Why post if you have no idea what you are talking about. 2x 7200 1TB drives is far cheaper and fast enough if you want media and game storage.Try buying a 1TB ssd then come back here and say its worth it.
The main advantage of an SSD is that they are shock proof and HD are not. The speed is usually far beyond what someone needs. There is never a need to put media on an SSD for simple playback and trying to place a ton of music and video files on an SSD defeats the purpose entirely, unless the device will be mobile.
This isn't about using a SSD as a media drive. Nobody has suggested that. What has been suggested is using the SSD to load games from because of the speed. It also nearly eliminates hitching caused by mechanical hard drive seek times. The overall performance of the computer will feel faster and very responsive if you load programs from the SSD instead of a mechanical drive.
Would you rather wait a full minute for a game to load, or a few seconds?
Nobody is telling you that your application of a SSD is wrong. It just isn't common. Most people don't need to wipe their OS for the life of their PC.
You should wipe your OS every few months incase of infection. Anti-virus are not perfect and a clean start every couple months goes a long way toward keeping the PC's performance high and removing root kits. Someone new to PC building will have a hell of a time removing a root kit manually.
Hitching is normally caused by vsynch issues, RAM being to full so you are using page file, or the main drive having the OS and games on it at the same time. If your OS is on a separate drive than your games, the OS can go about its business accessing all day and it will not bother the drive the game is installed on. This is also why I use 2x HD striped. Two striped drives is fast and I have very short load times.
I have 5 PC's in my house, 1 of them are older alienwares that came with 60 gig SSD for the OS and 2x hdd in raid 0 and the other a Falcon Northwest with the same build using different makes and models of storage. There is a reason you can find this build from companies such as Falcon NW, Alienware, etc. It makes boot times fast as well as most OS chores while keeping decent speed with decently large storage drives. This is a cost effective solution.
If price is no object I would have 2 SSD's of varying size, 1 60 gig for the OS, 1 256 gig for games, and then 1 2TB HDD for media.
If you get viruses so often that you need to wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything every few months, you're doing something severely wrong. Furthermore, even if you do have malware, wiping the OS drive while keeping all of your programs intact on a separate drive likely won't get rid of the malware. There's no rule that malware can only go on OS drives.
Hitching can be caused by a ton of different things, ranging from needing to recompile shaders while the game is running to trying to load too many textures into video memory at the same time to an anti-virus program in the background deciding that it's time to do a full system scan of your hard drive. It notably is not caused by vertical synchronization, however. It can be caused by running out of system memory, but that's not a major concern for gaming on a system with 8 GB of video memory.
Hitching can be caused by delays in loading things off of a hard drive while the game is running, but that can be avoided by a combination of clever programming and not needing to load excessive amounts of stuff off of a hard drive outside of loading screens. It can also be avoided by having the game on an SSD, regardless of whether the OS is on the same drive or not, as an SSD is plenty fast enough to handle all of the accesses from both.
The reason Alienware offers any hardware configuration is that it's what they've figured out that they can convince clueless customers to overpay for. Whether or not it's actually a sensible hardware configuration is less of a concern.
Should you decide to forgo the aftermarket CPU cooler and drop your PSU to a more reasonable 500-550 watt version (I would also recommend Seasonic in that wattage range but that is personal preference) you could easily pick up a better GPU such as the this:
That said I would agree that fitting a SSD in INITIALLY would be a better way to prioritize your system. Whether that's a 60GB or 120GB is up to you but having your OS and your other primary software (daily use programs) installed on the SSD will improve your quality of life over the GPU upgrade and just about anything else you could do to the system in your current budget.
Quality of life upgrades are the kind of upgrades you never knew you were missing until you finally experience them. Afterwhich you will be hard pressed to go back to a "lesser" experience.
The only real problem with buying a power supply with "too much" wattage is that it's typically a waste of money.
The 550 W version of the Rosewill Capstone is actually more expensive than the 650 W version today. Given that, which of the two would you buy? Can you find a good ~550 W power supply for substantially cheaper than the $90 for the Rosewill Capstone 650 W? Some days you can. I don't see any today.
The only real problem with buying a power supply with "too much" wattage is that it's typically a waste of money.
The 550 W version of the Rosewill Capstone is actually more expensive than the 650 W version today. Given that, which of the two would you buy? Can you find a good ~550 W power supply for substantially cheaper than the $90 for the Rosewill Capstone 650 W? Some days you can. I don't see any today.
Same price before rebate, and that's very much high end quality.
I really hope you do this type of work for a living because the shear amount of free advice you give people on this forum is pretty amazing and the technical help with random questions.
I'd go with higher PSU (700ish) in case later you want to upgrade to a better GPU from a newer (or at the moment unreleased) generation of cards, sure it's "money squandered" but it still comes out cheaper than replacing the PSU later. My brother did this and while the results were a bit weird the processor the computer had then was one from a crappier generation, an i5 should be able to handle GPUs from the next 2-3 years fairly easily and when time comes round to dick around with your rig you can get one of those GPUs on the cheap if you lack the money to go for a full upgrade (by the sounds of things you're gonna be upgrading to a new rig right around when CPUs go into single digits).
You should wipe your OS every few months incase of infection. Anti-virus are not perfect and a clean start every couple months goes a long way toward keeping the PC's performance high and removing root kits. Someone new to PC building will have a hell of a time removing a root kit manually.
Hitching is normally caused by vsynch issues, RAM being to full so you are using page file, or the main drive having the OS and games on it at the same time. If your OS is on a separate drive than your games, the OS can go about its business accessing all day and it will not bother the drive the game is installed on. This is also why I use 2x HD striped. Two striped drives is fast and I have very short load times.
I have 5 PC's in my house, 1 of them are older alienwares that came with 60 gig SSD for the OS and 2x hdd in raid 0 and the other a Falcon Northwest with the same build using different makes and models of storage. There is a reason you can find this build from companies such as Falcon NW, Alienware, etc. It makes boot times fast as well as most OS chores while keeping decent speed with decently large storage drives. This is a cost effective solution.
If price is no object I would have 2 SSD's of varying size, 1 60 gig for the OS, 1 256 gig for games, and then 1 2TB HDD for media.
Your paranoia over viruses is not shared by most people.
Viruses don't just infect a PC by themselves. You have to have a vulnerability which gets exploited. Most of the time, this is through the browser. Sometimes, it is through stupidity of running downloaded programs from unreliable sources. Every once in a great while, someone finds a vulnerability in Windows and spreads a virus without users interacting with it. This hasn't happened since XP was the most popular OS, if I remember correctly.
Raid 0 on mechanical drives is pointless for gaming. Most reads while gaming are so small that the data blocks being read are bigger than the reads themselves. SSD manufacturers like to brag about their 4kb read speeds because that is the average read when gaming. The reason you see that setup often on manufacturers like Alienware is because it makes them more money and their target market of people who are not well-educated about their computers will buy it.
I would drop the aftermarket CPU cooler. They used to be useful, but decent case airflow with the stock cooler is fine. I have my AMD FX-4100 overclocked to 4.15 GHz on the stock fan and the temperatures don't seem to go more than 30F over room temperature.
Buy case fans if you don't already have them or if the ones which come with your case are junk. You will need good airflow no matter what.
I am pretty much done argueing with you guys. I am a systems administrator and my qualifications are not basic. I am not bragging. I am just attempting to show that I know what I am talking about.
Virus
Every should always consider them. I have a BS in cybersecurity and its a high paying field for a reason. When China is hacking our power grid and the DoD is saying to not use any application that uses Java, there is a problem and you should pay attention.
Even with the basics, how many people are being compromised by keyloggers? With every mmo I play, people complain about accounts being stolen and I assure you that not every case of this is on the developers end. Every single time you download something, click on a link in your email, or click on a link in google, you are prone to infection.
I just do not get why people think "oh virus's wont happen to me". If sony can be hit. If the pentagon can be hit. You can be hit. The difference is that when you are hit, you are the one screwed. When sony is hit, they will appologize and nothing will come of it. You will end up with new debt that you have to pay back.
Raid 0
This does increase load times on most games at a fraction of the cost of an SSD. You do not need the speeds of an SSD simply to play games. Someone mentioned needing an SSD to stop hitching due to HDD seek speeds being to slow and this is fallacy. You may get hitching when an anti-virus or some other such program is running in the background or when you have your OS and the same HDD as the games you are playing. A 7200 rpm drive is never going to be the cause of hitching unless the HDD is simply bad.
SSD are primarily for boot drives or when you need a shock proof build. Spending a large chunk of change on a capacity SSD simply for games is a mistake, in my opinion. The only significant increase in performance for gaming is load times. You can buy a 60 gig SSD to use as a boot drive for around 70$ and save the 130$ more it would cost to buy a 256 gig SSD. Now you put that 130 saved dollars into a video card. Trust me, 130$ more spent on a video card goes a long way.
for gaming
Video Card - (MOBO CPU) - RAM - Storage
This is how I choose to spend my money. A good Mobo goes a long way toward upgrading, sli or xfire, etc. Unless you buy a super cheap CPU it isnt likely to be the bottleneck, the video card will be. I would get no less than 8 gig of ram at 1333, unless you are building an APU based system then I would get the fastest ram i could find. Storage is the least important thing due to it being cheap. Again I will say it, a 7200 rpm HDD will not have a negative effect on Frames Per Second nor Graphics Quality. An HDD will only have an effect on load times. If you are so damn impatient that you cant wait the extra 5 seconds to load a game that you are willing to sacrifice 7950 quality graphics for a 7850 solution, well thats your prerogative.
I am pretty much done argueing with you guys. I am a systems administrator and my qualifications are not basic. I am not bragging. I am just attempting to show that I know what I am talking about.
Virus
Every should always consider them. I have a BS in cybersecurity and its a high paying field for a reason. When China is hacking our power grid and the DoD is saying to not use any application that uses Java, there is a problem and you should pay attention.
Even with the basics, how many people are being compromised by keyloggers? With every mmo I play, people complain about accounts being stolen and I assure you that not every case of this is on the developers end. Every single time you download something, click on a link in your email, or click on a link in google, you are prone to infection.
I just do not get why people think "oh virus's wont happen to me". If sony can be hit. If the pentagon can be hit. You can be hit. The difference is that when you are hit, you are the one screwed. When sony is hit, they will appologize and nothing will come of it. You will end up with new debt that you have to pay back.
Raid 0
This does increase load times on most games at a fraction of the cost of an SSD. You do not need the speeds of an SSD simply to play games. Someone mentioned needing an SSD to stop hitching due to HDD seek speeds being to slow and this is fallacy. You may get hitching when an anti-virus or some other such program is running in the background or when you have your OS and the same HDD as the games you are playing. A 7200 rpm drive is never going to be the cause of hitching unless the HDD is simply bad.
SSD are primarily for boot drives or when you need a shock proof build. Spending a large chunk of change on a capacity SSD simply for games is a mistake, in my opinion. The only significant increase in performance for gaming is load times. You can buy a 60 gig SSD to use as a boot drive for around 70$ and save the 130$ more it would cost to buy a 256 gig SSD. Now you put that 130 saved dollars into a video card. Trust me, 130$ more spent on a video card goes a long way.
for gaming
Video Card - (MOBO CPU) - RAM - Storage
This is how I choose to spend my money. A good Mobo goes a long way toward upgrading, sli or xfire, etc. Unless you buy a super cheap CPU it isnt likely to be the bottleneck, the video card will be. I would get no less than 8 gig of ram at 1333, unless you are building an APU based system then I would get the fastest ram i could find. Storage is the least important thing due to it being cheap. Again I will say it, a 7200 rpm HDD will not have a negative effect on Frames Per Second nor Graphics Quality. An HDD will only have an effect on load times. If you are so damn impatient that you cant wait the extra 5 seconds to load a game that you are willing to sacrifice 7950 quality graphics for a 7850 solution, well thats your prerogative.
While it is good to take some precautions on malware, your suggested precaution of wiping the OS drive every few months won't do much good. If you've got malware that doesn't attach itself exclusively to the OS, and you wipe the OS while leaving everything else intact, then as soon as you reinstall the OS, you've still got malware. If you've got a keylogger, it doesn't take months for your passwords to get stolen.
The reason hard drives are slow is that whenever you have to stop reading or writing in one place to do so in another, you have to wait for the hard drive platter and head to physically move to the right place before you can continue. This takes on the order of 10 ms. Do it hundreds or thousands of times in a row and you get to sit there and wait a while. RAID 0 doesn't help with this at all, as waiting for two hard drive platters and two hard drive heads to physically move to the right spot isn't any faster than one. RAID 0 only helps with sequential access speeds, but even a single hard drive is plenty fast enough there for most purposes.
You do realize that there are SSD capacities between 60 and 256 GB, don't you? Such as what I recommended above, of around 120 GB.
Also, 1600 MHz memory costs basically the same as 1333 MHz these days, and even 1866 MHz isn't always much of a price premium. If faster memory is the same price as slower, you might as well get faster.
What's the difference between Radeon HD 7950 and 7850 quality graphics? They're the same architecture, with the same features and API compliance. For most games, the answer is basically nothing at all outside of outlandishly high monitor resolutions, as you can't turn things up past max settings. Sometimes a 7950 will let you use a higher degree of SSAA or enable some very computationally intensive lighting effect. Very high frame rates will tend to decrease your display latency a bit, as there will be less time between when the video card sends a new frame to the monitor and when the most recent frame was completed, but that's a pretty small effect.
A couple of minutes per day of playing games rather than staring at loading screens, on the other hand? That's very noticeable, and that's what an SSD may deliver, especially if you have to zone a lot in games that you play.
I am pretty much done argueing with you guys. I am a systems administrator and my qualifications are not basic. I am not bragging. I am just attempting to show that I know what I am talking about.
Virus
Every should always consider them. I have a BS in cybersecurity and its a high paying field for a reason. When China is hacking our power grid and the DoD is saying to not use any application that uses Java, there is a problem and you should pay attention.
Even with the basics, how many people are being compromised by keyloggers? With every mmo I play, people complain about accounts being stolen and I assure you that not every case of this is on the developers end. Every single time you download something, click on a link in your email, or click on a link in google, you are prone to infection.
I just do not get why people think "oh virus's wont happen to me". If sony can be hit. If the pentagon can be hit. You can be hit. The difference is that when you are hit, you are the one screwed. When sony is hit, they will appologize and nothing will come of it. You will end up with new debt that you have to pay back.
Raid 0
This does increase load times on most games at a fraction of the cost of an SSD. You do not need the speeds of an SSD simply to play games. Someone mentioned needing an SSD to stop hitching due to HDD seek speeds being to slow and this is fallacy. You may get hitching when an anti-virus or some other such program is running in the background or when you have your OS and the same HDD as the games you are playing. A 7200 rpm drive is never going to be the cause of hitching unless the HDD is simply bad.
SSD are primarily for boot drives or when you need a shock proof build. Spending a large chunk of change on a capacity SSD simply for games is a mistake, in my opinion. The only significant increase in performance for gaming is load times. You can buy a 60 gig SSD to use as a boot drive for around 70$ and save the 130$ more it would cost to buy a 256 gig SSD. Now you put that 130 saved dollars into a video card. Trust me, 130$ more spent on a video card goes a long way.
for gaming
Video Card - (MOBO CPU) - RAM - Storage
This is how I choose to spend my money. A good Mobo goes a long way toward upgrading, sli or xfire, etc. Unless you buy a super cheap CPU it isnt likely to be the bottleneck, the video card will be. I would get no less than 8 gig of ram at 1333, unless you are building an APU based system then I would get the fastest ram i could find. Storage is the least important thing due to it being cheap. Again I will say it, a 7200 rpm HDD will not have a negative effect on Frames Per Second nor Graphics Quality. An HDD will only have an effect on load times. If you are so damn impatient that you cant wait the extra 5 seconds to load a game that you are willing to sacrifice 7950 quality graphics for a 7850 solution, well thats your prerogative.
While it is good to take some precautions on malware, your suggested precaution of wiping the OS drive every few months won't do much good. If you've got malware that doesn't attach itself exclusively to the OS, and you wipe the OS while leaving everything else intact, then as soon as you reinstall the OS, you've still got malware. If you've got a keylogger, it doesn't take months for your passwords to get stolen.
The reason hard drives are slow is that whenever you have to stop reading or writing in one place to do so in another, you have to wait for the hard drive platter and head to physically move to the right place before you can continue. This takes on the order of 10 ms. Do it hundreds or thousands of times in a row and you get to sit there and wait a while. RAID 0 doesn't help with this at all, as waiting for two hard drive platters and two hard drive heads to physically move to the right spot isn't any faster than one. RAID 0 only helps with sequential access speeds, but even a single hard drive is plenty fast enough there for most purposes.
You do realize that there are SSD capacities between 60 and 256 GB, don't you? Such as what I recommended above, of around 120 GB.
Also, 1600 MHz memory costs basically the same as 1333 MHz these days, and even 1866 MHz isn't always much of a price premium. If faster memory is the same price as slower, you might as well get faster.
What's the difference between Radeon HD 7950 and 7850 quality graphics? They're the same architecture, with the same features and API compliance. For most games, the answer is basically nothing at all outside of outlandishly high monitor resolutions, as you can't turn things up past max settings. Sometimes a 7950 will let you use a higher degree of SSAA or enable some very computationally intensive lighting effect. Very high frame rates will tend to decrease your display latency a bit, as there will be less time between when the video card sends a new frame to the monitor and when the most recent frame was completed, but that's a pretty small effect.
A couple of minutes per day of playing games rather than staring at loading screens, on the other hand? That's very noticeable, and that's what an SSD may deliver, especially if you have to zone a lot in games that you play.
rootkits which are the nastiest to remove attach itself to the OS or the MBR. Most other malware is easy to remove. So instead of taking a scalpel to windows 7, which will end badly for most users, its much easier and faster to do a fresh install. Why do you think most businesses install fresh images. It is because its easier to start over than trouble shoot.
My steam archive alone almost fills up 100 gig so I dont see a point of having a drive under 256 for game storage. Its all about how much you need. You also need to pay attention to the speed of memory and how many slots they fill. Any memory over 1333 is actually OC'd and I have come acrossed problems when you try and fill every dimm with OC'd memory. You will not notice a difference using 1333 or 1600 unless you are using an APU.
A 7950 will allow a much higher res with respectable frame rates with pretty much everything turned on. I usually skip a generation when it comes to video cards so I would prefer to have a higher end card so that way it performs well when the next gen of games are released. When the next gen cards release I buy another 7950 at discount and now I have xfire.
Its odd that someone would complain about hitching then the next second say a 7850 is basically the same as a 7950. Go to andand or toms and post saying that nonsense and watch how fast you get put in your place.
You complain about a couple minutes of load times. This is pretty absurd. With my raid zero which cost 25% of what a 256gig SSD costs while giving me 4TB of storage, i load most games in 5-10 seconds. I dont see how this is a problem...
While it is good to take some precautions on malware, your suggested precaution of wiping the OS drive every few months won't do much good. If you've got malware that doesn't attach itself exclusively to the OS, and you wipe the OS while leaving everything else intact, then as soon as you reinstall the OS, you've still got malware. If you've got a keylogger, it doesn't take months for your passwords to get stolen.
The reason hard drives are slow is that whenever you have to stop reading or writing in one place to do so in another, you have to wait for the hard drive platter and head to physically move to the right place before you can continue. This takes on the order of 10 ms. Do it hundreds or thousands of times in a row and you get to sit there and wait a while. RAID 0 doesn't help with this at all, as waiting for two hard drive platters and two hard drive heads to physically move to the right spot isn't any faster than one. RAID 0 only helps with sequential access speeds, but even a single hard drive is plenty fast enough there for most purposes.
You do realize that there are SSD capacities between 60 and 256 GB, don't you? Such as what I recommended above, of around 120 GB.
Also, 1600 MHz memory costs basically the same as 1333 MHz these days, and even 1866 MHz isn't always much of a price premium. If faster memory is the same price as slower, you might as well get faster.
What's the difference between Radeon HD 7950 and 7850 quality graphics? They're the same architecture, with the same features and API compliance. For most games, the answer is basically nothing at all outside of outlandishly high monitor resolutions, as you can't turn things up past max settings. Sometimes a 7950 will let you use a higher degree of SSAA or enable some very computationally intensive lighting effect. Very high frame rates will tend to decrease your display latency a bit, as there will be less time between when the video card sends a new frame to the monitor and when the most recent frame was completed, but that's a pretty small effect.
A couple of minutes per day of playing games rather than staring at loading screens, on the other hand? That's very noticeable, and that's what an SSD may deliver, especially if you have to zone a lot in games that you play.
rootkits which are the nastiest to remove attach itself to the OS or the MBR. Most other malware is easy to remove. So instead of taking a scalpel to windows 7, which will end badly for most users, its much easier and faster to do a fresh install. Why do you think most businesses install fresh images. It is because its easier to start over than trouble shoot.
My steam archive alone almost fills up 100 gig so I dont see a point of having a drive under 256 for game storage. Its all about how much you need. You also need to pay attention to the speed of memory and how many slots they fill. Any memory over 1333 is actually OC'd and I have come acrossed problems when you try and fill every dimm with OC'd memory. You will not notice a difference using 1333 or 1600 unless you are using an APU.
A 7950 will allow a much higher res with respectable frame rates with pretty much everything turned on. I usually skip a generation when it comes to video cards so I would prefer to have a higher end card so that way it performs well when the next gen of games are released. When the next gen cards release I buy another 7950 at discount and now I have xfire.
Its odd that someone would complain about hitching then the next second say a 7850 is basically the same as a 7950. Go to andand or toms and post saying that nonsense and watch how fast you get put in your place.
You complain about a couple minutes of load times. This is pretty absurd. With my raid zero which cost 25% of what a 256gig SSD costs while giving me 4TB of storage, i load most games in 5-10 seconds. I dont see how this is a problem...
Larger businesses (loosely, anything big enough to have a lot of computers on a network, as opposed to only one or two) commonly have data stored elsewhere on a network rather than on a local system, so wiping the local hard drive doesn't mean losing data. The image that you reinstall from probably isn't a clean copy of Windows, either, but rather, has the desired programs already on it. Business computers tend not to have a bunch of games installed, either.
If you have 100 GB of games installed on your system, you probably don't play them all equally. More likely, there are some games there that you haven't played in quite a while, and one that you've played frequently lately. With a 120 GB SSD, you pick a few games that you've been playing a lot lately and put them on the SSD, and can move the others to a hard drive.
It's not two minutes of extra loading time all at once. 5-10 seconds every single time you zone adds up.
I'm not saying that a 7850 is the same as a 7950. For people who want a very high monitor resolution or really insist on max, max settings, there is a difference. But if all you want is high settings at 1920x1080? Are there any games at all where a 7850 wouldn't be able to deliver 60 frames per second there, without the problem being a bottleneck elsewhere?
The DDR3 JEDEC specification specifies 1066, 1333, 1600, 1866, and 2133 MHz speeds. It might also have 800 MHz; I'm not sure about that last one, but it would be kind of pointless considering that essentially all DDR3 chips can run at 1066 MHz just fine unless they're completely defective and don't run at all. Memory fabs will sell chips binned for 2133 MHz as their stock speed, too. Well, at least Micron does; I'm not sure about Samsung or Hynix, though if Micron can, then they probably do, too. So memory clocked as high as 2133 MHz isn't necessarily overclocked. Many of AMD's processors have a memory controller rated at 1866 MHz, including their entire FX line, so you're not overclocking that, either unless you go over 1866 MHz. Socket AM3+ motherboards generally officially support 1866 MHz memory bus speeds, too, for that reason.
So you mean to tell me you wipe the HDD every couple months? Then you reinstall and download everything again? Thats masochism at its finest. Also rootkits aren't as terrible to remove as before, there are several specific toolkits to kill them. Either way if you're sure you have a virus, malware or rootkit then fine wipe the drives. However if your system is running optimal and you've not noticed any browser, latency or packet issues then likely you're fine. The most homewrecking of malware is a keylogger and honestly you're screwed within the first week.
You can buy 1333 ram for $1-3 less than 1600.. so why not just get the 1600?
A 7850 at 1080 will run the same as a 7950 at 1080 in most cases. Now 7850 vs 7950 at 1440 is another story. Most people play at 1080 and don't need anything more than a 7870. This is all of course assuming the average gamer. Special needs are something that are of a different matter.
As for a 4TB raid setup costing 25% of a 256 SSD.. this never has happened even when 256 was premium price unless you have some bargain bin HDD's.
Its an SSD not an HDD and it takes me 2-3 minutes to format and install an image. I dont see that as masochistic. Its a boot drive so there is zero data loss, just the OS.
As far as the ram is concerned i prefer extremely low latency 1333. There will be a premium for 7-7-7 latency 1600 if you can even find it. WIth some testing I noticed my 1090T performs much better with lower latency ram than higher clock speeds.
Larger businesses (loosely, anything big enough to have a lot of computers on a network, as opposed to only one or two) commonly have data stored elsewhere on a network rather than on a local system, so wiping the local hard drive doesn't mean losing data. The image that you reinstall from probably isn't a clean copy of Windows, either, but rather, has the desired programs already on it. Business computers tend not to have a bunch of games installed, either.
Which is why I have a boot drive(ssd) and a storage drive. So like you say, wiping the local hard drive doesnt mean losing data. I create an image right after a fresh install with whatever updates that are needed.
So you mean to tell me you wipe the HDD every couple months? Then you reinstall and download everything again? Thats masochism at its finest. Also rootkits aren't as terrible to remove as before, there are several specific toolkits to kill them. Either way if you're sure you have a virus, malware or rootkit then fine wipe the drives. However if your system is running optimal and you've not noticed any browser, latency or packet issues then likely you're fine. The most homewrecking of malware is a keylogger and honestly you're screwed within the first week.
You can buy 1333 ram for $1-3 less than 1600.. so why not just get the 1600?
A 7850 at 1080 will run the same as a 7950 at 1080 in most cases. Now 7850 vs 7950 at 1440 is another story. Most people play at 1080 and don't need anything more than a 7870. This is all of course assuming the average gamer. Special needs are something that are of a different matter.
As for a 4TB raid setup costing 25% of a 256 SSD.. this never has happened even when 256 was premium price unless you have some bargain bin HDD's.
Its an SSD not an HDD and it takes me 2-3 minutes to format and install an image. I dont see that as masochistic. Its a boot drive so there is zero data loss, just the OS.
As far as the ram is concerned i prefer extremely low latency 1333. There will be a premium for 7-7-7 latency 1600 if you can even find it. WIth some testing I noticed my 1090T performs much better with lower latency ram than higher clock speeds.
You do realize that memory timings are in numbers of clock cycles don't you? The real world latency (in nanoseconds) of 1066 MHz CAS 8 would be the same as 1333 MHz CAS 10, 1600 MHz CAS 12, 1866 MHz CAS 14, or 2133 MHZ CAS 16. 2133 MHz CAS 9 is lower real-world latency than 1600 MHz CAS 7--and likely to be cheaper, too. Replace CAS by any other memory timing and the same is still true.
Even so, the memory latency due to waiting for a memory module to do its thing is a relatively small fraction of total memory latency, so tighter memory timings only save you a nanosecond or two out of total memory latency around 50 or 60 ns. In extreme corner cases, that could improve overall performance by a few percentage points, though the typical benefit would be far shy of that.
Originally posted by g0m0rrah Which is why I have a boot drive(ssd) and a storage drive. So like you say, wiping the local hard drive doesnt mean losing data. I create an image right after a fresh install with whatever updates that are needed.
I thought you were done arguing - because most of us were done reading your posts maybe 2 or 3 in, when it became evident that you didn't learn anything with your BS degrees, workforce experience, and certifications.
Anyway, to answer one particular question from the OP:
Thermal compound: I would not spend a lot of money on this - like more than a token $2-3. Most aftermarket heat sinks will come with a little tube of the stuff, and that little tube is enough to install 4-5 CPU's with. The difference in performance between the most expensive colloidal silver compound, regular old zinc-based paste and common toothpaste from your bathroom (which I don't recommend, but does work), is maybe 3-4F during extreme overclocking and nearly unnoticeable under stock conditions.
One thing to be careful of: many coolers will come with a thermal pad, and stock coolers are notorious for it. This thermal pad works well enough, once. You can't reuse it ever. If you pull the heat sink off later, it's not any good. Thermal interface material, be it the paste or pads, has to be cleaned off and re-installed fresh each time you re-seat the heat sink. For your own build, that shouldn't be that often, and hopefully it is only once, but you never know. Once those thermal pads have been used, they tend to harden and can be difficult to clean up, so if you have the choice, I'd use some thermal paste, but the pad will work well enough if you don't have any off hand.
Thermal compound installs like butter on toast, not like peanut butter on PB&J: A very thin layer, just enough to cover the entire mating surface of the CPU heat spreader with the bottom of the heat sink: You don't want to goop too much of it on there and have it squish out the sides when you clamp down the heat sink (it risks running down over the side of the CPU and getting into the socket, and then Really Bad Things happen), but you have to make sure the entire surface is covered. A very thin amount is all it takes - as thin as you can spread it with your fingertip or a tissue.
PS: I like the second build a lot. A 6300FX with a 7850 makes for a smart mid-range gaming system that will have some legs for a few years.
I'm not going to disagree with what Ridelynn just said, but I'll expand on it in a different direction.
Heatsinks and heatspreaders tend to be mostly made of aluminum (best heat conductor that is cheap) and/or copper (best heat conductor that isn't unreasonably expensive). The idea is that you put the base of the heatsink up against the heatspreader built into the CPU and then heat conducts from the latter to the former to get it away from the CPU. Metal-on-metal contact here is good.
The problem is that, at an atomic scale, neither the heatsink nor the heatspreader are all that smooth. This means that they wouldn't have that much direct contact. Instead, you'd have tiny air bubbles between them, and much of the heat would have to go through air bubbles to get away from the CPU. This is bad, because air is a terrible conductor of heat--about four orders of magnitude worse than aluminum or copper.
Enter thermal paste. The idea is that you put a (rather viscous) liquid between the heatspreader and the heatsink. When you press them together, thermal paste fills a lot of the tiny holes instead of air. This is good, because thermal paste conducts heat about two orders of magnitude better than air.
Unless, of course, you use way too much of it and have a thick layer of thermal paste separating the heatsink from the heatspreader. This is bad, because thermal paste conducts heat about two orders of magnitude worse than aluminum or copper. You want to use enough to squeeze out a lot of air, but no more than that. A small dot is all it takes, and if pressing the heatsink and heatspreader together and smearing them risks squeezing thermal paste out the sides of the crack between them, then you've used way too much.
To make sure I'm clear here, an order of magnitude means a factor of ten. That thermal paste conducts heat two orders of magnitude better than air means it conducts heat about 100 times as well as air. This is a rough approximation, and doesn't mean a factor of 100 as opposed to 99; the precise value will vary by what thermal paste you use. But it will be a lot more than 10 and a lot less than 1000. If one thermal paste conducts heat twice as well as another, that's not a big deal; what is a big deal is that they're both a lot better than air and a lot worse than aluminum or copper.
I think that will have me set up great for a good long time, hopefully.
Again I just want to let you guys know how much I appreciate all of your advice and time. Too bad I can't have one of you here to help me while I assemble it in about 3 days. Wish me luck.
Just to question the philosophy. Army of Socrates.
Do you download a lot of media files? Mechanical hard drives are not good for gaming performance. I highly suggest using a solid state drive for your OS and games. Keep the mechanical drive in there for storing large media files and other things which don't require a high performance drive. If you only use the computer for gaming and not media storage, you can drop the mechanical drive from the part list.
I have seen decent 120 GB OCZ SSDs for around $100 and 240 GB drives for $200 or so.
I suggest a 60+ gig solid state drive to put your OS on. I would not install games on it like this guy says. The point of having the OS on the ssd is so that you can, at a moments notice, wipe the ssd and install an OS without losing your data.
I would buy 2x 1 TB hard drives and stripe them. Being new you can use Microsofts software to stripe instead of using hardware raid. This gives you:
1. Fast SSD for the OS
2. The ability to format the OS if something beyond your skill level shits itself
3. Larger storage for games and media
4. A striped storage array for better than normal hard disk speeds
Now when you make back ups you can back up to 1 external disk and the OS isnt backed up. IMO there is no need to backup the OS on a PC when its so easy to do a fresh install.
I also suggest that you spend extra on a solid case. With a good case you dont really have to buy a new case when you upgrade. I have an FT02 and when a new interface comes out (like usb3 did), you can simply buy the new interface from the cases manufacturer. I got an FT02 because I like its 3 180mm intake fans, because positive pressure is good. Its a large case so its easy to work in. I purchased a closed loop cooler for my proc as I didnt really care to water cool more than it, but it does have room for a nice water cooling system. I also like that the mobo is rotated taking stress off the pcie slots.
Seems you buy SSD for different reasons than everybody else buys SSDs.
I don't understand your case setup. FT02 is the aircooling case of excellence, yet you have chosen closed loop cooling. Of the 3 choices, big air heatsink, closed loop, "real" watercooling, seems to me you chose the worst one for the case you use. FT02 doesn't have alot of spaces to vent outtake. It has a single 120 mm fan outtake, and it is generally considered a bad idea do block that with a radiator. Which is why people building open watercooling, usually mod the case to have the radiator in the bottom of the case.
Most will choose a big heatsink with 2 fans as the case designs begs for, or another case entirely.
I suggest you start reading up on sites like Tom's Hardware and comparing your newly found knowledge to the products available on Tiger Direct or Newegg. Get some visual references for how you want your computer to end up. Build wishlists of complete computers with all the components, making sure you're not bottlenecking your machine or going over/under your budget. This is how I started.
Comments
If you get viruses so often that you need to wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything every few months, you're doing something severely wrong. Furthermore, even if you do have malware, wiping the OS drive while keeping all of your programs intact on a separate drive likely won't get rid of the malware. There's no rule that malware can only go on OS drives.
Hitching can be caused by a ton of different things, ranging from needing to recompile shaders while the game is running to trying to load too many textures into video memory at the same time to an anti-virus program in the background deciding that it's time to do a full system scan of your hard drive. It notably is not caused by vertical synchronization, however. It can be caused by running out of system memory, but that's not a major concern for gaming on a system with 8 GB of video memory.
Hitching can be caused by delays in loading things off of a hard drive while the game is running, but that can be avoided by a combination of clever programming and not needing to load excessive amounts of stuff off of a hard drive outside of loading screens. It can also be avoided by having the game on an SSD, regardless of whether the OS is on the same drive or not, as an SSD is plenty fast enough to handle all of the accesses from both.
The reason Alienware offers any hardware configuration is that it's what they've figured out that they can convince clueless customers to overpay for. Whether or not it's actually a sensible hardware configuration is less of a concern.
Should you decide to forgo the aftermarket CPU cooler and drop your PSU to a more reasonable 500-550 watt version (I would also recommend Seasonic in that wattage range but that is personal preference) you could easily pick up a better GPU such as the this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202025
That said I would agree that fitting a SSD in INITIALLY would be a better way to prioritize your system. Whether that's a 60GB or 120GB is up to you but having your OS and your other primary software (daily use programs) installed on the SSD will improve your quality of life over the GPU upgrade and just about anything else you could do to the system in your current budget.
Quality of life upgrades are the kind of upgrades you never knew you were missing until you finally experience them. Afterwhich you will be hard pressed to go back to a "lesser" experience.
The only real problem with buying a power supply with "too much" wattage is that it's typically a waste of money.
The 550 W version of the Rosewill Capstone is actually more expensive than the 650 W version today. Given that, which of the two would you buy? Can you find a good ~550 W power supply for substantially cheaper than the $90 for the Rosewill Capstone 650 W? Some days you can. I don't see any today.
That said, there is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182271
Same price before rebate, and that's very much high end quality.
I really hope you do this type of work for a living because the shear amount of free advice you give people on this forum is pretty amazing and the technical help with random questions.
I am pretty much done argueing with you guys. I am a systems administrator and my qualifications are not basic. I am not bragging. I am just attempting to show that I know what I am talking about.
Virus
Every should always consider them. I have a BS in cybersecurity and its a high paying field for a reason. When China is hacking our power grid and the DoD is saying to not use any application that uses Java, there is a problem and you should pay attention.
Even with the basics, how many people are being compromised by keyloggers? With every mmo I play, people complain about accounts being stolen and I assure you that not every case of this is on the developers end. Every single time you download something, click on a link in your email, or click on a link in google, you are prone to infection.
I just do not get why people think "oh virus's wont happen to me". If sony can be hit. If the pentagon can be hit. You can be hit. The difference is that when you are hit, you are the one screwed. When sony is hit, they will appologize and nothing will come of it. You will end up with new debt that you have to pay back.
Raid 0
This does increase load times on most games at a fraction of the cost of an SSD. You do not need the speeds of an SSD simply to play games. Someone mentioned needing an SSD to stop hitching due to HDD seek speeds being to slow and this is fallacy. You may get hitching when an anti-virus or some other such program is running in the background or when you have your OS and the same HDD as the games you are playing. A 7200 rpm drive is never going to be the cause of hitching unless the HDD is simply bad.
SSD are primarily for boot drives or when you need a shock proof build. Spending a large chunk of change on a capacity SSD simply for games is a mistake, in my opinion. The only significant increase in performance for gaming is load times. You can buy a 60 gig SSD to use as a boot drive for around 70$ and save the 130$ more it would cost to buy a 256 gig SSD. Now you put that 130 saved dollars into a video card. Trust me, 130$ more spent on a video card goes a long way.
for gaming
Video Card - (MOBO CPU) - RAM - Storage
This is how I choose to spend my money. A good Mobo goes a long way toward upgrading, sli or xfire, etc. Unless you buy a super cheap CPU it isnt likely to be the bottleneck, the video card will be. I would get no less than 8 gig of ram at 1333, unless you are building an APU based system then I would get the fastest ram i could find. Storage is the least important thing due to it being cheap. Again I will say it, a 7200 rpm HDD will not have a negative effect on Frames Per Second nor Graphics Quality. An HDD will only have an effect on load times. If you are so damn impatient that you cant wait the extra 5 seconds to load a game that you are willing to sacrifice 7950 quality graphics for a 7850 solution, well thats your prerogative.
While it is good to take some precautions on malware, your suggested precaution of wiping the OS drive every few months won't do much good. If you've got malware that doesn't attach itself exclusively to the OS, and you wipe the OS while leaving everything else intact, then as soon as you reinstall the OS, you've still got malware. If you've got a keylogger, it doesn't take months for your passwords to get stolen.
The reason hard drives are slow is that whenever you have to stop reading or writing in one place to do so in another, you have to wait for the hard drive platter and head to physically move to the right place before you can continue. This takes on the order of 10 ms. Do it hundreds or thousands of times in a row and you get to sit there and wait a while. RAID 0 doesn't help with this at all, as waiting for two hard drive platters and two hard drive heads to physically move to the right spot isn't any faster than one. RAID 0 only helps with sequential access speeds, but even a single hard drive is plenty fast enough there for most purposes.
You do realize that there are SSD capacities between 60 and 256 GB, don't you? Such as what I recommended above, of around 120 GB.
Also, 1600 MHz memory costs basically the same as 1333 MHz these days, and even 1866 MHz isn't always much of a price premium. If faster memory is the same price as slower, you might as well get faster.
What's the difference between Radeon HD 7950 and 7850 quality graphics? They're the same architecture, with the same features and API compliance. For most games, the answer is basically nothing at all outside of outlandishly high monitor resolutions, as you can't turn things up past max settings. Sometimes a 7950 will let you use a higher degree of SSAA or enable some very computationally intensive lighting effect. Very high frame rates will tend to decrease your display latency a bit, as there will be less time between when the video card sends a new frame to the monitor and when the most recent frame was completed, but that's a pretty small effect.
A couple of minutes per day of playing games rather than staring at loading screens, on the other hand? That's very noticeable, and that's what an SSD may deliver, especially if you have to zone a lot in games that you play.
rootkits which are the nastiest to remove attach itself to the OS or the MBR. Most other malware is easy to remove. So instead of taking a scalpel to windows 7, which will end badly for most users, its much easier and faster to do a fresh install. Why do you think most businesses install fresh images. It is because its easier to start over than trouble shoot.
My steam archive alone almost fills up 100 gig so I dont see a point of having a drive under 256 for game storage. Its all about how much you need. You also need to pay attention to the speed of memory and how many slots they fill. Any memory over 1333 is actually OC'd and I have come acrossed problems when you try and fill every dimm with OC'd memory. You will not notice a difference using 1333 or 1600 unless you are using an APU.
A 7950 will allow a much higher res with respectable frame rates with pretty much everything turned on. I usually skip a generation when it comes to video cards so I would prefer to have a higher end card so that way it performs well when the next gen of games are released. When the next gen cards release I buy another 7950 at discount and now I have xfire.
Its odd that someone would complain about hitching then the next second say a 7850 is basically the same as a 7950. Go to andand or toms and post saying that nonsense and watch how fast you get put in your place.
You complain about a couple minutes of load times. This is pretty absurd. With my raid zero which cost 25% of what a 256gig SSD costs while giving me 4TB of storage, i load most games in 5-10 seconds. I dont see how this is a problem...
Larger businesses (loosely, anything big enough to have a lot of computers on a network, as opposed to only one or two) commonly have data stored elsewhere on a network rather than on a local system, so wiping the local hard drive doesn't mean losing data. The image that you reinstall from probably isn't a clean copy of Windows, either, but rather, has the desired programs already on it. Business computers tend not to have a bunch of games installed, either.
If you have 100 GB of games installed on your system, you probably don't play them all equally. More likely, there are some games there that you haven't played in quite a while, and one that you've played frequently lately. With a 120 GB SSD, you pick a few games that you've been playing a lot lately and put them on the SSD, and can move the others to a hard drive.
It's not two minutes of extra loading time all at once. 5-10 seconds every single time you zone adds up.
I'm not saying that a 7850 is the same as a 7950. For people who want a very high monitor resolution or really insist on max, max settings, there is a difference. But if all you want is high settings at 1920x1080? Are there any games at all where a 7850 wouldn't be able to deliver 60 frames per second there, without the problem being a bottleneck elsewhere?
The DDR3 JEDEC specification specifies 1066, 1333, 1600, 1866, and 2133 MHz speeds. It might also have 800 MHz; I'm not sure about that last one, but it would be kind of pointless considering that essentially all DDR3 chips can run at 1066 MHz just fine unless they're completely defective and don't run at all. Memory fabs will sell chips binned for 2133 MHz as their stock speed, too. Well, at least Micron does; I'm not sure about Samsung or Hynix, though if Micron can, then they probably do, too. So memory clocked as high as 2133 MHz isn't necessarily overclocked. Many of AMD's processors have a memory controller rated at 1866 MHz, including their entire FX line, so you're not overclocking that, either unless you go over 1866 MHz. Socket AM3+ motherboards generally officially support 1866 MHz memory bus speeds, too, for that reason.
Its an SSD not an HDD and it takes me 2-3 minutes to format and install an image. I dont see that as masochistic. Its a boot drive so there is zero data loss, just the OS.
As far as the ram is concerned i prefer extremely low latency 1333. There will be a premium for 7-7-7 latency 1600 if you can even find it. WIth some testing I noticed my 1090T performs much better with lower latency ram than higher clock speeds.
Which is why I have a boot drive(ssd) and a storage drive. So like you say, wiping the local hard drive doesnt mean losing data. I create an image right after a fresh install with whatever updates that are needed.
You do realize that memory timings are in numbers of clock cycles don't you? The real world latency (in nanoseconds) of 1066 MHz CAS 8 would be the same as 1333 MHz CAS 10, 1600 MHz CAS 12, 1866 MHz CAS 14, or 2133 MHZ CAS 16. 2133 MHz CAS 9 is lower real-world latency than 1600 MHz CAS 7--and likely to be cheaper, too. Replace CAS by any other memory timing and the same is still true.
Even so, the memory latency due to waiting for a memory module to do its thing is a relatively small fraction of total memory latency, so tighter memory timings only save you a nanosecond or two out of total memory latency around 50 or 60 ns. In extreme corner cases, that could improve overall performance by a few percentage points, though the typical benefit would be far shy of that.
I thought you were done arguing - because most of us were done reading your posts maybe 2 or 3 in, when it became evident that you didn't learn anything with your BS degrees, workforce experience, and certifications.
Anyway, to answer one particular question from the OP:
Thermal compound:
I would not spend a lot of money on this - like more than a token $2-3. Most aftermarket heat sinks will come with a little tube of the stuff, and that little tube is enough to install 4-5 CPU's with. The difference in performance between the most expensive colloidal silver compound, regular old zinc-based paste and common toothpaste from your bathroom (which I don't recommend, but does work), is maybe 3-4F during extreme overclocking and nearly unnoticeable under stock conditions.
One thing to be careful of: many coolers will come with a thermal pad, and stock coolers are notorious for it. This thermal pad works well enough, once. You can't reuse it ever. If you pull the heat sink off later, it's not any good. Thermal interface material, be it the paste or pads, has to be cleaned off and re-installed fresh each time you re-seat the heat sink. For your own build, that shouldn't be that often, and hopefully it is only once, but you never know. Once those thermal pads have been used, they tend to harden and can be difficult to clean up, so if you have the choice, I'd use some thermal paste, but the pad will work well enough if you don't have any off hand.
Thermal compound installs like butter on toast, not like peanut butter on PB&J: A very thin layer, just enough to cover the entire mating surface of the CPU heat spreader with the bottom of the heat sink: You don't want to goop too much of it on there and have it squish out the sides when you clamp down the heat sink (it risks running down over the side of the CPU and getting into the socket, and then Really Bad Things happen), but you have to make sure the entire surface is covered. A very thin amount is all it takes - as thin as you can spread it with your fingertip or a tissue.
PS: I like the second build a lot. A 6300FX with a 7850 makes for a smart mid-range gaming system that will have some legs for a few years.
I'm not going to disagree with what Ridelynn just said, but I'll expand on it in a different direction.
Heatsinks and heatspreaders tend to be mostly made of aluminum (best heat conductor that is cheap) and/or copper (best heat conductor that isn't unreasonably expensive). The idea is that you put the base of the heatsink up against the heatspreader built into the CPU and then heat conducts from the latter to the former to get it away from the CPU. Metal-on-metal contact here is good.
The problem is that, at an atomic scale, neither the heatsink nor the heatspreader are all that smooth. This means that they wouldn't have that much direct contact. Instead, you'd have tiny air bubbles between them, and much of the heat would have to go through air bubbles to get away from the CPU. This is bad, because air is a terrible conductor of heat--about four orders of magnitude worse than aluminum or copper.
Enter thermal paste. The idea is that you put a (rather viscous) liquid between the heatspreader and the heatsink. When you press them together, thermal paste fills a lot of the tiny holes instead of air. This is good, because thermal paste conducts heat about two orders of magnitude better than air.
Unless, of course, you use way too much of it and have a thick layer of thermal paste separating the heatsink from the heatspreader. This is bad, because thermal paste conducts heat about two orders of magnitude worse than aluminum or copper. You want to use enough to squeeze out a lot of air, but no more than that. A small dot is all it takes, and if pressing the heatsink and heatspreader together and smearing them risks squeezing thermal paste out the sides of the crack between them, then you've used way too much.
To make sure I'm clear here, an order of magnitude means a factor of ten. That thermal paste conducts heat two orders of magnitude better than air means it conducts heat about 100 times as well as air. This is a rough approximation, and doesn't mean a factor of 100 as opposed to 99; the precise value will vary by what thermal paste you use. But it will be a lot more than 10 and a lot less than 1000. If one thermal paste conducts heat twice as well as another, that's not a big deal; what is a big deal is that they're both a lot better than air and a lot worse than aluminum or copper.
Thanks a lot for all of the advice. I placed my order for all the parts this morning. I did end up getting the Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor with the Asus P8Z77-V LK ATX LGA1155 Motherboard in the end but kept all of the other items the same. I had to grab a monitor and speakers so I went with the Acer V243HAJbd 24.0" Monitor and Logitech Z313 25W 2.1ch Speakers. As well as an OCZ Vertex 4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk.
I think that will have me set up great for a good long time, hopefully.
Again I just want to let you guys know how much I appreciate all of your advice and time. Too bad I can't have one of you here to help me while I assemble it in about 3 days. Wish me luck.
Just to question the philosophy. Army of Socrates.
Seems you buy SSD for different reasons than everybody else buys SSDs.
I don't understand your case setup. FT02 is the aircooling case of excellence, yet you have chosen closed loop cooling. Of the 3 choices, big air heatsink, closed loop, "real" watercooling, seems to me you chose the worst one for the case you use. FT02 doesn't have alot of spaces to vent outtake. It has a single 120 mm fan outtake, and it is generally considered a bad idea do block that with a radiator. Which is why people building open watercooling, usually mod the case to have the radiator in the bottom of the case.
Most will choose a big heatsink with 2 fans as the case designs begs for, or another case entirely.