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last questions, I promise!
So, we've got done great deals so far with boxing day, almost done. I only have a few more questions. We are going with the MSI z97 mobo paired with an i7 4790k, good deal on the combo, only came out to 30 dollars more than getting the i5. What kind of rem should Iget for this, I notice the board supports up to ddr 3000, but prices start to get silly after ddr2400. I don't know a thing aboutlatency etc so I'm lost here. Also ssd drives. I see 240gb for a hundred bucks. They have comparable read/ write times of the newer drives, but are sandforce based, are these junk? Placing order this morning do thanks for the help in advance. This is the build so far.
Msi z97 gaming 5 mobo
Intel i7 4790k
Evga g1 power supply
Seagate 1tb hdd
Asus 290x 4Gb gpu
Msi z97 gaming 5 mobo
Intel i7 4790k
Evga g1 power supply
Seagate 1tb hdd
Asus 290x 4Gb gpu
Comments
With that CPU all you need for RAM is DDR3 1600. Or maybe 1866 if you can find it for the same price or cheaper than the 1600.
You could honestly go with 1333 and not notice any difference. But 1600 is usually the same price.
Something like this would work http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104464 . especially at this price.
Or this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231314 . Which is 1600 and a few dollars more than the 1866.
Hey, check this youtube video about ram... He explains it in a way that is easy to understand, and it will help you choose your ram.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWgzA2C61z4
Check out Samsung 840 Evo, it's widely known as one of the best SSD's, and rated very high everywhere.
There's a new one out, 850 Evo, it isn't faster at all, 850 is just a "built-to-last" variation of 840.
I personally have 2x 840's, and they run beautifully, and FAST! hehe
Grats on the new system, have fun!
I'm a gamer and I play games, not virtual vending machines.
I hope they aren't in a RAID0. That would just double your chances of a failure causing your system to be down with no real performance gains in almost all applications.
When it comes to SSDs, there isn't much performance difference between decent ones and the "best" ones on a SATA 600MBps port. In real-world applications (not synthetics benchmarks) any decent SSD is going to perform about the same as the Samsung 840s. Sure, you might shave 1 second off a 30 second boot time, but the whole purpose of getting a SSD is to shave 2+ minutes off a mechanical drive's boot times.
Selection of a SSD comes down to budget and how much you're willing to pay for minor performance gains. Personally, I feel the low-end-priced Crucial MX series are the best bang for the buck right now.
The OP's original question about RAM has a simple answer and doesn't require a youtube link. The short answer is that the speed of the RAM doesn't have any significant impact on gaming performance. Get what you can afford without spending an excessive amount for a minor upgrade in speed. If 1866 memory is only $5 more than 1600 memory, go for it if you have the budget for it.
A Samsung SSD is fast because it's an SSD, not because it's Samsung. Performance differences among modern SSDs basically amount to a rounding error in real-world use. And Samsung charges a lot for their SSDs; you can get something equivalent elsewhere for a lot cheaper.
That said, an SSD is one thing that the build in the original post is glaringly missing. There's also no mention of a case, CPU cooler, or OS license.
How much memory bandwidth you need is roughly proportional to how much CPU performance you need. A computer can be made completely functional with just a single memory channel, but there are reasons why AMD and Intel both include two channels outside of the very low end--and four channels at the high end. If you're getting a Core i7, you've got a fast enough CPU--and a large enough budget--that you can justify spending a few extra dollars on faster memory. But only a few, as opposed to spending an extra $20 to get faster memory. And I certainly wouldn't go any slower than 1600 MHz DDR3.
There are three potential limiting factors of how fast memory can be clocked are memory itself, the motherboard, and the memory controller in the CPU. All three need to be able to handle the speed that you want to run memory at or else it doesn't work. Motherboards sometimes claim to support crazy memory speeds, but the motherboard is rarely the limiting factor in how fast memory can go, at least in a desktop and if you exclude cheap junk motherboards.
The ratings on memory are a promise from the memory manufacturer that it can handle at least such and such speed at particular latency timings and voltages. Do note that the stock voltage for DDR3 is 1.5 V, so if you buy memory rated faster at 1.65 V, they're basically saying, if you overvolt it, you can overclock it to this speed. If memory is rated at 1.65 V and some speed, it can also run at 1.5 V and a slower speed, but not necessarily at 1.5 V at the rated speed.
There's also the memory controller in the CPU. And how fast does Intel claim that can run? 1600 MHz. That's probably just being ridiculously conservative on Intel's part, and I wouldn't have any qualms about running memory at 1866 MHz and 1.5 V. Intel also claimed 1600 MHz support way back in 2009, and memory has gotten a lot faster since then. Intel has a history of being ridiculously conservative with memory support claims, such as a $1000+ CPU that only supported 1066 MHz memory. And DDR3 memory rated at only 1066 MHz wasn't terribly common even then. But Intel is so conservative on memory support claims precisely because they know that it doesn't make much difference outside of supporting integrated graphics. And Intel integrated graphics are going to be slow no matter what memory you give them.
For what it's worth, if you really want to know why Intel's LGA 2011 platform needs four memory channels, it's so that it can support a CPU with 18 cores. But look at the memory support on there: DDR4 at 1600, 1866, or 2133 MHz. Never mind that DDR4 rated below 2133 MHz doesn't even seem to exist.
Nzxt s340 case
Evga 750w b1 power supply
Msi z97 gaming 5 mobo
Intel i7 4970k cpu
Seagate 1tb 64 cache hdd
Asus 290x gpu
Triton 240mm cooler
Windows 8.1
Looking at ssd and ram right now
Looks like you waited too long and the great deals on the Crucial M500 are now gone. You could grab these, perhaps:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721108
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231455
They aren't, they are fast enough as is.
I just bought a small SSD for my OS, and later a bigger one for my games.
Right, doesn't change the fact that it is one of the highest rated SSD's out there, and wins every test pretty much.
http://www.newegg.com/SAMSUNG-Internal-SSDs/BrandSubCat/ID-1077-636
130 bucks isn't too bad, you might be able to get something else cheaper, but you can say that about anything.
I'd still recommend the 840 evo, it's a nice SSD.
I'm a gamer and I play games, not virtual vending machines.
The only test that matters is reliability, and that's something that is impossible to get good data on. The Samsung EVO SSDs that you're pushing are likely to be among the worst at write endurance (because of TLC NAND), though even that doesn't matter for most purposes, as something else will kill the drive first.
It's not just that the difference between 400 MB/s and 500 MB/s or between 60K and 80K IOPS doesn't matter. I used to have an OCZ Agility 1, which topped out at something like 160 MB/s sequential read and write and maybe 7K IOPS. Basically all recent SSDs are much, much faster than that. But replacing it by a Seagate 600 didn't make any noticeable performance difference outside of synthetic benchmarks. The replacement was still worthwhile for the sake of extra capacity and because the old model had 4+ years of use, which is old enough that I don't really trust storage devices of that age.
Are Samsung's modern SSDs nice? Sure, but so are lots of other SSDs on the market--including some that are considerably cheaper for the same capacity. Samsung's EVO SSDs are a budget product without the budget price tag, and I don't recommend paying a price premium if you're not getting a premium product.
http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013#comments
"With an average lifespan of 75 years for the TLC memory chips, consumers have absolutely nothing to worry about. It doesn't mean the SSD will actually last 75 years, but the number of available write cycles will not be the bottleneck. That means we will amend our conclusion from a couple months ago. A Samsung 840 SSD with TLC memory is just as reliable as SSDs with MLC memory, and the type of memory should not be a reason to choose one SSD over another."
But even if that was a concern, he could just go for the 850 pro.
I'm a gamer and I play games, not virtual vending machines.
Do you work for Samsung or something? Why are you so dead set on on pushing Samsung SSDs for no identifiable reason in particular? Usually that sort of fanboyism is reserved for viral marketers and people pushing video card brands, not SSDs.
I already said that write endurance isn't a problem for most use. Someone getting an SSD to house a very write-heavy random-access database that is going to be written to around the clock shouldn't get a TLC NAND SSD. But that's not most use. Incidentally, someone once did a test with six SSDs and most of them lasted longer than the ~700 TB of the test in your link.
The problem is that you're ignoring prices and just recommending that people buy whatever parts you happen to like for no real reason in particular. If price really is no object, then you just buy a 1 TB SSD, skip the hard drive, and call it a day. But most people aren't in that boat. And for most people, paying a premium price tag for a decent product that has nothing to justify the premium price tag is a bad idea. If Samsung's budget SSDs carried a budget price tag rather than a premium price tag, then I'd say sure, buy one. But they don't.
If the problem is that a Samsung 840 Evo is too expensive, then saying to get the 850 Pro instead only makes the problem worse. That's even more expensive, and carries about a 70% price premium as compared to otherwise comparable products. For something like the write-heavy database referenced above, sure, you pay that premium because you need that write endurance. But for most people, you don't.
Incidentally, the only SSD I'm aware of from personal experience to die quickly (several months) was a Samsung 840 Pro. I'm not saying that all Samsung SSDs are junk; they're not, and it's just a fluke that that one died fast.
Maybe I do, maybe I don't.. It's irrelevant. Do you work for Kingston?
You brought up the fact that it was TLC and calling it a budget product because TLC is cheaper to make, it made it sound like the product is worse than all the other SSD's, when it's not.
So I just linked some tests.
And the 850 pro was in case TLC was gonna be problem, not about money.
I'm recommending the products I like and have experience with, just like you recommend whatever you like, there's no definite answer here, I don't know why you are trying to prove me wrong.
I think you just like to argue for the sake of arguing, like a "I know more than you, please shut up" kinda thing.
In the end, OP can decide for himself if the few extra bucks is worth it or not.
840 Evo, quality product - that's all from me on the subject, OP probably already have the info he needs anyway.
I'm a gamer and I play games, not virtual vending machines.
You're moving the goal posts here. If products A and B are a priori equivalent, except that product A costs $30 more than product B, if you want to justify the price premium required to buy product A, you have to explain why it's a better product than B--and at least $30 worth of better. Saying that it's not actually any worse than product B doesn't get you there, whether the assertion is true or not. Nor does claiming that it's a good product, just like B.
If I work at marketing for Kingston, I must be bad at it, given that I had previously linked a Crucial SSD for the original poster and only switched when prices on it changed. And in the very same post, I also linked G.Skill memory, not Kingston. But more to the point, I picked products that happened to be a good deal today. I didn't completely ignore prices and just link to a page with everything from some arbitrary brand and say, buy something off this list. I don't think I've ever done that on this forum, and when on occasion I do link to some search results on New Egg, it's always to make some more abstract point (e.g., everything in this category is out of stock), not to say, you should buy some random thing off this list.
Samsung drives do have a very nice companion application that lets you adjust some of the SSD parameters and see some key parameters (spare drive size, etc).
That being said, the consumer drives have a 3 year warranty, which is pretty standard for SSD.
Would I pay extra for the companion app? Hmm, probably not. It's nice, but it's not something that you will use every day - if this and another SSD were the same price and same features it may be a tipping point, but I don't consider it to be worth anything extra.
That being said, I would pay more for a Samsung than, say, an A-Data or VisionTek some other company that may not be around long enough to be able to honor their warranty - pretty sure Samsung won't be going anywhere anytime soon. But that can be said about a lot of companies, not just Samsung. I happen to be partial to Crucial myself, but I wouldn't spend extra for a Crucial drive over a Samsung or Intel... but I would over an OCZ or Mushkin or some other players that haven't been pushing SSDs for as long or have been as stable of a company.
Trust goes a long way, and the previous paragraph illustrates that - personally, I would be willing to pay more for a company I trust. There is something to be said for brand loyalty. I wouldn't fault someone willing to pay more for a brand name because of that - but it also wouldn't fault someone else for pointing out other options either. In the end, the person spending the money, it's their money, and their ultimate choice. Everyone else is just spouting opinions.
Well, once again thanks for all the replies, and lively debate. In the end, I went with what I could get on a boxing day sale at a good price for the ssd, so long as it has the read/write comparable to others. I also changed a few things cause I wasn't fast enough and things sold out on me. This is the final build
NZXT s340 white case
Evga supernova 750w power supply
Asrock z97 extreme 6 motherboard
intel i7 4970k CPU
Raijintek Triton Liquid CPU cooler
Kingston HyperX fury 8gb 1866 ram
Asus r9 290x video card
Patriot Blaze series 240gb SSD
Seagate Barracuda 1tb HDD
TP link wireless adapter
Um......yeah, thats about it, now to wait for it all to arrive!
Samsung 840 evo have cell bug, and after 30 days if any file on the disk isn't used atleast once in 30 days the speed of the whole disk drops below 100mb/s both read and write, and only a firmwire upgrade which doesnt work with amd ahci drivers helps. All disk made before circa mid november have the bug, and i doubt there's many manufactured after mid november considering 850 pro came out.
So be warned.
Sure it's relatively easy to upgrade the firmware and test the speeds with say hd tach, but u also have to uninstall amd ahci drivers and do it on base microsoft windows drivers, which is a little bit trickier, and not knowing about the bug will make your windows load as slow as a normal hdd, and you'll be the last one load a map in your game of choice, ...
That might be problematic. It uses a Phison controller, and while Phison's latest controller is at least decent if hardly great, their previous controllers were bad. Not "worse than a hard drive" bad like some of the early JMicron-based drives, but nowhere near how an SSD is supposed to perform.
Exactly which iteration of the Phison controller does the Patriot Blaze use? I can't find it. Patriot sends some of their products to tech sites for reviews, but not that one. The old, bad SSD controllers are mostly off the market, but you may have found one of the exceptions. I'd cancel the order and pick something else, even if you have to pay an extra $5 or $10 for a better SSD.
What you need to realize is that sequential read and write speeds basically don't matter. Hard drives can sometimes claim 150 MB/s in those, and if you get 150 MB/s whenever you access storage, that's blazing fast. 150 MB/s isn't the problem.
The problem is random access to hard drives. When you want to read from a hard drive, the hard drive has to stop for about 10 ms or so and wait for everything to move to the right physical position to read the file you want. You then get your 150 MB/s or so until you reach the physical end of what you're reading. If you need to read in a continuous 1 GB file, it will be plenty fast. If what you need is to read a thousand 4 KB files, then you read really fast for about 0.03 ms, stop and wait 10 ms to move to the right spot for the next, then read for about 0.03 ms, then wait for 10 ms, and so forth. In that sort of workload, a hard drive might not touch 1 MB/s.
SSDs tend to be pretty good at such a random read workload. But some completely fall apart in random writes. So if you need to write a hundred small files, suddenly it makes you wait. For example, when web browsing. Is the Patriot Blaze one of the bad SSDs? I'm not certain, but I'd say it's likely. If it were good, Patriot would tell you so. It's likely revealing that New Egg lists IOPS numbers for a lot of SSDs, but conspicuously skips them on that one, and Patriot doesn't report claimed numbers, either.
Two things are wrong with relying on that article.
The first is the random number chosen for writes per day has no basis or explanation of why that specific number was chosen. Yes, it seems like a high number if you think it only involves installing 10GiB worth of games per day, but that isn't what is really happening. Some programs (including games) write to the drive. These writes can be small in size, but they have to take up an entire block of space. That means a 4KB write could be causing 16KB of space to be written to, depending on how the flash memory is divided up. So, it is possible to average more than 10GB of writes per day, depending on programs you run.
The other thing wrong with relying on that article is that memory failure is rarely the reason a SSD fails. I have personally seen zero memory failures out of hundreds of failed SSDs that I have replaced. The point of failure lies between the memory and the SATA cable. There is a controller and a SATA interface on SSDs (among other critical circuitry) and if one of those fails, all of the memory becomes unusable.
The Phison controller on that patriot blaze ssd is probably Phison S10, used in corsair ssds, no clue if it's a finally decent iteration though.
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6554/phison-s10-quad-core-performance-ssd-controller-preview/index2.html
Maybe it is or maybe it isn't. Would you want to risk it if you didn't know? I wouldn't. Especially when a lot of SSD vendors have a history of grabbing junk controllers even after good alternatives were available. OCZ once said that their Vertex (Indilinx controller) was outselling their Summit (Samsung controller) by a ratio of 40:1, and even after that, vendors kept coming out with new SSDs based on JMicron and early Phison controllers.
No, you're absolutely right, i would never risk it, there's no reason anyone shouldn't get a micron ssd, they're the best out there for the price they're being sold at.
Was just trying to unravel the mystery of the the patriot blaze a little bit
Ow, my head hurts! Buy any SSD they say, oh wait, except for that one that you ordered.....it's horrible....lmao!
Anyways, ncix was difficult to deal with, ended up getting stiffed for a mouse, and ended up cancelling my order because I found better prices elsewhere.
This is my final build. Everything is on its way, and if any of it sucks, too bad for the kid lol!
NZXT source s340 case
Raijintek Triton 240 liquid cooler
EVGA 750w power supply
MSI z97 sli plus mobo
Intel i7 4790k cpu
Corsair vengence 8gb 1866 ram
ASUS AMD 290x 4gb GPU
Seagate 1tb 64mb cache HDD
Samsung evo 250gb SSD
motherboard wouldn't have been my first choice, but great boxing day deal and the kid wants a blue theme so it will work well