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On July 07 2013 10:51 Leyra wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Thanks a bunch, <3 massively helpful information. I think I'll go ahead and get the overclock-friendly processor/mobo, and look into fiddling with that once i get this up and running :D
Do you think a 250gb SSD is necessary if I only play... maybe... 2-3 games at any given time? SC2, dota2, + 1, usually. From what I understand you usually load the OS on there, as well as whatever loading-intensive games you play?
250gb isn't necessary if you only play three games. You want your OS on there and main programs (games you play regularly, icrosoft Office, Chrome / Firefox, Skype, etc). You can go with a 120gb if you think that's enough.
Windows 7/8 is ~20gb, Starcraft II is expected to be ~20gb with LotV, and DotA 2 is like probably under 5gb.
I just play two games with occasional third from Steam sales or new releases and I'm fine with a 80gb SSD if you want some sort of idea.
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Sounds like a 120gb would be plenty for me, then. :D Once more, thanks so much for the help, I really appreciate, and I'm sure the other clueless consumers that you've helped do too. 
Edit: Out of curiousity, compared to the case you linked from amazon, would it be reasonable to instead substitute the combo that iTzSnypah linked: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1354939 Since it has a different case, but the same power supply you listed, but saves some moneys? :D
E2: I think I answered my own question, I guess it's not compatible with the other mobo?
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That case is mATX so you would need an mATX motherboard.
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Isn't the one you linked mATX as well, or am I not reading appropriately (wholly possible, not being snarky)
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The one I linked is a Z87X-D3H which is ATX. There's a Z87MX-D3H which is mATX and less expensive.
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If you update to an SSD should you format your HD and just start fresh? It seems like if you buy an Intel SSD there's a way to transfer it more easily but I can't find anything for the other types.
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On July 07 2013 11:59 skyR wrote:
The one I linked is a Z87X-D3H which is ATX. There's a Z87MX-D3H which is mATX and less expensive.
Oh I meant the Case you linked. :D It looks like its compatible with matx, but not atx?
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On July 07 2013 12:01 SideAffect wrote:
If you update to an SSD should you format your HD and just start fresh? It seems like if you buy an Intel SSD there's a way to transfer it more easily but I can't find anything for the other types.
Some other manufacturers have upgrade kits as well (eg. Samsung). But upgrade kits are more expensive than OEM kits so there doesn't seem to be a reason to get them unless you're like getting it for a laptop.
But yes, it's easier and probably better to start fresh on the SSD. You don't have to format your HDD though if you want to keep the data and don't have it backed up somewhere, you can just delete the Windows portion on it.
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Hello, I'm sorta new to configuring setups for streaming so here is what I'm planning to put together.
I'm wondering if people could help me on what to finalize on.
I want to stream at 720p w/ 60 fps, maybe eventually for 1080p w/ 30+ frames or 60 if I could.
I have everything on SC2 at low, while Texture Qualities are at ULTRA.
I have a problem now where I use OBS + DXTory and I get 40-50 frames but when big engagements come into play, I get 15-25fps and it's near impossible to micro.
I want to have 60+ fps while streaming, is this possible? I see people's streams and it's like AMAZINGLY smooth and they seem to have no frame drops at all, anything less than 50. So I would really appreciate it if someone could share some knowledge with me :D
My friend said he has a used N460 I can slap on but can it handle SC2 + let's say OBS or XSplit without a 3rd party screen capture program?
I heard that when you use 3rd party capture programs such as DXTory, frames are a bit better vs the entire screen capture when you stream but I still can't play well even with the 3rd party program.
Do I REALLY need the hyper threading and can I get away using a i5 with my friend's used graphics card
Here is the plan.
CPU: i5-4670k or i7-4770k
GPU: Used MSI N460GTX Cyclone 768D5 OC or GTX 660(TI or non TI) Or another recommended GPU.
Cooling: Liquid Cooling most likely.
RAM: I have no idea what to look for in this category.
PS. Sorry for bad formatting and bad English.
Thank you in advance!
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United Kingdom20322 Posts
OBS game capture is the best performing software method i know of (though you have to fight with it sometimes for it to give you the FPS you set..) better than dxtory etc
460 would be overkill for trying to maintain 60-100fps minimums on sc2 max settings, on low shaders etc ultra textures, then gtx 260 would be really overkill, as in, won't pull less than 200-500+fps unless you're cpu limited
You can grab some ~2400mhz RAM, cas 10/11/12 (lower latency = better) cause it doesn't cost much more than normal RAM (you can get 8gb for like $20 more than the slowest ram most of the time) and it's significantly better, you have gains in the ~5-10% league sc2 compared to random 1333/1600 RAM and it helps a bit for encoding
What specifically do you want from liquid cooling? Cause most people seem to think anything with liquid in it is amazing, when in reality most of the closed loop coolers etc are actually pretty bad
Use i5, unless you want to spend quite a bit of money for potentially 0 gains. You can just clock i5 to 4.5-4.8 (depending on luck) and run 1920x1080, 48fps stream. There's not much point making higher fps stream when it will just pull your game performance down further etc, you can squeeze another ~20% fps out potentially with hyperthreading, but it'll cost you 100mhz heat-wise on overclock, plus the i5-i7 price difference, plus the game will run worse if you stream with higher fps at a high resolution too so i don't think it's worth it at all for sc2
What CPU do you have right now?
You can get really, really great performance with a strong, overclocked cpu (and high OC + nice RAM will literally give you 60% more minimum FPS than same, best available singlethreaded CPU at stock + 1600 RAM)
Never dropping below ~60fps in any cirumstances in maxed fights etc is a bit tricky to pull off, you can probably do it npnp though with physics and reflections disabled (physics, effects, reflections.. cpu settings, not graphics settings)
but the massive performance losses from using a software solution for screen capture etc for a high resolution and FPS stream really hurt, 1920x1080, 48fps you're losing at best a third of your framerate AFAIK. Think of how much it messes up game to run 720p60 stream, and then double it 
On low shaders though my CPU gives like 500-700fps at start of game. I don't mind losing a third of that
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Well I figured I would update everyone as to how my build went. A couple things deviated since they were out of stock and I got the closest equivalents
Intel i5 4670k
Gigabyte Z87X-D3H
G.Skill TridentX 16gb 2x8gb 2400
Seagate Barracuda 2TB
MSI GTX 760
Noctua NH-U14S
ASUS CD/DVD drive
Fractal Design Define R4 w/ Window Titanium
Seasonic G Series 550W PSU
The original goal of the build was to be fast and quiet and that it does pretty damn well. With the case fans set to 5V using the R4's fan controller, it's essentially silent, 7V being minimally audible (My cat sitting in my lap makes more noise than my computer). Under absolutely full load (prime95+furmark) it uses ~290W at the wall and is still one of the quietest computers in the house. Very successful with the original goals.
I currently have it OC'd to 4.3ghz rather comfortably, I might go for 4.4 but increasing vcore by ~.018V over what 4.3ghz requires in order to get stable is something I'm rather hesistant to do. I did manage to get the uncore to hit 4.3ghz though which isn't too bad.
I haven't touched the GPU at all yet, it's something that I might try later but it doesn't seem necessary at all. When/if I do it'll most likely just be bumping the clocks as far as I can without raising the voltages.
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United Kingdom20322 Posts
Great to hear, 0.18v for 100mhz though?
Did you tune VRIN (set its llc to extreme, vary the voltage for it, you probably want somewhere between 1.8 (default) and 1.9)
There's also ring voltage ofc, just raising CPU multiplier will also increase stress on ring bus, and you should try setting ram to 1066mhz and uncore to 30x to bump CPU clock up, not sure if i'm reading this correctly but either you need +0.018v for 100mhz, in which case it's a no brainer (many people like me for example need more than 3x that much per 100mhz for much of the clockspeed scaling, which throws up temperatures a LOT faster), or you need 0.18v and there's probably something big wrong that is causing instability for you. If that's the case, you could try +0.1 or +0.15 on system agent, analog io and digital io, see if it magically fixes anything. If not, dial them back to auto or whatever, if it works, see what you can dial down without losing stability etc.
What vcore are you using in particular? With extreme LLC on VRIN you probably want around ~1.85vrin around 1.2vcore, closer to 2vrin by 1.3vcore. Less or more can help a lot, always have it at least 0.4v above vcore but don't go over ~2.1vrin, +0.1-+0.15 on sys agent, dio and aio (lowest you can for safety, if it helps) and ~1.3vcore, i think those are pretty conservative numbers. You're probably at quite a bit lower vcore than 1.3 though
Uncore doesn't really matter, as long as it's somewhat close to the CPU so you don't have crazy bottlenecks. I mean, taking RAM 2000 to 2400 for example even if it means running uncore at 3.8 instead of 4.3 i would probably do, i don't think uncore can make a significant dent in an important benchmark or game if it's already close to CPU frequency, but RAM can definitely give you a few % for a notable change in frequency
And finally; What's your max temps? Prime, IBT and some other stress tests that heavily utilize avx instructions can cause some pretty crazy behaivour with haswell temperatures, the integrated voltage regulator increased vcore when you run stuff like that, but it basically does not occur outside of synthetics. Check your temps under Adia (stressing cpu, fpu, ram, cache) or under x264 benchmark 5.0.1 for example, or if you want to run prime/ibt, you can disable AVX to run them, but there's not too much point in doing that
You should be able to pull something like this off on a u14s + Show Spoiler +![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IA2dGsD.png) HT off because it was the hottest day so far this year at ~2pm and my room was some ungodly temperature >10c more than normal, also because of weird stability issues i was having at 4.6-4.7+, i5 doesn't have ht anyway. Low gflops on IBT 'cause it was avx off and RAM+uncore were at minimums. I don't reccomend running that - toggling avx doesn't seem to do anything significant for x264 though, heat-wise or temperatures, at least in some cases. It certainly doesn't give the 0.05-0.15vcore overvolt that happens with some stress tests, very few if any applications aside from stress tests will actually trigger that AFAIK
Oh, and use CPU-Z version 1.64.0. Not later/earlier version, for tracking vcore on giga z87 boards
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On July 08 2013 04:39 Cyro wrote:
Great to hear, 0.18v for 100mhz though?
Did you tune VRIN (set its llc to extreme, vary the voltage for it, you probably want somewhere between 1.8 (default) and 1.9)
There's also ring voltage ofc, just raising CPU multiplier will also increase stress on ring bus, and you should try setting ram to 1066mhz and uncore to 30x to bump CPU clock up, not sure if i'm reading this correctly but either you need +0.018v for 100mhz, in which case it's a no brainer (many people like me for example need more than 3x that much per 100mhz for much of the clockspeed scaling, which throws up temperatures a LOT faster), or you need 0.18v and there's probably something big wrong that is causing instability for you. If that's the case, you could try +0.1 or +0.15 on system agent, analog io and digital io, see if it magically fixes anything. If not, dial them back to auto or whatever, if it works, see what you can dial down without losing stability etc.
What vcore are you using in particular? With extreme LLC on VRIN you probably want around ~1.85vrin around 1.2vcore, closer to 2vrin by 1.3vcore. Less or more can help a lot, always have it at least 0.4v above vcore but don't go over ~2.1vrin, +0.1-+0.15 on sys agent, dio and aio (lowest you can for safety, if it helps) and ~1.3vcore, i think those are pretty conservative numbers. You're probably at quite a bit lower vcore than 1.3 though
Uncore doesn't really matter, as long as it's somewhat close to the CPU so you don't have crazy bottlenecks. I mean, taking RAM 2000 to 2400 for example even if it means running uncore at 3.8 instead of 4.3 i would probably do, i don't think uncore can make a significant dent in an important benchmark or game if it's already close to CPU frequency, but RAM can definitely give you a few % for a notable change in frequency
And finally; What's your max temps? Prime, IBT and some other stress tests that heavily utilize avx instructions can cause some pretty crazy behaivour with haswell temperatures, the integrated voltage regulator increased vcore when you run stuff like that, but it basically does not occur outside of synthetics. Check your temps under Adia (stressing cpu, fpu, ram, cache) or under x264 benchmark 5.0.1 for example, or if you want to run prime/ibt, you can disable AVX to run them, but there's not too much point in doing that
LLC is set to extreme, VRIN is 1.8V, VRING is 1.2V, RAM I just set to the XMP profile so 2400 10-12-12-31 IIRC
I'll try bumping up VRIN I guess, Vcore is at 1.25V for 4.3ghz, That could be due to the VRIN but I'm not too sure. I'll try messing around with settings after the EU LCS is done though.
temps I'm somewhat mixed about.
AIDA64 reports CPU temp at ~63C while the individual core temps are hovering around 15C hotter. I've been going off the core temps as far as limiting my OC
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United Kingdom20322 Posts
Go to 1.85 VRIN 1.2vring, put your ram at 1066mhz or something like that on the same volts and timings for feeling out vcore, see if you can get lower, clock ram/uncore up after core is sorted out
~80c max in adia (which is hotter than anything i use) seems ok i guess for 1.25vcore, i'm a bit lucky to pretty much have 4.6ghz by then though
VRIN is important. 1.8 with llc set won't be too far off for 1.25vcore, but on a 4.5 oc i tested, having VRIN 0.1v off (or 0.15v?) in either direction (too high or low) took an a stable overclock to literally unbootable, not making it into windows IIRC, and different values are better for different vcores etc
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Yo guys, my 560 TI just died after 1 year of release. I can't get warranty on it because I lost the box with all the information on it, also overclocked it before so it might of void the warranty anyways lol. Anyways I'm looking for a new video card now. Which one is best price/performance card out right now? My budget is about 200$ max but I am fine with finding cheap cards on craiglist. I don't need a very high end card as my most demanding game will be dota 2. My 560 TI was able to max it mostly on 120fps and only minor drops in big team fights.
Also I can get a used MSI 7870 for 150$ right now. Any thoughts/advice/suggestions guys?
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DotA 2 can be maxed with a ~$100 card like a Radeon HD7770 or GTX 650 Ti. Obviously downgrades from a GTX 560 Ti so you should look into RMAing the GTX 560 Ti. Overclocking does not void warranty, serial number and product number can be found on the card itself unless you ripped that sticker off...
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Oh I did not know that. I will definitely try to RMA now! I never did it before haha.
My 560 TI like I said did max it at 120fps but with some drops during big team fights. I would like a card that is a constant 120 fps =p
Still looking for suggestions if my RMA doesn't go through. Is there any new video cards coming out?
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On July 08 2013 02:19 Cyro wrote:OBS game capture is the best performing software method i know of (though you have to fight with it sometimes for it to give you the FPS you set..) better than dxtory etc 460 would be overkill for trying to maintain 60-100fps minimums on sc2 max settings, on low shaders etc ultra textures, then gtx 260 would be really overkill, as in, won't pull less than 200-500+fps unless you're cpu limited You can grab some ~2400mhz RAM, cas 10/11/12 (lower latency = better) cause it doesn't cost much more than normal RAM (you can get 8gb for like $20 more than the slowest ram most of the time) and it's significantly better, you have gains in the ~5-10% league sc2 compared to random 1333/1600 RAM and it helps a bit for encoding What specifically do you want from liquid cooling? Cause most people seem to think anything with liquid in it is amazing, when in reality most of the closed loop coolers etc are actually pretty bad Use i5, unless you want to spend quite a bit of money for potentially 0 gains. You can just clock i5 to 4.5-4.8 (depending on luck) and run 1920x1080, 48fps stream. There's not much point making higher fps stream when it will just pull your game performance down further etc, you can squeeze another ~20% fps out potentially with hyperthreading, but it'll cost you 100mhz heat-wise on overclock, plus the i5-i7 price difference, plus the game will run worse if you stream with higher fps at a high resolution too so i don't think it's worth it at all for sc2 What CPU do you have right now? You can get really, really great performance with a strong, overclocked cpu (and high OC + nice RAM will literally give you 60% more minimum FPS than same, best available singlethreaded CPU at stock + 1600 RAM) Never dropping below ~60fps in any cirumstances in maxed fights etc is a bit tricky to pull off, you can probably do it npnp though with physics and reflections disabled (physics, effects, reflections.. cpu settings, not graphics settings) but the massive performance losses from using a software solution for screen capture etc for a high resolution and FPS stream really hurt, 1920x1080, 48fps you're losing at best a third of your framerate AFAIK. Think of how much it messes up game to run 720p60 stream, and then double it On low shaders though my CPU gives like 500-700fps at start of game. I don't mind losing a third of that
I'm using a laptop atm, alienware m17x-r2. I needed a portable comp that could run sc2 but atm, the processor is lacking. I have a i7-740QM @ 1.73ghz and a ATI 5870M and 16GB of 1833Mhz Ram.
Thank you so much for your insight, I was thinking i5 too. I would be running 1080p but be streaming on 720p so I assume I can get 60 frames while maintaining a significant amount when i play right?
For the liquid cooling, could you recommend me one? I don't have anything in mind.
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On July 08 2013 06:36 kuruptt wrote:
Oh I did not know that. I will definitely try to RMA now! I never did it before haha.
My 560 TI like I said did max it at 120fps but with some drops during big team fights. I would like a card that is a constant 120 fps =p
Still looking for suggestions if my RMA doesn't go through. Is there any new video cards coming out?
Both Starcraft II and DotA 2 are not GPU dependant, you can have a quad GTX Titan setup and still dip below 120 FPS.
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EPT
