Building a new flying machine... could use any advice

[agrasyuk]

120Gb is plenty. win7, crucial apps (office, CAD etc) , RoF, BF3, BS and A10 all live on SSD with some room to spare. 240Gb is nice and even faster (since 240 is essentially two 120 gigers being read from concurrently. but that depends on particular drive construction), at that price almost attractive. I am not a fan of Agility series however, read reviews make your own decision .

 

as far as CPU, I tried and did not see measurable performance difference between 2600K and clocked 2500K. not worth extra 20$, let alone over 100$ of difference they actually ask for (that went towards better card).

 

+1 vote for the GTX570. would be my card of choice if i to build new system today.

[EtherealN]

240Gb is nice and even faster (since 240 is essentially two 120 gigers being read from concurrently. but that depends on particular drive construction)

 

Actually, only in very few cases does this hold true. Generally speaking, the thing that speeds up with larger drive sizes is write speed, but read speed tends to be almost exactly the same. This is due to the fact that most flash technologies read pretty fast but have difficulty writing. Therefore, the smaller drives with their fewer flash cells cannot spread the writes over as many cells, causing a slow down. This however does not impact reads.

 

 

as far as CPU, I tried and did not see measurable performance difference between 2600K and clocked 2500K. not worth extra 20$, let alone over 100$ of difference they actually ask for (that went towards better card).

 

He has already mentioned that he is using the processor for more than DCS products, where he is interested in the specific features of the i7's. Throw a nicely multithreaded application at it and you'll see a quite noticeable difference between i7 and i5.

[AKA_Clutter]

Speed,

 

I know I am jumping in late, but I recently went through an upgrade similar to what you are looking at. The main difference is that my is almost a purely gaming use only. My specs are in my signature below.

 

I went with the i7-2600k because I wanted it to last at least three years and I wanted to experiment with overclocking. Others are correct in that from a gaming perspective, you wont see much difference between the 2500k and the 2600k. Also, as far as I know (and can see from test) A-10C only uses one core. When I use Core Temp (freeware) to monitor CPU temperature, it shows one core at ~ 45 - 50% load while running A-10C. I think that means that my GTX 470 SC is the bottle neck.

 

I chose the Asus P8Z68 Deluxe motherboard because, I do gaming and I wanted to try overclocking. From the reviews I read (Tom's Hardware, Hardware Canuks, Anandtech), Asus have the best boards from an overclocking standpoint. I am very happy with it.

 

My CPU is overclocked to 4.4 GHz :) I have a Xigmatek Gaia SD 1283 CPU cooler (air cooler). When running a test that loaded all "8" cores (hyper-threading) at 100%, my temperatures were ~ 72 degrees C. Running A-10C the temps are around 55 C. All manageable.

 

I went for 16 GB Ram simply because it was cheap at the time I got this, and I got them in sets of 2 at two different times. HOWEVER, you will have to make sure that the cooler you chose does NOT interfere with tall memory sticks (like the Corsair Vengeance).

 

I have the Corsair Vengeance dual channel memory (4 GB sticks - 4 x 4GB = 16 GB total). When you get your motherboard, look at the specifications. It will tell you whether you need dual or triple channel memory ( I haven't heard of quad channel before).

 

As for SDD below is a link to a thread that I started asking about how ADD would impact the game. From what I have read I think I can expect faster load times of the OS and game load times, but not much impact once you are inside the DCS games. This thread pretty much confirms that. You very well may see better performance ,

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=81888

 

This link has a pretty good article on the various SSDs and what a lot of the terms means. I found it useful.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991.html

 

As for size, I thought about a 120GB, but hope to go with a 240 GB SSD. My OS and support files runs about 74 GB. DCS titles (BS1, BS2 and A-10C runs another 28 GB. Add in 8 - 16 GB for the page file for Windows (I know, I know, this can be debated) and you are running pretty slim on SDD space.

 

Hope this helps some. S!

[sobek]

Also, if I remember the performance specs right, going for the 240 instead of 120 will also give you a nice boost to your write performance, might be nice if working with large datasets from FRAPS and similar.

 

Curiously enough, this is not generally the case. You might find this article rather interesting.

[EtherealN]

Some interesting anomalies in there for sure, but that's a single type.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21843/3

 

As always, depends on the controller and chip technology used in a specific drive.

[EtherealN]

Also, as far as I know (and can see from test) A-10C only uses one core.

 

Two cores, the sound engine has it's own thread - though it is not likely to saturate the core.

 

I have the Corsair Vengeance dual channel memory (4 GB sticks - 4 x 4GB = 16 GB total). When you get your motherboard, look at the specifications. It will tell you whether you need dual or triple channel memory ( I haven't heard of quad channel before).

 

If you run four modules, you are in single-channel operation.

Quad-channel is a new thing with SandyBridge-E and socket 2011.

 

The big deal here is the memory controller (which is usually in the processor nowadays) and the chipset, not really the sticks themselves. And of course how you layout your memory units physically amongst the slots.

[Speed]

Wow, thanks for all the advice everyone!

 

If you run four modules, you are in single-channel operation.

Quad-channel is a new thing with SandyBridge-E and socket 2011.

 

What? The motherboard I am looking at is dual channel. You mean to tell me, if I fill all four memory slots, it will go from dual channel to single channel? But if I only fill two memory slots, it will run faster, dual channel?

[AKA_Clutter]

 

If you run four modules, you are in single-channel operation.

Quad-channel is a new thing with SandyBridge-E and socket 2011.

 

The big deal here is the memory controller (which is usually in the processor nowadays) and the chipset, not really the sticks themselves. And of course how you layout your memory units physically amongst the slots.

 

EtherealN

 

Not sure I understand or agree. I am NOT a computer expert by any means, just play around with them. From what I have read before and the article at the link below, it is my understand that if all four slots are filled with the EXACT SAME memory, it will be operating in dual channel mode. If you only fill three slots, or use different memory speed in the wrong channel you can end up in single channel mode.

 

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-the-Dual-Triple-and-Quad-Channel-Memory-Architectures/133/1

 

I know that it isn't operating in Quad mode. In fact I hadn't even heard of that until I read this thread. I now know that this is for the new i7-2700 based systems.

 

I only state the above because I am trying to whether confirm my understanding or increase my understanding/knowledge.

 

Thanks much!

[LawnDart]

I use a corsair all in one water cooler and overclock my slightly older i7.Right now I've stepped back to 3.9Ghz since it was occasionally bluescreening. I don't think I worked out the power settings properly.

 

I use a Corsair H50 cooler with my rig (see signature), and it's been awesome! Easy to install, no mess at all. Just attach the retainment bracket on the mobo and it's as easy to put in as any other air cooled solution with fan and heatsink.

 

The H70/80 etc. are better, but also louder and pricier. I currently have my i7-950 overclocked to 4 GHz (200 bclock, 20X multiplier). It takes a little tweaking of the voltages (Vcore, VTT etc. in the BIOS - just reference your motherboard's support forum for sticky threads and educate yourself). My core temps with prime95 (and IntelBurnTest) are in the mid-60Cs with the H50 cooler... Before I was using a Zalman fan and the same settings would yield core temps 80-90C under the same stress tests. That's a significant drop in core temps, and it even idles cooler now too. Not a single game comes close to hitting the same load as prime95... BF3 runs pretty high, but still about 10Cs cooler than any stress test I've done.

 

I've only blue screened once or twice during testing, but it was solved by raising the Vcore another increment. I've rendered 1080p videos, played BF3, DCS etc. on max settings, ran 3DMark11, tested stability with prime95 etc. etc. and not a single issue since. Core temps have remained in the range of 38C - ~65C (idle to full load which only prime95 reaches - DCS core temps may hit ~50C max).

 

Now, I don't expect you to soak up this info or even be interested, but I just wanted to show that you can overclock an i7-900 series processor up to 4GHz without any heat issues using the Corsair self-contained water coolers. The 32nm Sandy Bridge chip uses less Wattage and runs even cooler than the 900 series 45nm technology, and I've heard extremes of people OC'ing their i7-2600Ks > 5 GHz.

 

All that being said, even at stock speeds these CPUs rock and will kill any game you throw at it with a good graphics card in the box. It's just nice to know that you can squeeze a lot of juice out of the i7s if you want to and these self-contained water coolers are an enthusiast's dream.

 

Long story short: I'd highly recommend the Corsair H50/70/80 coolers. :thumbup:

Edited November 24, 2011 by LawnDart

[EtherealN]

I know that it isn't operating in Quad mode. In fact I hadn't even heard of that until I read this thread. I now know that this is for the new i7-2700 based systems.

 

i7-2700 is just a relabeled i7-2600. It has a dual-channel memory controller.

 

The Quad-channel chips are the i7-3960X, i7-3930K and i7-3820.

 

I only state the above because I am trying to whether confirm my understanding or increase my understanding/knowledge.

 

Thanks much!

 

Checked it out and the hardware-secrets article should be correct. I had tested this on my previous machine, but it appears the memory controller on that chipset had something funny happening to it. (I certainly did have issues with it, so it makes sense. I should have bought 16 gigs for this rig so I could have tested it on this one as well. :) ) So yes, your correction should be correct and in this time I'm the one learning. Cheers. :)

[AKA_Clutter]

:)

i7-2700 is just a relabeled i7-2600. It has a dual-channel memory controller.

 

The Quad-channel chips are the i7-3960X, i7-3930K and i7-3820.

 

 

 

:) Thanks for the information. Now to go and read something new. :book:

 

Salute!

[Druid_]

I am hanckering to upgrade but have decided to wait until spring next year. I've built my last 6 PCs and next Spring has me excited.

 

If you wait until March 2012, the new Intel Ivy Bridge 22nm processor (up to 20% better performance than sandy bridge) along with the latest Z77 chipset (update of Z68) which will support PCE-3.0, 14 USB (4 x USB3.0) RAID, AHCI and RST11 w/smart responce . To me it looks like the existing technologies with this new CPU will finally be married together correctly as opposed to the current motherboard solutions with sandy bridge.

 

As for getting one 240gb SSD, personally I would get two 120gb drives with a sandforce2 controller and RAID0 them for superb performance. The problem with Raid0 was TRIM support (aka garbage collection which improves SSD efficiency) however it finally looks like intel has got this one sorted on the next RST 11.5 release, see here

 

A word of warning on SSDs. It does appear that the failure rates of some companies are incredibly high, pick one and do some searching. If reliability is your thing then the datacentres seem to go for intel SSDs as they appear to be the most reliable of all. Not the fastest mind you (no slouch either) just most reliable.

 

If you can't wait (there's never a good time to upgrade!) then make sure to go for a Z68, P67 or H67 chipset as these will support ivy bridge processors if you decide to upgrade in the future.

 

Slightly off topic, but I'm also looking forward to ditching my trackIr when MS release the PC version of the KInect, see here

 

(p.s. stay clear of OCZ memory)

Edited November 24, 2011 by Druid_

[diveplane]

Here's some of the ASUS Z68 boards such as Ethereal recommended

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Description=ASUS+Z68&x=0&y=0

 

My god there's a lot of choices. Any particular that stand out there?

 

And why do these boards specify stuff like "DDR 2200 (O.C.)"? That means I have to overclock the motherboard in order to get that kind of speed out of my RAM?!

 

i picked up asrock z68 board great mobo value for money and future upgradable proof too.