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Hardware upgrade; For my desktop PC
Topic Started: Nov 5 2011, 10:02 PM (1,164 Views)
Dr. Best
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Recently my 1TB HDD screwed up. Now I have too much money and too little time to reinstall the system before I've upgraded the hardware. So here is what I want to get:
- A new motherboard and CPU. I prefer Intel CPUs and it should be a quadcore.
- A new graphics device. It has to be an nVidia card, because I want CUDA support and the fancy nVidia development tools.
- One or more new HDDs with ca. 1TB in total. I'd rather have a relatively fail-safe HDD than a cheap or big one.
- An SSD drive with at least 60GB, preferably 100GB. I want to have my sources and binaries on it to reduce compile times.

Everything else is already available. I've got 8GB RAM, optical drives, a 650W power supply, a tower with good air cooling and some additional HDDs. Though I may replace my 19" LCD by a larger one, if somebody can come up with a good recommendation.

The system should be particularly fast at compiling and offline rendering, so the CPU is quite important, but the GPU should be decent anyway. I thought of investing around 500 Euros, but it may be more or less dependent on what it gets me.

So let me know what you'd recommend ;) .
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Gandalf20000
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Let's see... 500 Euros equals approximately $688.85...

GIGABTYE GA-X58-USB3 -- $164.99
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield -- $259.99
EVGA NVidia GeForce GTX 460 -- $159.99
Samsung 1TB hard drive -- $139.99
OCZ 100 GB SSD -- $169.99

Total price: $894.95 or about 649.60 Euros

This is for what looks like a good mid-range gaming upgrade to me. It's got a fast processor, a DirectX 11 card, USB 3, and all the hard drive space you wanted. If you downgraded to a GTS 450, you might save a little bit, and if you downgrade to an i5 and a different motherboard, you can save even more. The newer Sandy Bridge i5s might be as fast as the older Bloomfield i7s (even though they're less expensive), but I don't know. I suppose a Sandy Bridge i7 would be out of the question if your target price is around 500 Euros. Also, none of this takes your power supply into account, but it should be sufficient.
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luenardi
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Gandalf20000
Nov 7 2011, 12:33 AM
Let's see... 500 Euros equals approximately $688.85...

GIGABTYE GA-X58-USB3 -- $164.99
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield -- $259.99
EVGA NVidia GeForce GTX 460 -- $159.99
Samsung 1TB hard drive -- $139.99
OCZ 100 GB SSD -- $169.99

Total price: $894.95 or about 649.60 Euros

This is for what looks like a good mid-range gaming upgrade to me. It's got a fast processor, a DirectX 11 card, USB 3, and all the hard drive space you wanted. If you downgraded to a GTS 450, you might save a little bit, and if you downgrade to an i5 and a different motherboard, you can save even more. The newer Sandy Bridge i5s might be as fast as the older Bloomfield i7s (even though they're less expensive), but I don't know. I suppose a Sandy Bridge i7 would be out of the question if your target price is around 500 Euros. Also, none of this takes your power supply into account, but it should be sufficient.
Don't go sandy bridge is going to be phased out soon.
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Gandalf20000
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luenardi
Nov 7 2011, 01:42 AM
Gandalf20000
Nov 7 2011, 12:33 AM
Let's see... 500 Euros equals approximately $688.85...

GIGABTYE GA-X58-USB3 -- $164.99
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield -- $259.99
EVGA NVidia GeForce GTX 460 -- $159.99
Samsung 1TB hard drive -- $139.99
OCZ 100 GB SSD -- $169.99

Total price: $894.95 or about 649.60 Euros

This is for what looks like a good mid-range gaming upgrade to me. It's got a fast processor, a DirectX 11 card, USB 3, and all the hard drive space you wanted. If you downgraded to a GTS 450, you might save a little bit, and if you downgrade to an i5 and a different motherboard, you can save even more. The newer Sandy Bridge i5s might be as fast as the older Bloomfield i7s (even though they're less expensive), but I don't know. I suppose a Sandy Bridge i7 would be out of the question if your target price is around 500 Euros. Also, none of this takes your power supply into account, but it should be sufficient.
Don't go sandy bridge is going to be phased out soon.
I doubt Sandy Bridge processors will completely disappear when the Ivy Bridges come along, considering you can still buy first generation i7s. Actually, it will probably drive down the prices of Sandy Bridges, making them even better to buy on a budget. Just because they are not the most recent does not mean they are not good. My brother's gaming rig can run pretty much any game you throw at it on max settings, and it's using a GTX 460 (granted, it's EVGA's superclocked version) and a Core i7 920, which are technically last generation pieces of hardware.

If you are planning on buying a Sandy Bridge, I guess wait for the Ivy Bridge processors to hit first to drive the price down some more. I think the first ones are supposed to hit before the end of the year, are they not?
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Dr. Best
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That is looking good Gandalf. Thanks for the recommendations. I will have a detailed look at the parts lateron.

According to this site Ivy Bridge processors won't be available for end users until March 2012. I certainly don't want to wait that long. I'd prefer getting the order out this week.

Regarding Sandy Bridge vs. Bloomfield, what differences would I need to be aware of besides the clock rate? With respect to the clock rate Bloomfield really seems to provide the better value for money. Either way I'll probably go for an i7.

While comparing prices I noticed that most Intel CPUs got like 10% more expensive over the last two months. Quite unusual for hardware. I wonder what is up with that.
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Gandalf20000
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Dr. Best
Nov 7 2011, 07:44 PM
That is looking good Gandalf. Thanks for the recommendations. I will have a detailed look at the parts lateron.

According to this site Ivy Bridge processors won't be available for end users until March 2012. I certainly don't want to wait that long. I'd prefer getting the order out this week.

Regarding Sandy Bridge vs. Bloomfield, what differences would I need to be aware of besides the clock rate? With respect to the clock rate Bloomfield really seems to provide the better value for money. Either way I'll probably go for an i7.

While comparing prices I noticed that most Intel CPUs got like 10% more expensive over the last two months. Quite unusual for hardware. I wonder what is up with that.
Sandy Bridges are made on a 32nm process, and Bloomfields are based on a 45nm process. They also have different sockets, so they require different motherboards.
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Reikyrr
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Dr. Best
Nov 7 2011, 07:44 PM
That is looking good Gandalf. Thanks for the recommendations. I will have a detailed look at the parts lateron.

According to this site Ivy Bridge processors won't be available for end users until March 2012. I certainly don't want to wait that long. I'd prefer getting the order out this week.

Regarding Sandy Bridge vs. Bloomfield, what differences would I need to be aware of besides the clock rate? With respect to the clock rate Bloomfield really seems to provide the better value for money. Either way I'll probably go for an i7.

While comparing prices I noticed that most Intel CPUs got like 10% more expensive over the last two months. Quite unusual for hardware. I wonder what is up with that.
Ive seen it happen last year too, in just a month prices rose with 20 euros (amd processors)
I think its just another economic crisis or something, nothing out of the ordinairy....

BTW, I have an i5, whillst its not the fastest I have no complaints at all, you can run multiple programs at once without any noticable lagg. (firefox with over 100 tabs and hosting a (usually empty) minecraft server and a demanding game.) So I think you'll be good any way, however as for grafics cards I am more an ATI AMD (gfx card) type of guy. Just figure out the pros and cons of them yourself :)
Edited by Reikyrr, Nov 9 2011, 11:59 AM.
~Inspirational quote~
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Dr. Best
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Reikyrr
Nov 9 2011, 11:55 AM
Ive seen it happen last year too, in just a month prices rose with 20 euros (amd processors)
I think its just another economic crisis or something, nothing out of the ordinairy....

BTW, I have an i5, whillst its not the fastest I have no complaints at all, you can run multiple programs at once without any noticable lagg. (firefox with over 100 tabs and hosting a (usually empty) minecraft server and a demanding game.) So I think you'll be good any way, however as for grafics cards I am more an ATI AMD (gfx card) type of guy. Just figure out the pros and cons of them yourself :)
When it comes to the CPU my concerns are less how "fluent" programs run. Any current low end CPU should perform quite well with respect to that. As I already said my primary concern is compilation and rendering times. Rendering an image in Blender or rebuilding Ultimate 3D 3.0 can easily take around five minutes. If I can get this down to one minute with a new CPU and an SSD that would be quite cool.

At the moment I have an AMD graphics card. If I wouldn't be developing graphics stuff, I would probably be perfectly fine with that. Unfortunately I am. Having CUDA support is a real benefit then. There are many renderers, which can use CUDA acceleration, we use CUDA for university projects and I might want to experiment with it myself. Besides nVidia PerfHUD looks quite useful.

Gandalf20000
 
Sandy Bridges are made on a 32nm process, and Bloomfields are based on a 45nm process. They also have different sockets, so they require different motherboards.
Thanks. So from what I see there are no significant differences in performance, which are not captured by the stats on the clockrate. Apparently Sandy Bridges require less power, but I don't see why I would need to care about that in my desktop PC.
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Gandalf20000
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I think the smaller die process allows them to cram more transistors onto a chip, but I'm not entirely sure if it serves any other purpose.
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luenardi
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Dr. Best
Nov 9 2011, 12:18 PM
Reikyrr
Nov 9 2011, 11:55 AM
Ive seen it happen last year too, in just a month prices rose with 20 euros (amd processors)
I think its just another economic crisis or something, nothing out of the ordinairy....

BTW, I have an i5, whillst its not the fastest I have no complaints at all, you can run multiple programs at once without any noticable lagg. (firefox with over 100 tabs and hosting a (usually empty) minecraft server and a demanding game.) So I think you'll be good any way, however as for grafics cards I am more an ATI AMD (gfx card) type of guy. Just figure out the pros and cons of them yourself :)
When it comes to the CPU my concerns are less how "fluent" programs run. Any current low end CPU should perform quite well with respect to that. As I already said my primary concern is compilation and rendering times. Rendering an image in Blender or rebuilding Ultimate 3D 3.0 can easily take around five minutes. If I can get this down to one minute with a new CPU and an SSD that would be quite cool.

At the moment I have an AMD graphics card. If I wouldn't be developing graphics stuff, I would probably be perfectly fine with that. Unfortunately I am. Having CUDA support is a real benefit then. There are many renderers, which can use CUDA acceleration, we use CUDA for university projects and I might want to experiment with it myself. Besides nVidia PerfHUD looks quite useful.

Gandalf20000
 
Sandy Bridges are made on a 32nm process, and Bloomfields are based on a 45nm process. They also have different sockets, so they require different motherboards.
Thanks. So from what I see there are no significant differences in performance, which are not captured by the stats on the clockrate. Apparently Sandy Bridges require less power, but I don't see why I would need to care about that in my desktop PC.
Military here makes use of cuda for damage control simulations.
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For your perception no.
But my universe has no such limits.


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Dr. Best
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By now I've been comparing parts and prices quite a lot. These things are always a little difficult. Basically I'm sticking to something quite close to Gandalf's suggestion, but I might go a bit more high end.

Prices are higher in Germany than in the US, so I will probably have to invest more than I meant to, but that's alright. I might be going for a Core i7 2600 (Sandy Bridge) and a Gigabyte graphics device with GTX 460 chip.

The choice of the SDD is quite difficult. An Agality 3 seems to provide the best value for money, but there are lots of reports all over the web that OCZ SDDs tend to cause blue screens and hangs. Reports on Kingston SDDs seem to be better, but I'd need to pay 50€ more for an SDD with identical size, speed and controller. If anybody has experiences to share on this matter, they are welcome.
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Reikyrr
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Less power equals less heat generation, since the most if not all power a processor uses is because of resistance which generates heat. My ocz vertex 2 works without a glitch, have had absolutely no trouble with it or anything. computer boots up pretty well, however the windows index score will drop alot in the begin. when I just had it I got a 7.7 for hard drive it now seems to have stabalized on 7.4 I'll re run the assesment to be sure. (which isnt very great for ssd's but it's not that bad if you only do it once in a while.) I think it also has to do with how stuffed your drive is.

Edit, jup 7.4
Edited by Reikyrr, Nov 13 2011, 01:34 PM.
~Inspirational quote~
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Dr. Best
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It took me a while, but now I am finally putting together my order for this hardware upgrade. I decided to go more high-end than I had meant to initially. Besides I will also purchase new RAM, because I figured that my old RAM is too slow for such a new system.

What Reikyrr said really helped me. If I would buy an SSD right now, it would be an OCZ Agility 3. However there's some interesting news on SSDs and due to this I will probably wait several months before I actually purchase an SSD.

Once I've got the list of parts complete, I will let you know.
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Dr. Best
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Ok, here is what I came up with. It will cost me 776,43 Euros and appears to be high-end except for the GPU which is upper mid-end.

  • Intel Core i7-2600 Box for 251,99 EUR. Since I do a lot of CPU intensive stuff I wanted a high-end CPU. I guess this one is the best I can get at this price.
  • Asus P8Z68-V Pro for 146,36 EUR. Has everything I need, most notably lots of S-ATA 3 and USB 3.0 slots. Tests are positive as well.
  • Gigabyte GV N560UD-1GI (based upon a GeForce GTX 560 Ti chipset) for 184,90 EUR. I decided to go for 560 chipset rather than a 460 chipset, because it appears to provide the better value for money currently.
  • 8GB G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-2133 DIMM CL11 Dual Kit for 74,33 EUR. I am not quite sure about this one. It is the fastest that my mainboard can take, it is all the memory that I need and the price is good, but I'm not quite sure whether it is a real quality product. If anybody has an advice it would be welcome.
  • Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 HDS721010DLE630 for 118,85 EUR. Choosing a HDD is painful these days. Due to the flood in Thailand HDD prices doubled and many HDDs are out of stock. Unfortunately the HDD is the only new part that I really need so I figured that there is no way around paying a bit more. This HDD used to cost 60€. Still it is the cheapest 1TB HDD that I could find at a shop of my choice that is in stock.
I can order all of this at two shops and the prices are close to the cheapest overall prices. Let me know, if there is something horribly wrong with the idea of buying these parts. Otherwise I will get the order out tomorrow in the evening.
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UCallMeExo
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I reccomend you to buy double GTX 560 with a motherboard supporting SLI. A 5000W power source would be necesary. Just sell out 10 tons of gold from your mine, and you'll prolly have enough cash left after the purschase, to buy a nanosuit.

Serious now. I realy recommend you the GTX 560 ti, with a 700W power source, so so.
Im buying this in december, a few days next :P
That is arround 470 U$S.
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