Overkill?

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

• GIGABYTE G1.Guerrilla Intel X58 Motherboard - ATX, Socket B (LGA1366), Intel X58 Chipset, 2200MHz DDR3, SATA 6.0 Gb/s, RAID, 7.1-CH Audio, CrossFireX/SLI Ready, Gigabit LAN, USB 3.0
• Intel BX80601960 Core i7 960 Processor - 3.20GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, 4.8GT/s QPI, HyperThreading, Quad Core, Bloomfield, LGA 1366, Retail
• Corsair CMZ12GX3M3A1600C9 Vengeance 12GB DDR3 RAM - PC12800, 1600MHz, 3x4096MB, Non-ECC, Unbuffered
• Seagate ST1000DL002 Barracuda® Green Hard Drive - 1TB, SATA 3G, 5900 RPM, 32MB
• LG GH24NS50R 24x Internal CD/DVD Drive - DVD±R 24x, DVD+RW 8x, DVD-RW 6x, DVD+R DL 16x, DVD-R DL 12x, DVD-RAM 12x, CD-R 48x, CD-RW 32x, SATA, 2MB, Black, OEM
• EVGA 01G-P3-1561-AR GeForce GTX 560 Ti Free Performance Boost Video Card - 1GB, GDDR5, PCI-Express 2.0 (x16), Dual DVI, HDMI, DirectX 11, SLI Ready
• NZXT PHAN-002GR Phantom Full-Tower Case - E-ATX, ATX, MicroATX, 5 x 5.25" Bays, 7 x 3.5"Bays, 200mm LED Fan, Black / Green
• Corsair TX750W 750-Watt Power Supply - ATX, 140mm Fan, SLI-Ready, SATA-Ready, 80Plus
• $1,200.00

[MH6~SPARTA~]

Hell that ain't even approaching overkill. Looks like a good setup, though to be honest I'd drop the Seagate Barracuda and get a Western Digital Caviar Black/Blue--just because I've had multiple Seagate drives fail on me in the past, but never a WD drive.

[GySgt~SPARTA~]

looks like a great setup i would hold back till the specs come out fir arma 3 though.

[MedicSN6]

looks like a great setup i would hold back till the specs come out fir arma 3 though.

 

The Reqs for ArmA 3 have been out for over a month and they are no slouch.

 

Minimums:

GAME REQUIREMENTS

(Note that this may change)

 

OS - Windows 7 / Vista

CPU - Intel Core i5 or AMD Athlon Phenom X4 or faster

GPU - Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or ATI Radeon HD 5770, shader Model 3 and 896 MB VRAM, or faster

RAM - 2 GB

HDD - 15 GB free space

DVD - Dual Layer compatible

DirectX® - 10/11

 

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=119512

 

Arma 3 system requirements:

 

* OS ? Windows 7 / Vista

* CPU ? Intel Core i5 or AMD Athlon Phenom X4 or faster

* GPU ? Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or ATI Radeon HD 5770, shader Model 3 and 896 MB VRAM, or faster

* RAM ? 2 GB

* HDD ? 15 GB free space

* DVD ? Dual Layer compatible

* DirectX® ? 10

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/19/arma-3-system-requirements-revealed/

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

So that setup with do the job then? Seems to be a bit future proof? Well, for about 6 months anyway...

[Hunter~SPARTA~]

Looks pretty good. Definitely better than a mac... ahem...

 

 

- JHunter

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

?Seagate ST1000DL002 Barracuda® Green Hard Drive - 1TB, SATA 3G, 5900 RPM, 32MB

 

BAD choice

 

When it comes to Hard drives, you need to try to get something fast. What you get there is a "storage" slow drive, good for secondary storage, not to handle the every day speedy interaction. Did you notice the 5900 RPM? Put that on a large 1 TB surface to scan and i am pretty sure read and write performances on that disk suck big time.

 

Whatever disk you choose it has to be 7200 RPM at least. Due to the fact you are not going SSD, you should consider a chance to get a RAID 0 config, to improve performances and speed up all.

 

If budget is your problem, you should look at least at 2 identical 250GB HHD, I would suggest WD brand, the highest cache memory you can find, so you will have the main operational storage at about 500GB in RAID 0, providing quite good speed and a decent real estate. If you need anything extra (you can add another disk in the future, doesn t have to be right now) you can add a majore storage with another 1 TB disk on top of it.

 

About your CPU, MB and RAM choice, is all good. Due to the fact you are building a new one now, did you check price comparisons with the newest SandyBridge configs?

As performances it s all on similar lines, some more some less, but about prices can be different. Most importantly, Sandybridge used DUAL channel RAM, therefore you have to buy 2 sticks instead of 3 (saving money) and you are not trading that much in performances at all.

 

Videocard: This is what will or will not make your machine a champ. If you can save money somewhere else (like 12 GB Ram, you DO NOT need it, really - and if you really do, you can add RAM in the future), put money on the Videocard. The 560 is good, but you should shoot higher than that, you really should.

 

Just suggestions here, but I hope it can help

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

By the way, all... This comes as a kit. Do, what you see is what you get.

 

Seems I should pass this one by...

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

And yes, I'm on a budget. ~$1,000

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

Round 2:

 

Changed up a few things...

 

 

 

Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor

 

ASUS P8P67 PRO LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

 

EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P3-1469-KR GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI

 

NZXT Phantom PHAN-001BK Black Steel / Plastic Enthusiast ATX Full Tower Computer Case

 

CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

 

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

 

CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V v2.2 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7

 

Relatively same price tag.

[MH6~SPARTA~]

That's more like it. I was going to go with the i7-2600K myself before I realized my PC was not in fact fried as I had believed. EVGA cards are top-notch, Corsair RAM is excellent (and 8GB is plenty). WD Caviar Black is good, power supply is good (Corsair makes good power supplies too).

 

My only suggestion would be to get a dedicated O/S drive that's a bit faster than the Caviar Black (i.e. a WD 300GB 10000RPM Velociraptor or a SSD drive of some sort). That's only if you can afford it though (and I won't even mention RAID because then prices really go up). Then you can run your games and operating system off of the much faster drive, and use the 1TB exclusively for data and programs where you don't care about the performance/load times. But that's just me--you can always just partition up the 1TB for O/S and data, which is perfectly fine.

 

I definitely like this setup over your previous selection.

 

Edit: If you want to really get adventurous, you can get an aftermarket CPU cooler and overclock your CPU. The "k" in i7-2600k means the multiplier is unlocked, so you can pretty easily overclock it up to higher speeds--but the stock cooler can't really support those speeds, hence the need for an aftermarket cooler.

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

That's more like it. I was going to go with the i7-2600K myself before I realized my PC was not in fact fried as I had believed. EVGA cards are top-notch, Corsair RAM is excellent (and 8GB is plenty). WD Caviar Black is good, power supply is good (Corsair makes good power supplies too).

 

My only suggestion would be to get a dedicated O/S drive that's a bit faster than the Caviar Black (i.e. a WD 300GB 10000RPM Velociraptor or a SSD drive of some sort). That's only if you can afford it though (and I won't even mention RAID because then prices really go up). Then you can run your games and operating system off of the much faster drive, and use the 1TB exclusively for data and programs where you don't care about the performance/load times. But that's just me--you can always just partition up the 1TB for O/S and data, which is perfectly fine.

 

I definitely like this setup over your previous selection.

 

Edit: If you want to really get adventurous, you can get an aftermarket CPU cooler and overclock your CPU. The "k" in i7-2600k means the multiplier is unlocked, so you can pretty easily overclock it up to higher speeds--but the stock cooler can't really support those speeds, hence the need for an aftermarket cooler.

 

I was just about to ask about fan/heatsink... will the stock keep my cpu from imploding if it's not OC'd?

 

 

 

 

[MH6~SPARTA~]

I was just about to ask about fan/heatsink... will the stock keep my cpu from imploding if it's not OC'd?

 

 

 

 

 

Stock is fine, as long as you don't OC

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

That start sounding an interesting choice.

 

Now let s talk about Hard drives, shall we?

 

You are choosing a massive 1 TB as a single solution.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284&Tpk=western%20digital%20caviar%20black%20wd1001fals%201tb%207200

 

Alright, so you spend 85 bucks and you think you are fine. You could be fine, but we are gamers, right? you are building a system to have fun, otherwise go to bestbuy and grab a laptop at 500 bucks, right?

What you are trying to do on this computer is a fast machine to have fun with your games. Storage is important, need to be fast. It will make a difference on loading times

 

You have to keep a ratio bbetween Speed and Size on a reasonable factor, because you are on a budget. At this moment you can forget SSD, because they are nice, but they are still too expensive for you.

Nonetheless, you need to look at RAID to squeeze speed and keep a good size for your programs, documents, media and Games.

 

Is not true RAID is expensive, that depends on what you want to get, let s see a couple of examples:

 

1 - Cheap RAID 0 + 3rd drive for storage - This needs a 3 drives configuration

Buy 3 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136771

Put 2 of them on RAID 0 and you have 500 GB high speed performance (decent performance) and you use the third one as extra 250 GB storage for crap doesn t need to be fast. Total $129 shipping included for total 750GB, 500GB hi-performances

 

2 - Hi - Performance RAID 0 optimized set - 2 Drives Hi-performances, 1 slower drive storage (you may not need the 3rd drive even)

Buy 2 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136797

and 1 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136771

These are Specific RAID drives, extremely high Cache memory (64MB) to speed up reading procedures. 2 of them and you have a RAID 0 at 600MB, very fast and relieble, cost $154 shipping included. You can add the 3rd drive for extra storage at other 40-something bucks if you like to go up to total 850GB.

 

3 - Expensive and fast set RAID 0 - 2 Drives RAID 0, you may want to add a 3rd one for storage, but you can do it later on...

Buy 2 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136322

Very fast performing drives at 10.0000 RPMs. Actually it sounds compelling, but considering how Hard Disk are subject to fail, the faster, the more performing they are and the more you stress their mechanical parts. longevity coould become a factor to consider. Wooping $300 for high performance 500GB RAID 0

 

4 - Blazing fast, freaking expensive, wonderful no RAID needed, 120gb PCI-e SSD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227578

Here you get Warp speed, your Hard drive reads and writes data from the future... Sacrifice real estate, only 120GB at the VIP price of $340

 

So, as you can see there are several solutions you can choose from, but the one .. 1TB only.. is not the wisest one

 

NOTE:

I still think you should improve your videocard, why are you stuck on a 560 ??

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

More on the hdd later..

 

But the graphics card... Budget. Looked at the 580/90 but they're way more expensive unless I'm blind. Suggestion?

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

Alright,

 

let s talk about budget then.

 

If you have a budget, you have to give priorities. You say the videocard have to be under par because you are under budget, you are making a mistake on priorities..

 

Now, look at your config: Your CPU and your MB are there for a total of $505. Lower down that asset a bit and look at this, Very Similar:

CPU

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115073

MB

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128487

Still hi-performances, a bit less competitive and you save $185

 

Now grab those 185 bucks and put it on top of your 560 = $435 to spend on Good videocard

 

So now you have 2 options:

this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133360

Price in cart is $470

 

or this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130687

for $400

 

Now you are in budget and you have a competitive machine.

Edited July 2, 2011 by Batwing~SPARTA~

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

as for hdd..

 

 

I have an external I dump crap onto. Plus my wish list actually includes two of those drives... overlooked that bit.

 

graphics:

 

I don't want to sacrifice on cpu or mobo.... this'll be more than just a gaming rig.

[Donziboy2]

I would not go with the 2500 cpu, 2500k is better, once you start running into a cpu bottleneck you just up the multi on the 2500k and your golden again.

 

2500k is $9 more then the 2500.....

 

 

For hard drives a raptor will do the job for a primary boot drive.

 

Seek time is more important then threw-put on games. Unless you like micro-stutter.

 

I had 2 raptors in my older system 1 150gb for os and some games and 1 300 for steam/impulse games. When I upgraded I stuck with the 300 raptor for games and just went with a 90gb SSD for OS.

 

 

With your ram the vengeance looks good for the price. Get the CAS 8 for about the same price as the CAS 9 stuff.

 

That cheap motherboard you posted is no good for SLI/CF if he decides to go that direction. Its 16x, 4x.

 

For graphics, im on the bench atm. 500 series is just a fixed 400 series. Im waiting to see what NVIDIA comes up with around the end of the year.

 

BTW Batwing that 570 card you posted is the most expensive 570 on newegg.....

 

I see 3 factors to the card. Cooling solution, price and power.

 

If it blows half the hot air back into the system I usually dont even give it a second look and move on.

If its a higher priced OC'd version I pass since they usually have a heat recycling design that just heats up the rest of the system.

And how much power do you want along with how much its going to cost you along with how noisy will it get.

 

You can always SLI/CF in a few months when prices drop for the new cards. There will be new cards and that means a price drop of around $100 before things start to disappear off the market completely.

 

I usually spend a month looking at parts, reviews and benchmarks before I commit to a system build. Dont jump into it. Take your time.

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

Donzy,

 

I am quite agree with you on a few points.

 

First of all i didn t spend too much time on Newegg yesterday to really find the best deal, but i think I made my point.

 

My point was to highlight priorities and that worked perfectly fine.

 

I chose a cheap MB and I didn t even read the specs, but is the price I was squeezing out. I didn t even notice the 2500K was 9 bucks more expensive...

 

The 570 being the most expensive of the pack, as well, I honestly didn t fell like digging prices too much yesterday and my search was done in 5 minutes.

 

I hope Tyler get the bottom line tho. When you are on a budget you can t have it all but then in gaming do not underestimate the importance of your videocard.

 

You doont need tons of RAM (I never been missing RAM from my 6 GB config), you can go down a notch on CPU without suffering massive losses. MB can be a barely decent one - if you are on budget you are not thinking at CF/SLI in short term.

[warzer0]

Donzy,

 

I am quite agree with you on a few points.

 

First of all i didn t spend too much time on Newegg yesterday to really find the best deal, but i think I made my point.

 

My point was to highlight priorities and that worked perfectly fine.

 

I chose a cheap MB and I didn t even read the specs, but is the price I was squeezing out. I didn t even notice the 2500K was 9 bucks more expensive...

 

The 570 being the most expensive of the pack, as well, I honestly didn t fell like digging prices too much yesterday and my search was done in 5 minutes.

 

I hope Tyler get the bottom line tho. When you are on a budget you can t have it all but then in gaming do not underestimate the importance of your videocard.

 

You doont need tons of RAM (I never been missing RAM from my 6 GB config), you can go down a notch on CPU without suffering massive losses. MB can be a barely decent one - if you are on budget you are not thinking at CF/SLI in short term.

 

 

I would disagree; tyler mentioned that the system will primarily be a workstation that has gaming capability. Going on that priority I`d lean more towards cost effectiveness and reliability and compromise on the video card. AT most it usually means the difference between playing say Battlefield 3 on all high settings vs playing it on all medium settings. Not to mention the graphics card is the easiest part in the whole system to swap out.

 

Reliability`s also part of the reason I don`t recommend RAID0. Except in server situations I have never had any real world performance benefits of running a RAID0 setup for desktops. Whatever throughput you could push into a RAID0 was generally offset by the CPU usage overhead. Very few desktop mobos included an actual RAID control, vs server motherboards that included very powerful ones. Without a dedicated controller and without saturating the throughput, RAID0 gives you improvement that`s measured in 10ths of a second.

 

To put it another way, both my parent`s computers are setup in RAID1 configuration. I did a `stopwatch` measurement of boot times on their machines before and after the RAID1 config. The difference in windows 7 loading times amounted to less then a second performance penalty (think closer to 0.5 second) and well the margin of human caused error. SSDs and fast spindle speeds are really the only thing that gave any marked improvement and the difference will still be measured in less then the time it takes for you to read this entire sentence.

Edited July 3, 2011 by warzer0

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

@ Warzer0:

 

I do agree we disagree

 

I was reading back the entire thread and Tyler never mentioned about not being a gamer rig till post 17

 

I don't want to sacrifice on cpu or mobo.... this'll be more than just a gaming rig.

 

when the conversation was way ongoing.

 

In my suggestion to review priorities I offered an opportunity to step down from the 2600K to the 2500K (I linked to the 2500 but I meant the 2500K) and a cheaper MB (not optimized for CF/SLI). The performance drop on what I was suggesting is irrilevant, while the money saving is quite interesting.

 

About the RAID example you bring on the table, I am a bit confused.

 

First of all "realiability". No Hard Drive is reliable without a consistant backup action. RAID 0 is a performance config, it can be risky (as much as having 2 drives on your system, statistically speaking), there fore is mandatory for the user take prevention with backup solutions.

 

With that said, then, you prortrait an example with RAID 1 configs, which are not performance configs but backup config, on RAID 1 your are Mirroring (for moere info cunsult Wiki).

 

RAID 0 has always been an affordable and cheap way to squeeze performances out of drives. It was the way to go before SSD came out and the RAID SATA config was the "consumer" choice after the SCSI (old and very expensive at that time) solution.

True, a dedicated RAID controller would be preferrable to the one integrated on our consumer MBs, however that doesn t mean the one on our MBs is not effective.

 

Anywhere (before SSDs) you were looking at high performing PCs, they were in some RAID 0 config with quuite expensive disks (you can find charts on the internet)

 

In my persoanal experience, I decided to go RAID 0, however I didn t invest on expensive drives, so my performance is better than one disk, not better than other high-end RAID solutions. I am satisfied with it and that is what counts.

 

With my RAID 0 I went from a single drive Burst reading barely aroun 50MB/s to 172MB/s. Effectivly the RAID 0 config simply doubled the performance I had before, so I paste here this benchmark as basic reference.

 

This is my RAID 0 performance. To have an idea on how it was on a single drive, just cut those numbers about a half.

 

To me this is a cheap solution, it works and I can "see" the difference on daily operations. Dependability? I do backup all of my most important info every week on the network server.

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

Well, as luck would have it... I just had an unexpected "emergency" expense of $1,500... So, this build will have to wait until next month. I'll keep an eye on deals and such until then. Thanks, all, for the help!

[warzer0]

Well, as luck would have it... I just had an unexpected "emergency" expense of $1,500... So, this build will have to wait until next month. I'll keep an eye on deals and such until then. Thanks, all, for the help!

 

<.< well then...THREAD HIJACK!! >

 

 

 

@ Warzer0:

 

I do agree we disagree

 

I was reading back the entire thread and Tyler never mentioned about not being a gamer rig till post 17

 

 

 

when the conversation was way ongoing.

 

In my suggestion to review priorities I offered an opportunity to step down from the 2600K to the 2500K (I linked to the 2500 but I meant the 2500K) and a cheaper MB (not optimized for CF/SLI). The performance drop on what I was suggesting is irrilevant, while the money saving is quite interesting.

 

About the RAID example you bring on the table, I am a bit confused.

 

First of all "realiability". No Hard Drive is reliable without a consistant backup action. RAID 0 is a performance config, it can be risky (as much as having 2 drives on your system, statistically speaking), there fore is mandatory for the user take prevention with backup solutions.

 

With that said, then, you prortrait an example with RAID 1 configs, which are not performance configs but backup config, on RAID 1 your are Mirroring (for moere info cunsult Wiki).

 

RAID 0 has always been an affordable and cheap way to squeeze performances out of drives. It was the way to go before SSD came out and the RAID SATA config was the "consumer" choice after the SCSI (old and very expensive at that time) solution.

True, a dedicated RAID controller would be preferrable to the one integrated on our consumer MBs, however that doesn t mean the one on our MBs is not effective.

 

Anywhere (before SSDs) you were looking at high performing PCs, they were in some RAID 0 config with quuite expensive disks (you can find charts on the internet)

 

In my persoanal experience, I decided to go RAID 0, however I didn t invest on expensive drives, so my performance is better than one disk, not better than other high-end RAID solutions. I am satisfied with it and that is what counts.

 

With my RAID 0 I went from a single drive Burst reading barely aroun 50MB/s to 172MB/s. Effectivly the RAID 0 config simply doubled the performance I had before, so I paste here this benchmark as basic reference.

 

This is my RAID 0 performance. To have an idea on how it was on a single drive, just cut those numbers about a half.

 

To me this is a cheap solution, it works and I can "see" the difference on daily operations. Dependability? I do backup all of my most important info every week on the network server.

 

 

Like I said, real world performance. The benchmarks always provide pretty numbers but with real world observation I have never seen an OS boot faster or game load faster under RAID0. At most I saw maybe 1 to 2 second difference in load times in the most intensive of operations (like loading Crysis). Everything else chugged along with differences measures in milliseconds; for the risk and the price of doubling hard drives it hardly seemed worth the effort. Nothing that particularly justified the CPU usage overhead. Maybe newer mobos like sandybridge implement better RAID controllers but my Asus P6T v2 (X58 based chipset) never gave me any appreciable difference. I eventually changed it back to a standard setup.

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

... And we could continue till the dawn of time discussing about this subject, with no winners or losers.

 

RAID 0 has always been a performance solution, you can read articles, physical performances and proof of better performances all over the Internet.

 

You can read more on specific courses as A+ Certification where RAID implementation is fully explained and/or just a friendly Wiki.

 

I am not here to convince you about something like this. It would be like discussing the existence of hot water and cold water. You may tell me you don t like cold water, which is something I may respect, you cannot tell me cold water does not exist.

 

Also, the funny thing is that we have exactly the same MB with the same controller. You never had improvement on performances and I have proof of improved performances (real world performances, I see the difference when I had 1 disk and then having 2 disks in RAID) on my system, and my set of drives "sucks", it would be nicer having some faster driver with better cache, but i got this and I ll keep it.

 

Therefore, let s keep it like this, you are not a RAID guy, I am a RAID guy, how simple is that

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

This is likely what will be sitting next to me in about a week:

 

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=18063426