Originally posted by NightHaveN While AMD chips are cheaper, usually motherboards are more expensive. At the end the savings are not that huge.
In the US I typically find the opposite to be true. Motherboards come in a wide spectrum of quality and features, you can find AMD motherboards that are more expensive than Intel motherbaords, but if you match up features and quality, AMD motherbaords tend to be anywhere from $15 cheaper at the low end upwards to as much as $75-150 less at the very high end.
Power usage is often wildly overstated, based on peak usage (which is rarely obtained outside of synthetic benchmarks) running 24/7. In reality, even during gaming, power usage is significantly lower. There's not a big difference in realistic use between similar products.
Originally posted by 13lake Never heard of Diamond for GPUs as of recently, i'd rather go for asus, the model i linked is still cheaper than the diamond one.
Diamond has been around for a long time in graphics sound cards, and other multimedia-related peripherals (thinks like video adapters and such). Once they stopped making their own GPUS (S3 Verge was popular for a bit several years ago), they became an ATI/AMD partner. They usually put out reference stuff - it won't have fancy coolers or crazy overclocks, but it's a reliable brand.
This was my understanding. I remember diamond from back in the day but don't recall much from them currently. The info here provided by Ridelynn is extremely helpful. Although I was still a bit concerned using the GPU since I hadn't heard many folks talk about Diamond.
I'll take another look at the card you suggest 13lake just to see if it's close in features. My main reason for choosing this video card was the 4gb memory and clock speeds, so will see if the link you provided is in the same area.
My only other concern with this build is the motherboard. As I said in that post, most friends and some posters here stated that it was a good brand so I was willing to give it a shot.
Thought this might give you something to think about....click on the $$ amounts
Yea definitely some interesting info, very close to the mid-range system. Taking a look at prices for some of the pieces, although they do seem to have some extra features that I dont when comparing. Although still quite close.
Ok so HolyNeo's link there got me thinking. I wanted to make sure I was getting the best bang for my buck GPU wise as well as getting a good current manufacturer. As I said above, Diamond I recall from the past but I don't recall hearing much from them in the past couple years, which made me a bit worry some. Anyway, I started to take a closer look at GPU's just to make sure I was making the right decision. The 4 I am currently looking at are as follows:
Now with all of these cards, as you can see they are all the R9-290 chipset (AMD/ATI), they are all 4GB cards and they are all in price range of $200-$300 and most being closer to the $300 mark not including the rebates. Now I have pretty much settled on this chipset and price range, basically deciding that for the price/performance I keep reading that these are the better value when compared to the Nvidia boards. However if anyone else has suggestion on an Nvidia board that is in the same price/performance area, I would love to take a look just to see the differences.
Ok so now, my main questions between these cards:
1.) To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, PCI Express 3.0 x 16 is the preferred interface however is it worth getting a card based on that? (The Gigabyte and Asus cards are both PCI Express 3.0)
2.) Is a core clock speed difference (947mhz - 1000mhz) a deciding factor or is the performance difference negligable? (The Asus card is the only one with a core clock speed of 1000mhz)
3.) With the thought of future proofing, would it be worthwhile to only get a crossfirex supported card? (All except the GIgabyte card are crossfirex cards, however if pcie 3.0 x16 is preferred, I would need a new MB that has 2)
4.) Ok, last but final question, all of these cards (except the Asus) are recommending a 600w+ PSU. Is this just a marketing gimmick or should I follow those specifications to the T? ( The Diamond and XFX are actually asking for a 750w minimum)
So those are my main questions with all of these, not to mention if there is a worthwhiel Nvidia card in that price/performance range or if an extra cooler or PCI fan is worthwhile for any of these cards.
Originally posted by Athisar Power usage is often wildly overstated, based on peak usage (which is rarely obtained outside of synthetic benchmarks) running 24/7. In reality, even during gaming, power usage is significantly lower. There's not a big difference in realistic use between similar products.
I'd usually agree in consumer desktops, which is what you're probably talking about. Obviously, there are cases where power usage is important, such as data centers where the difference between putting out 200 kW and 300 kW around the clock matters.
In a desktop, the difference between 150 W and 200 W under gaming loads doesn't matter so much. But the difference between 400 W and 600 W might well matter quite a bit, as that's getting a room awfully hot. Now, it does take a multi-GPU rig or otherwise doing something very strange to get power usage up into that range, but it is something to consider if looking at an SLI/CrossFire rig.
Originally posted by Athisar Power usage is often wildly overstated, based on peak usage (which is rarely obtained outside of synthetic benchmarks) running 24/7. In reality, even during gaming, power usage is significantly lower. There's not a big difference in realistic use between similar products.
I'd usually agree in consumer desktops, which is what you're probably talking about. Obviously, there are cases where power usage is important, such as data centers where the difference between putting out 200 kW and 300 kW around the clock matters.
In a desktop, the difference between 150 W and 200 W under gaming loads doesn't matter so much. But the difference between 400 W and 600 W might well matter quite a bit, as that's getting a room awfully hot. Now, it does take a multi-GPU rig or otherwise doing something very strange to get power usage up into that range, but it is something to consider if looking at an SLI/CrossFire rig.
Indeed, I'm talking about an individual average gaming desktop. Mostly emphasising the point that peak power usage does not reflect average use; playing a game that doesn't push the GPU hard will use considerably less power than a benchmark, but this is often not mentioned. AMD CPU tests for example tend to measure all 8 cores at 100% usage, something that essentially never happens in games.
1.) To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, PCI Express 3.0 x 16 is the preferred interface however is it worth getting a card based on that? (The Gigabyte and Asus cards are both PCI Express 3.0)
2.) Is a core clock speed difference (947mhz - 1000mhz) a deciding factor or is the performance difference negligable? (The Asus card is the only one with a core clock speed of 1000mhz)
3.) With the thought of future proofing, would it be worthwhile to only get a crossfirex supported card? (All except the GIgabyte card are crossfirex cards, however if pcie 3.0 x16 is preferred, I would need a new MB that has 2)
4.) Ok, last but final question, all of these cards (except the Asus) are recommending a 600w+ PSU. Is this just a marketing gimmick or should I follow those specifications to the T? ( The Diamond and XFX are actually asking for a 750w minimum)
So those are my main questions with all of these, not to mention if there is a worthwhiel Nvidia card in that price/performance range or if an extra cooler or PCI fan is worthwhile for any of these cards.
I'd be very surprised if there are any recent, high end video cards that don't support PCI Express 3.0 or later, or any Radeon R9 290/290X cards that don't support CrossFire. Just because it wasn't mentioned on a marketing blurb doesn't mean that it isn't supported. For comparison, a lot of modern x86 processors won't explicitly tell you that they support SSE2 as one of the highlights (though you can probably find that information if you dig around for it enough), but that's because they all do and it doesn't differentiate them at all.
The difference between 1000 MHz and 947 MHz is what the clock speed says it is: the former is about 6% faster. Higher clock speeds do come at a cost of higher power consumption and more wear on hardware (though both of those can be somewhat mitigated by various engineering choices), but it's not a huge difference.
Video cards make power supply recommendations in isolation, not knowing what else you have in the system. If you've got an FX-9590 with a TDP of 220 W, that takes rather more power than if you're using a dinky Core i3 as your CPU. Naturally, that affects power consumption. But the video card vendor doesn't know what you have, so they tend to estimate something high.
There's also the problem that some power supply vendors lie about their hardware capabilities. Some 550 W power supplies would have no problem with delivering 550 W under real-world workloads. Others will explode if you try to pull 400 W. Video card vendors don't know what you're using, so they tend to estimate high. Realistically, a good quality 650 W power supply will be plenty for anything you might plausibly do outside of CrossFIre/SLI.
1.) To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, PCI Express 3.0 x 16 is the preferred interface however is it worth getting a card based on that? (The Gigabyte and Asus cards are both PCI Express 3.0)
2.) Is a core clock speed difference (947mhz - 1000mhz) a deciding factor or is the performance difference negligable? (The Asus card is the only one with a core clock speed of 1000mhz)
3.) With the thought of future proofing, would it be worthwhile to only get a crossfirex supported card? (All except the GIgabyte card are crossfirex cards, however if pcie 3.0 x16 is preferred, I would need a new MB that has 2)
4.) Ok, last but final question, all of these cards (except the Asus) are recommending a 600w+ PSU. Is this just a marketing gimmick or should I follow those specifications to the T? ( The Diamond and XFX are actually asking for a 750w minimum)
So those are my main questions with all of these, not to mention if there is a worthwhiel Nvidia card in that price/performance range or if an extra cooler or PCI fan is worthwhile for any of these cards.
I'd be very surprised if there are any recent, high end video cards that don't support PCI Express 3.0 or later, or any Radeon R9 290/290X cards that don't support CrossFire. Just because it wasn't mentioned on a marketing blurb doesn't mean that it isn't supported. For comparison, a lot of modern x86 processors won't explicitly tell you that they support SSE2 as one of the highlights (though you can probably find that information if you dig around for it enough), but that's because they all do and it doesn't differentiate them at all.
The difference between 1000 MHz and 947 MHz is what the clock speed says it is: the former is about 6% faster. Higher clock speeds do come at a cost of higher power consumption and more wear on hardware (though both of those can be somewhat mitigated by various engineering choices), but it's not a huge difference.
Video cards make power supply recommendations in isolation, not knowing what else you have in the system. If you've got an FX-9590 with a TDP of 220 W, that takes rather more power than if you're using a dinky Core i3 as your CPU. Naturally, that affects power consumption. But the video card vendor doesn't know what you have, so they tend to estimate something high.
There's also the problem that some power supply vendors lie about their hardware capabilities. Some 550 W power supplies would have no problem with delivering 550 W under real-world workloads. Others will explode if you try to pull 400 W. Video card vendors don't know what you're using, so they tend to estimate high. Realistically, a good quality 650 W power supply will be plenty for anything you might plausibly do outside of CrossFIre/SLI.
Well during the comparisons on these 4 the information is literally blank. So your saying the specification pages are misleading me that they don't state crossfire support or mention ONLY PCI Express 3.0 and not x16? I would think this is false advertising and illegal. This would all be for the above rig I already linked on post #170. So if I want to "future proof" and have the ability of SLI/crossfirex in the future, I should get a PSU more powerful?
Originally posted by Cramit845 Well during the comparisons on these 4 the information is literally blank. So your saying the specification pages are misleading me that they don't state crossfire support or mention ONLY PCI Express 3.0 and not x16? I would think this is false advertising and illegal. This would all be for the above rig I already linked on post #170. So if I want to "future proof" and have the ability of SLI/crossfirex in the future, I should get a PSU more powerful?
I wouldn't say False Advertising - I would rather think it not a defining feature and as such, not worth mentioning. 99% of the time, the only real difference between the cards is going to be the cooler, and some chintzy factory overclock you could have done yourself in the driver anyway - so they really play up those two features, because everything else is pretty much identical.
Second - I wouldn't think of SLI/CFX as "futureproofing". In fact, I wouldn't consider futureproofing at all. SLI/CFX takes an entirely different build than the type you are putting together to be really effective. And for most people, by the time they hit something where the futureproofing finally pays off, they could have bought something less to begin with, and used that extra money to upgrade at some other point and came out ahead on technology for the same overall price.
Build a good computer today, within your budget. That's all anyone can do, and it usually ends up being a better build in the long run than if you start chasing what you think the game or hardware industry may or may not do tomorrow.
I don't think it's even possible to make a 290X without CFX support, barring artificially disabling it in the BIOS for some reason. GCN now uses the bridgeless CFX, it's all baked into the GPU chip itself, so there isn't a dongle or bridge connection or anything you have to include extra to make it work.
Well during the comparisons on these 4 the information is literally blank. So your saying the specification pages are misleading me that they don't state crossfire support or mention ONLY PCI Express 3.0 and not x16? I would think this is false advertising and illegal. This would all be for the above rig I already linked on post #170. So if I want to "future proof" and have the ability of SLI/crossfirex in the future, I should get a PSU more powerful?
So the card says it supports PCI Express 3.0 and you're worried that it doesn't explicitly state x16? PCI Express bandwidth is a physical connection that you can check yourself. The PCI Express connector is a gold color and at the bottom of the card; it's where the card plugs into the motherboard. PCI Express connectors come in x1, x4, x8, and x16 varieties. x8 is extremely rare, and x4 seems to be used for dedicated RAID cards and PCI Express SSDs and that's about it.
You can tell what the card is built for from the length of the connection at the bottom, as more lanes takes more pins and leads to a longer connector. Part of the connector is for delivering power, and is the same length, regardless of the PCI Express standard, but the rest of the connector is for data, and that's the difference between x1 and x16, for example. For reference, here's a PCI Express x1 card:
To make sure you understand the scale, the silver connector at the back of the card is the same size for nearly all expansion cards, though some have a half-height connector.
If a video card has a PCI Express connector about that size, it's x1. If it's the same length as other cards that are also x16, it's x16. There have been a handful of PCI Express x1 video cards, generally for low end cards where all that you really care about is adding more monitors. I've never seen a PCI Express video card that wasn't x16 outside of very low end products which use less PCI Express bandwidth for the same reason that it uses the lowest end GPU of its generation: because performance doesn't matter.
A check of New Egg found that of the cards labeled x1 or x8, the only one that wasn't a very low end card was one that is actually an x16 card and was mislabeled, probably because someone dropped the "6" in putting it on the site.
Second - I wouldn't think of SLI/CFX as "futureproofing". In fact, I wouldn't consider futureproofing at all. SLI/CFX takes an entirely different build than the type you are putting together to be really effective. And for most people, by the time they hit something where the futureproofing finally pays off, they could have bought something less to begin with, and used that extra money to upgrade at some other point and came out ahead on technology for the same overall price.
That's worth quoting. I'll add that by the time you upgrade a video card, the sensible thing to do will be to replace the old card by a single, faster new card, not to add a second of the old card. CrossFire and SLI are very dependent on video drivers customized to particular games to work properly, and AMD and Nvidia don't keep up this driver support for very long. CrossFire and SLI make little sense outside of people who decide that the top end card of the day isn't fast enough, so they'll buy two high end cards. That's something that you may think about on a $2000 budget (though even on that budget, I still wouldn't), but not $1000.
Second - I wouldn't think of SLI/CFX as "futureproofing". In fact, I wouldn't consider futureproofing at all. SLI/CFX takes an entirely different build than the type you are putting together to be really effective. And for most people, by the time they hit something where the futureproofing finally pays off, they could have bought something less to begin with, and used that extra money to upgrade at some other point and came out ahead on technology for the same overall price.
That's worth quoting. I'll add that by the time you upgrade a video card, the sensible thing to do will be to replace the old card by a single, faster new card, not to add a second of the old card. CrossFire and SLI are very dependent on video drivers customized to particular games to work properly, and AMD and Nvidia don't keep up this driver support for very long. CrossFire and SLI make little sense outside of people who decide that the top end card of the day isn't fast enough, so they'll buy two high end cards. That's something that you may think about on a $2000 budget (though even on that budget, I still wouldn't), but not $1000.
Well thanks both Quizzical and Ridelynn. Exactly what I was wondering on whether or not it was worth it. It also seems to make sense, getting a second older card not really helping and what not. As for the connectors, in the past couple years, I really only update a video card once, and the slots were labeled easily on the MB at the time so I never really looked at the size of the connectors or the amount, so thanks will take that into consideration.
Is there a particular manufacturer/GPU you would suggest either out of that list or in the same price range ($200-$300)?
For AMD: Asus, MSI, XFX, and Gigabyte tend to have better coolers. Asus in particular has some boutique stuff on their cards.
Sapphire, Diamond, Powercolor are all good reference manufactureres, I haven't seen a lot of press about their non-reference coolers.
I don't know much about HIS or Visiontek.
Personally, I wouldn't pay anything extra for a factory overclock -- nearly every card will overclock considerably better than anything the factory is willing to support, and it won't cost you anything, you just slide a slider in the driver.
I would consider which has the best cooler - that is something worth paying for. Pay particular attention to noise - 290X's can run hot and loud, and a good cooler mitigates both of those. Something like Asus DirectCU or XFX DoubleD are great to have.
Apart from that - it's the same chip, they are using the same design PCB. Whichever you can find on a good sale would be a good snag I would say.
There happens to be this sale going on right now for a nice Gigabyte card for $309, which has their Windforce cooler on it. No idea how long that will last, but it's about $50 off.
SLI and Crossfire are things that sound really really good on paper - take 2 cards, make them perform like one really fast card.
In reality, it doesn't quite work that way. It's very game and driver dependant, even when it works it usually isn't anywhere near double the performance, but you still get double the heat and double the noise; not to mention double the headaches with drivers and game incompatibility.
There are only 3 times I can see using SLI/CFX:
1) You know it has a bunch of issues, but you want to play with it anyway.
2) You get the second card for free/insanely cheap, and it doesn't cost anything to go ahead and throw it in
3) You want/need performance that absolutely can't be had in a single fast video card, so you have some really top-end stuff, are SLI/CFXing top-end cards on a top-end CPU and motherboard, and are spending a lot of money to get it.
The gigabyte 290 and Asus 290 are oscillating between $240 and the normal $270 price, just get the one which is $240 when you're buying (whoever the manufacturer is at that moment xD)
I know this is a bit of necroing a thread but now that the holidays are over, I've been able to save up enough for a system in the $900-$1000 range. Now I am looking to purchase ASAP. I am hoping to have the order in by mid week, but I want to put the build up for some scrutiny since I have made some changes to it with some recommendations from friends and I'd like to see what you folks think of it. Right now prices do matter, although I am still in the process of searching other sites for better prices, but if you have a better trustworthy site to suggest where a part is cheaper, please do and I will definitely take a look at it.
At this point, not completely sold on the SSD cause I keep hearing Samsung is the leader in SSD's and they have a 840 series or something that is in the >$100 range and that seems like it might have better read/write speeds. Unfortunately still out with family so this is a quick post of items I have been putting together over the weekend. Am I screwing up anywhere in yours eyes? Is there another site I can find a cheaper price for some of these parts? (All from Newegg ATM, my usual PC supplier) Any new price suggestions now that I am looking to order by Wednesday? It's down to the wire and looking for any help and suggestions before I click the order button.
That has a $30 rebate on the motherboard, too. It's Z87 rather than Z97, but it will work just fine, and I think it's a good place to save a little money while still getting nice parts.
The CPU cooler is cheap and a case of you get what you pay for. It will be a huge upgrade over the stock cooler, but don't plan on doing any more than minor overclocking on that cooler. That said, it will work well at stock speeds.
Samsung makes some nice SSDs, but so do a lot of other companies, and I'd advise against paying a price premium for a brand name. The problem is that Samsung basically prices themselves out of competition most of the time and relies on marketing or FUD to try to convince people to overpay. Samsung might claim to be the SSD leader, but Crucial/Micron and Intel would probably make the same claim. SanDisk might, too.
Basically, what you want in an SSD performance-wise is sequential read/write speeds well into triple digits (even 200 MB/s would be fine if that's real-world performance) and random read/write IOPS numbers well into five digits. The difference between 300 MB/s and 500 MB/s or between 100K IOPS and 30K IOPS basically amounts to a rounding error for consumer use. That's all fast enough that you'll virtually never be waiting on the SSD, as something else will be the bottleneck. For comparison, hard drives may chug along at 100 or 200 IOPS. And yes, the "K" in 30K for thousand.
That has a $30 rebate on the motherboard, too. It's Z87 rather than Z97, but it will work just fine, and I think it's a good place to save a little money while still getting nice parts.
The CPU cooler is cheap and a case of you get what you pay for. It will be a huge upgrade over the stock cooler, but don't plan on doing any more than minor overclocking on that cooler. That said, it will work well at stock speeds.
Samsung makes some nice SSDs, but so do a lot of other companies, and I'd advise against paying a price premium for a brand name. The problem is that Samsung basically prices themselves out of competition most of the time and relies on marketing or FUD to try to convince people to overpay. Samsung might claim to be the SSD leader, but Crucial/Micron and Intel would probably make the same claim. SanDisk might, too.
Basically, what you want in an SSD performance-wise is sequential read/write speeds well into triple digits (even 200 MB/s would be fine if that's real-world performance) and random read/write IOPS numbers well into five digits. The difference between 300 MB/s and 500 MB/s or between 100K IOPS and 30K IOPS basically amounts to a rounding error for consumer use. That's all fast enough that you'll virtually never be waiting on the SSD, as something else will be the bottleneck. For comparison, hard drives may chug along at 100 or 200 IOPS. And yes, the "K" in 30K for thousand.
I'll take your word on the power supply only cause I looked at it only based on price and reviews. Seemed highly rated based off of the reviews which is why I chose it compared to everything else in the price range.
However, with the combo, wouldnt I want to try and stay with a Z97 chipset? I know that overall it wouldn't change the performance all that much but wouldn't it still be worth the price difference or not really?
I know this is a bit of necroing a thread but now that the holidays are over, I've been able to save up enough for a system in the $900-$1000 range. Now I am looking to purchase ASAP. I am hoping to have the order in by mid week, but I want to put the build up for some scrutiny since I have made some changes to it with some recommendations from friends and I'd like to see what you folks think of it. Right now prices do matter, although I am still in the process of searching other sites for better prices, but if you have a better trustworthy site to suggest where a part is cheaper, please do and I will definitely take a look at it.
At this point, not completely sold on the SSD cause I keep hearing Samsung is the leader in SSD's and they have a 840 series or something that is in the >$100 range and that seems like it might have better read/write speeds. Unfortunately still out with family so this is a quick post of items I have been putting together over the weekend. Am I screwing up anywhere in yours eyes? Is there another site I can find a cheaper price for some of these parts? (All from Newegg ATM, my usual PC supplier) Any new price suggestions now that I am looking to order by Wednesday? It's down to the wire and looking for any help and suggestions before I click the order button.
Haven't shopped for components in over a year but your build looks pretty good.
For case I would do http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042 Saves you some money and I have been using that case for several years now and it is the best case I have ever owned. Keeps everything running really cool, it is quiet, easy to work in, and all the fans are still running without a problem.
I just picked up a Samsung Evo 840 SSD and am loving it.
Your vgu, cpu, and cpu coolers all look like good choices. But if you plan on overclocking at all, I don't like that PSU. If you aren't overclocking I don't think you need an aftermarket cpu cooler.
Can't go wrong with newegg. I can't remember the last time I bought anything from somewhere else.
Always fun putting together a new build, good luck!
My only issue with the case is that it seems there is no 2.5 adapter or slot for internal SSD and the SSD I have chosen is that size. Where the current case I have doesnt have a slot but does come with an adapter to house 2 2.5 size drives. Now I will say, I am still looking at SSD's and trying to decide on one so that could change but that would be one of my concerns.
As for the RAM and overclocking, I choose the ram at a higher speed incase I wanted to start with a small over clock there, although again not decided and that would be a future thing anyway. I wouldnt be doing anything like that till at least a year or 2 into using it. Not to mention if overclocking did become something I wanted to do, I would go for a different CPU cooler. Just to give some ideas where I am coming from with some of the choices here but thanks for the options.
That has a $30 rebate on the motherboard, too. It's Z87 rather than Z97, but it will work just fine, and I think it's a good place to save a little money while still getting nice parts.
The CPU cooler is cheap and a case of you get what you pay for. It will be a huge upgrade over the stock cooler, but don't plan on doing any more than minor overclocking on that cooler. That said, it will work well at stock speeds.
Samsung makes some nice SSDs, but so do a lot of other companies, and I'd advise against paying a price premium for a brand name. The problem is that Samsung basically prices themselves out of competition most of the time and relies on marketing or FUD to try to convince people to overpay. Samsung might claim to be the SSD leader, but Crucial/Micron and Intel would probably make the same claim. SanDisk might, too.
Basically, what you want in an SSD performance-wise is sequential read/write speeds well into triple digits (even 200 MB/s would be fine if that's real-world performance) and random read/write IOPS numbers well into five digits. The difference between 300 MB/s and 500 MB/s or between 100K IOPS and 30K IOPS basically amounts to a rounding error for consumer use. That's all fast enough that you'll virtually never be waiting on the SSD, as something else will be the bottleneck. For comparison, hard drives may chug along at 100 or 200 IOPS. And yes, the "K" in 30K for thousand.
I'll take your word on the power supply only cause I looked at it only based on price and reviews. Seemed highly rated based off of the reviews which is why I chose it compared to everything else in the price range.
However, with the combo, wouldnt I want to try and stay with a Z97 chipset? I know that overall it wouldn't change the performance all that much but wouldn't it still be worth the price difference or not really?
The problem with power supply reviews on New Egg is that few buyers have the ability to rate a power supply on anything beyond it died or it didn't, or perhaps how noisy it is. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of people who actually know a little about power supplies would completely skip the cheap junk ones in favor of higher quality units, so user reviews of high and low quality power supplies will tend to be from entirely different categories of people, making the reviews not comparable.
Apparently the advantage of the Z97 chipset over Z87 is M.2 support. That's a smaller form factor for SSDs than the common 2.5" laptop drives, which allows them to take less space in laptops. But it's still a pretty rare form factor for SSDs: New Egg has 12 M.2 SSDs, as compared to 606 SATA. Z97 will also officially support Broadwell CPUs, while Z87 won't, but Broadwell CPUs aren't likely to matter in a desktop.
Z87 was the original high end chipset for Haswell CPUs such as what you're getting. So it will work fine, and you're not relying on motherboard manufacturers to hack something together that Intel never intended to work. For the same price, you'd rather have Z97 than Z87, but if you can save $20 by going with Z87, then do it.
Building a nice system with expensive hardware and putting a craptastic PSU in it all in the name of saving $20 is not the way to go. Never understood people spending $970 on hardware and buying a $30 power supply.
Check out the Black Pearl on cyberpowerpc.com and they go buy all the components on newegg and build that PC yourself. That's what I did and it cost me right at $1000. Only think I changed was I put a GTX 770 in it and upgraded the power supply to a 700 watt.
It's $1500 to buy on that website so you save about $500 building it yourself.
Comments
In the US I typically find the opposite to be true. Motherboards come in a wide spectrum of quality and features, you can find AMD motherboards that are more expensive than Intel motherbaords, but if you match up features and quality, AMD motherbaords tend to be anywhere from $15 cheaper at the low end upwards to as much as $75-150 less at the very high end.
This was my understanding. I remember diamond from back in the day but don't recall much from them currently. The info here provided by Ridelynn is extremely helpful. Although I was still a bit concerned using the GPU since I hadn't heard many folks talk about Diamond.
I'll take another look at the card you suggest 13lake just to see if it's close in features. My main reason for choosing this video card was the 4gb memory and clock speeds, so will see if the link you provided is in the same area.
My only other concern with this build is the motherboard. As I said in that post, most friends and some posters here stated that it was a good brand so I was willing to give it a shot.
http://www.pcper.com/hwlb
Thought this might give you something to think about....click on the $$ amounts
Yea definitely some interesting info, very close to the mid-range system. Taking a look at prices for some of the pieces, although they do seem to have some extra features that I dont when comparing. Although still quite close.
Ok so HolyNeo's link there got me thinking. I wanted to make sure I was getting the best bang for my buck GPU wise as well as getting a good current manufacturer. As I said above, Diamond I recall from the past but I don't recall hearing much from them in the past couple years, which made me a bit worry some. Anyway, I started to take a closer look at GPU's just to make sure I was making the right decision. The 4 I am currently looking at are as follows:
Diamond: DIamond Radeon R9-290 4GB 512-bit GDDR5 PCI express 3.0 X16
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814103247
Gigabyte: Radeon R9-290 4GB 512-bit GDDR5 PCI express 3.0
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125505
XFX: Double Dissipation Radeon R9-290 4GB 512-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150697
Asus: DirectCU II OC Radeon R9-290 4GB 512-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121842
Now with all of these cards, as you can see they are all the R9-290 chipset (AMD/ATI), they are all 4GB cards and they are all in price range of $200-$300 and most being closer to the $300 mark not including the rebates. Now I have pretty much settled on this chipset and price range, basically deciding that for the price/performance I keep reading that these are the better value when compared to the Nvidia boards. However if anyone else has suggestion on an Nvidia board that is in the same price/performance area, I would love to take a look just to see the differences.
Ok so now, my main questions between these cards:
1.) To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, PCI Express 3.0 x 16 is the preferred interface however is it worth getting a card based on that? (The Gigabyte and Asus cards are both PCI Express 3.0)
2.) Is a core clock speed difference (947mhz - 1000mhz) a deciding factor or is the performance difference negligable? (The Asus card is the only one with a core clock speed of 1000mhz)
3.) With the thought of future proofing, would it be worthwhile to only get a crossfirex supported card? (All except the GIgabyte card are crossfirex cards, however if pcie 3.0 x16 is preferred, I would need a new MB that has 2)
4.) Ok, last but final question, all of these cards (except the Asus) are recommending a 600w+ PSU. Is this just a marketing gimmick or should I follow those specifications to the T? ( The Diamond and XFX are actually asking for a 750w minimum)
So those are my main questions with all of these, not to mention if there is a worthwhiel Nvidia card in that price/performance range or if an extra cooler or PCI fan is worthwhile for any of these cards.
I'd usually agree in consumer desktops, which is what you're probably talking about. Obviously, there are cases where power usage is important, such as data centers where the difference between putting out 200 kW and 300 kW around the clock matters.
In a desktop, the difference between 150 W and 200 W under gaming loads doesn't matter so much. But the difference between 400 W and 600 W might well matter quite a bit, as that's getting a room awfully hot. Now, it does take a multi-GPU rig or otherwise doing something very strange to get power usage up into that range, but it is something to consider if looking at an SLI/CrossFire rig.
Indeed, I'm talking about an individual average gaming desktop. Mostly emphasising the point that peak power usage does not reflect average use; playing a game that doesn't push the GPU hard will use considerably less power than a benchmark, but this is often not mentioned. AMD CPU tests for example tend to measure all 8 cores at 100% usage, something that essentially never happens in games.
I'd be very surprised if there are any recent, high end video cards that don't support PCI Express 3.0 or later, or any Radeon R9 290/290X cards that don't support CrossFire. Just because it wasn't mentioned on a marketing blurb doesn't mean that it isn't supported. For comparison, a lot of modern x86 processors won't explicitly tell you that they support SSE2 as one of the highlights (though you can probably find that information if you dig around for it enough), but that's because they all do and it doesn't differentiate them at all.
The difference between 1000 MHz and 947 MHz is what the clock speed says it is: the former is about 6% faster. Higher clock speeds do come at a cost of higher power consumption and more wear on hardware (though both of those can be somewhat mitigated by various engineering choices), but it's not a huge difference.
Video cards make power supply recommendations in isolation, not knowing what else you have in the system. If you've got an FX-9590 with a TDP of 220 W, that takes rather more power than if you're using a dinky Core i3 as your CPU. Naturally, that affects power consumption. But the video card vendor doesn't know what you have, so they tend to estimate something high.
There's also the problem that some power supply vendors lie about their hardware capabilities. Some 550 W power supplies would have no problem with delivering 550 W under real-world workloads. Others will explode if you try to pull 400 W. Video card vendors don't know what you're using, so they tend to estimate high. Realistically, a good quality 650 W power supply will be plenty for anything you might plausibly do outside of CrossFIre/SLI.
Well during the comparisons on these 4 the information is literally blank. So your saying the specification pages are misleading me that they don't state crossfire support or mention ONLY PCI Express 3.0 and not x16? I would think this is false advertising and illegal. This would all be for the above rig I already linked on post #170. So if I want to "future proof" and have the ability of SLI/crossfirex in the future, I should get a PSU more powerful?
If there are no large price differences I'd pick out Asus out of those options because their DirectCU II coolers are usually really good.
I wouldn't say False Advertising - I would rather think it not a defining feature and as such, not worth mentioning. 99% of the time, the only real difference between the cards is going to be the cooler, and some chintzy factory overclock you could have done yourself in the driver anyway - so they really play up those two features, because everything else is pretty much identical.
Second - I wouldn't think of SLI/CFX as "futureproofing". In fact, I wouldn't consider futureproofing at all. SLI/CFX takes an entirely different build than the type you are putting together to be really effective. And for most people, by the time they hit something where the futureproofing finally pays off, they could have bought something less to begin with, and used that extra money to upgrade at some other point and came out ahead on technology for the same overall price.
Build a good computer today, within your budget. That's all anyone can do, and it usually ends up being a better build in the long run than if you start chasing what you think the game or hardware industry may or may not do tomorrow.
I don't think it's even possible to make a 290X without CFX support, barring artificially disabling it in the BIOS for some reason. GCN now uses the bridgeless CFX, it's all baked into the GPU chip itself, so there isn't a dongle or bridge connection or anything you have to include extra to make it work.
So the card says it supports PCI Express 3.0 and you're worried that it doesn't explicitly state x16? PCI Express bandwidth is a physical connection that you can check yourself. The PCI Express connector is a gold color and at the bottom of the card; it's where the card plugs into the motherboard. PCI Express connectors come in x1, x4, x8, and x16 varieties. x8 is extremely rare, and x4 seems to be used for dedicated RAID cards and PCI Express SSDs and that's about it.
You can tell what the card is built for from the length of the connection at the bottom, as more lanes takes more pins and leads to a longer connector. Part of the connector is for delivering power, and is the same length, regardless of the PCI Express standard, but the rest of the connector is for data, and that's the difference between x1 and x16, for example. For reference, here's a PCI Express x1 card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166096
To make sure you understand the scale, the silver connector at the back of the card is the same size for nearly all expansion cards, though some have a half-height connector.
If a video card has a PCI Express connector about that size, it's x1. If it's the same length as other cards that are also x16, it's x16. There have been a handful of PCI Express x1 video cards, generally for low end cards where all that you really care about is adding more monitors. I've never seen a PCI Express video card that wasn't x16 outside of very low end products which use less PCI Express bandwidth for the same reason that it uses the lowest end GPU of its generation: because performance doesn't matter.
A check of New Egg found that of the cards labeled x1 or x8, the only one that wasn't a very low end card was one that is actually an x16 card and was mislabeled, probably because someone dropped the "6" in putting it on the site.
That's worth quoting. I'll add that by the time you upgrade a video card, the sensible thing to do will be to replace the old card by a single, faster new card, not to add a second of the old card. CrossFire and SLI are very dependent on video drivers customized to particular games to work properly, and AMD and Nvidia don't keep up this driver support for very long. CrossFire and SLI make little sense outside of people who decide that the top end card of the day isn't fast enough, so they'll buy two high end cards. That's something that you may think about on a $2000 budget (though even on that budget, I still wouldn't), but not $1000.
Well thanks both Quizzical and Ridelynn. Exactly what I was wondering on whether or not it was worth it. It also seems to make sense, getting a second older card not really helping and what not. As for the connectors, in the past couple years, I really only update a video card once, and the slots were labeled easily on the MB at the time so I never really looked at the size of the connectors or the amount, so thanks will take that into consideration.
Is there a particular manufacturer/GPU you would suggest either out of that list or in the same price range ($200-$300)?
For AMD: Asus, MSI, XFX, and Gigabyte tend to have better coolers. Asus in particular has some boutique stuff on their cards.
Sapphire, Diamond, Powercolor are all good reference manufactureres, I haven't seen a lot of press about their non-reference coolers.
I don't know much about HIS or Visiontek.
Personally, I wouldn't pay anything extra for a factory overclock -- nearly every card will overclock considerably better than anything the factory is willing to support, and it won't cost you anything, you just slide a slider in the driver.
I would consider which has the best cooler - that is something worth paying for. Pay particular attention to noise - 290X's can run hot and loud, and a good cooler mitigates both of those. Something like Asus DirectCU or XFX DoubleD are great to have.
Apart from that - it's the same chip, they are using the same design PCB. Whichever you can find on a good sale would be a good snag I would say.
There happens to be this sale going on right now for a nice Gigabyte card for $309, which has their Windforce cooler on it. No idea how long that will last, but it's about $50 off.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125499
----
SLI and Crossfire are things that sound really really good on paper - take 2 cards, make them perform like one really fast card.
In reality, it doesn't quite work that way. It's very game and driver dependant, even when it works it usually isn't anywhere near double the performance, but you still get double the heat and double the noise; not to mention double the headaches with drivers and game incompatibility.
There are only 3 times I can see using SLI/CFX:
1) You know it has a bunch of issues, but you want to play with it anyway.
2) You get the second card for free/insanely cheap, and it doesn't cost anything to go ahead and throw it in
3) You want/need performance that absolutely can't be had in a single fast video card, so you have some really top-end stuff, are SLI/CFXing top-end cards on a top-end CPU and motherboard, and are spending a lot of money to get it.
Happy Holidays Everyone!
I know this is a bit of necroing a thread but now that the holidays are over, I've been able to save up enough for a system in the $900-$1000 range. Now I am looking to purchase ASAP. I am hoping to have the order in by mid week, but I want to put the build up for some scrutiny since I have made some changes to it with some recommendations from friends and I'd like to see what you folks think of it. Right now prices do matter, although I am still in the process of searching other sites for better prices, but if you have a better trustworthy site to suggest where a part is cheaper, please do and I will definitely take a look at it.
Case - $49.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147153
PSU - $49.99 ($20.00 Rebate): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817159082
RAM - $79.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460
MotherBoard - $118.79: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128713
CPU - $229.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117372
CPU Cooler - $24.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186134
SSD - $109.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148694
GPU - $289.99 ($20.00 Rebate): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202080
Total: (($953.72 - $40.00) + $21.91) = $935.63 After Rebates /w 3-day shipping
Total: $953.72 + $21.91 = $977.13 Before rebates /w 3-day shipping
At this point, not completely sold on the SSD cause I keep hearing Samsung is the leader in SSD's and they have a 840 series or something that is in the >$100 range and that seems like it might have better read/write speeds. Unfortunately still out with family so this is a quick post of items I have been putting together over the weekend. Am I screwing up anywhere in yours eyes? Is there another site I can find a cheaper price for some of these parts? (All from Newegg ATM, my usual PC supplier) Any new price suggestions now that I am looking to order by Wednesday? It's down to the wire and looking for any help and suggestions before I click the order button.
The power supply is a piece of junk and would be a danger to fry everything in your rig. This will be nice:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182068
Don't overclock the video card, though, and don't overclock the CPU very far. Not that the cooler you picked would handle a big overclock.
The memory is nice, but you wouldn't notice the difference between that and 1600 MHz memory, which could be had for perhaps $10 or so cheaper.
You can get a better motherboard as part of a combo deal with the CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2060546
That has a $30 rebate on the motherboard, too. It's Z87 rather than Z97, but it will work just fine, and I think it's a good place to save a little money while still getting nice parts.
The CPU cooler is cheap and a case of you get what you pay for. It will be a huge upgrade over the stock cooler, but don't plan on doing any more than minor overclocking on that cooler. That said, it will work well at stock speeds.
Samsung makes some nice SSDs, but so do a lot of other companies, and I'd advise against paying a price premium for a brand name. The problem is that Samsung basically prices themselves out of competition most of the time and relies on marketing or FUD to try to convince people to overpay. Samsung might claim to be the SSD leader, but Crucial/Micron and Intel would probably make the same claim. SanDisk might, too.
Basically, what you want in an SSD performance-wise is sequential read/write speeds well into triple digits (even 200 MB/s would be fine if that's real-world performance) and random read/write IOPS numbers well into five digits. The difference between 300 MB/s and 500 MB/s or between 100K IOPS and 30K IOPS basically amounts to a rounding error for consumer use. That's all fast enough that you'll virtually never be waiting on the SSD, as something else will be the bottleneck. For comparison, hard drives may chug along at 100 or 200 IOPS. And yes, the "K" in 30K for thousand.
I'll take your word on the power supply only cause I looked at it only based on price and reviews. Seemed highly rated based off of the reviews which is why I chose it compared to everything else in the price range.
However, with the combo, wouldnt I want to try and stay with a Z97 chipset? I know that overall it wouldn't change the performance all that much but wouldn't it still be worth the price difference or not really?
My only issue with the case is that it seems there is no 2.5 adapter or slot for internal SSD and the SSD I have chosen is that size. Where the current case I have doesnt have a slot but does come with an adapter to house 2 2.5 size drives. Now I will say, I am still looking at SSD's and trying to decide on one so that could change but that would be one of my concerns.
As for the RAM and overclocking, I choose the ram at a higher speed incase I wanted to start with a small over clock there, although again not decided and that would be a future thing anyway. I wouldnt be doing anything like that till at least a year or 2 into using it. Not to mention if overclocking did become something I wanted to do, I would go for a different CPU cooler. Just to give some ideas where I am coming from with some of the choices here but thanks for the options.
The problem with power supply reviews on New Egg is that few buyers have the ability to rate a power supply on anything beyond it died or it didn't, or perhaps how noisy it is. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of people who actually know a little about power supplies would completely skip the cheap junk ones in favor of higher quality units, so user reviews of high and low quality power supplies will tend to be from entirely different categories of people, making the reviews not comparable.
Apparently the advantage of the Z97 chipset over Z87 is M.2 support. That's a smaller form factor for SSDs than the common 2.5" laptop drives, which allows them to take less space in laptops. But it's still a pretty rare form factor for SSDs: New Egg has 12 M.2 SSDs, as compared to 606 SATA. Z97 will also officially support Broadwell CPUs, while Z87 won't, but Broadwell CPUs aren't likely to matter in a desktop.
Z87 was the original high end chipset for Haswell CPUs such as what you're getting. So it will work fine, and you're not relying on motherboard manufacturers to hack something together that Intel never intended to work. For the same price, you'd rather have Z97 than Z87, but if you can save $20 by going with Z87, then do it.
Do yourself a favor and buy a decent PSU.
Building a nice system with expensive hardware and putting a craptastic PSU in it all in the name of saving $20 is not the way to go. Never understood people spending $970 on hardware and buying a $30 power supply.
Check out the Black Pearl on cyberpowerpc.com and they go buy all the components on newegg and build that PC yourself. That's what I did and it cost me right at $1000. Only think I changed was I put a GTX 770 in it and upgraded the power supply to a 700 watt.
It's $1500 to buy on that website so you save about $500 building it yourself.