Author Topic: Need advice on PC configuration (CPU & MB) (Read 13647 times)

Zad · « **Reply #25 on:** August 07, 2012, 06:07:08 pm »

It sounds like a power problem to me too. You do have the separate processor power connector connected, and (if you have one) the PCI-E power connector plugged into the graphics card?

I love all these people using statistics to prove their pet theories as to why their particular make of something is best. In the real world you just can't tell. 90% of the time I can't tell the difference between my old X2-3800 and my i7 with overclocked GTX670. The only difference is games or video/3D rendering. SSDs make a huge difference in boot time, but to be honest after that the difference is marginal.

http://hexus.net/
http://www.anandtech.com/
http://tomshardware.co.uk/

T4P · « **Reply #26 on:** August 07, 2012, 06:19:46 pm »

Well i most certainly can tell a BIG difference between my mom's A6-3400M 1.4GHz Quadcore laptop and my Athlon II P320 laptop
Both of them are based on the same platform ...

M. András · « **Reply #27 on:** August 07, 2012, 07:18:44 pm »

can be failing ram too. i wouldnt hurt anymore a good cleaning and a memory test

Simon · « **Reply #28 on:** August 07, 2012, 08:13:46 pm »

yea, I damaged a ram module by not plugging it in properly, computer still worked but highly unstable, sounds just like yours. I set-up a pc for my sister and that did random resets, used memtest to find it was 2 in 3 modules faulty.

free_electron · « **Reply #29 on:** August 07, 2012, 08:26:37 pm »

i5-760 on a DP55GW mobo with 8 GB ram and a nvidia graph card with 1GB of video mem and DX10 in hardware. win7 64 bit.
Altium / solidworks / Rhino run like a charm.
since that hardware is 'old' now it can be had for cheap. the cpu will be around 100$ mobo maybe 80 or so.

Simon · « **Reply #30 on:** August 07, 2012, 08:31:25 pm »

I find that a lot of software is not multicore compatible despite claims. Photoshop is the biggest con as many of its plugin's or subcomponents that actually do the intensive work are single core. I was stunned to find that dragon naturally speaking also only uses one core. I'd really not be too fussed about getting more than 4 cores, I only bothered to have 4 cores now because I run grid computing software so can run more than one project at once.

T4P · « **Reply #31 on:** August 08, 2012, 02:58:26 am »

Multiple cores are really useful for opening multiple instances of something, ah well.

Quote from: free_electron on August 07, 2012, 08:26:37 pm

i5-760 on a DP55GW mobo with 8 GB ram and a nvidia graph card with 1GB of video mem and DX10 in hardware. win7 64 bit.
Altium / solidworks / Rhino run like a charm.
since that hardware is 'old' now it can be had for cheap. the cpu will be around 100$ mobo maybe 80 or so.

Interesting you say that ... the FX-4100 is 100 bucks too ... But the LGA1156 platform is nowhere to be found already

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #32 on:** August 08, 2012, 03:35:25 am »

For general office and most electronics work, a dual core i3 or Atom is plenty. If you're planning to do SDR and/or FPGA work, you'll want something faster. Keep in mind that while some apps like GNURadio multi thread very well, while others like Xilinx ISE will only use one core effectively. For the former, a 6 core i7 would be excellent, while with the latter, you'll want an i5 or i7 that can turbo very high. I got a 6 core since I'm planning to do both (as well as distributed computing, gaming, and video work), and I got a nice deal on the CPU and motherboard.

Something to keep in mind is that Turbo Boost is highly dependent on cooling. Therefore, don't go too cheap with the fans or heatsinks. With a Cooler Master heatsink and some Delta fans, my 6 core i7 will hold a 3.8GHz turbo (about 19% performance boost) on all 6 cores indefinitely.

Quote

I have a 128GB Vertex3 SSD, and it is nice, but not essential and not that drastic of a performance increase. Try two SATA 6Gb/s mechanical drives in RAID 0 instead.

On a laptop, a SSD will make a very big difference because laptop drives are slow compared to the desktop versions. It's enough that my old Core 2 Duo laptop equipped with a SSD will boot faster than a new Ivy Bridge i7 mobile workstation equipped with a HDD. On a desktop, a SSD will make a much smaller difference, especially if you make a 120GB or so root partition at the start of the disk to keep the speed critical files close together on the fastest part of the disk.

poorchava · « **Reply #33 on:** August 09, 2012, 11:47:38 am »

I've chosen preliminary setup for the PC:
-AMD X8 FX-8150 + water cooling
-MSI 990FXA-GD65 motherboard
-Corsair 16GB 1866MHz CL9 DDR3 ram (Vengeance Red)
-OCZ Agility3 90GB SSD
-WD 1TB Sata3 HDD
-Gigabyte HD6570 2GB ram GPU
-OCZ Fatality 550W modular power supply

Total of $1k. Now i need to gather money for it

I may choose to replace Ram with 8GB or get some smaller HDD. My internet connection sux and in my location there's currently no technical possibility to get a better one, so HDD space doesn't matter that much.

I didn't include the case because it doesn't matter anyway, you can get one for free. I keep both side panels open all the time anyway. I will also have to buy some optical drive, because i don't happen to have SATA optical drive at hand, and this MB doesn't have ATA port. But some random SATA dvd drive is about $20 so no problem there.

free_electron · « **Reply #34 on:** August 09, 2012, 02:39:38 pm »

Ocz ssd ? Seriously ? You must like to replace that sucker every 2 months.
Ocz are the most unreliable ssd's out there....
Go for an intel drive. Those are most reliable

free_electron · « **Reply #35 on:** August 09, 2012, 05:10:17 pm »

Here are some hard numbers ...

Return rates for SSDs by vendor: ( confirmed defects )

Prior to April 2011 :

- Intel 0.1%
- Crucial 0.8%
- Corsair 2.9%
- OCZ 4.2%

(parts sold between April and October 2011, for returns created before April 2012)

- Crucial 0.82% (against 0.8%)
- Intel 1.73% (against 0.1%)
- Corsair 2.93% (against 2.9%)
- OCZ 7.03% (against 4.2%)

splitout of the OCZ failers :

- 15.58% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 240GB SSD
- 13.28% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 160GB SSD
- 11.76% 2 OCZ Vertex Series SSD 80GB
- 9.52% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD
- 8.57% 3 OCZ Vertex Series 120GB
- 7.49% 2 OCZ Vertex Series SSD 60GB
- 6.61% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 3.5 "SSD 120GB
- 6.37% 3 OCZ Vertex Series 240GB
- 6.37% March 60 GB OCZ Agility
- 5.89% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 100GB SSD

You pull the conclusion ...
Any modern operating system supports the TRIM operation. and the drives fully support that now.
Samsung makes a pretty good drive as well but they are mainly focused on mSATA. Some newer motherboards have a slot for such a cartridge.
My laptop runs from a Samsung mSata drive. Lightning fast. But... the machine also has two regular harddisks... the swap files , user folders etc live on the magnetic media. only he OS and software lives on the flash drive. so very little write operations ocurr there.

As for magnetic drives :
Western Digital BLACK series. without a doubt.

Green is low power 5400 rpm... good for archival.
Blue is an overall usage 7200 RPM desktop drive
Black is a 7200 RPM performance / reliability drive with more cache and a faster channel than the blue. they also use lower areal density (more platters) which makes them more reliable. but they draw more power...
RED is for NAS systems and bulletproof backup. Basically BLACK drives with special firmware optimized for bulk throughput.

and what's this obssesion with watercooling. An intel stock heatsink + cooler is all you need.

T4P · « **Reply #36 on:** August 09, 2012, 05:15:11 pm »

At 125W you need some big heatsink ... the water cooling only costs 30 bucks extra from AMD plus it's MUCH better than intel's stock HSF

poorchava · « **Reply #37 on:** August 10, 2012, 08:22:54 am »

I didn't know that OCZ SSDs show that many failures. Is this also true for OCZ power supplies? I generally thought of OCZ as a company who makes gaming rig stuff... True is also that these OCZ drives are most affordable. Though I may wait a month or two longer, gather some more funds and make stronger setup with 2 HDDs in RAID 1.

Btw, what do you think about that GPU? It's definitely on a cheap side ($80) and not the newest architecture (128bit bus). I'm not planning to play new games (IMO good games ended around 2003 - now they are too easy)

As for watercooling: If not for very attractive price I probably wouldn't go for it.

T4P · « **Reply #38 on:** August 10, 2012, 12:46:22 pm »

Who cares if it's old or new! There's a quite big amount of power in this GPU! It's equivalent to 2008/9's ... 5670
So yes it is decent unless you want to talk about the 7970 ... again no point but it beats nvidia at this price point that's what i'm concerned
6570 is good for most things

free_electron · « **Reply #39 on:** August 10, 2012, 03:01:23 pm »

Raid doesn't solve anything... A defect bit on a drive will happily be copied to the other drive yielding two corrupt files.
It feels as if you are wasting money on stuff that brings nothing to the computing experience.
Get an intel SSD of 120 gig. Install OS and apps ther. Get a WD black and use that to storeyour home directory and data. Run windows 7 backup tool to make a golden system image once al software is installed. If the SSD goes belly up : reload from the sysimage. The sysimages are about 5 to 10 gig depending on how much stuff you got. If you copy all data then they are larger ). Make a duplicate of the sysimage on an external usb drive. Laptop style drive. Those are cheap. Worst comes to worst you can redeploy from there that drive lies on a cupboard, disconnected and powered off until you either need it to recover, or want to update the sysimage.

Now, i am talking purely technical apps here, i don't game, so you'll have to tweak my advice toward you liking.
Intel i5-760. Older cpu , cheap but a true quad core. Stock cooler is dead quit
Intel dp55bw or gw mobo. Bulletproof, nu futzing with overclocking. Built like a tank. I got about 20 of those in the lab ( we build or own ) and 4 at home.
True 1.5 volt memory from a reputable brand like samsung, kingston or corsair.
I use a simple nvidia graphics card with two dvi ports and 1 gig memory. I think its a 500 series. Was like 75$...
4 gigs of ram ( we still run 32 bit win7 )

That thing churns through Altium , solidworks , visual studio , Altera and Xilinx software , matlab , cadence viewers and all kind of other hi- end software without blinking.
And you can get that stuff dead cheap because this is an older generation cpu.

I stick em in Antec titan cases . Because they are long and squat. They dont topple over if you bump in to them and have lots of room. Since these are lab machines the sides are off. The antec psu in the titan is 650 watts. Plenty for what we do.

We typically have additional sata boards in there with multiple drives on it, sometimes 12 per machine ( advantage of the titan case. Lots of room for drives.... But then again, we develop drives so thats why.. )

T4P · « **Reply #40 on:** August 10, 2012, 03:33:43 pm »

Well actually i didn't have to buy a i5-760 to run altium and such,
i didn't even need a quadcore
I have a (i built in 1 month ago ...) uATX pc outside in the hall
Pentium Dual-Core E5700 3GHz
( Don't talk about the motherboard ... it's a POS for overclocking )
WD Black 1TB 64MB (well yeah ...)
4GB of DDR3 Kingston 1333MHz RAM ...
HD5450 ( Best bargain for 50 sing dollars! ) I didn't do overkill, i met my needs just a cheap as possible desktop for a "media" box that has HDMI and can play battlefield 3 at decent framerates

I mean of course he likes the FX-8150 lots of performance to had for less money plus you can't really find a LGA1156 CPU anymore easily ...
plus that motherboard is begging for Piledriver

M. András · « **Reply #41 on:** August 10, 2012, 09:56:57 pm »

Quote from: free_electron on August 09, 2012, 05:10:17 pm

Here are some hard numbers ...

Return rates for SSDs by vendor: ( confirmed defects )

Prior to April 2011 :

- Intel 0.1%
- Crucial 0.8%
- Corsair 2.9%
- OCZ 4.2%

(parts sold between April and October 2011, for returns created before April 2012)

- Crucial 0.82% (against 0.8%)
- Intel 1.73% (against 0.1%)
- Corsair 2.93% (against 2.9%)
- OCZ 7.03% (against 4.2%)

splitout of the OCZ failers :

- 15.58% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 240GB SSD
- 13.28% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 160GB SSD
- 11.76% 2 OCZ Vertex Series SSD 80GB
- 9.52% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD
- 8.57% 3 OCZ Vertex Series 120GB
- 7.49% 2 OCZ Vertex Series SSD 60GB
- 6.61% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 3.5 "SSD 120GB
- 6.37% 3 OCZ Vertex Series 240GB
- 6.37% March 60 GB OCZ Agility
- 5.89% 2 OCZ Vertex Series 100GB SSD

You pull the conclusion ...
Any modern operating system supports the TRIM operation. and the drives fully support that now.
Samsung makes a pretty good drive as well but they are mainly focused on mSATA. Some newer motherboards have a slot for such a cartridge.
My laptop runs from a Samsung mSata drive. Lightning fast. But... the machine also has two regular harddisks... the swap files , user folders etc live on the magnetic media. only he OS and software lives on the flash drive. so very little write operations ocurr there.

As for magnetic drives :
Western Digital BLACK series. without a doubt.

Green is low power 5400 rpm... good for archival.
Blue is an overall usage 7200 RPM desktop drive
Black is a 7200 RPM performance / reliability drive with more cache and a faster channel than the blue. they also use lower areal density (more platters) which makes them more reliable. but they draw more power...
RED is for NAS systems and bulletproof backup. Basically BLACK drives with special firmware optimized for bulk throughput.

and what's this obssesion with watercooling. An intel stock heatsink + cooler is all you need.

ocz vertex 2 120gb reporting from here almost 2 years old used daily atleast 10+ hours as system drive.
did you find any hard data on the total sold drives or just these failures in percentage? i would love to see if that 4.2% failed drive from few million sold unit or from few thousand

i hope you get my point. im not an ocz fan.

poorchava · « **Reply #42 on:** August 11, 2012, 12:21:10 pm »

I'm trying to get higer-end-of-chart coponents because this approach has worked to me quite well. At the time when I purchased the current PC (~2006) I chose the best components I could find that didn't cost ridicuolous amount of money. For example E6400 CPU was aroung $300-350 back then and another one in the chart was above $600 and the performance gap didn't justify paying $250 more for CPU. I did the same for all stuff other than GPU (didn't need a good one at that time).

I'm not sure though if it makes sense now, because development in field of operation speed is slowing down as CPU manufacturers are hitting technology maxima. They are adding additional cores, wider bussed more cache etc, but operating frequencies don't go up that much anymore.

I consider myself a little bit biased towards Intel products, but on the other hand last AMD CPU i had was LONG time ago (some 1GHz single core athlon). And nowadays price gap is so in relation to performance gap, that AMD seems more attractive. I'm also considering lower range bulldozers like X8 FX-8120 or X6 FX-6200. They cost around $200. I only wonder what is stock cooling system like (I mean would I have to raplace it with 3rd party one to get decent cooling)

T4P · « **Reply #43 on:** August 11, 2012, 04:26:19 pm »

It's a BIGGG difference so big that only the 200 odd dollar HSFs can beat the Asetek Water Cooler/Antec Kuhler 920 (Asetek OEM's them all)
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1743/1/
The main reason why AMD bundled this water cooler for only 30 bucks is that for overclocking this is really important, the max temp for it is 61C but yeah, that's just bullshit actually it's pretty safe at 77C


EEVblog Main Site	EEVblog on Youtube	EEVblog on Twitter	EEVblog on Facebook	EEVblog on Odysee

Author Topic: Need advice on PC configuration (CPU & MB) (Read 13647 times)

Share me