Niel wants a new computer

[Niel]

Hi,

I'm thinking about building myself a new box - i've had the current one a while and i'm tired of mediocrity. So.....having hinted to the missus that i might be spending more than normal i've come up with a basic build in my head.......but researching just sends me into hours of tail chasing and doubt/questions.

Basically i want to build something i can throw anything current at and it will not blink an eyelid at it.

The system i'm thinking of is along the lines of :-

Motherboard - ASUS P8Z68-V PRO Gen 3 - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-491-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990

CPU  -  i5 2500K - clocked up. I did consider the i7 2600K but in everything i have read the i5 can be clocked to hell and back for a lot less £'s.

Ram - 8 or 16gb of Corsair Vengeance 1600 ram - decent enough quality for clocking.

GPU - a couple of 560Ti using SLI - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-GeForce-560TI-DirectCUII-Graphics/dp/B004K8R8DA/ref=pd_cp_computers_0

HD's - this is where i am still not sure where to go. Not sure whether to go for say a 120GB SSD as primary and a decent standard hard disk as the install drive for programs or whether to use the features of the motherboard the using a smaller SSD as a cache drive ( say a 60GB ) with a decent standard HD as the system drive. Only something i've read about being possible on the motherboard i picked - reviews seem positive/negative/contradictory about the use of the cache.....anyone any experience of doing this ? I can see in theory how it could work well........anyone done it in practice ?

PSU - still undecided

Cooler - still undecided......water cooler possible but is it needed even clocking the beast ? Any advice ?

Case - still undecided

Assuming i get my remaining choices right i'll have a system that i can clock to 4.5ghz or greater with decent graphics cards that can handle all current games.......in fact it should be a bit of a beast.

If anyone has any suggestions - especially around the HD config/setup it will much appreciated. The budget is a little flexible but everything has to be justified to "the boss" so maybe i shouldn't go picking the shiniest things at the highest price as i'll be hitting £2K and that is maybe going a bit too far........so i want the shiny things but at the same time keeping it in a reasonable balance with only extravagance where it best fits.

Cheers

Niel

[lionheart]

"I'm thinking about building myself a new box ."

The lions ears prick attentively


"i'm tired of mediocrity."

"Basically i want to build something i can throw anything current at and it will not blink an eyelid at it."


These are quotes from a man much aligned with my way of thinking.


But then this .... " i'll be hitting £2K and that is maybe going a bit too far." and I slump forward in the realisation that I still haven't found that one person for whom price is no object in the search for PC Gaming Excellence.


So,realistically How much do you want to spend ?

[DrunkenZombiee]

That is basically my PC with an i5 rather than an i7 2600k and 2x 560Ti in SLI rather than one.

It wont cost you any more than £1200 unless you go mad with the case and really expensive PSU, as all of those components are really good value for money in terms of the performance you will get vs cost. I would reconsider the i5 Vs i7, Its a lot more bang for your buck for not much more outlay. Depends on the work you are doing on your PC but for me its the difference between running 4 VM's well and 8VM's well.

I would go for a sealed block water cooler like the Corsair H range. The best one out there at £80 is the ANTEC KULER H20 920 which destroys pretty much everything in the noise VS Cooling categories... I want it!! As my H50 with 2 NOCTUA P12's in push pull  **** me off with a very slight rattling sound caused by air getting stuck in the impeller pump sometimes after being on for long periods. Other than that I can run my i7 2600K at close to 5 Ghz and its whisper quiet with great head management.

I have a 120 gig SSD with my OS and a select few games/apps that can handle the speed. I also have a 7200rpm 1TB drive for my steam collection, slower apps, photos etc. It works nicely for me as I can run MW3/SWTOR/COD/SKYRIM off the SSD uber fast but I still have a load of space for older games on the 1TB 7200 RPM. You might do with a 60 gig one but most modern games end up to be 15 gig after patches and new maps. You will only get 2 or 3 games on an 60 gig SSD once the OS is on there and other overheads.
The REVODRIVES are worth a look as the use your PCI-E ports to get round the SATA limitations but they are pretty expensive and you cant use it in a lappy if required etc.

Hope this helps.

DZ

[kregoron]

Ive setup the Z68 Smart response tech (SSD caching) on a m8's PC, and must admit its running like a charm, good speeds, with good respons time with the space for loads of things

[Tutonic]

My thoughts:

Ram - 8 or 16gb of Corsair Vengeance 1600 ram - decent enough quality for clocking.

There isn't anything I can think that would need 16GB of RAM, so stick with 8. You can easily upgrade later.

GPU - a couple of 560Ti using SLI - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-GeForce...cp_computers_0

Don't bother with SLI, it'll give you headaches when you run into a game that doesn't support it properly (I'm speaking from experience here).

I'd go for a single GTX 580. It'll cost about the same and give you just as much performance but without the potential SLI drawbacks.

HD's - this is where i am still not sure where to go. Not sure whether  to go for say a 120GB SSD as primary and a decent standard hard disk as  the install drive for programs or whether to use the features of the  motherboard the using a smaller SSD as a cache drive ( say a 60GB ) with  a decent standard HD as the system drive. Only something i've read  about being possible on the motherboard i picked - reviews seem  positive/negative/contradictory about the use of the cache.....anyone  any experience of doing this ? I can see in theory how it could work  well........anyone done it in practice ?

SSD's are great, but it'll cost you a fortune for any serious storage. I reckon the best setup right now is to install your OS & apps on an SSD (128GB would be plenty for W7), then RAID 0 a couple of fast conventional drives for your game installations (I have a pair of WD Raptors in RAID 0 and it's almost as quick as an SSD).

You'll get a nice responsive OS, plenty of storage for games and decent load speeds to go with it.

PSU - still undecided

Everyone will recommend a different brand here, so I can only speak from experience. My choice would be Corsair, they haven't let me down yet.

Go for a modular supply if you can afford it, it'll help with the build.

There's a very useful power supply calculator here, which is useful if you're not sure how much juice you're going to need. I'd add 20% to the total it comes up with, just to be sure

[Niel]

Cheers for the input guys.........i'll continue to look at the "computer porn" sites.....the ones with all the shiny shiny tempting gear that keep make me shift my spending horizons upwards.

I'm hoping to knock it together for £1200-£1500..........higher and it'll need justifying to the boss

The motherboard i am pretty set on.

I'm 50/50 on the i5 or i7.

8GB of memory it is.

Graphics card - a 580 would be great.....but if i can squeeze decent performance out of an SLi config of cheaper cards then i don;t mind........what kind of issues and which games caused you problems Teutonic ? The 560 ti i like the idea of....friend at work just built one using the same setup and he loves it and has hit no issues yet tho i'm sure they are out there as you say.

I think i've decided to give the SSD caching a go using a 60GB - if i don't like it i can always put it in the kids PC as a boot drive and buy another larger one to go as a boot drive in mine

PSU and cooler......i've been eyeing up various corsair offerings so i guess i'll end up going that way.......the water cooling i am probably hesitant about as i have never built one using it but theres a first time for everything i guess.

Cheers

Niel

[lionheart]

What are you using as a display?  This will have quite a bearing on your GPU choice.

[Niel]

i have a http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-2443BW-24-Inch-Monitor/dp/B001EX01YM/ref=sr_1_32?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1322173401&sr=1-32


Will probably be updating that in the near future also......but pretty nice for now.

[Tutonic]

Graphics card - a 580 would be great.....but if i can squeeze decent  performance out of an SLi config of cheaper cards then i don;t  mind........what kind of issues and which games caused you problems  Teutonic ? The 560 ti i like the idea of....friend at work just built  one using the same setup and he loves it and has hit no issues yet tho  i'm sure they are out there as you say.

My SLI experience was a mixed bag. Some games had great support for it, and the performance was excellent (Arma 2, Source Engine) where as others were simply dire (any of the Crysis games & Bad Company 2 are just two of many), with poor performance and all sorts of extra glitches that you wouldn't get from a single card setup.

Basically it totally depended on whether the game engine supported SLI properly or not.

I have a single 560 Ti in my PC now and it plays everything without any issues, so it's a good card. If your budget will allow for a 580, get that instead - it'll have better all-round performance than 2 x 560 and it will cost about the same.

[T-Bag]

My SLI experience was a mixed bag.

When I upgraded from an 8800 GTS card to a 4870 I passed the old card to my little brother, my older brother did the same upgrade as me, the 8800s were both from the exact same manufacturers which should be the perfect setup. We got really good performance in games with out more powerful single cards. Whereas my younger brother with two cards that were in themselves fairly powerful got pretty miserable performance in some games and nothing spectacularly huge in the ones everything worked in. The second card seemed to give 30% boost on average. I'm not sure if that was drivers at the time, motherboard etc, but I was expecting better.

The downside for that performance was glitchy second monitor support in games, having a second monitor plugged in when trying to play games caused issues and needed to be disabled before playing. Some games SLi needed to be turned off before running etc. Having seen that I've been primarily focused on single card performance.
Personally I would steer clear of SLi unless the savings are so huge you can't say no (like my little brother getting 2x 10 month old cards for next to nothing). Buying new the single card wins out.

[lionheart]

Anything from a Nvidia 560 upwards will be good for that monitor, or a 6870 up from ATI

To be honest I would wait a little while if you can, ATI will be releasing the new 7 series cards in the next month or so, at the very least you can expect the prices of existing cards
to fall, but rumour has it that the 7 series will be quieter and faster than anything around at the moment.

[Niel]

System Built :-

Asus P8Z68 PRO/GEN3
i5 2500K - currently running very happily at >4.5gig but i have as yet hardly tried to push it.
Antec Kuhler H20 920 cooler - and it is so far running very very nicely and quietly, so nicely that i've been concerned that my CPU is running too cool for the settings i am running at with Prime95 running away beasting the system to death.
8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 ram
560 Ti ( 1 x right now but i'm still tempted to add a 2nd in the future to try the SLi out....but everything i tried right now runs just great )
Main HD ( not yet arrived so i'm running a spare 250gb one i had )
Vertex 3 60gb SSD - running as a cache drive using the Smart Response caching on the Z68......works like an absolute dream. Everything i use regularly is cached and gives almost SSD levels of performance but cacheing for the much larger old tech spinning disk. I tried it and i love it...highly recommended.

It's clocked but not massively right now - in fact all i've done right now is pump up the multiplier and it lives with it straight away. I'll get down to really pushing it one of the weekends coming.

Even though i have a cranky old disk i had laying around as the boot drive until i get my 1TB drive from Amazon - the cache feature of the Z68 board really kicks in and everything that i currently use regularly is basically running from the SSD. The really great thing is that as the programs i use will change or be added to then the cache will automatically update so i get the benefit of the SSD applied to the programs i use most.

All in all it so quick during operation that i'm still getting used to it.....now its me that needs to speed up.

Cheers

Niel

[Gorion]

Sli is not worth the trouble and issues.  A good number of games still don't support it, and even in the ones that do support Sli, the performance increase is disappointing.

Better off having a good single vga.

[kregoron]

System Built :-

Asus P8Z68 PRO/GEN3
i5 2500K - currently running very happily at >4.5gig but i have as yet hardly tried to push it.
Antec Kuhler H20 920 cooler - and it is so far running very very nicely and quietly, so nicely that i've been concerned that my CPU is running too cool for the settings i am running at with Prime95 running away beasting the system to death.
8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 ram
560 Ti ( 1 x right now but i'm still tempted to add a 2nd in the future to try the SLi out....but everything i tried right now runs just great )
Main HD ( not yet arrived so i'm running a spare 250gb one i had )
Vertex 3 60gb SSD - running as a cache drive using the Smart Response caching on the Z68......works like an absolute dream. Everything i use regularly is cached and gives almost SSD levels of performance but cacheing for the much larger old tech spinning disk. I tried it and i love it...highly recommended.

It's clocked but not massively right now - in fact all i've done right now is pump up the multiplier and it lives with it straight away. I'll get down to really pushing it one of the weekends coming.

Even though i have a cranky old disk i had laying around as the boot drive until i get my 1TB drive from Amazon - the cache feature of the Z68 board really kicks in and everything that i currently use regularly is basically running from the SSD. The really great thing is that as the programs i use will change or be added to then the cache will automatically update so i get the benefit of the SSD applied to the programs i use most.

All in all it so quick during operation that i'm still getting used to it.....now its me that needs to speed up.

Cheers

Niel

Dont clock it to high when running smart respons cache as users have reportet that it makes data corrupt when running high OC'es, i have noticed anything tho xD