New PC Build - Needs Review.

[Ashen]

Someone wanna take a look and advise? Its been a while since I built a custom rig. I've already got an acceptable monitor/TV setup and GPU that I can use (GTX 460) I know its a bit dated, but I can get a new GFX card later. I'm really looking for a base system upgrade atm.

https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/MySa ... D=17835354





Also, I'll be raid'ing two of those HDD's.

 

[grossaffe]

I'd comment, but I don't have a newegg account so I can't see the build. :/

 

[Ashen]

Added SS's

 

[grossaffe]

One thing I'd do, if I were you, is upgrade the i5 4670 to the 4670k. It's $20 more, but it'll allow you to overclock which would come in handy if you wanted to run dolphin or just to help future-proof. Also, it seems like it comes with a $20 gift card right now, so if you're gonna get a new GPU from them in the future anyways, it's basicallyoffsets the price-tag difference.

 

[Mako321]

One thing I'd do, if I were you, is upgrade the i5 4670 to the 4670k. It's $20 more, but it'll allow you to overclock which would come in handy if you wanted to run dolphin or just to help future-proof. Also, it seems like it comes with a $20 gift card right now, so if you're gonna get a new GPU from them in the future anyways, it's basicallyoffsets the price-tag difference.

You can't overclock, it's a haswell. Even with a H100 you'll hit temp limits really quickly on stock voltages, it's insanely bad.
Save some money and get a 3570k, which has a lot more overclocking headroom and basically the same performance clock for clock. Plus, 1155 motherboards are a lot cheaper than 1150s right now.
I'd get some cheaper ram too, extra clock speed from your ram makes near as no difference in 99.9% of applications, and absolutely none in the other .1%.
Get a different CPU cooler too, something like a Hyper 212 Evo for around the same price. Reviews say that the rosewill is worse than or just as good as the stock cooler, it'd be an absolute waste.
There are also a LOT of better options than OCZ PSUs unless something drastic has changed in the past 6 months, I'd recommend this instead: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817151132
Even then, you'd probably need a 500w PSU max for your rig unless you plan on SLIing in the future, save your money there and get something more relevant like an SSD or expensive quiet fans or thermal paste or something.

 

[grossaffe]

One thing I'd do, if I were you, is upgrade the i5 4670 to the 4670k. It's $20 more, but it'll allow you to overclock which would come in handy if you wanted to run dolphin or just to help future-proof. Also, it seems like it comes with a $20 gift card right now, so if you're gonna get a new GPU from them in the future anyways, it's basicallyoffsets the price-tag difference.

You can't overclock, it's a haswell. Even with a H100 you'll hit temp limits really quickly on stock voltages, it's insanely bad.
Save some money and get a 3570k, which has a lot more overclocking headroom and basically the same performance clock for clock. Plus, 1155 motherboards are a lot cheaper than 1150s right now.

You're exaggerating on the Haswell and overclocking.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/0 ... u-review/7

"Overall it's noticeably faster than its predecessor, the Core i5-3570K in most of our tests, particularly so at image editing. However, the difference isn't as significant as we'd hoped. It's certainly not worth upgrading if you own a K-series Ivy Bridge CPU and only the result in our image editing test would possibly warrant an upgrade from a Core i5-2500K.[...]

The issue with heat and overclocking is certainly a worry, but only really to those that planned on whacking the clock speed up to 4.8GHz like you could with Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge. At 4.6GHz, it kept pace in many of our tests with previous generation CPUs that were overclocked much higher anyway. As such, the argument that you should buy an Ivy Bridge CPU instead doesn't really hold up in the overall scheme of things; even if you find a Core i5-3570K in a flash sale, LGA1155 is now end of life so makes for a pretty poor purchase if you're an upgrade fanatic. In addition, even if you only overclock the Core i5-4670K to 4.4 or 4.5GHz, it's likely to be as fast as previous generation CPUs clocked 200-300MHz faster. And again, if you're willing to de-lid the chip, there's room to stretch this CPU further.

The Core i5-4670K might not offer the same wow-factor as Sandy Bridge did when it hit the shelves in early 2011, but it's without doubt the CPU you should be considering if you're buying a new system, or upgrading from a pre-Sandy Bridge one with a budget of less than £200."

Also worth noting, Haswell tested very well on Dolphin, if you plan on running Gamecube and Wii games on this. The SSE improvements made in Haswell makes it perform better than the Ivy Bridge for Dolphin despite lower clock speeds.

 

[Mako321]

.

Don't trust any overclocking results from cherry-picked review CPUs.
In the real world, you'll be hard pressed to hit 4.5, and again, the money used on a barely faster CPU could be used in a lot of other places with better performance gains for the money.
Maybe I would be more open if Intel didn't change up their motherboards every 5 months and use horse cum for TIM.
Generally the community agrees that haswell is a useless waste of money.

 

[XCVG]

The Haswell question is a fiery one, but I'm going to say that if you have no intention of overclocking, you're better off with Haswell, and leave it at that.

There's no point in paying extra for faster RAM, since stock speeds are limited to 1866 (if I remember correctly) and the gain in memory bandwidth doesn't net you much anyway.

The cooler is probably a piece of flax, but I'm the guy who staunchly refuses to put a gigantic tower on my motherboard. I held out on stock cooling until last month, then installed a Corsair H60.

Get an SSD. Seriously, it's like a night and day difference. A 120/128 is probably big enough if you don't plan on putting any games or large apps on it. The Intel 520 is the classic, there are other good ones out there but stay away from anything made by OCZ (although their new ones might be better).

OCZ power supplies are generally not very good and they aren't cheap anymore either. Corsairs are nice but expensive, same with Antec. I'm using an XFX 650W, which is a rebadged Seasonic.

If you want to save some cash, you can go for a cheaper motherboard provided you don't plan on overclocking or SLI.

 

[Ashen]

Thanks for the advice guys. I've changed some stuff around and think I'm pretty happy with what I've picked out. I get the whole "Haswell isn't worth the upgrade" thing. But I'm upgrading from a Core2 Duo, I want the latest and greatest. I did take Groose's advice and get the overclockable chip though. I also switched for a better modular power supply and better CPU cooler. Can't wait for this flax to get here now and put it all together. Its a long overdue upgrade.

My question now has to be is the update to a 64bit OS (Win 7) really worth it? I've been running 32bit (XP/Vista/7) forever now on my desktop and it performs really, really well for its age. I do have 64bit Win 7 on my lappy and don't really see and real performance benefits. I really want to get the most out of my new rig though, so if someone has some legit reasons to update to x64 then I will.

 

[XCVG]

32 bit Windows only supports up to 4GB of address space without hacks, so you get less than that of RAM. I'm not sure if you'll notice any visible improvements, but x64 apps that do heavy computation will be faster. There is no reason to run 32 bit Windows in this day and age. Move to 64 bit.

 

[grossaffe]

as XCVG said, 32-bit can only address 4GB of RAM and VRAM combined (2^32 = 4*1024^3), and depending on the program, there should be speedups or just the ability to use bigger numbers. Going back to Emulators here, if you're emulating a 64-bit processor, it'll be faster to do so with another 64-bit processor so you don't have to do two 32-bit operations to simulate one 64-bit operation.

 

[Ashen]

Yea, I figured as much. I knew about the memory access limitation and of course the upgraded 64 bit operation set. I was worried more about stability/compatibility issues to be honest. Like I said I have x64 Win 7 on my laptop. But it honestly doesn't get used nearly as much as my desktop. Especially for gaming/emulation. Looks like I'll be trying x64.

 

[ghig]

Have you considered a solid state drive?

If only a small one for the OS?

 

[Ashen]

I'm not sold on the whole solid state drive thing yet. The low capacities are really the break point for me. Well, that and the price difference. I'll take a good raid setup any day.

I'm posting this from my new PC. I have to say its Dang lovely and I'm pretty happy so far. Making some quick benchmark comparisons this system is over twice as fast (double+ benchmark scroes) as my old system, and that's without a GPU upgrade. I've done some mild overclocking (4.0ghz) and need to re-run some tests now. Everything seems nice and stable, even when running prime95 overnight @ 100 cpu load I got 0 errors, no crashes. Under normal load the CPU cores never go above 40 degrees.

 

[grossaffe]

SSDs are best used in conjuction with an HDD. Install your OS and programs onto the SSD, and then your tons of data goes on the HDD.

 

[Ashen]

I get how they are supposed to be used. They're just not for me. I've weighed the pro's and cons of them, and to me the low capacities and high costs aren't worth the tradeoff for only marginally higher read/write rates compared to a raid 0 setup, which I've used for years now without fail (knock on wood).

 

[grossaffe]

fair enough.

 

[XCVG]

Have you actually used a computer with an SSD? They're kind of like mechanical keyboards in this regard.

I don't want to come off as an asshole, but building a computer without an SSD in this day and age is foolhardy to put it mildly. On paper, the performance improvements seem mild, but you get more in real world performance out of an SSD than any other upgrade. Booting is nearly instant and programs load in seconds. It's a relatively cheap upgrade that breathes new life into a machine- my dad's main computer is an old Core 2 Quad rig with an SSD 520 in it- despite being restricted to SATA2 it's still fast.

 

[grossaffe]

I've read good things about using SSD as another level in the memory hierarchy (SSD Cache) rather than storage.

 

[Ashen]

Yes, I have used SSD's before. Like I said, they are just not for me/I'm not sold on them yet. Yes, they are fast. You don't have to jump through the hoops of raid to get good performance with them either. BUT the cost to performance ratio does not appeal to me at all. Especially considering (as was already stated previously) most people set up their OS on their SSD and then INSTALL ALL THEIR APPS/GAMES to a second/third/fourth standard drive anyway.

So yea, your computer boots 10 seconds faster than mine. I however have 10x+ the space you do for 1/2 the cost and only marginally inferior performance. My "Windows experience index" rates my HDD transfer rates at a 6.9 out of a possible 7.9 (yes, I know its a flax benchmark). Still, it gives me something to compare it to and it's pretty good IMO.

Until the prices come WAY down on SSD's I'm just not buying it.