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What is your budget? 1.300€
What is your monitor's native resolution? 1920 x 1080
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings? Path of Exile, Witcher, Ark, Assasins Creed...stuff like that.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming? Some office stuff.
Do you intend to overclock? Yes.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire? No.
Do you need an operating system? No.
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget? Yes, a monitor as included on my list; it's part of the budget.
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify. None.
What country will you be buying your parts in? Germany.
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify. None.
So here is my current idea of a build. It doesn't feature a GPU since I'll be using a GTX 770 I've already got.
I have two motherboards on the list for the simple reason that I don't know whether to buy a Z87 or a Z97 - some info on that would be awesome.
Thank you in advance <3
+ Show Spoiler +
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I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card. I'm currently using a 7870 Asus DirectCU II. Which one should I pick? I prefer AMD, but if you guys believe that NVIDIA deserves a shot, I'm all for it.
Budget: 550$
Currently looking: AMD R9 390
Should I wait for the R9 Nano?
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United Kingdom20297 Posts
On July 01 2015 13:47 HyDrA_solic wrote: I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card. I'm currently using a 7870 Asus DirectCU II. Which one should I pick? I prefer AMD, but if you guys believe that NVIDIA deserves a shot, I'm all for it.
Budget: 550$
Currently looking: AMD R9 390
Should I wait for the R9 Nano?
What PSU?
The goal of the nano is power efficiency; it's a big GPU that's heavily underclocked (likely to around two thirds of performance potential) in order to improve power efficiency. The cooling and PCB will be built to support a GPU of ~140w, so you can't just expect to buy that and then re-OC it with amazing results. The same GPU is used in the R9 Fury and Fury X with a 275w power target at stock.
R9 Fury is the one that you would probably consider, the air cooled full performance SKU of fiji. It's $100 cheaper than fury X or 980ti, which it needs IMO. Fury X is cooled better but $100 is really a lot of money to pay for that with not that much extra performance on the table and the fury X cooler has ongoing issues with some annoying high pitched pump noise 24/7, while the regular Fury will be available with a different reference cooler (or much better, sold with non-reference coolers by third parties)
390 is a 290 rebrand with minimal changes (the silicon is the same) and 8GB of VRAM instead of 4GB. One of the best 290's is $265 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202143 so this is far, far short of the ~$450-700 budget range. 290x/390x is more expensive - but barely better, like less than 5% at the same clock speeds often.
The question of will 4GB vs 8GB of VRAM matter to you is a bit important, but overall i think 4GB is more than enough for most people. They're not super high end cards and it might be a limit in some games making you want to drop a setting or two (it's not enough to just mindlessly max everything on every game, even at 1080p), but AMD is using 4GB of VRAM on the Fury GPU's (not entirely by choice) so having 4GB on a GPU that's quite a lot weaker isn't that bad. Nvidia also has 3.5GB and 4GB on their 970/980 competing with the 290/290x/390/390x.
PSU and case cooling ability is pretty important though with high end GPU's. If your PSU doesn't supply enough good power then it can't run - and if your case cooling isn't up to the task, it won't run well.
Funnily enough, a 290 or an R9 Fury would have similar power consumption and heat output even though the fury is substantially faster (like, maybe even 1.5x at similar clock speeds) - the power savings on the Fury come from a more updated architecture (290/290x/390/390x is a chip that launched over 1.5 years ago, fury chip is brand new) coupled with a new VRAM technology that's faster but uses far less power
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A quick question: I bought a new system on 2013 December on the following specifications:
i5 4570 Geforce Gtx 680 8 GB RAM Windows 8.1 Pro
So far I am very satisfied with its performance in various games, including Witcher 3 which I'm pretty much playing on the highest settings except maybe 1-2 small details, which are on very high anyway. My question is, how long can this system last for gaming, and in a potential upgrade scenario which part should be my priority? Thanks in advance.
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United Kingdom20297 Posts
Depends what games you're playing and what your standards and priorities are. Consumer-level GPU's are advancing much faster than CPU's though
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Fury isn't a bad looking chip, I guess.
Not sure about pricing or anything though, didn't get around to looking at that
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Can anyone point me to what processor + mobo + case I should get for a build I'm doing for my parents? It only needs to be able to watch videos online (netflix, youtube) as I think that's the only thing that I can imagine them doing that will take up resources. I think I can figure out the RAM, OS and drive on my own.
+ Show Spoiler +What is your budget? as cheap as possible
What is your monitor's native resolution? 1600x900
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings? no games
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming? web browsing, youtube netflix
Do you intend to overclock? no.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire? No.
Do you need an operating system? No.
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget? No
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify. None.
What country will you be buying your parts in? USA
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify. None.
Thanks for anything!
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Pointless, will be more expensive building in pieces than just buying a system. Well, maybe not quite if you already have an extra Windows install and count that cost as zero.
Something along these lines will work fine, being complete systems not much more than $200: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0ZK-003C-00002 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883221089
Probably spend $15 or so on an extra 2 GB of DDR3 (laptop form factor, SO-DIMM) to chuck in there. The Zotac doesn't have Wi-Fi; the Asus does. Check specs. These have Celeron 2957U, which is dual core Haswell at 1.4 GHz, plenty for web. That's about as fast as a midrange Core 2 Duo, as fast as the non-Turbo speeds of something in Ultrabooks, Macbook Air, etc.
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What idle temps and under load temps should I have? I'm using a I7 4790 with corsair air 240, One of the case fans aren't running cause I didn't have enough 3 pins to connect to the mobo and I'm using the stock cooler My idle temp is like 52 and my under load when I'm not even doing something that heavy like csgo or watching streams bring it up to about 72-83ish and I even saw it go up to 96 once.
Granted that the summer is pretty terrible here but these temps worry me Should I be worried? And if I go buy a CPU cooler and a 3 to 4 pin adapter to connect the inactive case fan to the mobo, should I go for a noctua air cooler or cooler master seidon M liquid cooling I would get a 212 evo but that's not compatible with my case
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United Kingdom20297 Posts
On July 02 2015 21:07 IceHism wrote: What idle temps and under load temps should I have? I'm using a I7 4790 with corsair air 240, One of the case fans aren't running cause I didn't have enough 3 pins to connect to the mobo and I'm using the stock cooler My idle temp is like 52 and my under load when I'm not even doing something that heavy like csgo or watching streams bring it up to about 72-83ish and I even saw it go up to 96 once.
Granted that the summer is pretty terrible here but these temps worry me Should I be worried? And if I go buy a CPU cooler and a 3 to 4 pin adapter to connect the inactive case fan to the mobo, should I go for a noctua air cooler or cooler master seidon M liquid cooling I would get a 212 evo but that's not compatible with my case
Idle temps should be about 10-15c over your room temp. As long as your cooler is mounted properly, this doesn't very much at all cooler to cooler because the power at idle is very low, heatsink size isn't really a factor at all (even small heatsinks will stay cool under a 5 watt power load)
If they're too high, then you might not have c-states or power saving settings set up right. You should have c7 state manually enabled (you can enable c3, c6 and EIST as well) - that stuff is in bios - and then in windows you should use the Balanced power plan, not High Performance or Power Saver.
Load temps depends hugely on what load you're running but CSGO or watching a stream should be way, way cooler than a sustained 100% load across all cores, which you should aim to keep below 80c or so outside of extreme circumstances. A decent test for load temps would be to download Cinebench r15 and then hit run (check to make sure all cores are loaded) 2-3 times.
for reference i have a silver arrow sb-e SE on CPU, 4770k at 4.5ghz, 1.285v. 4790's don't have the better thermal solution (only 4790k's.. you have regular 4790 right?) so it should be directly comparable. Room temp well over 20c, maybe even 25c (it's ~17c for >90% of the year, big heatwave in scotland) and i'm still under 80c on that test on hottest cores, scoring ~920
Case fans won't influence CPU temperatures much with those CPU's - and when they do influence CPU temperatures, it will be after a long period of load like after 15 minutes and not really impact the temperatures in the first few minutes at all. If those temperatures are too bad and the inside of your case isn't hot, you know that you have a CPU cooler problem. I think it's just likely that it wasn't mounted correctly but the stock cooler is not great, it's unusable for 4790k's and very hot usually on the i7 cpu's when all threads are loaded
if you ended up buying a cooler, it would depend on your case (why doesn't hyper 212 fit? which case is it?) and goals. Good air coolers have more fitting requirements, but the closed loop liquid coolers ship with very loud fans to inflate their performance benchmarks and the small ones are not very good unless it's the only thing available (especially due to kinda high pricing in some areas)
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Cosair Air 240. This is pretty much a case where you frequently don't want to use air cooling because nothing good fits (120 mm clearance), and downblowers that barely fit will struggle pulling air from right up against the side panel. Noctua NH-D9L might be the best sideblowing tower that fits (expensive for what it does, though), but if you go this route you may also want to populate the 80 mm slots in the back.
Unfortunately, you'll need to pay extra for a liquid cooler if you want significantly lower temps.
That said, maybe something's wrong with how you installed the cooler, and you may be able to get by with something relatively dinky, especially with the regular i7-4790 and not overclocking.
Something in the mid price range that should be okay is the Scythe Big Shuriken 2, a compact but not ultracompact downblower that should have enough room to operate and is beefy enough. Triple check all dimensions, including RAM clearance and PCIe slot clearance, though. http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=FAN-SHURIK
edit: on second thought, NH-D9L isn't that much more at $55. Probably could get away with less, though, especially if not targeting low noise..
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I vaguely remember that a small amount of thermal paste got off the stock cooler and onto my fingerwhen I was installing it. Could that be it? My case does get pretty hot when I put my hand over the top of the case and the noise gets really loud
Anyways, I don't plan on overclocking so I got the regular 4790.
Anyways, between these two, which would you recommend? https://pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-cpu-cooler-rls12m24pkr1
Or
https://pcpartpicker.com/part/noctua-cpu-cooler-nhd9l
I'll probably also pick up a noctua or artic silver thermal paste along the way. So I thought I'd get the cheap 3 to 4 pin adapter for the last remaining case fan as well for my other parts.
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If thermal paste is missing or compromised on the part that mates with the area over the CPU that would explain things. The high noise is in part because the fan is working overtime because something is wrong and temps are too high.
The coolers will come with suitable thermal paste; getting a decent, unadulterated mount on a respectable cooler with reasonable enough thermal paste will be sufficient. The differences in cooling between thermal paste is usually low single digits degrees.
I would much trust Noctua's NH-A9 fan over the fan on the Cooler Master Seidon 120M's fan (looks like a Blade Master variant) for acoustic profile and long-term longevity. Never mind the increased moving parts of the Seidon 120M when you consider the integrated pump and potential problems there over the long run, and how the tubing holds up. With Noctua you get free socket mounting hardware for new boards (if they change the mounting hole layout, which Intel hasn't since LGA 1156 on the mainstream) if you ask for it, for years and years. Between those two the choice should be clear.
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Is there any gain of ever decreasing nm of CPUs? Yes, less power usage. What about performance? Is base clock going above 4.0 or is it just more performance/power usage?
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On July 03 2015 05:32 darkness wrote: Is there any gain of ever decreasing nm of CPUs? Yes, less power usage. What about performance? Is base clock going above 4.0 or is it just more performance/power usage? The obvious advantage is cost. Eventually (after implementation details hammered out), the cost of manufacturing a given die size on a smaller process is comparable to the same size on a larger process. If nothing else, you use up less silicon wafer and other supplementary materials, and those cost money.
Base clock could well go over 4.0 GHz if that was the design goal, but it's not. The logical (computing) design of the circuits has a lot to do with how quickly operations can be executed. A narrow pipeline like on Intel's Pentium 4 and AMD's Bulldozer can support higher clocks at the expense of being able to do less useful work on average per clock.
When performance is power or size (of chip) constrained, smaller feature size will improve performance because then you can fit more cores in and keep the thermals manageable. You see more and more cores crammed into the high-end Xeon chips with each generation. There are Haswell Xeons with 18 cores and hyperthreading.
As for clock speeds, that depends on a number of factors of the geometry and materials of the transistors, operating voltage, and so on. This in part has to do with the strength of the electric field at the gate of the transistor, which like for a capacitor is influenced by the area (getting smaller with smaller processes, which hurts) and thinness (thinner means stronger field, but little gains to be had here anymore and since a while back). A stronger field facilitates movement of charge carriers when the transistor is switched "on" and thus how quickly the charge can build up and the state change. Other factors of course include operating temperature, as you'd expect. Another major concern these days is the interconnecting wires between transistors. Smaller designs mean thinner wires, which mean higher resistance, which means more heat and higher temps, not to mention less current flow, slowing things down.
In any case, between generations you generally see that you're not really comparing apples-to-apples, that multiple things other than just the process size has changed. It's complicated.
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United Kingdom20297 Posts
When performance is power or size (of chip) constrained, smaller feature size will improve performance because then you can fit more cores in and keep the thermals manageable. You see more and more cores crammed into the high-end Xeon chips with each generation. There are Haswell Xeons with 18 cores and hyperthreading.
28 cores in skylake xeon next year
In like 2008-2009, the best CPU dies were available to both consumer and server - after that, intel stopped offering their best to consumers but kept pricing the same. Since then AMD hasn't made anything that's arguably better than an intel quad core on either server or consumer so the last 5 years were so much more stagnant than they could have been
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On July 03 2015 19:38 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +When performance is power or size (of chip) constrained, smaller feature size will improve performance because then you can fit more cores in and keep the thermals manageable. You see more and more cores crammed into the high-end Xeon chips with each generation. There are Haswell Xeons with 18 cores and hyperthreading. 28 cores in skylake xeon next year In like 2008-2009, the best CPU dies were available to both consumer and server - after that, intel stopped offering their best to consumers but kept pricing the same. Since then AMD hasn't made anything that's arguably better than an intel quad core on either server or consumer so the last 5 years were so much more stagnant than they could have been Dunno, Core 2 Duo E6600 (E6700) launch price of $316 ($530) in mid-2006 had a die size of 143 mm^2 on 65 nm. The Core 2 Quad of that generation was two dies, and corresponding Xeons had the same configs. Core i7-4770k launch price of $339 in mid-2013 had a die size of 177 mm^2 on 22 nm. That's with the integrated graphics, northbridge, memory controller, and all that other stuff included.
It's mostly that the top-end Xeons these days are huuuuuuuge, 662 mm^2 on 22 nm now. Starting from Penryn and 45 nm they started going over 500 mm^2 for those, building separate chips and making them much bigger and more expensive than they could sell to consumers.
Recall that Itanium used to be a thing. Intel's biggest, most expensive chips were Itanium, not Xeon. They started scaling up Xeon when that market grew.
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United Kingdom20297 Posts
If die size is a huge problem, they could offer a CPU without iGPU at consumer price points. Over half of the 14nm quad core dies are dedicated to iGPU
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I think you're missing the basic reason they don't offer them at consumer price points - the market segment being targeted is the enterprise.
iGPU on a large die is not an issue if you're putting it all into a 1U rack, stacking six of them, and putting it into a climate controlled data center. And the GPU on the die is still less of a draw on space and power than a separate GPU, allowing you to stack more chips into that 1U alongside beefy interconnects and large tracts of RAM.
I mean, yes, the could offer Xeons without integrated GPU at consumer price points. But they won't. That's not their target market. And fewer processes and different types of chips reduces overall production costs.
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