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New computer time
For comparison, my old rig:
CPU: Core i7-860
Motherboard: Asus P7P55D
GPU: Radeon HD 5850
SSD: 240 GB Seagate 600
Memory: 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) 1600 MHz DDR3 9-9-9-24
Power supply: Enermax 82+ Pro 525 W
UPS: CyberPower CP1350AVRLCD
Case: Antec Three Hundred
Monitors: 2x 19", 1280x1024, one from Dell, the other Hanns-G
I replaced the SSD (originally I had a 120 GB OCZ Agility) in late 2013, and the GPU cooler in 2010, but the rest of the parts date to 2009 or older. But the computer has crashed three times in total in nearly six years, all of which were fine after a quick reboot, so I'm happy with the reliability.
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What's really driving the upgrade is monitors. I want more and bigger monitors. I thought 1920x1080 was a stupid resolution, so I skipped it. I'm not meaningfully budget limited, so I can get what I want, whatever it costs. I just ordered three of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236466
That's the Asus MG279Q. It supports adaptive sync, and hence AMD FreeSync. It sports a 2560x1440 resolution, 27" size, 144 Hz refresh rate, IPS panel, DisplayPort 1.2, and pivot, among other things. FreeSync will cap the refresh rate at 90 Hz. I'm planning on putting them in portrait mode, for a combined resolution of 4320x2560.
I'd normally wait and buy everything at once, but there's only one monitor on the market that does everything I want, and it's 10% off right now with a promo code, so I decided to grab it.
For the rest of the computer, some parts are subject to change:
CPU: Core i7-6700K
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117559
Motherboard: not sure yet, but possibly this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130879
That might change depending on what else shows up.
Memory: 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4. If I had to buy right now, it would be this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231826
I'm going to get something among the cheaper memory modules that meets the specs I want.
SSD: Something in the 500 GB range that I trust to be reliable. Likely this, though that could change if prices do:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148946
Power supply: Seasonic Snow Silent 750 W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151154
Because it's the best consumer power supply there is and I don't want to mess around with reliability.
UPS: CyberPower CP1350PFCLCD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842102133
The last UPS I got from them has worked flawlessly for six years now, through several dozen power events. I don't know how long a UPS can be expected to be reliable, but it's not something that I want to risk.
Operating system: Windows 10 Home full
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832588528
It's an extra $20 to get the full version, so I can move it to another computer if the need strikes. And I get it on a USB stick, which is a definite plus. Which leads to:
Optical drive: none
It's been years since I used the optical drive in my current computer. If I need one at some point, I can grab it from the old computer.
Internal hard drive: none
Because hard drives are backup devices and I don't have ridiculous amounts of junk data to store. Speaking of which:
External hard drive: not sure yet, but something USB 3.0 in the ballpark of 500 GB-1 TB. A complete image of my SSD periodically makes a nice supplement to daily incremental backup to USB flash drives.
Video card: Probably a Radeon R9 Fury X, though it's out of stock at the moment. Which particular board partner I get depends on what comes back in stock. If Nvidia announces support for adaptive sync very, very soon, I might get a GeForce GTX 980 Ti instead. Otherwise, the Fury X is the choice.
Case: Not sure yet. Probably a mid-tower in the ballpark of $70-$100. There are a lot of cases that will work fine and I'll have to see how prices are when I'm ready to buy the other stuff.
CPU heatsink: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103099
No real need to overthink it. Cooler Master sells a zillion of these for good reasons, and I'm not likely to overclock.
Right now, it's waiting on the CPU and GPU to be available for purchase.
That comes to somewhere in the ballpark of $1900, not counting $1620 for the monitors. I'm counting on this to last a long, long time, with possibly an upgrade of the video card in a few years or so.
Comments
Enjoy it! :P
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
2 comments (apart from your previous thread):
UPSs need to have their batteries replaced every so often (5 years or so) - for units that have replaceable batteries. Those that don't, yeah, replace them every few years. Apart from that, they will work reliably until they just up and don't work any more - at which point it's very obvious they need to be replaced. They aren't quite like a power supply, where they will kill other components - it's more like a light bulb - use it until it burns out, then replace it.
For an external drive - It may not be a high priority, I don't know how many PCs or mobile devices you have sitting around, but an NAS is another option for external storage. They cost a bit more, but they are much more flexible. If you have multiple devices, everything can access it simultaneously (and with gigabit ethernet at pretty good speeds)
Solid build idea...
The R9 fury x is a good but bad investment. Though a pricey one, and same with that Nvidia titan...
The good: good cards, both of them.
The bad: You might have a 1-2 fps edge over the less expensive R9 390x or Nvide 980... Save yourself a couple hundred bucks, you'll be glad you did, really.
On the UPS, you probably know a lot more about it than I do, so I'll take your advice. Is this the sort of thing that any battery that says it's compatible should work, or are some batteries problematic? In my case, this is a whole lot cheaper than buying a new UPS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1TW0RT2156
Strangely, New Egg categorizes replacement UPS batteries under "Keyboards & Mice".
For the external hard drive, it is purely for backup, and most of the time won't be plugged into anything at all. If something goes horribly awry and everything plugged into the system is destroyed (electrical, malware, etc.), that won't touch a backup that isn't plugged in. Alternatively, if I have to format and reinstall everything for some reason, it would be very nice to be able to copy a drive image from a few months ago, and then add more recent files from a daily incremental backup.
Including the monitors, I'm going to spend somewhere in the ballpark of $3500. It's not like I'm cutting back to get junk somewhere else to make room for a high end video card.
Furthermore, I'm going to be gaming at a resolution of 4320x2560--and I like SSAA when I can get it. That's a whole lot of pixels, and you really do need a lot of GPU power to drive that at the settings I like. "The settings I like" doesn't mean "max everything"; I turn a lot of fancy lighting effects off because I don't think they make the game look better.
True... Though I am referring to 4k resolution based on benchmarks of that same hardware. Not a great example, one that I was able to pull quickly from the top of my head, but see Rich's review here:
I could go into in-depth technical details if you're interested but long story short: while processors and GPU's have gotten a hell of a lot better, the chipsets controlling the bus operations of the data between microprocessors has not really improved in about five years. AMD's 990fx chipset for a great example... Intel a little different story as bus operation is handled within the CPU... AMD's equivilant being the APU (A-Series all-in-one processing unit) doing the same by essentially having the chipset built into the die.
This is starting to come out longer than I wanted to explain... Nevertheless until chip-to-chip communication improves, the bottleneck of the current chipsets available on the open market aren't powerful enough to get all of that juiciness out of the CPU/GPU... Data processes on the entire board through the needed controllers, if the controllers suck, it doesn't matter how powerful the other hardware is.
An additional tid-bit all graphical data still has to be processed and sorted in the RAM/CPU stack. The bigger the stack the more that has to be calculated in precious microseconds. 12 gigs of DDR5 video memory means nothing if the bus speeds can't keep up to send the data to the be processed to the frame buffer to begin with.
While there absolutely are algorithms that are so heavily bound by the PCI Express bus that it doesn't even matter what you stick in the PCI Express slot unless it's something stupid, games are not among those algorithms. A PCI Express 3.0 x16 connection is not a meaningful bottleneck for graphics unless you're overflowing video memory and having to borrow from system memory.
Sorting draw calls is not a meaningful bottleneck unless the video drivers are doing something stupid under the hood. It's easy to collate draw calls by which program they're going to call as they come into the rendering thread, so that you only have to sort smaller sets of them in each frame. And even for those smaller sets, sorting is an O(n log n) algorithm that can be handled by its own thread if you like--and that thread will be sitting there idle most of the time if you do it that way.
The CPU never sees the frame buffer and never has any reason to know what's in it. Passing uniforms over the PCI Express bus takes minimal bandwidth. Switching samplers, textures, or programs means some host code overhead, but it's not clogging the PCI Express bus--and much of that overhead is going away with DirectX 12 and Vulkan. Passing entirely new textures to the GPU does take significant bandwidth, but that will typically be bottlenecked by the hard drive or SSD long before the PCI Express bus is a problem.
Very true on the programming level in the cases of threading and OpenCL API (Can't leave out Nvidia PhysX I suppose)... Vector divisions are incredible in what they are capable of when programmers use them properly. And since these API's are to become more common over the next few years than on the current software market, by all means You have a worthy investment on your hands.
You'll have to forgive me I'm trying to adjust my sleep schedule here so practically writing the blind and half out of my mind.
If your goal is bleeding edge, obviously it is, you're absolutely down the right path, and you'll be ahead of the curve for quite a while.
I'm not extremely familiar with software development, I'm only a computer/electronics engineer. Those guys blow my mind with that code stuff. I just feed them the components. haha.
You've still beyond a hell of a gaming rig going on in that build, that 3500 will last you nearly a decade unless some super advancement occurs (Optical or similar to RADAR waveguides gas pressured moved to miniature... Maybe lithium if it weren't so volatile?) as we are getting really close the the limitations of copper/silicon/germanium etc.
I'm actually a bit glad that more software oriented optimization is coming about, cleaner code, cleaner compilers. Without it we wouldn't have the tablets and other PID's currently on the market, particularly those that are running nearly on purely interpreted code (Python, Ruby, etc) thank you Linus. And I'm sure it will get even better... At least I can hope, W10 just like every other MS OS before it scares me... 8.x was garbage and still is. At least from a user perspective. But I do like that they are moving back to the familiar GUI.
Anyhoo... You know very well what you are doing... Curiously, why did you ask about it here? haha.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
Too bad there's no white super flower leadex platinum 750w
the only white one is :
http://geizhals.eu/super-flower-leadex-gold-white-750w-atx-2-3-sf-750f14mg-white-a1193404.html
And neither evga nor rosewill have it, the only super flower leadex platinum u can get in america is :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438057
i also don't know why they didn't put white sleeving on the cables for neither the seasonic nor the super flower ;(
It's gonna go great with the white krait, you should get some NZXT white case also so everything is in tone
between phantom 530/630, noctis 450, and source 340/440/630 there's a few different almost full white designs.
and some bitfenix/cable mod/nzxt white (24/8 pin) extension cables, now that would be awesome.
Something like these white extension cables : http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100016764%20600020182&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30
Because it works and is quiet. Quiet is under rated by most people when they build a system. I use the same CPU cooler.
I live in Texas without air conditioning. This past week high temperatures have averaged over 100F / 36 C. My room temperature averages 90 - 95 during the day. My CPU is never more than 25 C over my room temperature of 95F / 35C even under load.
My experience is the GPU needs more cooling than the CPU. My GPU on the other hand is usually 35 C over room temperature at load.
Apparently CyberPower does make their own replacement batteries for my UPS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842102185
But they charge more than double the price of the off-brand battery:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1TW0RT2156
It is a difference between 8 AH and 7.5 AH, but I don't see that as justifying double the price. A longer run time during a power outage doesn't matter if it's just a brief flash for a second or two. Even for longer outages, it usually only takes a minute or two to shut down my computer if it's in use when the power goes out, though it can take longer if Windows has decided that it is time to install a bunch of updates at shutdown. And yes, that did happen to me once during a lengthy power outage.
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First, the 6700K is probably going to be available before the locked Core i7-6700 version. But more importantly, I'm betting that the 6700K will be clocked much higher than the 6700. Look at Devil's Canyon:
http://ark.intel.com/products/80806/Intel-Core-i7-4790-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz
http://ark.intel.com/products/80807/Intel-Core-i7-4790K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_40-GHz
The locked version has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a turbo clock of 4.0 GHz. The unlocked has a base clock of 4.0 GHz and a turbo of 4.4 GHz. In the case of Sky Lake, the 6700K has a base clock of 4.0 GHz and a turbo of 4.2 GHz, while on the 6500K, they're 3.5 GHz and 3.9 GHz, respectively. I'm betting that the 6700 will have a max turbo of 3.9 GHz or 4.0 GHz or so--and definitely less than 4.2 GHz. So I'm paying for the extra clock speed and betting that Intel wouldn't set the default clocks at something that won't be reliable.
Because the air cooler is cheaper and will do everything that a CPU cooler should do (i.e., keep the CPU cool while running quietly) and will do it well. There's nothing wrong with spraying 100 W of heat off scattered through a case, especially with a liquid-cooled GPU not adding another 250 W to that. Any decent mid-tower gaming case is built to handle a lot more than that and will keep everything cool. I think that liquid cooling a CPU is ridiculous if you're not going for an unreasonably large overclock.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1TW0RT2156
Strangely, New Egg categorizes replacement UPS batteries under "Keyboards & Mice".
For the external hard drive, it is purely for backup, and most of the time won't be plugged into anything at all. If something goes horribly awry and everything plugged into the system is destroyed (electrical, malware, etc.), that won't touch a backup that isn't plugged in. Alternatively, if I have to format and reinstall everything for some reason, it would be very nice to be able to copy a drive image from a few months ago, and then add more recent files from a daily incremental backup.
That's a good price - and the biggest compatibility issue is that the batteries won't fit inside the enclosure, but will work fine otherwise. They are usually commodity items and come in pretty standard generic sizes.
Ahh, cool. Was wondering if it was a performance or preference. Think I'll wait till the FPS module for Star Citizen to come out before I work on a build. Thanks.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
Two of the monitors have all of the pixels work properly. The third has three dead pixels. The pixels are small enough that it will probably be less disruptive than the two defective pixels in one of my old monitors. But with three monitors, I can pick one of the flawless ones to be the central monitor.
It will however take a lot from your videocard with 3 of these plugged in. Heck, maybe you should consider a Titan card even though they are insanely expensive.
I'm waiting for stuff to come in stock because I'd prefer to order everything at once. Right now, the last thing I'm waiting on is a Core i7-6700K. I could test the monitors without the rest of the new computer because I can plug them into the old computer. But I can't test a new motherboard in isolation, for example, and don't want to wait an unexpectedly long time for parts to come in stock and then find out that something is dead on arrival after it's too late to RMA it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2401347
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103099
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231671
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151154
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148946
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139008
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8AX32E2465
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236894
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832588528
I gave up on waiting for a Core i7-6700K, and went with a Core i7-4790K instead. It's very nearly as good, is cheaper, and allows for cheaper memory and a cheaper motherboard.
That's definitely not the motherboard I was planning on getting. But the Radeon R9 Fury X has said it's out of stock for quite some time, but if you buy it as part of a combo deal, it said it was in stock. But it is a nice motherboard, and with a $40 combo discount, it isn't really out of line with what I was expecting to pay for a motherboard. The CPU and GPU were the parts I wanted (well, my second choice on the CPU, so it's not like I'm throwing in random junk as part of a combo deal.
I'm planning on running the memory at 1.5 V and 2133 MHz, not 1.65 V and 2400 MHz.
I think that MSI motherboard looks well enough as well, it's not setting off any warning bells at least.
Let us know how undervolting that RAM works out - I'm curious. It's not something I would have done.
If it can't run at 1.5 V, calling it legitimate DDR3 is somewhat dubious. Really, though, the question is not whether it can run at 1.5 V, but at what clock speed and timings. It's not guaranteed that I'll get it at 2133 MHz and 1.5 V; maybe I'll need 1.55 V, or maybe I'll drop the clock speed to 1866 MHz or something. But there was a promo code on it so it was nearly the same price as 1600 MHz DDR3.
I usually shop with an eye toward latency rather than clock speed, but to each their own, it's not like the RAM is going to make a significant difference in overall performance (at least versus the impact it can have on the budget).