Computer Build Resource Thread - Page 1387

On February 22 2013 09:12 DaHui2 wrote:
Requesting a system build.
What is your budget?
$1200 usd
What is your resolution? 1600x900
What are you using it for? Gaming (Battlefield 3, Starcraft 2, Crysis 3) and running AutoCAD
What is your upgrade cycle? 2-3 Years.
When do you plan on building it? Within the next 2 weeks.
Do you plan on overclocking? Yes.
Do you need an Operating System? Yes
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire? No
Where are you buying your parts from? I will buy from online stores and the Fry's Electronics if necessary

On February 22 2013 15:59 Aylear wrote:
I've assembled an upgrade pack, just want to double check here before I order.

• Intel® Core i5-3570K Processor
  
• XFX Radeon HD 7870 2GB GDDR5
  
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU
  
• MSI Z77A-GD55, Socket-1155

- Expecting 1080p resolutions, used mostly for gaming (including some new releases + streaming what I play using OBS).
- My upgrade cycle is every 3 years or so.
- Plan on building it yesterday, because fuck my netbook, I want my desktop back
- No plans to SLI / Crossfire, but the option is there


From reading recommendations in this thread and elsewhere, I went with the i5-3570K, the Z77 motherboard, and the Hyper 212 with the intent to overclock the 3.4GHz processor to 4.0GHz or above. For general gaming, this should give me better performance for the price, as the i7 is only worthwhile if you're doing a lot of video editing and such.

The HD 7870 2GB seems to be an extremely solid card for the price. While I play and stream at comparatively low resolutions, this will give me the opportunity to upgrade to 1080p. I have a solid cabinet with high air flow for cooling, and a 650W 12V V2.3, 80+ power supply, which should be sufficient.

Please correct any misconceptions I've made during this assembly, and let me know if there's anything else I need to be aware of when doing this build. Doing this research in 1024x600 on a netbook that loads webpages like my desktop loads Crysis has been a character-building experience.

On February 22 2013 16:20 Rollin wrote:

Not sure if the xfx 7870 has a broken cooling system or not, some of the 7950/7970's from xfx had issues before, particularly the "Double D" range. Should be ok though. Everything else is A-OK.

And I know the pain of a netbook, mine lasted less than 6 months before I bought an ultrabook to replace it, primarily because of the abysmal resolution.

On February 22 2013 16:38 Aylear wrote:


Hmm. That's disconcerting, because I went for this 7970 because of its comparatively low price. The specs were excellent, but I even saw some 7950s that were more expensive than this particular 7970, so now I'm a bit apprehensive.

There might be a 7970 that's not from XFX that's slightly more expensive, but would give me peace of mind. I guess I'll brave the waters of netbook-browsing and look into this a bit more.

On February 22 2013 16:38 Aylear wrote:


Hmm. That's disconcerting, because I went for this 7970 because of its comparatively low price. The specs were excellent, but I even saw some 7950s that were more expensive than this particular 7970, so now I'm a bit apprehensive.

There might be a 7970 that's not from XFX that's slightly more expensive, but would give me peace of mind. I guess I'll brave the waters of netbook-browsing and look into this a bit more.

Edit:

Found a PowerColor Radeon HD 7870 2GB GDDR5, though it costs quite a bit more. Still, 1100MHz clock speed and 4.9GHz memory speed is pretty solid. Worth the peace of mind over the probably-not-but-possibly-broken XFX?

On February 22 2013 18:27 Cyro wrote:
You wanna add hyperthreading? Go for it. If not, dont.

There used to be a lot of question in the overclocking community if it was worth it to get a 3770k over a 2600k, new vs new, for the same price. The added heat (as much as >20c at the same clock speeds) and hardly improved performance per clock (~7-8%?) meant that you could just run the 2600k like 300mhz faster and have it perform equally or better.

As it turns out, with a long time to play with things, Ivy's heat problem is not so bad and it is also much more tolerant of higher voltages (an advantage) and in general, not as bad of an overclocker as people thought. If you get really lucky on a chip, you can run it 5.2ghz 24/7. Most dont come close to that, but there's a slight lead for ivy bridge in terms of performance after overclocking - if it justifies the extra cost is another argument though - again, this is new vs new. People who literally do not have a CPU would pull up the question of if it's worth buying an ivybridge CPU or if the one you already have would be a better choice.

Stock vs stock, 2500k is 3.3ghz, 3770k is 3.5 with about an 8% performance per clock increase, so something like a 14% improvement in single threaded performance and 35-40% in multi-threaded.

You're talking about unlocked vs unlocked CPU's though, that gap will be brought closer with overclocking and if you dont have a higher end air cooler and a decent setup with case fans etc - the advantage just gets pushed further towards sandy bridge.

Nobody really knows what to expect from Haswell (releasing in the first days of june) but it's clocked the same as ivy bridge - i think it will be something like 10-25% performance improvements (over ivybridge), but likely to be the lower end of that

It will use a new socket and be the last intel CPU to use DDR3 RAM IIRC, so its a little tricky for upgrading into/out of - im not sure on the details if its revision (broadwell) in a year or whatever that uses DDR4 will need a whole new motherboard or anything like that, its all new to me

Haswell could have significantly better overclocking performance - ivy bridge overclocks great, better than sandy, more tolerant of even 1.55v for 24/7 overclocks whereas sandy users reported degradation at 1.4, better performance, its basically great, but just has a massive issue with running so hot. Most of them comes down to a manufacturing problem - Intel used some bad thermal interface material or whatever on the die instead of using fluxless solder (correct me if im wrong here anyone) so thermal performance is just really bad - there's a club on overclockers.net specifically dedicated to delidding CPU and applying a certain type of thermal paste (liquid ultra/pro or something) which consistently cuts temperatures by like 10-30 degrees celcius. With that mod, the CPU's are amazing overclockers, but its unknown if haswell will have the same problem, running a lot hotter than it should. Hopefully it wont, at the very least intel are aware of it

On February 23 2013 01:24 jamesr12 wrote:
Thanks for the help mister fred, is there any resources out there how to actually put it all together if i were to buy all those components

On February 23 2013 01:31 Cyro wrote:


Sandy Bridge is one generation - Haswell is the next. The last generation before that was in 2008/9 or something - ivy bridge is just minor changes to sandy.

Your cooling situation should be pretty good, pretty high end setup for air - at that point it will depend on your luck of the draw with the CPU that you get. What voltage are you running the 2500k at for 4.7ghz? What are your temps under load (intelburntest 2/4gb/max RAM or 5-10 mins small fft prime95)

Me and a friend were overclocking recently, the 3770k i have does 4.4ghz on 1.128v. Both of the 3570k's he got needed over 1.25v for full stability - by 4.6ghz he was at 1.4v while my chip did 4.7 on 1.24v. Some CPU's are just better than others for overclocking. If you get a good one, with an NH-D14 you could go to perhaps 4.9ghz 24/7 without messing with the CPU physically - bad one, 4.4-4.5. Some numbers from your 2500k would help to get a better idea of thermal performance but it might not limit you here

Takes some careful benchmarking and stress testing under encoding and playing load etc to work out good settings - because i was experimenting a lot myself, i figured that 1920x1080, 60fps at Veryfast should be doable solidly on a 3770k at ~4.6-4.8+ghz - a lot of people throw in wrong or over the top settings that can give bad or suboptimal results at times, i think that is about the CPU threshhold when you can start using those kinds of settings. The difference from your 2500k at that point would be something like 25-40% more encoding performance on your CPU with the load of the game on, but there's the potential to be stuck a few hundred mhz down.

Its also tricky to livestream 1920x1080, 60fps because it just brings down performance so much. Tested against a 300fps base, the best performing option i have found on two systems is OBS game capture, which cuts FPS by about 45% - but i was never able to get a solid video from this - output always ranges from about 45-60fps, averaging maybe 50 without any CPU cores coming near max load - the average user would not notice but it could affect benchmark results. Im not sure how to make it work, so i never used it in depth. Xsplit screen region is notably worse, and its gamesource cuts FPS by about 65%.

With a 2500k@4.4ghz (according to R1CH's benchmark, 1v1 lategame zvz) you see FPS minimums below 40.. if you are losing half of that, its a very big deal.. and of course any time your game is above 16.67ms frametimes (below "perfect" 60fps - in reality this is closer to 80-100+fps in sc2) your stream will miss frames, or encode the same frame multiple times, because it does not have a new frame source to encode, so you start to see the effects of having lower framerate very very soon.. Its a problem at all settings, but higher resolution*fps screen/game capture makes it a lot, lot worse. Its a question to me even if you have the CPU power, if it is worth doing because you lose so much performance with every option (and i have tested them all, a lot) that the stream, being stuck at 3mbits or so regardless of settings due to internet - would suffer and be worse set to 60fps, compared to 30