The purpose of this thread is for everyone to benefit from the advice and knowledge of everyone else. I used to run with Eggxpert.com and could rely on them for knowledge. But a year or two ago I decided never to return due to personal issues with a few people in the Controversial Discussion forums there. I prioritize stability highest. With price being a secondary concern, and performance a tertiary concern. That said, I hope to find a stable, cheap and reasonably well performing build made up of the best parts I can manage. I have already decided upon reusing whatever parts I can when my current system dies. But if any part dies, it will have to be replaced immediately since I have only one system. (I gave away every last system as I built the next. I will likely do that again if I can somehow manage to find a way to actually build a system.) If I cannot reuse my Corsair TX650 PSU I will replace it with a Seasonic 650 Modular. (Seasonic actually makes the Corsair PSUs like mine. They are simply rebranded parts.) I have several 1TB hard drives and an Intel 80Gb SSD, not to mention a Sony Optiarc DVD burner with DVD-ROM booktype enabled so I can burn DVDs that are literally indistinguishable from pressed disks like those you purchase software on. (Also, region free.) So I will not likely need any drives. My current system is an Asus motherboard with a Phenom II 955 x4 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and I use an Asus 5850 GPU as well. All in all, it cost about 1k to buy over a year or more. I do not *Ever* overclock anything at all. I see no reason to risk hardware I cannot afford to replace for a meager 5-10% benefit in speed. Most of my tasks are pitifully easy for this system. The most taxing thing I do is play modern games. And even then I usually turn up the GPU fan to 40% to keep the temp well under 70 Celsius to prevent it burning out since the drivers are pathetic and would let it cook at 80+ Celsius before it exceeds 25% fan speed. My biggest questions at current are these: 1. Would I be better off with an AMD build or an Intel build? I know Intel builds cost extra relative to the performance, but would it be worth the difference? If so, can you help me understand why? 2. AMD or Nvidia GPU? Again, I would appreciate why as much as if not more than an opinion on the choice. 3. I am a few years out of date on the latest and greatest stuff to have. What features should I look for? And what should I avoid? What is hype and not important too? Thank you in advance for any replies. (BTW, I have put off my Keyboard and Speaker purchase at this time since I can live with what I have. I have not forgotten them though.)
Currently in terms of CPU AMD was left in the dust. Their bulldozer chipset was a miserable failure so nothing comes close to the Rev2 i3/i5/i7 by Intel. I'm currently running an i7 2600k and loving it. GPU-wise I couldn't really say since I've only ever used Nvidia cards. Currently running a GTX 460 which is a couple years old. I'll probably upgrade this summer since that's really the only old part this PC has. I would upgrade to at least 8gb ram if I were you. Ram is cheap and has a noticeable effect. I'm using 16gb Corsair Dominator because it was on sale when I bought it, and it's a bit overkill. 8 should be fine really.
As this is no longer 1995, that is not a problem. All CPUs (and I believe GPUs) have temperature-based failsafe switches and so forth which make it nigh-on impossible to bake components when overclocking. I think you actually have to try to break them, and even then it's hard. 1. I'd say Intel, simply because they're generally a lot more consistent with their products. 2. nVidia, I would say. I find their drivers to sometimes be a bit of a pain in the arse, but I've only ever used nVidia cards and never had an issue. The differences in the majority of cases are minor. 3. No idea. But if you want to avoid bottlenecks, you want to use the highest bandwidth things you can, as well as the fastest. SSDs (for the OS), SATA3, double/triple channel RAM. Maximise your build with clever thinking and you'll get big gains. That said, I wouldn't quite jump on the SSD train yet. I'm not sure how far it's advanced in recent years, but they were less durable than conventional HDDS.
Regarding overclocking: what she said is true, it's almost impossible to get to settings that are harmful to your parts anymore, unless you disable every failsafes (and I'm not sure that's even possible for most). That said, I haven't had a need to OC yet since builds these days are overkill just for gaming.
Oh, agreed on that last bit. I'm on a Q8300 (I think), which is a Core 2 Quad at 2.4GHz. With 4GB of RAM and a GTS 450 1GB, I've run into few games that really need turning down to play smoothly. If I turn some post-processing effects down, most games run nicely with highest textures, moderate AA (4x)/AF (4-8x) and so on. I found the more effects you have, the worse it generally looks.
I'd argue against overclocking for two reasons: One, it should hardly ever be necessary to run games well, since it's not difficult to get good hardware; two, there's plenty of games (looking at you, Bethesda) that are notorious for becoming stupid crashy if anything on your system is overclocked even slightly.
Until manufacturers start warranting parts for OC use, I will abstain. There just is no reason to void my warranty by OCing. I knew 'Dozer was a poor implementation due to eight or more integer core pairs all having to share caches and a few other technical things. But what Intel chipset should I focus on? My last five GPUs have been Radeon. Moving over to a Geforce will be a big change. I hope it actually is as simple as it looks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_bridge#List_of_Sandy_Bridge_processors As I mentioned, I have the 2600k. From what I understand the i5 2500k is already amazing (again, bought my i7 on sale). Could already probably run all modern games on the i3s. Either that or wait a couple months for the new Ivy Bridge, which I believe is supposed to be available at the end of the month. Personally I'd say if you upgraded from 4gb ram to 8gb you'd already see a major difference.
It is possible, but you'd have to know what you are doing, as the fail-safes have their own fail-safes (so you won't be able to set them off without either having the necessary knowledge or simply destroying the component). My friend actually had to learn how to do that since his project for one course was "analysis of modern computer component fail-safes and safety limits", or something like that. Depending on which i3 and what cooling, but if you don't want the highest settings and don't have a really shoddy GPU, there's no problems with running them, yeah. That I agree with. For normal use with occasional gaming, additional RAM isn't all that great, but having more of it does increase stability, and it's probably the cheapest component, so it doesn't hurt to have more of it. I don't know about the others, but personally I had found GeForce GPUs to be more stable than Radeons. So for you, since you want stability above all, they should be good.
As far as the RAM thing goes, I do not need more yet. No games made in the last few years exceed two or four gibibytes in requirements, and I am a real minimalist with my system. If not for Windows using extra available RAM as a cache I would have easily half my RAM free while playing modern games. (Since they cannot use more than two gibibytes per process due to Windows Kernel limitations.) I will upgrade my RAM. But probably not on this build. Check this out: I disable services and programs I do not use. No RAM vampires = plenty of RAM even if altogether there is only four Gibibytes of it.
Windows 7 (and probably windows xp to a lesser extent) and applications do use some caching wizardry to make things run fast, which scales with the amount of ram available. For example, out of my 16gb I have a whopping 7.7gb cached and around 3gb actively used (with a bunch of stuff open but no games). The result is that everything runs lightning fast including applications. If I load resource intensive games (I've gotten to 4gb used in certain games) the other ram is freed. It's somewhat advanced, but the reason you're seeing a lower ram usage other than your careful service choices is because you don't have much ram. Which is why I said there you would feel a major difference if you did upgrade.
I will have to check pricing on Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPUs and motherboards. Ivy looks like a long term winner due to Tri-Gate Transistor stuff cutting the TDP by as much as 50%, but I cannot fathom how they can produce these CPUs at all since they have been working quite unsuccessfully to mass produce the design since 2002. Intel says they are delaying Ivy to help sell off remaining Sandy CPUs. Lame. Price fixing at its best. That said, Ivy has RdRand. That basically uses the existing clock and hashes it with the on-chip AES instructions for supposedly better randoms and supposedly better performance. No benchmarks yet exist to show if it will reduce the chore, nor if it will produce better randoms. Still, 77 watts for the highest speed Ivy CPU sounds awesome. It would be a great performance to energy consumption improvement in my case. (I use a 125 watt Phenom II 955 x4 3.2Ghz.) I can probably wait until June or whenever they roll them out to snag a Sandy at a discount, or pay a premium and get an Ivy. I will attempt to save...
Actually, I have ran my current build with the service for caching entirely disabled. My memory usage is pretty static. I can disable my Swap file... Errr. Paging File as Windows calls it without issues. But I run my OS on a SSD so I already have lightning fast speeds for data not already cached. The only times I recall seeing a performance drop was during a game that had a big bad memory hole. It was noticeable. But once the game was killed, everything was back to normal. I understand your reasoning and acknowledge that it may well be an improvement. But I am going to have to buy new RAM for my upcoming build anyway. I may as well wait until then to buy a proper set of matched DIMMs for my new system. (You know the problem with mixing RAM? Even if it is the same module, if it was not matched, it simply will not work right. It *May* work without fail. But then it is a roll of the dice.)
I don't think you got what I meant exactly. I meant that the advantage of having more ram is things will go faster due to caching (since you said your pc usage didn't reach 4gb, it would if you had 8gb.) That said, yeah, it's worth waiting for the new build.
Ah. I see. Cool. I agree then. I would much rather buy one set of new matching RAM precertified to run together for my new build than to buy it twice since I would have to throw out my existing years old RAM before the upgraded RAM could even boot, and then again as I switch from an AMD build to an Intel build. (I think they still use different voltages between the AMD and Intel modules. I could be wrong though.)
Actually I cannot. It was years ago and even the same branded modules will be incompatible. They may work together, but the odds are the memory controller would notice that they have different revision numbers and set it to single channel mode. Thus the speed would be cut in half. I would have to replace the RAM I have to get more than my current amount. I will wait.
At current, this is what i have picked. I am not planning to buy now, nor anytime soon, so this is just a plan to see what I get for the effort and expense. In this example I will reuse my keyboard/mouse/headset. I will probably either use my current GPU or the integrated one on the motherboard until I can afford to get a *Real* GPU. Also note that CAS 7 RAM costs more than twice, but just shy of thrice the expense of CAS 9 RAM. So CAS 9 it is. Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA 2011 Intel X79 $320 (Ouchie! There are cheaper options, but I chose 2011 as an example of the latest and greatest available. Prices will lower in time.) CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 Sandy Bridge-E 3.6GHz LGA 2011 $310 (Double Ouchie! That hurts even more since it lacks a heatsink/fan.) Cooler: ZALMAN CNPS12X 120mm Triple Fan CPU Cooler $100 (Already I can see that LGA 2011 is not working out. And these were some of the better priced parts...) RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 24GB (6 x 4GB) $150 (Much better. I could cut this in half and have more than I expect to ever need. But it is 1.5 volt and a Hexa-Channel Kit, so who cares?) G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) $90 PSU: SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold Modular $140 (I may well use my current PSU instead of this one, but who knows. It could die before then.) I still have not looked for a case. But I was careful to limit myself to looking only at ATX size motherboards, so this will be easy. Next up I will probably check the 1155 chipset options for comparison and then see what an AMD build looks like dollar for dollar and relative to performance per dollar.
Here is the 1155. Note that I am not bothering to list the RAM, PSU, or Heatsink/fan again. They are listed right above. Motherboard: ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 $180 (*MUCH* better than 300+ for a MB. But note that this has half the RAM slots, and can only utilize dual channel mode instead of quad channel mode as above. I am *Still* not listing additional RAM for this one since the price will be right about half the above RAM set in quantity, number of DIMMs, and price.) CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz 95 Watt Quad Core 1155 $220 (Not bad. Not bad at all. Not really an upgrade from my current AMD 955 3.2 Ghz x4 CPU though.) Next post will be the current AMD best pick as I can find it. *Edit* How did I miss that this CPU has a heatsink and fan? Duh!
Motherboard: ASUS F1A75-V PRO FM1 AMD A75 (Hudson D3) Or: GIGABYTE GA-A75-UD4H FM1 AMD A75 (Hudson D3) Both are $115. Both are also pretty much identical as well. Chose whatever brand you like best. I usually go ASUS. CPU: AMD FX-8120 Zambezi 3.1GHz Socket AM3+ 125W x8 $190 (An eight core CPU running 3.1 Ghz for less than $200? Wow. IT ALSO COMES WITH A HEATSINK AND FAN!!! Sorry for screaming, but the +$300 Intel CPUs still need a heatsink and fan purchased separately. So this is basically half that price.) RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) $90 (I am amending the above Intel posts to have this since it is a quad channel kit and none of the builds listed need more than that.) So 115 + 190 + 90 = $395. Not bad. Note that this excludes the PSU listed above too. But even accounting for that, the 2011 build is much much more money. (320 + 310 + 100 + 90 = $820 for the 2011 build, again not counting the PSU or anything else. The 1155 is slightly better at $490. (180 + 220 + 90 = $490) Still 490 - 395 = $105 saved. Can anyone tell me why I should spend $105 more for a system with half the cores operating at slightly higher frequency? *Edit* Corrected the math since the 1155 build has a heatsink and fan.
