Computer Build - Phase IV (Now with pictures)

[Alexander Morou]

Perhaps I'll be using SlimDX, as an alternative to XNA. It appears to be an attempt to support up through DirectX 11; however, I haven't fully evaluated it to discern the level of support at this point.

When I get the new PC fully built, I'll be able to take more direct actions in researching this. My computer still seems to be slightly infected by a computer virus, so I'm going to have fun with this one until then.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Just thought I'd post this system comparison.

This will be a kick-ass upgrade.
Well, I just did some checking on the hard drive that I currently have. The drive is called a Momentus 4200. Turns out that the drive spins at 5400RPM but delivers 4200 class performance (this is from Seagate itself). It delivers 38 MB/s data transfer rates on average and 48.25 at peak.

Intel's SSD delivers 180-220MB/s consistently from reviews I've read, which depending on which ends you view, can be from 373-578% performance compared to the Seagate HDD. The drawback comes in the write sector, Intel's only drawback is its write performance, which is still about twice what my current hard drive's is.

You spend most of your time waiting for things to load, versus writing data to the drive (file moves not included). I'm half tempted to use Raid 0 on two of them to speed things up more.
Just ordered one of the GTX 480's, given that they keep going in and out of stock, I wanted to be sure that there wouldn't be a sudden 'lack' of them any time soon.

Since this is rent week, I have to wait for my next check to buy the SSD, and PSU.

 

[Alexander Morou]

GTX 480 #1 received.

Now on order: Cooler Master's V10

[Embedded content has been removed]

I wonder if I should post pictures once I've built this monstrosity.

 

[Ceroscuro]

Yes. Yes you should.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Well here's photo number 1:


(Click to enlarge)

Just the motherboard by itself, I'll take more complete photos once I have enough of the parts to start the build.

Here's a few lists which illustrate how what you think something will cost isn't always what it costs.

1. Currently purchased
2. Next purchase (ETA: June 14th)
3. The rest of the build

The main delay for the images is I don't have a camera of my own. I took a few shots of the motherboard due to potential RMA of the board. When I get the next purchase in, I get the pleasure of testing it to ensure the northbridge doesn't exceed 65°C after running in idle in the bios with a skeleton setup.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Silverstone 1500W PSU and Optical Drive on the way.

 

[Tdata]

On the Topic of the SSD, Have they found a solution to the write cycle problem? 100,000 Writes per Cell is rather low. *Imagines placing his Page file on a separate SSD to increase performance...*

Personally I would have held off on the i7 and gone for the i9, but that is just me. The Ram looks good, The V-Cards look good, so long as they are SLI enabled... To Bad you didn't want a QuadroFX 5800 ^_^

Overall A nice system. Puts mine to shame... Phenom II X4 3.4ghz with 16gb DDR3 Ram and 2tb HDD... ^_^

 

[Alexander Morou]

Well,

As far as the processor goes, look up 'Core i9' in google, and you'll find it's a misnomer and the aforementioned Core i7 980x was the actual i9. It's a six core processor, they assumed it would have been given a new title because of the extra cores.

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

Yeah, originally Intel had announced an i9 processor that would be something like 1.66Ghz for 6 cores, plus hyper threading, for release Q3 2010. Apparently, they've figured something out since then and released a 3.33Ghz i7 with 6 cores. It's still possible that we will see an i9 later that may use an entirely new core. Remember that since it is an i7, it has the same cores as, say, a 930, but there's 2 more of them and the clock is not limited to 2.88Ghz, and the multiplier is not locked. That means it takes advantage of all of the bug fixes and such that the original i7 9xx that came out a couple of years ago.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Bingo, which means it's a beast in overclocking, no i7 920 can beat it when the same level of overclock is applied.

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

Well, unless I missed a stepping somewhere, the i7 980X has the same exact cores as the i7 920 E0, so theoretically, their max speeds should be basically the same. Remember that people are easily breaking 5Ghz with the i7 920.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Yes, but that's not using normal cooling methods.

I'm more referring to the two extra hyper-threaded cores. That's something it can't compare on. That and it's an unlocked multiplier, so overclocking is probably simpler to attain a stable overclock.

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

Right, yeah, the i7 920 can't magically get extra cores :P But yeah, obviously, I am not talking about stock air. On stock air, I've seen 4Ghz commonly, which is still pretty damn good. The i7 cores are the most overclockable since the P4

 

[Alexander Morou]

The last image is a size comparison between the new Lian Li Case and my old Dell tower. It's notably bigger.
Original post updated with the same information. Sorry for the crappy shots, I was using my cellphone's camera.

Next up, once I receive the SSD and memory modules, I'll post pictures of the full system as well as benchmarks.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Well,

The system's built and running fine.

Until my father gets back, I can't upload any pictures because the camera I have sucks. Here's a benchmark called passmark.

 

[psiclone]

why do benchmark tools cost money.. seriously. are there any free ones anywhere?

 

[Alexander Morou]

Well, I got tired of waiting so here's two images.

 

[Alexander Morou]

Well, five years and two months later, and it's time for another upgrade, as you can expect: it's another beast.

Long story short:
Two dodeca-core Xeon E5 2680 v3's which support hyper-threading for 48 threads.
128GB of Ram
500GB Samsung EVO 850 SSD
1300w PSU
nVidia GTX 980 Ti (I never made proper use of the SLI setup, it always got too hot and generated artifacts, no matter how many RMAs were involved)

You don't want to know how much it was.

Though in recent days I've made more use of large data sets, parallelism, memoisation. I develop server software running MS SQL Server 2014, IIS running multiple website instances (for testing), I hope to dabble more in 3D modeling (previous efforts fell flat), and I hope to get into virtualization to handle multiple platforms (Android, Linux, et cetera.) So my needs have surely grown since my previous build. Certain other projects have hours long run-times that I hope to cut down drastically.

Here's hoping this holds me out another five years!

 

[Ellie]

I should bloody hope so! Are SSDs reliable enough yet? Used to be the case that it's not a good idea to use it for your main data, as there's limits to how much can be rewritten, and if the disk crashed you'd lose everything. But I'm a bit out of the loop.

 

[Xilef]

I should bloody hope so! Are SSDs reliable enough yet?

About 1.5 to 2 years ago SSDs were expensive and unreliable. The technology has matured incredibly fast and prices are dropping and reliability is now very acceptable. SSDs are worth it for anyone and are now consumer-grade components.