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Life Advice / Re: Sensei is building a Compuper
« on: June 01, 2015, 08:38:13 pm »
I'd recommend to not use SLI (or any dual graphics) because of many reasons:
- it often produces uneven frametimes which result in a framerate that seems a lot lower than it actually is. example: 50fps which usually means one frame each 20ms. but with sli it can happen that it results in 5ms 35ms 5ms 35ms.... which the looks like 28fps.
- sli efficiency nearly never reaches 100% (and is often a lot less) which means that you don't touble the performance
- higher power consumtion, requiring a bigger psu resulting in lower efficiency when your computer is idle. also harder to cool
- if two cards are directyl above each other airflow can be an issue
- It also makes it harder to impossible to build a mico atx pc
-> get an new card in a while which also might have new features (maybe next direct X generation)
if you still consider dual graphics make sure that the 16x slots you are going to use are far enough apart (better more than one slot in between them) and that both are connected with at least 8 PCIe lanes. And ideally the mb uses no bridging chip for doing that, because that increases latencies.
- i5 vs i7: depending on your workload, an i7 is roughly 20% faster when all cores are used (same clock of course). At least now games rarely make good use of more than 4 cores but that might change with DX12. if you still consider an i7 you might consider a Xeon E3-1220 v3, too: it has no integrated graphics and thus freeing a few watts for overclocking, is cheaper than an i7 with the same clock and has more features (for virtualization & ECC memory, you might never use them). And it usually fits the same mainboards. But better check that before.
Well... i just saw you are considering something with a higher clock than the Xeon E3-1220... but maybe this is still helpful for someone.
- mainbord: I'd recommend not paying more than around $120. a higher priced mb is usually not less bugged than cheaper ones. they may contain more features (more sata connections for example) but these additional chips usually make booting slower. And they require more power. Also these 12-phase power desing things usually just consume more power and are more expensive but are not really useful 5-7 phases should be ok for everything but extreme overclocking. If you are interested i can look for a board i bought about half a year ago which was booting quite fast :-). Also make sure to set your SATA connections in the BIOS to AHCI instead of IDE if that is not already the case. This should improve your HDD/SSD performance. Do that BEFORE installing windows, otherwise you will get a bluescreen (which you can worked around with some registry fiddling before changing the setting if necessary). Make sure your board has 4 memory slots.
- Raid0 (as already mentioned above): don't unless you really know what you are doing. i personally dont mind if data are transferred with 100 or 200mb/s. which is only the case for sequential access patterns. for random access raid0 is about as slow as a single disk. and when one of the two disks fail you loose all the data.
-> so you better go for a 512 gb SSD, like the Samsung 850 EVO already mentioned. and a bigger hard drive for data storage.
you might also want one more disk for backups. maybe an external one (i'd recommend USB3. eSATA might be better, but only if you know what your doing)
Cooling: watercooling is usually not worth the hassle. especially if you want a mobile micro ATX PC. Better get a decent top blow cooler. Tower colers don't cool the components surrounding your cpu that well. These components include the power regulators which then tend to overheat especially when overclocking. You should try to create a nice airflow through your case. a 120mm inlet fan where the HDD & SSD are and an 120mm outlet fan at the rear where the CPU is should get the job done. You might want to get fans with 4 pin connectors so that the mb can regulate them nicely. If the cooler is to big it can be quite hard to install, especially in small cases. And be careful with those intel default pushpins, they can really give you a hard time. Make sure all 4 are installed correcty. this can bea easier if you install cpu and cooler to the mb before installing it into the case. Are you familiar with assembling a pc yourself?
Memory: get some with the same speed rating as the maximum supported by your cpu. can easily be found on ark.intel.com. and don't spend to much on low latencies. depending on your workload a latency class faster provides around 0%-5% performance gain. usually around 0%-1%. get 2 modules, maybe 4gb each. And make sure to install the correctly so they can run in dual-channel mode. If you want to upgrade later, you can get another 2x4gb or even 2x8gb. I'd recommend kingston without any fancy coolers.
Well... i hope that this is at least a bit helpful and not to confusing due to un-sorted-ness, not to full of typos and my english not to bad because it is way too late for me.
Regards Mimos
- it often produces uneven frametimes which result in a framerate that seems a lot lower than it actually is. example: 50fps which usually means one frame each 20ms. but with sli it can happen that it results in 5ms 35ms 5ms 35ms.... which the looks like 28fps.
- sli efficiency nearly never reaches 100% (and is often a lot less) which means that you don't touble the performance
- higher power consumtion, requiring a bigger psu resulting in lower efficiency when your computer is idle. also harder to cool
- if two cards are directyl above each other airflow can be an issue
- It also makes it harder to impossible to build a mico atx pc
-> get an new card in a while which also might have new features (maybe next direct X generation)
if you still consider dual graphics make sure that the 16x slots you are going to use are far enough apart (better more than one slot in between them) and that both are connected with at least 8 PCIe lanes. And ideally the mb uses no bridging chip for doing that, because that increases latencies.
- i5 vs i7: depending on your workload, an i7 is roughly 20% faster when all cores are used (same clock of course). At least now games rarely make good use of more than 4 cores but that might change with DX12. if you still consider an i7 you might consider a Xeon E3-1220 v3, too: it has no integrated graphics and thus freeing a few watts for overclocking, is cheaper than an i7 with the same clock and has more features (for virtualization & ECC memory, you might never use them). And it usually fits the same mainboards. But better check that before.
Well... i just saw you are considering something with a higher clock than the Xeon E3-1220... but maybe this is still helpful for someone.
- mainbord: I'd recommend not paying more than around $120. a higher priced mb is usually not less bugged than cheaper ones. they may contain more features (more sata connections for example) but these additional chips usually make booting slower. And they require more power. Also these 12-phase power desing things usually just consume more power and are more expensive but are not really useful 5-7 phases should be ok for everything but extreme overclocking. If you are interested i can look for a board i bought about half a year ago which was booting quite fast :-). Also make sure to set your SATA connections in the BIOS to AHCI instead of IDE if that is not already the case. This should improve your HDD/SSD performance. Do that BEFORE installing windows, otherwise you will get a bluescreen (which you can worked around with some registry fiddling before changing the setting if necessary). Make sure your board has 4 memory slots.
- Raid0 (as already mentioned above): don't unless you really know what you are doing. i personally dont mind if data are transferred with 100 or 200mb/s. which is only the case for sequential access patterns. for random access raid0 is about as slow as a single disk. and when one of the two disks fail you loose all the data.
-> so you better go for a 512 gb SSD, like the Samsung 850 EVO already mentioned. and a bigger hard drive for data storage.
you might also want one more disk for backups. maybe an external one (i'd recommend USB3. eSATA might be better, but only if you know what your doing)
Cooling: watercooling is usually not worth the hassle. especially if you want a mobile micro ATX PC. Better get a decent top blow cooler. Tower colers don't cool the components surrounding your cpu that well. These components include the power regulators which then tend to overheat especially when overclocking. You should try to create a nice airflow through your case. a 120mm inlet fan where the HDD & SSD are and an 120mm outlet fan at the rear where the CPU is should get the job done. You might want to get fans with 4 pin connectors so that the mb can regulate them nicely. If the cooler is to big it can be quite hard to install, especially in small cases. And be careful with those intel default pushpins, they can really give you a hard time. Make sure all 4 are installed correcty. this can bea easier if you install cpu and cooler to the mb before installing it into the case. Are you familiar with assembling a pc yourself?
Memory: get some with the same speed rating as the maximum supported by your cpu. can easily be found on ark.intel.com. and don't spend to much on low latencies. depending on your workload a latency class faster provides around 0%-5% performance gain. usually around 0%-1%. get 2 modules, maybe 4gb each. And make sure to install the correctly so they can run in dual-channel mode. If you want to upgrade later, you can get another 2x4gb or even 2x8gb. I'd recommend kingston without any fancy coolers.
Well... i hope that this is at least a bit helpful and not to confusing due to un-sorted-ness, not to full of typos and my english not to bad because it is way too late for me.
Regards Mimos