Erectin' a New Rig for my cousin -

[Mkilbride]

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=17144287

It's his money, not mine, he wanted to spend 1500$, get decent quality parts, and have enough room for expansion if he needed it.

We're going to RAID-0 the two Samsungs which will outperform a normal 1TB Samsung(Sure, they're 16mb cache, but in the end, it makes little difference in such a setup)

Solid State drives are to expensive to consider, he wants space more than speed.(Anime, games, ectera.)

OC teh 920 i7 to 4.0GHZ on air, I've read it can reach 4.2-4.4GHZ on air in really good conditions, so that's way more than you really need.

6GB of high quality DDR3 RAM, he's set for years!

5850 ATi, DX11, DX10.1 support, ectera, faster than a 285 and 100$ cheaper. I dislike ATi myself, but he wanted the best bang for his buck ratio and DID NOT want to wait for Fermi.(Hey, he has a single core & 8400 GT I believe, 1GB OF RAM also)

Awesome case with x3 240 mm fans and x1 140mm fan, with room for 2-3 more 120mm fans. Solid Steel. Motherboard has enough room for Tri-SLI if wanted, PSU is plenty powerful & Modular, which means better airflow.

For 1500$, it's hard to beat this system without buying cheaper built parts that can't handle Over-clocks well. I mean, personally I like to spend 800$ on cheap parts and get a noice rig, but it's my cousins and he wants a amazing rig that'll last him 5 years, but still has room for small touch ups.(Case supports 2 PSU's, water cooling, and as I said, mobo has room for TRI-SLi if anything ever needs that)

Pretty with happy with the outcome myself. If I had like 100$ more, I'd get high quality HDD's most likely. Cooler is rated the best Air cooler on the market, only 5 degrees hotter than the cheapest water-cooling solution. It's awesome.

He's going from a Single-core, 1GB, GeForce 8400GT, Ball mouse too(I'm giving him my old laser mouse until he gets his next paycheck), to the rig I described. He is beyond happy and is going crazy over the thought of how all the games he's wanted to run for years will now be easily run with all the eye candy very acceptable performance.

Can't say I blame him, that's a nice rig. I wish had cash to blow on something like that, except I'd wait for Fermi.

 

[Optional]

Very nice choices. I have some recommendations though.

1) You can do fine with a 650 watt PSU from Corsair (see note at bottom). http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139005&cm_re=tx-650-_-17-139-005-_-Product
2) With the money you save on the PSU, try a 500gb HD for $50 and a $150 SSD (OCZ Vertex 30gb) and put the OS on it. It's much faster over all. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...27393&cm_re=OCZ_Vertex-_-20-227-393-_-Product
3) What's with the mobo? Go with an Asus P6t. It is roughly the same price, and it supports Crossfire in case he wants to upgrade later on. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...3131359&cm_re=asus_p6t-_-13-131-359-_-Product
4) OCZ Gold is probably more highly recommended and cheaper. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0227365&cm_re=ocz_gold-_-20-227-365-_-Product

Also, you can easily hit 4 ghz on air with that set up. However, I would not recommend pushing it past 4. The video card isn't fast enough to really warrant pushing it further, and past 4 ghz, you run the risk of reducing the 920's life span by increasing the voltage to about 1.4. You can hit 4 ghz without raising the voltage very much.

On PSU power: http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html
Plug it all in using 2x 7200 RPM HDDs, and Newegg recommends a 550 watt PSU. This is a over estimation since SSDs use up considerably less power than conventional hard drives. Newegg's calculator also over estimates in order to add room for USB devices and fans. For a more accurate recommendation, try http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine . It will give you a similar answer.

 

[Mkilbride]

Mm, thanks. EVGA's board supports TRI-Sli though man. It comes with 16x/8x/16x/,

x8 in Sli has proven to have 0% performance impact, so it doesn't matter. EVGA comes more recommended for quality parts.

That ASUS is a nice board though and I may consider it, but the EVGA has more room for expansion, room for a PhysX card and Soundcard. Plus additional things I may want in there.


650w PSU? Are you kidding me? I have a Q6600, GTX280, 4GB RAM, ectera, and I have Antect 650 TruPower PSU and it struggles with this setup.(600w was recommended for it, I went 650w just incase, but now the PSU is 2 years old, so it's at the breaking point and I had to De-OC tthe Q6600 from 3.4 to 3.0)

I don't trust Newegg's PSU calculator, I've tried official ones from Corsair, Antec, and Gigabyte and they suggest more than 550PSU is needed, especially for SLi. For example, if he was to put in another 5850, it suggests 751w's...also with a 1.4GHZ over-clock, it's said the PSU requirement will go up about 40-50, so it's pretty good. I've factored in Over-clocking the CPU & GPU, so that's why I wanted a good PSU. His case has room for two PSU's though, so maybe he can use my old 450w if he needs more in the future)


Also, I know about SSD drives. I'm sorry to say, but I will not get any of those until they reach acceptable prices for how much they can store. I've seen they can be more than twice as fast as conventional HDD's, but they also cost 4x as much for 4x less space..and space is all that matters for alot of people right now.

My friend has his 920 i7 @ 4.2GHZ on 1.19v man, so I dunno, I don't think I'll push it past 4GHZ anyways.

Also, Corsair RAM is more high recommended for Over-clocking purposes. Trust me, I know computers and I did my research.

Ah, and I apologize if I came off as hostile, I just kind of get in the competitive zone when comparing PC parts.

 

[Optional]

Oops, I saw EVGA and assumed it was an nVidia chipset. My bad, they don't even make those for x58 systems yet. I'm a little tired .

I suggest the 650 watt PSU because you didn't seem interested in duel video cards. If that's your plan down the line, go with the 850. In my experience, almost no one actually upgrades to two video cards. Within a year, it will be more logical to buy a single video card that is way more powerful that two 5850s.

As for the RAM, either way, they are good brands.

As for the SSD, I take great offense! Once you go SSD, you never go back. 13 second boot times and every application loads retardedly quick. Raid 0 with 7200 RPM HDDs doesn't make sense to me. SSDs are way, way faster than Raid 0 HDDs. With a 30gb SSD and a 500gb HDD, you get awesome storage and awesome speed.

4.2 ghz on 1.2 volts means you got a great D0 stepping 920. You can't always pull that off because not every 920 was created equally. Some have finicky memory controllers, some don't etc.

 

[Mkilbride]

Yeah, I know about the stepping.

The last 10-12 people who bought it off Newegg said they received D0 stepping, so I think I'm safe. Also, shortening the CPU's life span? They have recommended 10 years @ default, I read that OC'ing them by a large amount like 1-1.5GHZ will reduce them to 5-7...I think that's plenty of time.

Regardless, more wattage, the better.

Regardless man, SSD is to much and not within the 1500$ dollar budget he has. Also, I have a 2001, IDE HDD, 60GB, like 3200 RPM, and tons of bad sectors, over 45,000 hours logged into it it says, about 187 + days or so, I have my main Windows 7 portion on it.

Guess what? It boots to windows within 15 seconds. Sorry, SSD is impressive, but unless it can do it in 5 seconds, I'm not impressed enough to pay 200$ more for 400% less space, even if it is faster. They say quality, not quantity, but currently that doesn't apply to HDD"s.

Raid-0 with 7200's makes sense to someone within a budget; especially since according to Benchmarks, said 2 HDD's can reach up to 150Mb/s Burstpeed, 117MB/s average read / write. My friend has two SSD's in RAID=0, with an average of 512MB/s Read / Write he said. That's 5x faster pretty much. It's also 5x as expensive. If I had 500$ more to spend, sure!

Currently a 64GB SSD on Newegg is within the 220-250$ range, now if I was to knock off both HDD's, that's 104$'s back, and if I was to get the cheaper RAM and PSU, I may be able to reach it, but clearly not worth it.

Sorry, my 2001 IDE HDD can boot Windows 7 64-bit in 15 seconds, sure, it was faster when I first installed it, but hey, it's fine for me and 15 seconds is plenty.

I probably won't purchase a SSD HDD for another 2 years myself, or more, until they're reasonable prices.

A 1TB SSD drive is currently 3,900$, alright? A 2TB HDD is currently around 160-180$ for a good one, Barracuda speeds even. The 1TB SSD Drive is 5x faster, but way more than 5x the price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ... 1421430848&name=64GB&ActiveSearchResult=True

I'd rather just buy him 2x 500GB Spinpoints & RAID-0 them for excellent performance than spend 3-4x more and get awesome performance.

He has a 1500$ budget he's working within, and the rig right now, is intense. You have to factor in Over-clocking the RAM, CPU & GPU, 650w is not enough.

850w is future proof also, as he can re use it in future builds.

Fermi could be insanely power hungry as NVIDIA cards tend to be, you know? NVIDIA fanboy though
[video=youtube;96dWOEa4Djs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs[/video]

Intense^

 

[Optional]

There is NO way you are booting in 15 seconds.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=28

At minimum, you will be booting in 30 seconds. I'd bet if you actually timed a boot, you would be around 1 minute or greater.

You should do some reading on SSDs. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1 and http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=1 are great places to start.

Also, the SSD I recommended is $150 for 30gb (it's also one of the best, OCZ Vertex). That's really all you need. Win7 + some basic apps is roughly 25 gb.

 

[Mkilbride]

Not lying, sorry.

But anyways, yeah, I know SSD's are amazing.

a 30GB SSD still isn't worth it though.It's recommend to have at least 20% free space for optimum performance, so if you really did use 25GB, it'd slow it down somewhat.

Listen, for 110$, 40 less than what you suggest, he's getting 1TB, great speeds, and it's within budget and he keeps high quality parts.

Sorry, you can't sell me on SSD. If I was rich, sure, I'd get 6 and RAID Em, but I'm not. He's not rich either, this is his rig, his budget, and he's getting the best bang for his buck right here.

I may change to the ASUS board depending on what the Onboard Audio on the EVGA is, cause I know Realktek is really good. EVGA's I can't find what onboard audio they use. He doesn't have any money left for a sound card right now, he'll deal with onboard, as it's acceptable these days.

He mainly uses a headset anyways, he has no speakers.(Again, when his budget increases, sure.)

 

[Optional]

Let's make a bet. Make a Youtube video of your computer starting completely off with a clock next to it. If it boots up in roughly 15 seconds, I will pay you $20 on Paypal. This is not a joke. If you lose, you have to at least have an appreciation for non-Raid'd SSDs.

 

[Mkilbride]

I'm not aware of anyway to record boot up without the aid of an external device. I have no camera or anything like that. Also, I wouldn't want yer 20$. Why are you getting so crazy about this? I didn't think it was a big deal. I thought SSD did it almost instantly, like 2-5 seconds.

But anyways, I might go with the ASUS, as I heard they can over-clock abit better, and the onboard audio is slightly superior. Less PCI-E slots, but the 16 x 16 of the ASUS are next to each other, so it's alright.

It doesn't look as sexy as the EVGA though, but oh well. Thanks for recommending it.

 

[Sicron]

2-5 seconds isn't really realistic, your RAM would probably bottlenecking your SSD for such start up speeds. But I agree with Opti, I don't believe your 3200RPM 60GB drive can load Windows 7 in just 15 seconds. My 7200RPM 100GB disk barely gets to 30 seconds I think. And you get other stuff with that SSD as well, such as nearly no heat (=longer life) and they are very silent. Plus, if your friend plans to do some Photoshopping (Hell even gaming, everything will load up MUCH faster in your RAM), or whatever, a SSD is really nice to have.

 

[Mkilbride]

Yes, sorry, but you're just re-posting what I've already said, so I don't see what your point is?

And I counted, it was 17 seconds.

When you say "load Windows 7", it's when you select it from the Boot Menu, right? To the Login screen?

Also, HDD longer lives? as I said, I've had mine for 9 years now and I left my computer on every night for almost all of that time until just a few months ago and it's still working dandy. I don't need one to last 20 years lol.

 

[Optional]

That's not a full boot. When the computer posts (motherboard logo appears) and the logo disappears, you start a timer. It is finished when you can successfully load a single program from the desktop.

 

[Sicron]

Indeed, even after your login screen is available, your computer is still loading a lot of things. My login screen is reached in like..10 seconds or so, but the other 20 seconds it is still loading all kinds of stuff, before eventually the harddrive stops rattling and it has stopped loading.

 

[kam!]

2-5 seconds isn't really realistic, your RAM would probably bottlenecking your SSD for such start up speeds. [snip]

RAM is way faster than SSDs, that's why it's way more expensive (measured per GB).

A 30GB SSD is a waste of money. 60 is much more realistic for OS and most programs you'd want to use (+ maybe some games where you want to see shorter load times). SSDs need some spare space in order to retain performance.


Where SSDs really shine is not boot time, but every day usage. Especially when you do 2-3 things at once they start to really outperform HDDs.

If you want much storage space and can live with normal pc performance (and don't want to spend half a fortune), use HDDs.

 

[Mkilbride]

Kam just gave some of the best advice of the thread. Kudos to you.

Ok then, it's not 17 seconds, it's roughly 35 seconds.

Still, I don't need it to happen in 13 seconds. It'd BE nice, but I'm not going to spend 5x the money for that, ok?


Until 500GB SSD's are like 150$, I'm not getting one. SO yeah, I'll be waiting awhile...no wait, I won't, Tech moves fast.