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On April 23 2013 07:47 skyR wrote: You can re-use the PSU.
All retail CPUs come with a heatsink. Not sure what you're confused about. You're going to have to install a heatsink either way. Installing the Intel provided heatsink just involves using lots of force to push down 4 pins. Installing a purchased heatsink generally involves installing a backplate, applying thermal paste, and screwing in some screws.
If you are perfectly content with a 150gb HDD then why would you want a bigger HDD over a SSD (which is significantly faster than HDDs) of similar size as your current HDD?
Futureshop has a very limited selection and their pricing is awful so you generally never buy from there. Besides shellshockers / sales or Rosewill products, no point in buying from Newegg. Tigerdirect and Amazon, generally terrible. The major Canadian website is NCIX. Some other more local retailers are Memory Express and Canada Computers.
Thanks. About the heatsink, I was just confused as I looked up the same part on different sites and 1 had the heatsink as provided and the other separately, I was thinking it was just an error but wanted to be sure.
As for the HDD, I have been using an external HD to free up/rearrange space as needed which I would like to stop doing as frequently. The SSDs do seem enticing, but for their current size/price I would rather wait.
Thanks for the NCIX + stores, I'll browse them.
Ashem
As skyR says, Intel provides a heatsink/fan with the CPU you buy. You do not need to buy a fancy heatsink or watercooling system or something outrageous.
Is your 150 GB HD IDE or SATA? If it's IDE then you won't be able to use it with your new system. IDE means there is a long, narrow cord plugged into your HD. Do you have this?
The AMD 7750 draws all of its power from the Motherboard and is around $150. The AMD 7770 and above require at least one 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector recommended. I don't know if your power supply has extra connectors.
SLI (NVidia) and Crossfire (AMD) are basically the same technology from different companies. It refers to installing multiple video cards (eg: 2 AMD HD 7950) either at time of purchase or in the future. It requires a power supply w/ enough juice to run multiple cards + a motherboard that has 2 or more slots for video cards + a case big enough to hold all of those things.
Just to give you an idea, here is a system that will cost around $800 + tax + other fees (eg: environmental fees if you live in Ontario) at regular prices in Canadian dollars. Obviously, buying the parts when they're on sale is recommended. $125 Intel i3-3220 (Intel i5-3570 (non-k) is about $90 more) $60 8GB DDR3 RAM @1600 $115 Asus p8h77-v (the -m version only has 2 slots for RAM) (z77 boards are for overclocking and more expensive) $110 AMD HD7750 $75 WD Blue 1 GB $100 Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit (or Windows 8 - non pro edition) (XP will support receiving update ~Apr 2014) $80 Power Supply (if yours is fine, remove this) $80 Case (probably on the high side. Don't get a massive $200+ case with 5 fans) $30 DVD player (your old one is probably using IDE like mine. If you have an external using USB, or one using SATA then you don't need this)
Thanks I just wanted to be sure about the heatsink. Yes, my HDD is IDE, and plan to get a larger one. My PSU has 2PCI-E 6&8 compatible, would that change your recommended motherboard? I don't plan on using SLI/Crossfire, but thanks for the rundown.
Thanks for the advice and suggestions skyR and Ashem - I'm still looking into various parts myself and will post a build to double-check in a day or so.
One quick question, while I was briefly browsing through HDDs I noticed some were SATA, others SATA3. Does it matter which one I choose?
On April 23 2013 18:34 LFHaunt wrote: Thanks Waffing. The reason I'm going with the motherboard on Newegg is because they have a promotion right now where I can get 2 free 4GB RAM stick with that motherboard. About a $50 value so it comes out to about the same as buying from microcenter. Maybe I will buy from mircocenter, look for RAM on Ebay for cheap.
Also about the CPU and hyper threading, I didn't know that so thanks.
@syzygy: It's mostly about the bandwidth with SATA2 and SATA3. I think only an SSD can use SATA3's additional bandwidth, so an HDD not having SATA3 does not matter (and SATA1 does not exist anymore, I'm pretty sure). Intel's chipset supports two SATA3 ports and four SATA2 ports, so that's what you'll typically have on a motherboard.
About your decision of holding off about the SSD, prices seem to have reached a plateau, not moving downwards anymore for a while (it's like that for nearly a year now). The SSD is the single biggest thing you can upgrade for performance for work on a PC nowadays. Disregarding games, an old PC with Athlon 64 X2 and an SSD felt more useful for work than a current PC with i5 and an HDD.
As for the HDD, I have been using an external HD to free up/rearrange space as needed which I would like to stop doing as frequently. The SSDs do seem enticing, but for their current size/price I would rather wait.
For their performance and price you should definitely go with an SSD, it would be a real shame to go with no SSD with anything but a build under $200 using scrap parts. They are about 50 times faster in where it counts. Have you ever used a macbook air? Basically, SSD performance is the most important factor in the speed of day to day general usage - internet, file management, transferring from phones and ipods and music players, loading small programs up, productivity suites. I'd rather go with an i3 and an SSD than an i5 and hdd, it makes a huge difference.
You really don't need much space on a modern gaming system, so despite the price/size, you only need so much size anyways. Just go with a 128GB SSD, and if you really need more you can spend $20-40 on whatever HDD.
Thanks I just wanted to be sure about the heatsink. Yes, my HDD is IDE, and plan to get a larger one. My PSU has 2PCI-E 6&8 compatible, would that change your recommended motherboard? I don't plan on using SLI/Crossfire, but thanks for the rundown.
You need to junk that HDD then. IDE stopped being used many years ago, that's like a floppy drive basically. Current gen motherboards don't even have PATA/IDE slots anymore, you'll have to use an adaptor.
What PSU do you have? What model you have makes a big difference, and wattage means nothing.
SATA3 hdd's really aren't noticeably faster than sata2, it doesn't make a difference but most sata3 hdd's are faster than their sata2 counterparts. You really want to put your money into an SSD, and then just get however much storage you need for your HDD. Even with SSDs, SATA3 really doesn't matter as 4k write/read, which is what matters, does not go above SATA2 speeds yet anyways.
The more storage you need, the slower drive you can get for the price.
Haha a successor to those 5Ghz Clarkdales - is that your thinking?
Actually i was not around to see that. It was a thing?
It's one of the reasons i was so suprised at blue, i had almost 0 tech knowledge, like my first interest was "oh, this thing called sandy bridge just got released", i guess it was an A for effort from whoever blues people?
I dunno, just woke up one day not a pm or anything o.0
Hahah maybe you were probably elected for upside. Just don't pull a Blatche/Miličić and you'll be fine. About 2-3 years ago, it was mostly Wom/Myrm/skyR that were also posting at the time. Just to give you an idea of how long ago that was, SeleCT and Geoff were posting help threads at the time too
But on the Clarkdale, it was the last dual-core to allow legitimate overclocking via BCLK adjustment and basically dropped right into the current s1156 boards at the time.The on-package IMC did it in, making its performance more Core2 (Wolfdale) than a true Nehalem chip.
I signed up nearly 2 years ago, didn't post in tech support for a while though i think
Blatche/Miličić?
And sounds fun :D Overclockable dual cores that do not suck (looking at you, athlon/phenomII in an ivybridge world) would be great. I dislike the market assignment of "i3 = worse" rather than "i3 = lower price point" and the gating towards the highest i5 model if you want to even start overclocking which is mandatory if you want anything remotely close to the best performing CPU in single threaded.
I mean, an i5 with a high end overclock and a little luck will be 50% faster singlethreaded than anything on the market. The best stock i3, i7, extreme editions, whatever. Even an equal overclock on piledriver, it still has that 50% performance advantage. I would call 20% maybe at most, personal taste, but more than that feels mandatory - 50% is not in the "mandatory" level for me, it's in the if-it-does-not-cost-more-than-2x-as-much-for-the-entire-system-to-get-that-50%-performance-lead-wtf-are-you-doing-by-not-overclocking range, as long as you have a basic idea of what you are doing, i mean especially because you can't really get singlethreaded performance from anywhere aside from overclocking, once you are at the i3 price point - it's only you are forced into i5 for overclocking.
Would rather have the choice between dual core at one price point - or quad at another - not horrible CPU at one price point, good one at another, though it makes sense for intel to gate them like that..
It's still worth buying i5 for having 4 cores instead of 2 - but well we buy i5's because they have a 1.5x lead on performance over an i3 on singlethreaded tasks, core count not really relevant for that, when logically and as far as i have seen, less cores should be able to correlate to faster per-core. It kinda baffles me that Intel lets AMD run away with the low end market, with apu's, even for an sc2 + streaming system, phenom II x4 is just what you want, it's the best choice, it's better than ivy bridge i3 and arguably haswell i3 (it's certainly cheaper..) but if haswell i3 could run at 5ghz instead of 3.3, it would kinda completely remove AMD from the low end market. Four cores with 1x performance = 4x at best, two cores with 2x performance = twice as good single threaded performance, same multithreaded. Better in many ways, worse in none.
I mean with haswell integrated graphics, especially the bga chip version (but that is overkill), a haswell i3 @5ghz would have minimum FPS on low settings in sc2 over double that of AMD's best APU's, close to double that of a phenomII+gtxtitan system. APU would be better only in the gap where you need a cpu but not a strong one, haswell integrated graphics are not enough yet, APU ones somehow are yet you can't afford a dedicated GPU. I mean it's a small market segment - and PhenomII is completely gone. Piledriver/steamroller does not compete in singlethreaded and it never will, it seems like overclockable haswell i3's would just wreck so much shit.
It did not persist or really interfere with my gaming experience. I've read some posts that suggest it is related to the game being played (Dota2). I want try to figure out if it is defective before the 30 day mark has passed, as after that I cannot return it. How should I go about testing the card to see if it is working properly?
Get a GPU stress test (like furmark), should be pretty straightforward - run, check for artifacts, if you want even undervolt slightly and see how far you have to push it before fails or artifacts, etc. That should be pretty much it (i never did it before though, just intuition)
So, I did this after updating the drivers (I think I derped pretty hard when I was originally looking). Things seem ok? Here are the results... I didn't see any artifacts.
Also, should I be thinking about overclocking at all? I have no experience with it and it scares me a bit, but things seem to run pretty cool on my machine.
CPU OC on an old cpu (probably athlon/phenom II) and random motherboard on stock cooler, probably no. And 7950 is really powerful, plus you cant go far with GPU overclocks
A good overclock on an i5 for example would be 30-50% - a good overclock on a GPU, i think is like 10% or something - and because GPU's eat a lot more power, power = heat = noise and GPU's are one of the loudest components in a system (you can get cpu coolers like the hr-02 macho or nh-d14 that cool amazingly yet are very quiet) it's kinda noticable if the GPU's cooling is ramping up to higher levels with less load compared to before, and is louder at max load, which it will be noticable probably.
I don't have experience with fan-cooler GPU's (only full cover, blower ones that throw air out the back) so i can't say if the same would hold true for you, but i found on a 10% or whatever GPU overclock i could pull off on my 580, i had no trouble at all blind testing if OC was on or not just from the noise the GPU gave when playing certain games, and it was enough to draw my attention, which is too much for a 10% overclock on GPU IMO.
It's on GPU too - GPU bound things, you can lower graphical settings, or resolution for example - to get that extra FPS by force - but CPU bound ones - like starcraft 2 - they run equally shitty or great on any settings, like you run 15fps in a maxed 2v2 fight on both minimum and extreme settings, the only thing that can change that is a CPU overclock (not even buying a better cpu, because for singlethreaded performance, they don't exist) and the effectiveness vs drawbacks of CPU OC, IMO, completely blow GPU out of the window.
If you have a well cooled case (half a dozen case fans) or don't mind noise, or even just want numbers or a little boost, you can do it, kinda personal if you would want to or not, but hey, i am going haswell on a gtx260, not the biggest GPU enthusiast. When i played GPU bound games, 10% higher performance did not matter to me - because i would just set the performance level i wanted (fps-wise) and take the loss of whatever little setting it took that i did not really care about, to get that 10% if i wanted it. You just can't do that with CPU in many games, in Sc2, gw2 etc, basically everything i play seems to be CPU bound and have awful performance while being CPU bound, sick of fps minimums in the 20-30 range with OC'd i7, obviously nehalem not enough
Thanks for the SATA info guys. About the SSD/HDD, I just watched a video comparing boot up, shutdown, applications, etc times and the difference is really impressive, but to be honest I'm not too bothered by my current slower load times. However, occasionally a few apps "freeze up or stutter" for a few seconds - I think my HDD causes that (not sure though)? That is quite annoying. What I do like about the SSD is having no moving parts thus being silent. My HDD is quite loud, and was a bother before I got used to it.
I'm not completely opposed to getting an SSD, so a questions: The Samsung 120gb seems to be a popular choice online.Samsung840 vs Samsung840 kit The second offer is the same as the first but throws in "SATA data and power cables, screws, 2.5-inch-to-3.5-inch adapter bracket, SATA-to-USB adapter cable, mounting spacer" - I have no idea if I need any of that, I'm pretty sure I have some very old SATA cords, but thats it.
Belial88 You need to junk that HDD then. IDE stopped being used many years ago, that's like a floppy drive basically. Current gen motherboards don't even have PATA/IDE slots anymore, you'll have to use an adaptor.
What PSU do you have? What model you have makes a big difference, and wattage means nothing.
Yes, my HDD will be scrapped, I know it's very outdated. My PSU is Corsair CX500.
You should know the Samsung 840 SSD is designed for 120, 250 and 500 GB sizes while others are 64, 128, 256 GB. The design does not get its full speed with the smallest size. It might be the best choice for a drive intended for Windows and programs at 250 GB size, but if you are interested in the 120 GB size, you should research about the competition. Regarding the competition at 128 GB and comparisons in reviews, note that Samsung "840 Pro" is different than "840", the "830" is related to the "840 Pro" and better than "840", and disregard a comparison using the "840" at 250 GB size.
I have the kit and I think it's pretty useless:
You will get several SATA3 cables with your new motherboard. The old cables you have might be SATA1. They can't be used for SATA3 despite using the same connector if they are thinner and less stiff.
A case will surely come with at least one mounting spacer for 2.5", or will have holes somewhere in the right spacing for 2.5", or you can simply tape the SSD wherever you want inside your case, for example hide it behind the motherboard panel with all the cables.
The USB adapter in the kit only works for SSDs (I don't know if it's only Samsung SSDs). It can't be used for connecting HDDs to USB as there's not enough power for that on USB alone. That would have perhaps made choosing the kit interesting, but it would have still been overpriced for that. The adapter is intended to be used with migration software on a notebook before replacing the notebook's old HDD.
This is never acceptable on a $1k card. With the issues known widespread i don't know why anybody bought crossfire in the last 2 years.
I mean, "not that bad" "good enough" "not really noticeable" SERIOUSLY? Ludicrous overuse of those words has made me struggle not to laugh when anybody uses them in any form to reference hardware, after the obvious issues here and people trying to underplay them so badly
hey guys, would like to buy a new pc but after not caring for pcs / hardware i am clueless and need help
budget is like 800EUR or something, could be higher if perf is "much" better
currently running phenom 955 oc to 3700 4gb ram gtx 460 and 500gb hdd (which is super slow O.o)
need it for gaming and should be a lot better than my config now, i also would like it to be quite, i really hate my current pc for being super loud, no monitor, windows or peripherals needed, would like to assemble throu mindfactoy.de
What's your screen resolution and what games do you play?
This is everything when deciding what to buy.
At that kind of price point you pretty much reach the i5 + 128gb SSD + decent single GPU, it could potentially be worth upgrading the GPU depending on what you do particularly if you care about noise: You can get a GPU model with a good, quiet cooler - and newer GPU's are much more efficient than the 400 series, in that they use less power - as much as barely half as much power - power translates to heat, which translates to noise. If a fan has to remove twice as much heat energy per second, it has to spin a lot faster.
A 460 is a great card though, it's lowmidrange level of performance, it really depends what games you are playing. For starcraft 2 on 1920x1080 for example, 460 is more than capable of any settings, hell, 260 is, your lower framerates will have the cpu to blame, not GPU. Without specific needs in mind, it's hard to tell you to upgrade it.
An i5 3570k at, say an easy OC of 4.4ghz, with a hr-02 macho to keep it really cool with very low noise, would have somewhere around a 75% performance lead over your current CPU - that's the kind of groundbreaking upgrade to get, and it will double your minimum FPS in starcraft 2, for example.
But in Metro2033, you wouldn't see any noticable at all difference between a phenom II and an overclocked ivy bridge i5 - it really depends what games you play, what resolution your monitor is, to give any kind of non vague advice.
Another upgrade - if you do not have, the 128gb SSD is REALLY amazing. Doesn't require constant defragmenting to maintain performance, and will boot your system in 1/3 of the time of the fastest hard drives, running 3x faster for large file transfers and sequential reads/writes, but up to hundreds of times faster when dealing with many small files, which makes tasks like opening a folder in windows or loading a game happen almost instantaneously compared to a hard drive, it's night and day difference, one of the most important things you can have in a newer system - BUT, it will not actually change your framerates - at a low budget it's tricky, but at 700-1k euro, it would be absurd not to throw in a 128gb ssd
There's also new Intel tech coming in 6 weeks (cpu's, new motherboard socket) which seems to be ~8% faster at stock settings, but there is a lot of reason to believe (i believe) it will have more than an 8% performance advantage in overclock vs overclock situations against current tech, no solid data though.
Oh, and new GPU's next month. The 700 series, refresh of current (600 series) tech, but better - and prices knocked down across the board - the 780 for example is a slightly weaker version of the GTX Titan (as far as we know) - around 90% of the performance for around 50% of the cost.
The 770, 760ti also have the chance to send massive ripples through price : performance brackets.
Basically this is the worst time to build since.. january 2011? If you can handle waiting til the start of June, i would.
Oh, and you can probably sell your current system for like, 300 or something, if you want a fresh build. I am not at all an expert on used prices, but it's got some kick to it - it's just not a competitor to what you could build now in mid 2013 with 800 euros or 1100 euros (if you add 300 from the sale for example) because of it's age and not being the strongest system, even in it's time.
Your build is pretty balanced. Personally I'd wait a few more months (maybe save up some more money?) But I'd get a 120/128GB SSD for now. You'll see big gains from that. No harm in cleaning out your HDD either (defrag, virus scan, maybe backup + format etc etc).
Well, skyrim, sc2 are extremely heavily CPU bound, i think LoL is too, though it's not as performance demanding. The >40% performance gain from stock i5 is a massive deal there, but you can double the margins gained with a decent motherboard, a hr-02 macho (for amazing cooling performance at very low noise) and overclocking i5
I don't think you can really see big performance gains from a better GPU in any of those three games, i mean 460 is still a great card - but if you want a step up in performance at higher budget''s it might be worth getting a stronger and much more efficient card with a good cooling setup on it (to reduce noise if it's important to you), but only after you go to overclocked i5 and ssd, really
If you want my opinion, i'd say wait til june 2 and go Haswell i5 with a powerful but quiet cooler (bigger air coolers have massive cooling performance at tiny fan RPM), see how they overclock (we don't know yet) and hope for the best, worst case scenario your CPU is like twice as fast without pushing it.
SSD, plug it in and everything loads 3-200x faster, boom. Big deal.
Graphics card, if you want lower noise, you can sidegrade the 460 with a good cooler model on a 7770, or something and sell the 460 - but i think that's a pretty bad idea if you are not selling the rig or components anyway - it's not great to replace GPU unless you are going to say $200+ for a big step on on performance, too. It depends how much noise means to you - you seemed bothered by it on a single GPU setup which is pretty indicative that it is important to you to keep it down - otherwise i would never say to replace the 460 with anything less than, say, a 7950.
yea performance wise i only see problems in skyrim, else my system is okay for what i do (well gw2 played rarely but it doesnt run well) the most annoying part for me is that my system is really loud for me, i would prefer some super silent pc already using headphones to cancel out some noise lol. and ssd is a must for me for the new build
Has anybody mentioned the Samsung 840 going for 80$ on newegg right now? I have only glanced on pages but didn't see it. Pretty good deal o:
So I'm doing a new build around the June timeframe basically as soon as Haswell/new GPUs come out. I was originally planning to do a quiet build but given how often I might be moving my desktop around for LANs around college, I was thinking about doing something like the Bitfenix Prodigy. Would the space available in an mITX case allow for enough cooling to run the 4570k (or whatever it ends up being) at a 4.5-5ghz overclock? Basically whatever I can safely get on air, but I hear Haswell should overclock really well, so higher overclocks would be possible? What kind of cooler would I need to keep it cool? And I only play SC2, so I'd probably get something along the lines of a GTX 760, which would probably fit in the case?
And how would noise be on something like that, if I'm looking for the quietest possible (although not completely necessary).
And does anybody know what the best 140mm PSU would be? Apparently the prodigy only supports up to 140mm PSU's. If y'all think that it's a bad idea overall to do that, do you have any other recommendations for a build that might move around a lot? (If I'm moving up to microatx, I'd love a quieter build)
Budget will probably be up to about 1200$, so not really constrained. It's essentially only an SC2 rig, so I don't want to spend what I don't need to. Extra money will probably go into a chair to replace this wooden dining chair I have haha.
EPT
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