Computer Build Resource Thread - Page 1421

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When using this resource, please read FragKrag's opening post. The Tech Support forum regulars have helped create countless of desktop systems without any compensation. The least you can do is provide all of the information required for them to help you properly.

Ropid

Germany3557 Posts

March 19 2013 20:32 GMT

#28401

On March 20 2013 04:40 findingthelimit wrote:+ Show Spoiler +

hey everyone, i followed TL's advice and built a computer roughly a year back, and it turned out very well. i have some very good internships, and i will have 7k USD to burn soon. i'd like to pimp up my computer as much as possible whilst money wisely. Below is my build:

ASRock H77 Pro4-MVP
Crucial Ballistix 2x4GB 1633MHz RAM
Antec 900 ATX Case
Rosewill Capstone 450w PSU
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ CPU Fan
Intel i5-3570 CPU
Samsung 830 128GB SSD

Here are a few questions:

I'm into quiet computing. The PSU's fans, the hyper 212+, the case fans, and the Gigabyte GPU's triple fans are annoying as shit, even at low settings. I'm not planning to change my graphics cards, but is there a PSU that's similar to the capstone 450w in efficiency, but not nearly as load and irritating? I saw some fanless Rosewill PSUs, that appear very interesting.

I'm thinking of changing my rig such that it is over-clockable in the future, but I'm wondering whether I should buy a new MOBO now? are there any announcements regarding the socket of Haswell; will it be compatable with the SB 3570 I currently have? If it is, i'd like a recommendation on a new Motherboard, as I'd like to finish this rig at once and just pop in a new CPU when the time comes.

I want to try water cooling. I assume its not as loud, and I'm also hopeful that it will make the computer look prettier in general; please correct me if i'm wrong? Can anyone please recommend a good liquid-cooling brand? I'm looking at the corsair liquid cooling systems; seems pretty sleek to me.

Any thoughts on a case that looks similar to the Antec 900, but relatively mod-dable? My friend has a NZXT switch 810, and he installed some external fan controllers which really appeal to me. I'm sure many cases allow this - just not the Antec 900, from what I've seen. Any recommendations on new cases?

I need a new SSD. Thinking of the samsung 840. Is it as easy as installing it and popping the sata cables in? I already own a 830, i assume having two samsung ssds won't cause any silly issues, but i could be wrong...

that was a long list with many questions. many thanks for those who read my entire post! have a good evening, TL.

I think you are wrong about water cooling. You still have to put the heat into the air at some point, and you will have fans for that. The water is used to move the heat from the CPU and GPU to the radiator. If you compare that to what you have now, the position of the radiator is the difference. With water cooling, you can move that part of the cooling around, it does not have to sit directly on the CPU like your current heatsink does. Water cooling adds the sound of a pump.

What you should look into, you might want a case that can work with 140 mm fans, you need a CPU cooler with 140 mm fans, and you can buy a PSU where you find reviews that it is inaudible, and you need to do something about the graphics card.

About the CPU cooler, the big ones will do what you want. There are several brands that know what they are doing about getting the heat removed from the CPU, and you can simply look at the numbers for those (how much the cooler weighs etc.). Thermalright builds a cooler "HR-02" that can actually cool your current CPU passively in a case with air movement, and they sell it optionally with a reportedly very silent fan. If you overclock, you need the fan, and then you can look at differently configured coolers which cannot work passively, but use the fan's air movement better. Look at Noctua, Phanteks, Thermalright. The other brands all have some duds in their line-up, I feel from looking through reviews (meaning they sell large coolers that aren't better than simple ones).

You could simply buy a new fan for you current cooler. There are 140 mm fans that have the mounting holes at the position of 120 mm fans, that you may be able to put on your current Hyper 212.

About the case, perhaps look into not having openings at the top and the side, instead have the option for a fan at the front top where most cases have the 5.25 inch drive cage, so there's some kind of wind tunnel from there over the RAM and CPU to the back.

The graphics card, I don't know if there's one being sold that's actually really silent, so you have to look into aftermarket cooling solutions. I'm planning to do something about my own graphics card that was reportedly good about noise but is actually still pretty shitty by replacing the fans with something do-it-yourself with a good case fan blowing on the heatsinks. Water cooling would be something that could help a lot with the graphics card.

Do you have HDDs? Those are what's most annoying about my PC together with the graphics card. Decoupling those from the case helps a lot (the whole case rumbles if you don't do that), but there's still a lot of noise from the drives spinning at 7200 rpm. For that, there's something like Scythe Quiet Drive and GrowUp Japan Smart Drive (that one very pricey) which insulate the drive in thick rubber foam with a metal plate for cooling.

You have to make sure to have all fans decoupled with silicon buffers.

I've seen a forum somewhere with a post collecting information about a lot of fans and reviews, etc., but I can't find it anymore. I think you may have to be prepared to experiment with fans. How they sound can be more annoying than the amount of noise, and that's subjective.

The Samsung SSD, the successor for your 830 is the 840 Pro. The 840 (without "Pro") is something new and slower, I think. The overall number of writes it can take is reduced, but still more than what normal use will ever exhaust (probably). The 840, you'd use as a second larger drive, the 840 Pro would be a replacement for your 830.

Belial88

United States5217 Posts

March 19 2013 20:37 GMT

#28402

What games do you lag in? Your psu isn't too weak, it's low quality. Quality >>>>> Quantity. People talk about wattage and amperage because they don't know better or because they are accounting for low quality. Any quality unit, will have the amperage.

I mean what exactly is going on? If you are playing the same games as you were in 2010, ie sc2, and your system worked fine then, then upgrading won't solve what may be a software issue for why your computer is slowing down.

What are you trying to do? A 5850 will struggle to max out sc2, but it should do high just fine You'd get a decent upgrade in upping your cpu and motherboard though. I'd say it really depends on how much are you trying to spend and how bad are things now. I normally wouldn't recommend any wait to haswell (you'll always be waiting if you wait for the next big thing, and the next big thing is never that big), but if your current build is sufficient it would be smart to maybe wait until black friday, or at least haswell (if you are trying to spend that much, that is).

Really need more information. What resolution, what games, what are you trying to spend... for the most part your build is okay, just depending on your needs your cpu or gpu could be changed, that's all. You would see a huge improvement in overall system snappiness to get an SSD though, if you don't have one.

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 19 2013 20:41 GMT

#28403

A 5850 will struggle to max out sc2

Its between the 460 and 7770. No problems maxing game at 1920x1080 with cpu limitations

Belial88

United States5217 Posts

March 19 2013 20:49 GMT

#28404

I think you are confusing 460 with 460SE if you are looking at the passmark benches. It's weaker than the 460. Struggle might have been the wrong choice of words.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

March 19 2013 20:58 GMT

#28405

On March 20 2013 05:16 niteReloaded wrote:

Show nested quote +

Sweet, thats amazing.

Did you miss the cheaper cases on the website (maybe you went straight to page 5 or 6) or are you choosing the more expensive one for a reason? There are 100 cases below 758 HRK for example.

Also, the HDD we have is an external drive. So I guess it's better to use this external one as backup, and use the internal as main. Would your choice of HDD be the same if you were to pick a 'main HDD' ?

Once again, thanks!

AFAIK the ones listed with one star are out of stock, or not really available?

A lot of the options I would pick are not available. Most of the others are probably low quality, cheap for a reason, mostly lower-cost regional brands. Out of those that are higher quality and more well known, 550D wasn't more than say 20% more expensive than the cheapest of this class, and 550D is pretty good anyway so I just went up to that. I meant "not many [good] lower-end choices".

You can just get one of the 7200 rpm drives as a main data hard drive, if you're using it like that. The SSD will have all the programs, right?

I still think that the storage may be the huge bottleneck and if you're working with large files, particularly raw or very uncompressed video data, you should probably get multiple large hard drives to use in RAID as a scratch space.

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 19 2013 21:05 GMT

#28406

On March 20 2013 05:49 Belial88 wrote:
I think you are confusing 460 with 460SE if you are looking at the passmark benches. It's weaker than the 460. Struggle might have been the wrong choice of words.

Its better than the 7770 and the 460 does not have big margins on either. I mean notable perhaps, but its still the same class of GPU.

I can max the game without it affecting my minimum framerates on a 260 - a far far weaker GPU.

Linus bench has the 7770 CPU capped at ~67fps - same as the 7950 i think - with game maxed in a kind-of-stressful situation

EtherealDeath

United States8366 Posts

March 19 2013 21:16 GMT

#28407

On March 20 2013 06:05 Cyro wrote:

Show nested quote +

? Wait, so SC2 is CPU capped in general? I was actually trying to find out if there is any point getting something like a 7970 over a 660ti at the present, assuming a budget that doesn't really give a damn about the $100 price difference.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

March 19 2013 21:21 GMT

#28408

SC2 is effectively CPU capped when looking at modern CPUs and GPUs, yeah. Whenever there's a lot of stuff happening late game, even if you've got an overclocked i5-3570k, it's not going to matter if you have an HD 7770 or GTX Titan (at 1080p, 60 Hz screen, no heavy AA). Certainly at around say GTX 660 Ti level you're way beyond what you need unless you want to see an even more stupidly-high fps figure early game that your monitor can't display anyway.

Belial88

United States5217 Posts

March 19 2013 21:23 GMT

#28409

Didn't that bench basically show it was not gpu hardware, but driver optimization, that was the key factor in sc2? Your right, 5850 is definitely more than powerful. Poor choice of words. I didn't mean it that it wouldn't be capable, I meant it that it's just enough power to do max settings, AA, etc.

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 19 2013 21:50 GMT

#28410

Didn't that bench basically show it was not gpu hardware, but driver optimization, that was the key factor in sc2?

No, i dont know where that came from. Maybe Radeon cards have better driver support for sc2 so you can reach required GPU performance at lower price brackets - it just meant being CPU capped with a 7770 instead of needing a better GPU for his test. The slightly higher result for the 7970 would not be reflected in minimums and i think is just a weird outlying result that is probably wrong.

Nobody wants to run AA with sc2. The ingame method is awful, costs almost nothing to run but is a post processing effect that blurs textures and health/energy bars among a few other things - it's not at all an improvement of image quality - Out of game forced AA? Well good luck with that, you blur the hell out of the UI and minimap as well as everything else. I was unable to find a usable method.

There's a ceiling on FPS that is introduced by this:

[image loading]

And pulled down wildly with added stress on CPU until it seems even a gtx260 is not a liability to performance, though something like 7770 is much more suited for keeping FPS much higher at other points in the game.

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 20 2013 01:12 GMT

#28411

+ Show Spoiler +

There's aparantly multiple new batches performing like this..

Ropid

Germany3557 Posts

March 20 2013 01:26 GMT

#28412

Is there something off in that screenshot? I apparently have more GFlops at 4.6 GHz with a 3570k and the same settings.

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 20 2013 01:34 GMT

#28413

HT scores vastly lower than no HT in gflops in IBT/LinX. My 3770k ht off has seen 135 or something.

Ropid

Germany3557 Posts

March 20 2013 01:44 GMT

#28414

But that's a i5-3570k in the screenshot, no HT possible. You can also see it's 4 threads in the status bar. I tried setting the same settings for memory in LinX and get something like 125 at 4.6 GHz, finishing a few seconds faster with a run.

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 20 2013 01:56 GMT

#28415

Wait, oops. Sorry, i got confused by something else - and the numbers are about in line of what would be expected with HT.

Its one of many reports though

Ropid

Germany3557 Posts

March 20 2013 02:01 GMT

#28416

It's still interesting: the CPU works correctly with low voltage but does not perform like you'd expect for 5.2 GHz. Perhaps it has something that keeps it slow and stable. But that would be weird, it has the exact same stepping, revision, etc. as my CPU.

Craton

United States17232 Posts

March 20 2013 02:22 GMT

#28417

R.I.P. one of my Acer x223W's.

Flickering backlight + annoying noise + slight smell of burning when close to vent.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

March 20 2013 03:02 GMT

#28418

Maybe my CPU-Z is old, but ~~since when do they show 5 digits for the bus speed~~ (edit: checked some more images, and happens sometimes I guess), and since when do people actually land on exactly __00.00 MHz for clock speed?

On March 20 2013 11:22 Craton wrote:
R.I.P. one of my Acer x223W's.

Flickering backlight + annoying noise + slight smell of burning when close to vent.

Time to buy something better than an Acer x223W??

Cyro

United Kingdom20274 Posts

March 20 2013 03:14 GMT

#28419

On March 20 2013 11:01 Ropid wrote:
It's still interesting: the CPU works correctly with low voltage but does not perform like you'd expect for 5.2 GHz. Perhaps it has something that keeps it slow and stable. But that would be weird, it has the exact same stepping, revision, etc. as my CPU.

That would be really weird, im pretty sure it's not the case. Just odd result - but we have many many reports of multiple batches getting around 5ghz on 1.2v, ones that actually perform correctly. Stepping, revision etc is unchanged - but they are not the only performance variables, even CPU vs CPU you can have them both manufactured the same and have one do 4.8ghz on 1.3v - another fail 4.4 - but it seems some or all of the newer batches are getting insane results.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

March 20 2013 03:31 GMT

#28420

But what actually would cause a performance difference like that, to get a significantly higher clock but clearly worse benchmark time?

If you're running the same code on the same processor with same processor and RAM speeds, you should get the same results. It could be that the application code is a bit different (different version, though Linpack shouldn't be changing that much AFAIK, especially if these are all post-AVX versions). The other thing then would be background processes, OS, etc. but those really shouldn't take many cycles.

I mean, for a digital logic running at a certain speed, it doesn't matter the quality of the transistors or whatever manufacturing variations there are. Same input -> same output at same speeds.

Actually, what it looks like are those dips below 100% CPU utilization on the graph might be causing lower performance, but why are those happening? I wouldn't think that a power or temp (CPU or VRM) limit would be hit, considering the voltage and how it's running on a Sabertooth... It's either something like the above, something I didn't think about, or a 'shop of the CPU clock on the CPU-Z window.

edit: but if it's multiple reports, doesn't even matter if one is falsified really: the point is still there

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