernation and reduce the page file.

Dr_Teeth

I got back my replacement cooler from Corsair H100 and all seems well now. My idle CPU temp is about 32, is that good? What sort of over-clock can I get out of my 3570K with this set-up?

Procrastastudy

Well depends - a water cooler wont get below amibent but 32 does seem a little high. My V8 does 30C idle. Have you properly applied the termal paste? Do you have the fans or pumps set very low? Are your voltages stock?

All thins to check 30C is fine and you'll proabbly find the H100 comes into its own under load.

Xenoronin

Doesn't the H100 just sit on low until it gets something to do? Probably would account for the higher (but still really really low) core temp.

Procrastastudy

Seems there's about half a dozen ways that thing can be set up but you're more than likely right.

Stick Prime95 on and see what it does.

NTMK

GCDLawstudent wrote: »

Well depends - a water cooler wont get below amibent but 32 does seem a little high. My V8 does 30C idle. Have you properly applied the termal paste? Do you have the fans or pumps set very low? Are your voltages stock?

All thins to check 30C is fine and you'll proabbly find the H100 comes into its own under load.

My h80 and my friends h100 idle around 30°C so its normal

Dr_Teeth

I left Prime95 going for half an hour and the CPU temp was 57C. I don't have the cooler on its highest setting (2/3).