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United Kingdom20344 Posts
On May 24 2016 03:50 SkrollK wrote:
Hey guys,
Got some question again : what's better
- AMD FX 8350
- Intel i5-6500
?
Cause from what I read in benchmarking, they are roughly the same in term of performance (mb AMD a little better), but the fact that there's no integrated GPU just lower the marks a looooot.
So I was wondering if it's a big deal having no integrated GPU ? I mean, what's the deal with integrated GPU anyway ? When you plan having a GPU, integrated GPU is totally useless no ? Even for putting 2-3 screens ?
An i5 6500 is a much better and generally safer CPU overall (pretty good at everything, vs better-at-one-task-but-awful-at-others).
iGPU isn't really relevant at all for CPU performance unless you're using a niche workload and you're probably looking at bad benchmarks
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Some feedback from my first ever computer build that I've done entirely on my own. Here's the build: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/XrW32R
Hardware:
I had no intentions of overclocking, which is why I went with the 6500 instead of the 6600k (and to save cost on the aftermarket cooler, so I could apply the money elsewhere). Still, I should have looked a little closer at compatible RAM because I bought 8 GB of DDR4-3000 RAM, and the CPU is compatible with 2133, unless overclocked. Whoops. So I returned the 3000, spent an extra $15 and got the 16 GB of RAM in the link.
•I chose to go with 16 GB because I'm planning on running at least one virtual Linux machine to play around with
both Linux and virtual machines.
The biggest problem I had with the hardware was the case. If I did it again, I'd probably spend an extra $10 and get a better one that has more room in it: the Thermaltake Versa H22 is really cramped. If you go with it, remove the top fans and do NOT put them back in until you're done with the installation.
The only other HW problem I had was that I got what seems to be the one i5 6500 that came without thermal paste already on it. Thankfully, I live close to a parts store.
Software:
I had some issues getting Windows to install from a flash drive too. It kept saying that the drivers were not available to install from a USB. I searched for hours trying all different things to get it to work, and none of the resolutions fit my issue. I finally gave up and bought some DVDs (which I would have done in the first place had I had them), and it loaded without a problem.
I made one mistake during the installation: I wanted to move the users folder to the D drive (the 1 TB HDD), but I forgot to make the changes at the onset, and I'm too lazy to reinstall now (Here's a breakdown of what I'm talking about, for anyone interested.)
The only reason I wanted that was because I had heard that SSDs have short lifespans, and you want to avoid writes as much as possible. It turns out that my fears about longevity of the SSD are overstated.
After installation, Win 7 would not pull down any updates for me: it found the Win 10 upgrade, though. I found nothing on Google indicating that this was a problem for anyone else, so I really can't make heads or tails of this issue.
Win 10 Privacy:
I don't know if this was touched on for Win10 installations--apologies if it has been, but I'm not going to read through 600 pages to confirm it!
If you're installing Win 10, these are the two best topics I found on disabling all the privacy intrusions that it has in it:
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3f38ed/guide_how_to_disable_data_logging_in_w10
• https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3f10k0/things_to_removedisable_in_windows_10
Between those two, it covers everything that I found on other sites like Overclock, Tenforums, arstechnica, and a slew of other sites.
One of those threads has a link to a batch file that does essentially all of the work for you, but some of it isn't "bad" per se, and may even be desirable, depending on how you use your PC, so look through it before you run it.
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
SSD's are very reliable compared to HDD's, as well as being able to write a ton i don't think they randomly fail as much and they won't stop working because of a 5 inch drop (personally seen that one twice with a >1TB HDD full of stuff..)
For write longevity, if you're writing 80-170GB a day every day for years to be hitting the warranty limits then you already know about it, that takes some real effort and a dedicated workload to achieve.
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With only an i5 6500 at stock your power usage at idle will be almost nothing and power usage at full load will be in the 50-100w range, so a 550w PSU is kinda weird.
It's way more than neccesary and full system load isn't enough to get into the good efficiency range of the PSU, though it doesn't really matter when you're drawing so little power. Even a good 350w PSU would have allowed you to add in a gtx1080.
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Here was my thought process on the PSU:
I added a GTX970 (the card I would most probably upgrade to if I want to play PC games because I don't think anything I'll play really requires a 980 or better) on PCPartPicker and it put the wattage at 387. Granted, that is obviously within 430W.
Also, it's probably because they were cheap, no-name PSUs but I remember blowing out a bunch of 450W PSUs on old computers, and I figured it was because they were under-powered. That was probably like 15-20 years ago, though, so that was probably heavily influenced by less efficient HW, in general, and more poorly made PSUs, in general.
But I don't doubt you're correct. Honestly, I didn't know shit about PSUs, and I got caught up in the deal they had, and I didn't feel like waiting for one to ship, or doing any additional research, so I just bought bigger. Luckily, I didn't actually pay almost $80 for it; I paid $59.99, about $10 more than the 430 EVGA.
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Do you know if the larger SSDs have any lifespan issues? I've heard that larger HDDs are often less reliable than the smaller drives for apparently unknown reasons, and it seems that there are often question marks about HDDs when a newer, larger version hits the market.
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@SweeTLemonS[TPR]:
Don't sweat it, you bought a really good PSU one that I always recommend if anyone needs a new one. It should last you a long time even if you get stuff that requires more power later on.
About HDD's I think it's the fact that larger drives usually have more platters that the spindle have to go through. SSD's doesn't share this problem, the bigger the better both in speed and storage(obv).
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ssd and hdd are two completely technologies. if one has issues then its completly unrelated to the other.
[fake edit]
its just occurred to me that it may have been a typo
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my parts will arrive tomorrow - hopefully - quick question about win10 - i currently use win10 on this rig, got it via the upgrade from win7. is it possible to just do a fresh install of win10 and be done or do i ve to do something i can't think off
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Last I heard about it, you pretty much had to go through the upgrade process every time.
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Also if it's a OEM license then it will tell you that your key is invalid for Windows 7, but during installation you can activate via phone to reset the key pretty easily. After that you got to upgrade again in Windows update.
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Aren't Windows 10 keys locked to a motherboard? As I understood, Colma has a new mobo for his new rig. Can he actually reuse his old key, now associated with his old mobo, with his new rig like you two are suggesting?
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
On May 25 2016 21:47 SweeTLemonS[TPR] wrote:
Here was my thought process on the PSU:
I added a GTX970 (the card I would most probably upgrade to if I want to play PC games because I don't think anything I'll play really requires a 980 or better) on PCPartPicker and it put the wattage at 387. Granted, that is obviously within 430W.
Also, it's probably because they were cheap, no-name PSUs but I remember blowing out a bunch of 450W PSUs on old computers, and I figured it was because they were under-powered. That was probably like 15-20 years ago, though, so that was probably heavily influenced by less efficient HW, in general, and more poorly made PSUs, in general.
But I don't doubt you're correct. Honestly, I didn't know shit about PSUs, and I got caught up in the deal they had, and I didn't feel like waiting for one to ship, or doing any additional research, so I just bought bigger. Luckily, I didn't actually pay almost $80 for it; I paid $59.99, about $10 more than the 430 EVGA.
Many 970's are locked at 200-220w max power limits when you're overclocking and overvolting and they use less power when you're not doing that (reference stock power limit is 145w) so that's a pretty big overestimation, a quality 350w unit is fine even there. Since future GPU's will generally get their performance gains from being more power efficient you can drop in something like a 1070 that'd use similar power but be 1.7x faster for example.
PSU thing is probably just bad units. There are a lot of bad PSU's today and there were probably a lot more bad PSU's 15 years ago
$60 is pretty nice, just letting you know that the capacity is overkill :D
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On May 26 2016 06:13 Durak wrote:
Aren't Windows 10 keys locked to a motherboard? As I understood, Colma has a new mobo for his new rig. Can he actually reuse his old key, now associated with his old mobo, with his new rig like you two are suggesting?
All OEM keys are technically locked to the hardware they're bought on. But unless they've changed things drastically with Windows 10, you can still use them again, usually by calling the Microsoft robot and entering the key there.
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United States24799 Posts
When I built my new computer I disassociated the key with my old computer, then installed on my new computer and associated the key... supposedly you can do that a certain number of times (like 4 maybe).
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On May 25 2016 22:04 EmKey wrote:
ssd and hdd are two completely technologies. if one has issues then its completly unrelated to the other.
[fake edit]
its just occurred to me that it may have been a typo
It wasn't a typo. I figured that the issues with HDDs had to do with platters and the mechanical parts of it more than anything else, like someone suggested just before your reply, but I had never thought to look into it to verify. It's sort of a stupid question, either way.
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On May 25 2016 22:18 {ToT}ColmA wrote:
my parts will arrive tomorrow - hopefully - quick question about win10 - i currently use win10 on this rig, got it via the upgrade from win7. is it possible to just do a fresh install of win10 and be done or do i ve to do something i can't think off
Yes you can.
If you do not have your product key, this link gives you a vb script to run to extract it from the registry. I used what I believe is the same script to get the Win7 Pro key from my last computer because I only had a 32 bit Home disc available for the new computer.
To note, the Win7 Pro disc that installed to my last computer was an OEM version, and I installed on a new PC without any hindrances.
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On May 26 2016 10:07 SweeTLemonS[TPR] wrote:
It wasn't a typo. I figured that the issues with HDDs had to do with platters and the mechanical parts of it more than anything else, like someone suggested just before your reply, but I had never thought to look into it to verify. It's sort of a stupid question, either way.
If you learned something from it then it wasnt a stupid question ^^
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On May 25 2016 21:50 SweeTLemonS[TPR] wrote:
Do you know if the larger SSDs have any lifespan issues? I've heard that larger HDDs are often less reliable than the smaller drives for apparently unknown reasons, and it seems that there are often question marks about HDDs when a newer, larger version hits the market.
I feel like this is kind of a loaded question and I'm not overly familiar with the numbers in question. But, I can make a few guesses.
Larger hard drives (these days, 3tb+, especially 4tb+) are much newer than their counter parts so whatever they're doing under the hood to reach these sizes are naturally going to be less robust due to comparative immaturity. As problems arise, manufacturers are going to come up with ways to reduce, offset, or avoid them. It's in their best interests to continually improve their drives since they're competing with the other manufacturers. Whoever improves their drives will lower their failure rates and consumers will migrate to that brand (and conversely, migrate away from those who don't improve).
This superuser post took some data from a Blackblaze study regarding platter count vs failure rate, which actually shows correlation between more platters and longer lifespans. Obviously there's a lot of other potential factors, but it's at least some evidence against the premise that larger drives fail sooner.
HDDs have some SMART characteristics that can be pretty predictive of impending failure, but some characteristics are fairly meaningless and some HDDs will fail without having those SMART warnings occur at all. I don't know much about SMART's efficacy for SSDs.
SSDs as a technology are still undergoing a lot of change with things like the many variations of NAND architecture (single level cell, multi level cell, enterprise-grade multi level cell, triple level cell, etc.) and the NOR architecture. I think that techniques to handle wear leveling and write amplification are also being continually worked on. I'm not sure how the shift from SATA to PCI-e will affect SSD architecture, if at all.
In my head, I feel like SLC SSDs last longer than MLC, but when I tried to look it up for confirmation I found sources that completely contradicted each other on the subject.
To summarize, I don't really know whether larger HDDs fail more often than smaller ones or if SSDs have that problem either. This is all just some background on the subject.
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On May 26 2016 13:59 Craton wrote:
It's in their best interests to continually improve their drives since they're competing with the other manufacturers. Whoever improves their drives will lower their failure rates and consumers will migrate to that brand (and conversely, migrate away from those who don't improve).
Improve - yes, longevity - no. Its in their best interest to these things brake down not last 20 years. Its called planned obsolescence. I dont know how prevalent it is in IT industry but id imagine not many people know the excact numbers except few key employees at involved companies. Try reading forums about x brand vs y brand. You will find tons of contradicting opinions which lasts longer simply b/c noone except very few people has statistically significant data to back up their claims and those who has them dont want to reveal these data for obvious reasons.
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On May 26 2016 20:17 EmKey wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2016 13:59 Craton wrote:
It's in their best interests to continually improve their drives since they're competing with the other manufacturers. Whoever improves their drives will lower their failure rates and consumers will migrate to that brand (and conversely, migrate away from those who don't improve).
Improve - yes, longevity - no. Its in their best interest to these things brake down not last 20 years. Its called planned obsolescence. I dont know how prevalent it is in IT industry but id imagine not many people know the excact numbers except few key employees at involved companies. Try reading forums about x brand vs y brand. You will find tons of contradicting opinions which lasts longer simply b/c noone except very few people has statistically significant data to back up their claims and those who has them dont want to reveal these data for obvious reasons.
I would imagine that data storage is one of the few places you wouldn't see much in the way of planned obsolescence. Storage isn't something that needs to fail for someone to buy more, they just need to fill up the space. Eventually, everyone runs out of space.
BackBlaze has an ongoing study on drive life. This is the most recent update. This is the data overview.
EDIT: It's the updated version of the study linked to in the Superuser post that Craton provided in his last post.
In terms of determining best brand, I still don't think this really answers the question because the sample sizes just
aren't large enough for 50% of the brands that they use.
It seems that computer technology, in general, is one of the few places that we see actual improvements over planned obsolescence. The lifespan of computer hardware extends far beyond its period of usefulness. I wonder how many people replace their computers because of actual hardware failures, over the hardware's inability to meet modern software demands?
If planned obsolescence happens anywhere, it's in SW: instead of continuing to patch your OS, they make an entirely new one, for instance.
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EPT
