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Got a few questions for a new computer
core i7 975 vs 960
Will the differences between the two really be noticeable, any reason to pay for the upgrade?
dual 1GB GTX 285 vs single 2GB GTX 295
Which would perform better generally? The only upgrade I plan on making to the computer in the next 4 years is the GPU. So if I go with the single card this means buying a second one later when it's cheaper, or if I go the dual route I'll probably try to replace them with a superior single one.
1333Mhz vs 1600Mhz memory
I read something somewhere that implied i7 doesn't see improvement above 1333 mhz, that doesn't sound right at all to me.
SLI vs single card with dual monitors
My issue is with playing games while having browser or something on the second monitor. From what I understand you can't run 2 monitors with SLI enabled which would mean my game is running as if i just have 1 video card which defeats the purpose of getting 2 cheaper GPUs. Also, if I go with the single GTX 295, will I be able to run a game on one monitor with a browser on the other monitor?
Comments
CPU: get a cheaper model like 920 and OC it. Paying for factory overclocks isn't smart.
GPU: Nvidia has nothing to offer atm which could compete against ati. Single 5870 is pretty much the best option, no multigpu problems and still offers enough performance so you don't have upgrade for a while.
Almost no effect to performance, but higher clock memory can make overclocking easier. If the price difference is small, go for faster. With 1366 socket cpu make sure you get 3 memory chips.
You won't see much of a difference between a Corei7 975 and a 960. There is no reason to get the upgrade.
Dual GTX285 will be better then a 295 considering a 295 is 2 GTX275's.
You shouldn't even be bothering with DDR3 unless you get 1600mhz. I think the cap is 2133 for Core i7's memory controller. The real issue is making sure its in the right voltage which is easy to do. Just get triple channel memory.
You could do what you want with a game and a browser with a single GPU. That all comes down to how you set it up within the operating system.
Ok I think I'm going to go with GTX 285 SLI plus a GT 220 dedicated physx card and a core i7 960.
So now I'm wondering, should I go with 6gb or 12 gb ram. Basically I've heard 12 is overkill, but then again I'm trying to get a computer to last 4 years without additions so would 12 be a safe bet?
If I don't get 12, I could use that money instead to get a separate SSD for the OS, would that increase performance better than going from 6 to 12 gbs? Also, when you use SSDs what all gets installed there? I know the OS does, but do you also install any device driver as well? Is there any danger at all of reinstalling/updating/whatever else enough times that the the memory cell expires? How much room would I need on a SSD, is 80 gb enough?
After 4 years your computer will be unbearably slow, no matter of memory amount. There's really no much point if what you are planning, getting a single more powerful gpu is much better option, all things considered.
The computer I currently use I bought 4.5 years ago, the only thing I've changed since then is dropping $80 on a new GPU. It runs L4D2 pretty well so don't think its out of the question for a computer to last that long.
Anyway this is what I'm planning on getting now from ibuypower.com, any advice?
CoolerMaster HAF 922 Mid Tower Gaming Case-Black
Intel® Core™ i7 960 Processor (4x 3.20GHz/8MB L3 Cache)
PowerDrive Level 1 - Up to 10% Overclocking
Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ 120mm Radiator [SOCKET-1366]
6 GB [2 GB X3] DDR3-1600 Triple Memory Module-Corsair Dominator
2x ATI Radeon HD 5870 - 1GB Crossfire
ASUS P6T -- Intel X58 Chipset CrossFire and SLI Supported w/7.1 Sound, Triple-Channel DDR3, Gb LAN, S-ATA Raid, USB 2.0, 3-Way SLI PCI-E MB 3-Way SLI
1000 Watt -- Extreme Power Supply [Gaming Series] Quad SLI + Active PFC
80 GB Intel X25-M MLC SSD
1.5 TB HARD DRIVE -- 32M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s-Single Drive
22X Sony Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive Black
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
Killer Xeno Pro Gaming Network Card w/ Game Networking Acceleration + Hardware-accelerated Voice
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
There is a core i7 930 @ 2.88ghz coming start next year might want to save a few hundred $$ and get that instead.
What CPU cooling is it on offer?
Drop the Xeno, and maybe go with 850W PSU.
The SSD is good, I have one.
Do some research on ibuypower I think they have a bad rating with the BBB, if you feel confident enough you could build yourself for a lot less.
I have 8GB of memory and can sometimes use all of it within Windows Vista due to prefetch. 12GB will have an impact.
Only seeing one problem (besides what Avery said), the motherboard. If you're looking for long term performance you should grab a board that supports USB 3.0. Unfortunately we're still pretty early in roll out so any board at this point with USB 3.0 and SATA 6gb will be kinda limited compared to the next generation which is what I'm waiting on to build. Not to mention which socket the i9s will use.
I am wondering why you're going with Windows 7 Pro (maybe bitlocker?) and the 922 instead of the HAF 932, unless space is an issue you might want the larger case. Or if you can afford it and can use the hot-swappable hard drive feature the Corsair Obsidian 800D (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=784) is a solid choice. I currently own a HAF 932 but if I was buying a case today I'd pick the Corsair.
Played in some form:
UO til tram, AC, EQ, AO, WW2O, PS, SB, CoH, AC2, Hor, LoTRO, DDO, AoC, Aion, CO, STO
Playing: WoW (for gf), WAR
Waiting For: SWTOR, FFXVI
Hoping For: DCUO, Secret World, Earthrise
-S- (UO Sonoma)
Only seeing one problem (besides what Avery said), the motherboard. If you're looking for long term performance you should grab a board that supports USB 3.0. Unfortunately we're still pretty early in roll out so any board at this point with USB 3.0 and SATA 6gb will be kinda limited compared to the next generation which is what I'm waiting on to build. Not to mention which socket the i9s will use.
I am wondering why you're going with Windows 7 Pro (maybe bitlocker?) and the 922 instead of the HAF 932, unless space is an issue you might want the larger case. Or if you can afford it and can use the hot-swappable hard drive feature the Corsair Obsidian 800D (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=784) is a solid choice. I currently own a HAF 932 but if I was buying a case today I'd pick the Corsair.
I have to Corsair 800d too anything you want to know or to see some pictures I'd be happy to help on the case side of things here. It is a wonderful case but it is massive.
Ok so, I can drop the xeno if you guys don't think it really helps. Instead I can either upgrade the motherboard to ASUS P6X58D Premium or maybe I can add a GT 220 GPU dedicated physx card. Which would be better?
I could probably upgrade to the CoolerMaster 932 and since I'm going to be using the computer in a hot poorly ventilated room I want to stick with this case since I hear its good at cooling.
Don't know anything else about the liquide cooling other than [Free Upgrade] Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ 120mm Radiator [SOCKET-1366] [Holiday Special]
SLI is really a bad choice here, a 295 will outperform 2 285 in most games. Also will you have no use whatsoever in any MMO, few MMOs if any supports SLI.
www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/Sum-of-FPS-Benchmarks-1920x1200,1538.html Here is a chart. As you can see is the 285 performing great in SLI but the problem is that few non FPS games supports SLI. The 295 hydro copper are performing almost exactly as good and it will do that in any game, SLI support or no. At least check if all your favorite game have SLI support, otherwise you will waste money on nothing, 1 285 is nowhere near a 295 as you see in the same chart.
As for the coolmaster against the Corsair i would go for the corsair as long as you have enough fans in the computer. Corsair is the best PSU in it's price class but to be fair have I only had one coolmaster and 3 Corsair (the coolmaster got noisy after a while). But no matter, they are both a good choice.
Good luck
Eh, SLI GTX 285 beat a single GTX 295 in every benchmark.. My understanding is that just because the GPU's are on the same PCI-e slot for the GTX 295 (SLI GTX 275) doesn't mean it bypasses SLI limitations, it still has to use SLI to coordinate the GPU's so if the drivers don't support a certain game well in SLI it's going to perform just as poorly on the GTX 295 as SLI GTX 275's.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gtx285sli-hd4890cf_9.html#sect1
Thing with the Xeno is it only helps if your bandwidth is maxed out, and then all it's doing is setting up Quality of Service (QoS) for you automatically. This is something you can do in a lot of routers already, and doing it through the router helps your whole network not just your main PC. Also you can just throttle your background downloads to 90% to leave room for your gaming.
If you don't want to bother setting up the network settings yourself and you often are downloading at your *peak* bandwidth then the Xeno will help out, but $100 is a lot for 5 minutes of adjusting network settings.
Between the dedicated Physx card and the upgraded mobo, you won't be able to take advantage of the mobo features (USB 3.0, SATA 3.0) right away but they would be nice future features once USB 3.0 external hard drives and SATA 3.0 SSD's come out but it won't pay off if you don't plan on buying either of these things.
The Physx card would pay off more for gaming but if you want both mobo and physx the best is to get the upgraded mobo and then buy a cheap Nvidia card off Newegg for Physx, they are easy to put in.
Be aware that you have to be willing to tweak some things to get Physx working as Nvidia has disabled Physx in their drivers if it detects an ATI card in the system. Personally I would get the Physx card and not worry about the mobo, $120 for USB/SATA 3.0 is way too much for me.
Ok so it basically seems like I have these choices
2x GTX 285 2GB SLI OR GTX 295
GT 220 dedicated physx
ASUS P6T
2x HD 5870 Crossfire
ASUS P6T
Killer Xeno network card
2x HD 5870 Crossfire
ASUS P6X58D Premium
I'm leaning toward one of the 5870 setups because I hear it performs almost as well as the 295 by itself so I'm assuming if I crossfire them, it will out perform both 285 SLI and 295 single. Unless of course the dedicated physx card changes things to make the nvidia cards better, anyone know?
As for the xeno vs the ASUS P6X58D Premium could someone actually explain how the different mobo would help. I know its USB 3.0 instead of 2.0, but what does that mean for functionality? Also will the different SATA speeds effect performance? Don't really know much about it, but I thought it relates to bus speed which I heard is a major bottleneck in good systems.
For the xeno, are you sure it only helps when the network is at max capacity? Don't know too much about networking, but it seems to me offloading packet processing to the card would speed things up regardless of wether or not the bandwidth is maxed.
The Xeno for the price is not worth it over a regular Network card. 2x 285's does beat a 295. (I have had both and I run right now the 2x285's OC) I will be waiting for Nvidia's new cards and more info is coming in Jan on them.
I wouldn't want to waste money on buying Nvidia's old stuff when new is right around the corner. If you update every 4 years then the most logical thing to do is to wait another month or two.
There is pretty much nothing USB 3.0 at the moment, all it means is that everything looks the same but the connection is a lot better / faster so you would future proof yourself buy having things like thumb drives / external stuff be quicker in future purchases.
mmorpg.com looked at the killer cards there is a review somewhere, the money better spend elsewhere honestly.
The 2x5870's are a better choice than the 2x285's, however, it would be a shame if Nvidia new card info came out in January and if you could wait a short while to see what they are like and you find for near the same price you would get better performance. (Still considering you want the PC to last as long as possible right?)
The 5870 setup is the fastest thing available. Nvidia GTX 300 series should be out in March but they are most likely going to cost more than their equivalent Radeon parts because of the die size and the trouble they've had making them, so prices are gonna be stuck where they are till summer I would think.
The USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 both have higher throughput. SATA 2.0 is 300MB/s, and a single SSD can do around 220MB/s, so there is still headroom there. If you had multiple SSD's in RAID they could be bottlenecked by SATA 2.0, so SATA 3.0 would be useful provided you had a ton of money to blow on SSD drives that support it but there are none yet.
USB 3.0's 400MB/s is pretty promising for external drives because they are limited to about 50% of their transfer speed by USB 2.0's 60MB/s transfer rate, but again there's no USB 3.0 external drives yet.
The Xeno NIC does handle the network processing instead of making the CPU do it, this woulda been a big deal on a Pentium II 233Mhz (and there were lots of NIC's that did this back in the day) but on today's CPU's it takes .001% of the processor's time up so it doesn't free up much CPU power and isn't reflected in FPS. It can help lag by prioritizing packets, but if there's nothing to prioritize over (ie, not maxed on bandwidth) it doesn't make a difference, and many routers have QoS to do this for you anyway (the connection to the router is infinitely faster than your internet connection, so the router can prioritize them for you before you hit the bottleneck).
Lastly the info for using a dedicated Physx card in a Radeon system is here:
http://physxinfo.com/news/942/hybrid-physx-mod-1-02-195-xx-drivers-and-win-xp-support
I haven't tried it but it does sound promising and pretty simple to set up. Right now this setup is the fastest, gets you DX11 and Physx.
Ok, think I am gunna go with
2x HD 5870 Crossfire
ASUS P6X58D Premium
and maybe in 2.5 years I'll look into upgrading the Video card if the better nvidia cards are cheap enough
So one last question, could someone explain why SSD drives are good? From what I understand you install the OS and drivers on the SSD and everything else on a larger data drive. How does this actually improve performance? I know they can read faster, but isnt all the OS/driver data it needs loaded into memory anyway so the faster reads wouldnt matter? Or, are there parts of the OS that a game will access half way through which it requires reading from the drive? I can see it being a faster startup time, but I don't really care about that.
just add window 7 64 bit to your actual system and all will be ok ,microsoft fixed that
You want your OS, apps, and most used games installed to the SSD. The big advantages are faster reads and instant random access. Putting the OS on the SSD helps with boot times and app/game start up times by giving instant access to the DLL's and such.
You're right once the game is loaded the OS being on SSD isn't as big a deal, but having your games on the SSD improves your minimum performmance level and load times. This is because games, especially MMO's, often have to load textures on the fly. In MMO's this most noticeably happens when you cross into a new area that doesn't have a load screen, run up to where a lot of players are hanging out, or some new mobs get spawned. If the textures for these things aren't already in memory it has to load them off the drive and there's a huge stuttering impact on performance that doesn't happen with SSD's. It still helps even if it's just 1 or 2 mobs it has to load textures for but it's most noticeable in crowds.