EPTYou'd think if they were that concerned about pricing, they'd offer a $100 premium for a "fixed" i5. A lot of people would buy it - i know i would - however stupid it is.
Computer Build Resource Thread - Page 1419
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
You'd think if they were that concerned about pricing, they'd offer a $100 premium for a "fixed" i5. A lot of people would buy it - i know i would - however stupid it is. | ||
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Myrmidon
United States9452 Posts
If something is better in some way (reliability? probably not here) or saves money, it's the way to go. Under stock typical operating conditions, the current Ivy Bridge setup is more than fine. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
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mav451
United States1596 Posts
Cyro - it's funny you brought that line about it being an OCer's dream, but we've heard that line with every launch haha. Opterons, the original Conroes, Wolfdales/Yorkfield, and of course - SB. So many bought into the BD hype without noticing that the highest OC was running on a reduced core count bwahaha. Anyway, I'm still more than happy with my Lynnfield, but if I was going to finally ugrade, Haswell would need to be extremely compelling (e.g. $189 or less i5 K variant at MC, mobo combo price less than $300 combined). I just have a lot less patience and tolerance being an early adopter these days too. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
Especially since sc2 has shown greater-than-linear returns with singlethreaded performance for minimum framerates, a 50% singlethreaded performance increase >could< translate to as much as 55-70% higher minimum FPS (basically never less than linear, at least IIRC | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
On March 19 2013 01:50 druss90 wrote: haha wow, thanks a lot man. One last question. I was fiddling around with a budget build, how do you think this would fares? http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Kxiq That's a great build man, for the budget route, and it'll stream 720@60fps smoothly once you overclock it to a guaranteed 4-4.2ghz. Most of the parts in their I've used myself. Just a few adjustments: Coolermaster is notorious for making bad PSUs. You can find the corsair CX series of psus (the 430 is more than powerful enoguh for any single gpu system) and that'd be the cheap way to go. For a power supply there's the xfx pro 450w or pc power and cooling at $49, I'd really recommend those over the cx line. PC P&P is semi-modular, a plus or con depending on your personal tastes. It's a bit of a fail to not have an SSD in your build. Do you really need 1TB of data, ie do you rip blu rays to pirate them? If you don't, then you might want to consider a high quality storage unit with less storage. I mean I've only used 40gb of HDD in 3 years, so I went with a small, 80GB ssd (and i actually regret having not gotten a faster, 64gb model instead for the same price). The samsung 830 and crucial m4 can be found for slightly cheaper than that 1TB drive for about $60 at 64gb quantities. For slightly more, you can find them at $85 for 128gb. If you need space though, you need space, maybe at least just buy some piece of crap $30 ssd with 32-64gb of space like some patriot drive, in the very least, if you really need a HDD. You need a heatsink. Hyper 212+ for $19 on newegg. The motherboard choice is pretty terrible, actually. You should really take a look at AM3 legacy boards if going Ph II since am3+ is overpriced for being newer gen but your using an older gen CPU so it doesnt matter (you dont want to upgrade to fx in the future lol). Here's the best I could really find, but you should check Geeks.com for full size ATX boards, AM3, for under $60 depending on quality (their stock changes every day): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157291 | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
That's a great build man, for the budget route, and it'll stream 720@60fps smoothly once you overclock it to a guaranteed 4-4.2ghz In terms of encoding requirements, sure, it will. Actually phenIIx4@4ghz is pretty much lowest end for what i would try 720@60fps with. In terms of framerate, you would simply have something like 60-70% higher FPS with 3570k at a decent overclock - which means your stream will be a lot better, because capturing game at 720, 60fps you are looking at losing a third of your FPS - which means around 20fps minimums on the phen II, but 35 or so on oc'd 3570k. Actually, both of those numbers are a touch high even. Obviously both of these are far below 60, so you are streaming the same frame multiple times or missing frames in the video (you can only stream what you have..) but the point is, it takes a lot, lot more to push 3570k below 60fps than it does a 965BE - which is outperformed by massive, massive margins, and the 965BE is really on the edge of what you should be trying to stream 1280x720, 60fps with - you are really pushing things. In terms of performance value - Look at the price gap between the entire system with an x4 695 - vs unlocked i5 - and consider that you're talking 60-70% higher FPS with the i5 system ingame which is not only, well, your ingame FPS, but makes a much better experience for stream viewers, when even a midgame battle can rip you below 60fps with a weaker CPU. | ||
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Craton
United States17232 Posts
On March 18 2013 21:18 niteReloaded wrote: Hi, I'm the niteReloaded brother. Hope I'm not violating forum rules by writing from his account. Just backup disk would be good enough for us. Sorry, I don't know what you mean by this. I'll just explain your options: Option 1: SyncToy You set up folder 'pairs' and then every time you run the program all the files from the 'source' folder will be copied to the 'destination' folder (maintaining hierarchy). You can easily automate this to run once a day (or any interval, really) through Window's Task Scheduler. Upsides are that you can use any side or speed disk for a backup, including an external / thumbdrive (it will copy over a bit slower on one of these than an internal drive, but that probably isn't an issue if you schedule it for a time when you're not using it (e.g. overnight or at lunch). You can manually sync at any time. Only files that are newly added, deleted, or modified are moved to the 'destination' folder during the sync, so it's usually pretty fast (maybe not so much for you with large media files). Downsides are that you only save the files you specify and you'll still need reinstall any programs that were installed on that drive. If the drive you're backing up just has assorted files, this isn't an issue at all, but if it's e.g. your boot disc this could be a big pain (especially with how licensing works on some software). Option 2: Mirrored Drive There are two ways to mirror a drive: a RAID array (typically RAID 1 in your case) or a Window's mirrored volume. Both function in more or less the same way for the user, though they're a bit different behind the scenes. Performance is pretty even as a whole, with each having better/worse performance in certain categories (it's close enough that it's not a huge deal which you use). Windows mirrored drives can be pretty seamlessly moved from one system to another, while HDD ones might have issues. I'm not overly familiar with recovery on RAID arrays, but I've read that the differences between controllers on different motherboards can sometimes cause issues, but again this is only when you're moving from one system to another, not just replacing a failed drive. Window's mirrored volumes have some reservations when it comes to the mirrored drive also being your boot drive. I think you can get it to work, but there's some extra legwork involved. It's easiest if you have one boot drive then two other drives that are mirrored (just takes a few clicks). Someone else might know more. Performance-wise you'll generally get the speed of the worst disk because they both have to do everything. Iirc RAID 1 has slower writes than a single disk, but reads are good (not sure if equal / better / worse). Typically a RAID 1 controller can use differently-sized disks, but only the space of the smallest one will be usable. Windows 7 should be the same in this regard. Better RAID controllers have the ability to finish writes when power is lost to maintain data parity between drives. I don't think this is common on consumer-level stuff. You can always get an uninterruptable power supply if you're really paranoid, but we're probably overkill at this point. You'll have to see if your motherboard has RAID support (0/1 is pretty common) and plug into the right hubs (some motherboards will have RAID support on e.g. the first 2 ports but not the rest). Windows 7 mirrored shouldn't matter how things are plugged in. For you, I think Windows mirrored volume is probably the best of these two options. Option 3: Disk Image A bit of options 1 and 2. You won't have real-time backups, but you will have the entire drive recoverable (you can do just pieces of the drive if you want for more frequent jobs). You can automate this to run on intervals, though I think it takes a fair bit of time. You could set this up to do something like a full drive backup once a week/month and a nightly backup on the folders that change frequently (e.g. your work files). http://serverfault.com/questions/34995/windows-disk-imaging-for-backup-with-auto-scheduling -- For what it's worth, I use a mix of #1 and #2. I two 3TB drives mirrored that contain all of my big media files (mostly videos) that would be very hard to replace. I also have folder pairs for regularly backing up certain files from my C drive. I think you would probably be fine with an infrequent image of your disk (monthly is pretty good) and a frequent backup of specific work folders (e.g. a nightly SyncToy run). If you're just looking to protect from simple drive failure, this is pretty quick and easy. Keep in mind that none of these solutions will project you from force majeure events. The best option here at the very minimum, is to store your monthly image offsite. And finally, don't take everything here as gospel. I'm sure I got a few details wrong. | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
I think both of your streaming numbers are a bit too low, I never reached minimum 20 on my athlon ii x4 @3.4ghz (i think the very lowest i got in 1v1 was around 23, and just for a split second, it was never so slow that it affected gameplay, although it was noticeable at some times but not enough to mess up gameplay). I've always felt that above 30fps is where you want to be (at all times, including minimums). I mean a 30fps game with a 60fps stream will still be a better looking stream than a 30/30 stream. Having used an athlon, phenom, i5, and i7, I gotta say that the phenom and i5 are both at great values and I think in similar value (the i5's ability to overclock further and just overclock 'better', makes up for it's very high cost). i5/mobo is double the cost of phenom/am3 - there's some wiggle room (microcenter or best buy at $169 for i5 at some times, extremely good boards at only $60-80 at microcenter, b95s for $65) but generally speaking, the i5/z77 is a little more than double the price. Of course everyone would recommend the i5 and Z77 over phii/am3, if you can do that that'd be awesome, but if not, that's fine, phii will do very well. I'll put it this way - better to get a phenom ii and an ssd, than i5 with only a hdd. I mean I'll be the first to say the i5 is an amazing chip in more ways than just raw performance, definitely get it if you can afford it. Just if you can't, not a big deal. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
My minimum fps with the phenom ii was right above 30 in maxed out, 1v1 crazy battles motherboard, full creep, bl/infestor battles. R1CH benched 2500k stock to 27fps, you dont have performance levels anywhere remotely close to that baseline and i dont know of a method to lose less than a third of your framerate with 1280x720, 60fps streaming. I can pull my system (nehalem@4ghz) to 30 fps minimums WITHOUT streaming in 1v1 - i think phenII would be lower? Not sure, think its worse than nehalem clock for clock. I mean a 30fps game with a 60fps stream will still be a better looking stream than a 30/30 stream. No it wont, a 25fps game is a 25fps stream, only if it's set to 60 you are wasting resources displaying the same frames multiple times etc - even if you had the game at, for example, 20fps - trying to stream it at 30 instead of 60 could raise that 20 to 25. I'll put it this way - better to get a phenom ii and an ssd, than i5 with only a hdd. Entirely subjective and i would disagree. System performance increasing by 60-70% in cases you are CPU limited (which is pretty much everything to me - why im going haswell on a gtx260) is too valuable. the i5/z77 is a little more than double the price. No it's not, in cases where you are limited by single threaded performance of the CPU, you are talking a, for example, $500 build getting 100fps - vs a $650 build getting 170. You cant just compare by the price of a couple of parts in an entire system of reliance's. If you were comparing phenII + motherboard vs i5 + motherboard, sure. But you're not, you have to factor in the price of case, power supply, cooling, RAM, GPU, everything. The reality is that a decently OC'd 3570k system - while costing perhaps 1.3x as much as a phenIIx4 system - can run the game with something like 1.7x the framerate and close to 2x the encoding capability with remaining resources. | ||
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Gumbi
Ireland463 Posts
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
I'm not here to cause trouble. I'm simply saying the athlon ii, much less my phenom ii at almost 800mhz faster, was able to stream very, very smoothly on 720. Very subjective to say Phenom + SSD vs i5 + HDD, but I have noticed much more day to day upgrading from a hdd to ssd on my athlon ii system, than going from athlon ii to i7@5ghz. Of course the i5 is recommendable over the phenom ii, I'm simply saying the phenom ii will handle streaming at 720 very, very smoothly, at ease (as much as a cpu can be at ease with streaming sc2, that is). i5 is definitely a 60-70% performance boost, but you are talking about a ~130% increase in price. An SSD is what, 500% performance of a HDD, and equal cost (then again he may have picked 1tb because he rips blurays, but 128gb should be more than enough). | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
7950@1100mhz is pretty much irrelevant - you can hold the same FPS with the game maxed and a card the third of the price, or a lot less - the kind of cards that can run the game maxed at 200fps or whatever in the early game, well, CPU power requirements go up by a factor of more than 10, GPU probably goes up per-frame but framerates come to a crawl - you need very little GPU strengh to max the game when you can only run at 30fps because of the CPU. | ||
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Gumbi
Ireland463 Posts
On March 19 2013 06:42 Belial88 wrote: Not going to get into this. What has your Phenom got over my 3570k? Am I missing something here? I'm not beating on you, I just genuinely can't see how a Phenom II can be beating a 3570k (at 4.6ghz I might add). | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
I mean my athlon ii stream looked vastly superior to the overwhelming majority of pro streamer's streams. I just had set up my stream way better than most of them did. Destiny, for example, has a really good stream (and a beast system to boot). Plenty of pros have i7s and all the latest and greatest, and you can see their streams look like crap. both athlon ii, pentium, and an i7, is going to dip into the 20s'-30s in a big battle, just an athlon will have a minimum of 23 and an i7 will maybe have a minimum of 35. The intel chips are also going to have a much more solid average fps through most of late game as well. But as long as fps stays above 25 you can play just fine, and if it stays above 30-35 it will be smooth. Higher will of course be smoother and better looking but I definitely streamed smoothly, with no hiccups or issues, on an athlon ii. My phenom ii was quite a big step up, and I streamed very well on that. Then the i5 and i7 were huge steps up but I mean it was a rather small increase given the price hike. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20274 Posts
On March 19 2013 06:46 Gumbi wrote: What has your Phenom got over my 3570k? Am I missing something here? I'm not beating on you, I just genuinely can't see how a Phenom II can be beating a 3570k (at 4.6ghz I might add). Its just a cheaper option. On March 19 2013 06:42 Belial88 wrote: ^ yes, on 1080 right? Mister said he intends to stick to 720. I'm not here to cause trouble. I'm simply saying the athlon ii, much less my phenom ii at almost 800mhz faster, was able to stream very, very smoothly on 720. Very subjective to say Phenom + SSD vs i5 + HDD, but I have noticed much more day to day upgrading from a hdd to ssd on my athlon ii system, than going from athlon ii to i7@5ghz. I respect your opinion, but you have to realize that this is a case of simply having 70% more FPS - At all framerates on low settings with an adequate GPU, or at higher supplies/engagements with max settings and a weaker GPU. Both ingame and on stream. "Smooth" is subjective and will always be a mediocre experience in sc2 with no CPU coming anywhere close to consistent sub-16.7ms frametimes, +70% is always simply better. The budget choice is good, if you really really have to - I mean a 695BE and a gts250 or something for streaming low? Completely fine with me. SSD's are also amazing - its just simply the fact that you have to wait for your opponents to load anyway and for the 5-60 mins you are actually in the game, the ssd is literally unused, you are already loaded. But for any kind of higher budget system it is not an option in my eyes for an sc2 and especially an sc2+stream rig. both athlon ii, pentium, and an i7, is going to dip into the 20s'-30s in a big battle, just an athlon will have a minimum of 23 and an i7 will maybe have a minimum of 35 Not streaming, athlon number seems a touch high. Maybe 20. Nehalem@4ghz or stock 3570k? 30. high OC'd 3570k? lower end of the 40's. And then cut a third of that off for 1280x720, 60fps streaming, if you are. | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
Of course, no question, if you can get the i5, get it. But in my opinion, as someone who works as a computer repair technician and having used all this hardware for streaming sc2, i really gotta say, no ssd is a big fail in a modern build. It's just something that you wouldn't think matters, until you get one. Yea, it might not speed up your minimum fps or affect streaming, but it just speeds up all these little things by 10x that make you really notice you got an ssd instead of a hdd. It's true it wont, specifically, increase streaming performance, but it does impact affect game performance (sc2 by not much, and granted most games by not much, it's more games like mmorgs and large map games, total war, dynamic load games) and really affects system performance more than anything else in your system. For general usage, SSD from HDD has a far greater impact on system performance than anything else. CPU, RAM, and graphics are already more than strong enough for general usage. It would just be silly to get an i5 and then no SSD. HDDs, and optical disks. god, why are these things still around. Molex too. | ||
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niteReloaded
Croatia5281 Posts
On March 19 2013 06:23 Craton wrote: Sorry, I don't know what you mean by this. I'll just explain your options: Option 1: SyncToy You set up folder 'pairs' and then every time you run the program all the files from the 'source' folder will be copied to the 'destination' folder (maintaining hierarchy). You can easily automate this to run once a day (or any interval, really) through Window's Task Scheduler. Upsides are that you can use any side or speed disk for a backup, including an external / thumbdrive (it will copy over a bit slower on one of these than an internal drive, but that probably isn't an issue if you schedule it for a time when you're not using it (e.g. overnight or at lunch). You can manually sync at any time. Only files that are newly added, deleted, or modified are moved to the 'destination' folder during the sync, so it's usually pretty fast (maybe not so much for you with large media files). Downsides are that you only save the files you specify and you'll still need reinstall any programs that were installed on that drive. If the drive you're backing up just has assorted files, this isn't an issue at all, but if it's e.g. your boot disc this could be a big pain (especially with how licensing works on some software). Option 2: Mirrored Drive There are two ways to mirror a drive: a RAID array (typically RAID 1 in your case) or a Window's mirrored volume. Both function in more or less the same way for the user, though they're a bit different behind the scenes. Performance is pretty even as a whole, with each having better/worse performance in certain categories (it's close enough that it's not a huge deal which you use). Windows mirrored drives can be pretty seamlessly moved from one system to another, while HDD ones might have issues. I'm not overly familiar with recovery on RAID arrays, but I've read that the differences between controllers on different motherboards can sometimes cause issues, but again this is only when you're moving from one system to another, not just replacing a failed drive. Window's mirrored volumes have some reservations when it comes to the mirrored drive also being your boot drive. I think you can get it to work, but there's some extra legwork involved. It's easiest if you have one boot drive then two other drives that are mirrored (just takes a few clicks). Someone else might know more. Performance-wise you'll generally get the speed of the worst disk because they both have to do everything. Iirc RAID 1 has slower writes than a single disk, but reads are good (not sure if equal / better / worse). Typically a RAID 1 controller can use differently-sized disks, but only the space of the smallest one will be usable. Windows 7 should be the same in this regard. Better RAID controllers have the ability to finish writes when power is lost to maintain data parity between drives. I don't think this is common on consumer-level stuff. You can always get an uninterruptable power supply if you're really paranoid, but we're probably overkill at this point. You'll have to see if your motherboard has RAID support (0/1 is pretty common) and plug into the right hubs (some motherboards will have RAID support on e.g. the first 2 ports but not the rest). Windows 7 mirrored shouldn't matter how things are plugged in. For you, I think Windows mirrored volume is probably the best of these two options. Option 3: Disk Image A bit of options 1 and 2. You won't have real-time backups, but you will have the entire drive recoverable (you can do just pieces of the drive if you want for more frequent jobs). You can automate this to run on intervals, though I think it takes a fair bit of time. You could set this up to do something like a full drive backup once a week/month and a nightly backup on the folders that change frequently (e.g. your work files). http://serverfault.com/questions/34995/windows-disk-imaging-for-backup-with-auto-scheduling -- For what it's worth, I use a mix of #1 and #2. I two 3TB drives mirrored that contain all of my big media files (mostly videos) that would be very hard to replace. I also have folder pairs for regularly backing up certain files from my C drive. I think you would probably be fine with an infrequent image of your disk (monthly is pretty good) and a frequent backup of specific work folders (e.g. a nightly SyncToy run). If you're just looking to protect from simple drive failure, this is pretty quick and easy. Keep in mind that none of these solutions will project you from force majeure events. The best option here at the very minimum, is to store your monthly image offsite. And finally, don't take everything here as gospel. I'm sure I got a few details wrong. (Nite here again) Alright, this will be useful, thanks! Do you think you could recommend us a good build to buy? That was the main reason of my post, but we got sidetracked into talking about backup, which is important of course, but the main priority is finding out a good build to buy so that we actually start working on that computer, and have stuff to make backups of :p I wrote our main preferences in the 'nested quote', if you (or if someone else wants to help out) can check that out? We basically need a power PC for video editing, so if you can recommend a good setup we'd be thankful. If you could assemble it on www.protis.hr it would be awesome, but if it's too much to ask let me know and I won't bother you anymore...  | ||
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Gumbi
Ireland463 Posts
On March 19 2013 06:51 Belial88 wrote: Different systems are different, ram overclock (not huge but at the level we are talking about, a factor), different software, streaming optimizations, internet connection (i have a pretty good internet connection). I don't feel comfortable continuing the conversation if it's going to get heated. I think most people will agree you gotta put an SSD on any modern build these days, even if it's just some junk $30 patriot 32-64gb ssd just to put your OS on and then throw everything on a HDD. That, and a phenom ii will stream starcraft at 720 very smoothly. I mean my athlon ii stream looked vastly superior to the overwhelming majority of pro streamer's streams. I just had set up my stream way better than most of them did. Destiny, for example, has a really good stream (and a beast system to boot). Plenty of pros have i7s and all the latest and greatest, and you can see their streams look like crap. both athlon ii, pentium, and an i7, is going to dip into the 20s'-30s in a big battle, just an athlon will have a minimum of 23 and an i7 will maybe have a minimum of 35. The intel chips are also going to have a much more solid average fps through most of late game as well. But as long as fps stays above 25 you can play just fine, and if it stays above 30-35 it will be smooth. Higher will of course be smoother and better looking but I definitely streamed smoothly, with no hiccups or issues, on an athlon ii. My phenom ii was quite a big step up, and I streamed very well on that. Then the i5 and i7 were huge steps up but I mean it was a rather small increase given the price hike. Chillax, like I said, I'm not here to beat on you. I'm not even talking about streaming, I'm talking about normal games in which my FPS hits 30 in the lategame PvZ. | ||
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ScrApeD
Hungary9 Posts
i decide, that i say goodbye to my old laptop, and build a new PC for StarCraft2. My goal is to play smooth SC2 on ultra settings in single, and in multiplayer also. My plan is the following: i5 3570 3,4Ghz Radeon HD 7870 4Gb RAM What do you think about this rig? Is this capable of running smoothly SC2 on ultra settings? All answers would be appreciated. Thank you! ScrApeD | ||
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