New computer #4

Message

#1 Post by **palmboy5** » Fri Jun 10, 2011 3:41 am

It's been 3 years, my longest interval so far and while I am mostly happy with my Q6600 system, I think it's time to move on.

Here is my draft #1 list of parts:
$159.99 - 20 Rebate SILVERSTONE RV02B-W - Quiet and awesome

$189.99 Corsair CMPSU-850AX - Overpowered, looking for alternative that is quiet at 400/500W load
$129.99 + 8.25% tax GIGABYTE GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 - Z68 board, dunno if needed
$224.37 Intel Core i5 2500K
ALREADY HAVE COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus
$64.99 + 8.25% tax G.SKILL Ripjaws F3-10666CL9D-8GBXL
$229.99 + 8.25% tax - 30 Rebate ZOTAC ZT-50301-10M GTX 560 Ti 1GB
$154.85 Kingston SSDNow SVP100S2B/96GR
Total = $1139.23 AR + tax (shipping not yet considered)

$1200 budget goal, want to try spending about as much as build #2 again.

I'm still looking for a better SSD and such, but there is what I have so far. Up for comments!

#2 Post by **palmboy5** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 4:38 am

Update:

BOUGHT $178.00 SILVERSTONE RV02B-EW - Amazon
$189.99 Corsair CMPSU-850AX - Amazon
BOUGHT $214.16 ASRock Z68 Extreme4 - Newegg
$305.89 Intel Core i7 2600K - Micro Center
ALREADY HAVE COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus - Newegg
BOUGHT - $129.88 2x G.SKILL Ripjaws F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL - Newegg
BOUGHT $199.99 PNY GTX 560 Ti 1GB VCGGTX560TXPB - Amazon
BOUGHT $97.41 Crucial 64GB CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1 - Newegg
Total = $1315.32 after tax, rebates, and shipping costs

I'm first going to see if I can run the system on my current 430W PSU because the Nexus VALUE 430 is the quietest PSU one can find anywhere (a better 500W PSU is only available in Europe for some reason). But, if I keep the current PSU and save $189.99, then I way underblew my target $1200 budget... so I upgraded the mobo and CPU so that its about $1125 without the PSU, and I'll let it go over $1200 if I do need a new PSU.

2005 · #3 Post by **2005** » Sun Jun 26, 2011 8:38 pm

Comments...

Based off of my build, what I paid and how pleased I am with what I got...

I don't think you'll be able to get away with a 430W PSU
I just don't think thats enough juice even if your GTX 560
does draw about 15W less then my HD 5870 does.

It's sick how much cheaper ram has gotten, it's getting sooo sick.

$130 for 16GB of memory is nuts... when I built 11 months ago that amount of money only got me 6GB of ram. But I've never had any more then 3 ish used at any one time.

For the price you paid... that 560 Ti is a hell of a card. Basically it's right on par with my 5870 and I've had zero issues gaming at 1080p. I paid double what you did only 11 short months ago.

I almost got that 96GB kingston SSD for $105 off of newegg... I just don't think I would see enough of an increase. I don't really use my computer as much as I used to. It would almost triple my Seq read speeds at 270 MB/s and increase my seq write speeds from 85 MB/s to around 130 ish. I'll wait for the price per GB to come down a little more before I make that plunge. I learned my lesson with my blu ray writer. Well with both of the last builds I did in their entirety lol. I got rocked hard on falling prices.

I like that motherboard it's sorta similiar to my ASROCK board but yours has sata 6GB/s support and USB 3.0 suport which is nice. I don't think it will be that big of an issue for me but thats nice.

I sorta wanna compare our i7's... a review on newegg claims his i7 920 (mines a 930) at 4.0ghz was slower then this 2600K was at 3.4ghz....

I'm not sure if his was turbo boosting during tests and running at 3.8ghz instead. It's hard to believe that an 920 at 4.0 is slower then a 2600K at 3.4

Thats a good bit of clock cycle imrovement. Especially when you have people on newegg claiming they can get the 2600K to 4.7 on air.

Otherwise everything looks good. I still have yet to feel any signs of my computer aging yet. I went 4 years in between builds last time and I think I can get 3 more out of this setup.

For the heck of it I'll post my build list / final price list later.

#4 Post by **palmboy5** » Mon Jun 27, 2011 1:21 am

My 430W handled just fine, peak load I saw was 380W with the 2600K @ 4.5GHz and the system fully loaded. I'm not even going to be keeipng the CPU at 4.5GHz, more like 4.3ish. The cooler can handle 4.5GHz fine if I let the fan spin up, but that's not going to happen. I want my silence.

I went all out and basically got the best mobo available instead of the Asrock.

Final specs are
SILVERSTONE RV02B-EW
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro
Intel Core i7 2600K
2x G.SKILL Ripjaws F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL
PNY GTX 560 Ti 1GB VCGGTX560TXPB
Crucial 64GB CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1
Total = $1125.33 after tax, rebates, and shipping costs
+
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus
Samsung 1TB 5400RPM
Nexus VALUE 430 430W

16GB RAM is so much lol, I didn't even have a problem with 8GB (6 isn't enough though). But yeah, cheap enough.

The SSD has been nice, does what one would expect; drastically reduce loading times.

http://www.mylilsite.net/images/cineben ... latest.png
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/cineben ... latest.png

I can't be sure on 4GHz vs 3.4Ghz but you can see in the R10 chart that the 2600K @ 3.5GHz has a 160MHz disadvantage to the 920 @ 3.66GHz and has the same number of cores + hyper-threading. That didn't stop the 2600K from making an unquestionable win over the 920. I'd say Nehalem 4GHz ~= Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz is a believable claim.

Pics? Pics!
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/sandybridge-2/

The thing fascinating me right now is that not only can I run displays off the onboard GPU and the card at the same time, the monitor connected to onboard has the performance and features of the card. Dragging the Unigen Heaven benchmark between the monitors is seamless and I get tessellation on both even though the Intel GPU isn't even DX11. Someone's been working their magic to make this happen... Lucid?

Directive · #5 Post by **Directive** » Mon Jun 27, 2011 5:38 pm

I wish I had that much money shooting out of my a$$ for frivolous spending. Enjoy your new getup.

#6 Post by **palmboy5** » Tue Jun 28, 2011 7:36 pm

At least now I'm spending my own money instead of parent's. *-10 Spoiled Points*

I can't figure out how to get MediaEspresso to use QuickSync lol, with Virtu enabled the hardware acceleration option is greyed out! My test encoding took way too long (in terms of QuickSync) and was clearly using the CPU so I dunno man...

2005 · #7 Post by **2005** » Wed Jun 29, 2011 5:50 pm

What exactly are you doing that you need more then 6GB of ram?

I just freshly reformatted my system with
windows 7 ultimate and idle it's using 1.05 GB of memory. That leaves 4.95GB free...

I can't image how your chewing through that.

Directive · #8 Post by **Directive** » Wed Jun 29, 2011 7:18 pm

palmboy5 wrote:At least now I'm spending my own money instead of parent's. *-10 Spoiled Points*

LOL that's good to know.

#9 Post by **palmboy5** » Wed Jun 29, 2011 9:06 pm

2005 wrote:What exactly are you doing that you need more then 6GB of ram?

I just freshly reformatted my system with
windows 7 ultimate and idle it's using 1.05 GB of memory. That leaves 4.95GB free...

I can't image how your chewing through that.

6GB is EASY. My typical idle usage with AIM, Chrome, WinXP VM (768MB RAM), and miscellaneous gets me 4 or 5GB depending on what/how many browser tabs I have open. If I do anything beyond that, such as using Photoshop on my pictures or an additional Ubuntu VM for school related software development, it gets to 6 or 7GB.

The thing that I see that bugs me is that all these operating systems like to reserve like 20% of total RAM to never be used unless you really really overload it. What a waste. I guarantee you if I had 6GB RAM, a 6GB workload would magically fall below 5GB just because the OS decided to page file the rest for god knows why.

Likewise, a system with more RAM will, as a result, have more RAM used for an otherwise identical workload. You may THINK you have enough RAM, but that might not be the case. For example with my Android phone, it has 1GB RAM when pretty much all older phones had 512MB or less. So what does Android do? Even when I close everything I can with Advanced Task Killer, I still have less than 500MB of RAM free. So with stock idle the phone happily started using up more RAM than previous phones even had in total. But does this mean all those other phones always have all of their RAM used? Nah, there is going to be more page filing going on or certain things aren't loaded. All of which mean they aren't going to run as fast or as well as they could if they had more than 512MB RAM. Ergo, phones with <=512MB RAM may not appear to need more RAM but they actually do.

2005 · #10 Post by **2005** » Wed Jun 29, 2011 11:02 pm

I can understand that to a degree... but when my system never goes above 3GB I'm not in that situation.

The VM's are taking up some (my guess would be about 1.5 to 2 GB total).

How does photoshop chew up so much of your memory? Thats the only other listed thing I see that might possibly take up more memory.

Do you open like 300 photos at once?

#11 Post by **palmboy5** » Thu Jun 30, 2011 2:18 am

I limit to 25 opened at a time just because CS4 limits to that number before it stops using OpenGL acceleration, but 25 is pretty rare lol. As I just checked, my RAM usage went up 120MB after I opened one 18MP picture in Photoshop (that doesn't count Photoshop). 25 of that would mean 3GB used.

You never go above 3GB? *close VM* *resize Chrome window* *screenshot*
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/ramuse/ ... 3576MB.png

EDIT: After closing Chrome as well.
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/ramuse/aim2828MB.png

EDIT: After rebooting and not doing anything.
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/ramuse/2270MB.png

This is about the same as what I see with the previous desktop. I do see 1GB usage after reboot on some of my other Windows 7 machines, they have 2GB RAM...

2005 · #12 Post by **2005** » Thu Jun 30, 2011 10:27 pm

In taking my own response screen shot I have found this....

For some reason my task manager shows me that I have only 3GB of ram installed (which 1.5 of is now being used)

According to both CPU-Z and CCleaner I have 6GB of ram.

But according to CPU-Z my 930 is only running at 1600mhz....

Under system properties it shows me having a i7 930 at 2.80ghz and having 6GB of ram (says 3.19 usable....)

I have NO idea whats going on lol....

I did however forget to install the proper drivers for my motherboard so thats a big face plant on my part. Maybe thats whats up.

2005 · #13 Post by **2005** » Thu Jun 30, 2011 11:35 pm

Well... after installing the drivers from ASROCK's website and a reboot the thing is now correctly showing 2.8ghz but still only 3.19GB usable out of 6.

This is still plenty for everything I do as I will never have 25 18MP pictures open at the same time and don't run VM's

But in light of that I found that my cooling solution is inadequate..

All 4 cores hit 99 C after 5 min of AIDA64 stress testing. SOO that means I'm in the market for a 1366 cooler... seems the only good one around any more is the TRUE.

#14 Post by **palmboy5** » Fri Jul 01, 2011 10:33 am

Your OS is 32bit lol, get 64bit.

1.6GHz should be the normal idle speed.

Is this what they gave you? rofl.
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/sandybr ... puHsf3.jpg

Nevermind the TRUE, this has succeeded it as the enthusiast favorite.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835103065
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.c ... 419&page=5

I don't know why its $50 right now though, I got it for $15 AR and indeed Camelizer indicates this is a horrible time to buy it!
http://camelegg.com/product/N82E1683510 ... medium=www

2005 · #15 Post by **2005** » Fri Jul 01, 2011 9:11 pm

I can get one of those coolers for $28 no rebates.

I guess that is as good as it's getting for me.
But much less then the cost of the true so it all works out.
I really can't believe a name like cooler master has such a
top notch cooler lol thats usually reserved for Zalman or
TT or something like that.

Anyways I had the 64 bit version of windows 7 on here and it did nothing but piss me off.

I have officially though had another of those *smack self in the back of the head moments*

The reason why I can't use all 6GB of ram is because you can't count that high with only 32 binary digits. I should know better lol I spent a full year having that drilled into my head at college

Anyways I think I'm gonna get that cooler