Kyoji said I could find some serious tech guys here to help me with my new pc build? I usually stay in the Ps2 forums so I don't know any of you outside that division, but thanks ahead of time for any help offered. First off, this upgrade is to improve performance in 2 areas. "AREA 1" Planetside 2 frames per second. I average about 30-40FPS riding around in the world and in small battles and then about 20-25FPs when in a big battle or anytime I start frapping. Hoping this newer system will increase those FPS. "AREA 2" Just as important as area 1 are my render times in Maya 2012. A 15 second animation using image based lighting with emmision + Final Gather + HD 1080P production quality can take about 3-5 hours with my current system. Hoping to cut that time in half. Maya 2012 has NO CAPS on how much ram or cpu % it will utilize in the rendering stage. It will eat your high end pc for lunch (depending on your poly counts, shaders, lighting and frame lengths). When it's render time i turn off the monitor and go to bed since my pc becomes useless, so please don't post any nonsense that anything past 8-12Gb is a waste or I will likely nerd rage on you My current system is a i7-920 2.4Ghz quad core cpu, 12Gb ddr3 triple channel ram, 7500rpm 2.5 TB hard drive, HD 7970 Ghz edition 3gb version video card, and a 600w rosewill psu. I had already posted this in the PS2 division and got some help there before kyoji recommended posting here also for additional help. here is what I am up to: Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V LE LGA 1155 Intel Z77 CPU: Intel Core i7-3770 Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 CPU Cooler: CORSAIR H50 RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (Vista 64bit Ultimate is my OS) Power Supply: CORSAIR HX Series HX750 Primary OS Drive: SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256BW Secondary Storage Drive (already Have): Western Digital WD Green WD25EZRX 2.5TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Video Card (already Have): SAPPHIRE Vapor-X 100351VXSR Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 Mouse: Logitech G600 Mechanical Red switch Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K90 * i already have arctic silver5 paste for the cpu and a full tower case My budget is 1200$ and I am at that now so if you have a recommendation make sure it costs the same or less cause I cant go past 1200. <--- that's the limit
Get CORSAIR Hydro series H50 instead of zalman. About the same price and way better performance/ease of installation http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181010 and i would not touch ocz, not very reliable. go with samsung 840
I have no plans to overclock as I have never been able to get it stable every time I tried. with that in mind don't you think liquid cooling is a bit overkill? your not the first to mention the Samsung 840 I had picked the ocz one cause it showed faster but with everyone saying the Samsung is better I guess I will have to switch it. edited OP
Don't think of it as a watercooling. Think of it as a better cooler then air, but with water inside =] You don't have to OC. Your temps will just be 10c-15c lower then on air for the same price.
alright then sold... price now 1236... so if there are more changes needed they need to be same price or lower
I dont know if it matters to you or not, but another of our members here bought a computer a month or two ago with a lot of Corsair products too. He has had terrible luck with them and has RMA'd just about every piece with Corsair in its name so far: http://www.xoohq.com/threads/31010.New-PC-time&p=347281&viewfull=1#post347281 Corsair reviews cannot be relied on for computer hardware since they are the most famous company for "bait and switch" when a product gets popular. Mushkin or GSkill are always my recommendations on RAM. My choice of a heatsink for someone who wants to go cheaper, doesnt care much about overclocking, or wants to OC but doesnt care about going over 4.5GHz then I always recommend the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO As for Maya, I dont know much about it to be honest. But Nvidia has a plugin for it that supports CUDA acceleration: http://www.nvidia.com/object/MayaCgPlugin.html Which leads me to belive an Nvidia GPU is probably better for you since a main purpose will be Maya use. I am assuming you plan to keep your current GPU though since you already have it? But it might be something to look into for just how much of a performance increase an Nvidia GPU could give you in rendering. Lastly, I would caution against a Western Digital Green series drive. Lately all hard drives have terrible reliability, but the green drives from WD are especially bad. I have had many the past few years and every one has failed. One of the reasons I believe the green drives especially have such a massive failure rate is because of the extra focus on power savings in the green series. The heads go into park mode after a few seconds of not having to read/write data, which IMO causes far too much unnecessary movement. The reasoning of WD is that it is "safer" to move the heads into park every time because the recording head cant touch the magnetic disk when it is parked. Solid reasoning or not, real world data says it is a retarded idea. Old drives that didnt care about this "efficient tech" worked perfect and lasted more than a decade with ease. New drives are lucky if they last a couple years, most seem to fail in the first month or two. The "black" series of drives that dont do such aggressive parking have much less failure rate, but overall I just recommend to stay away from WD. Seagate is hardly better, but at least it is something. Samsung is manufactured by Seagate but oddly enough doesnt havent quite as high failures in those drives for some reason. Toshiba might also be a good choice to try, but there is no data to back them up since they havent been big in the desktop drive business for a LONG time and are just barely getting back into it these past few months. If you can, it would probably be best to keep your current hard drive and move it to the new computer since you seem to have lucked out and gotten one that will last a while. And one thing to note is also that a 2.5TB drive of modern design will use two and a half magnetic platters. Modern platter tech is 1TB per platter
I don't own anything that is corsair made right now. Those corsair products came from the ps2 thread. I had originally selected other stuff but was told by more than one person that corsair was the bomb dot com so I switched. What do you think of this PSU instead then: COOLER MASTER That corsair ram is the only dual channel kit of ddr3 1600 on newegg. The only other one is a gskill one that is actually 1333 that must be oc'ed to 1600 so thats a no-go. Is using 4 sticks of 8gb same type ram as good as a dual channel kit? if so then what about this ram : Crucial - just using 4 of them? is that as good as dual channel kit? The liquid cooler doxy linked was only 20$ more so i just added it. is that cooler you linked better than the liquid one? I'm not opposed to overclocking but I just could never get it stable in the past when i tried, so I kind of gave up on it. I may try it again if I need more speed but i think going from 2.4 to 3.9 will solve my problems. If it don't I will definitely try oc'ing then so it might be better to go to liquid cooled. The video card has no part in rendering in maya. when I am saying rendering you are thinking in gamer terms... IE how far away can I see / my target is 3000meters out so it's not rendering / those damn glowy bushes with the pink berries aren't showing up on my screen, so they aren't rendering (those are all rendering issues caused by a video card). from a CG persepective rendering is the process of exporting a sequence of say 500 still frames and drawing them out of the program to an external file frame by frame so that they can be used in some other video editing software for making an animation. Kind of like drawing a stick man on a post it note pad and then flipping through them really fast to show the stick man walking CG rendering wouold be the process of drawing each little stick man on each little post it note throughout the whole pad. As you mentioned nvidia also does have a plugin that goes along with maya, but is for pc's with really old graphics card and is for helping out when modeling and also adding in dx9,10 and 11 support to your models. I have no problems with freezing up on modeling and am not modeling for a video game, nor professionally, so I don't need an nvidia card for it. The AMD video card is what I already have in this pc and plan to carry over to my new pc, not what I intend to order. I just bought it about two months ago
I can confirm that cooler master for psu is better imho. I have x3 cooler master psus and they still work without a hitch. Gskill is imho a very good ram manufacturer. Have x16 gigs of 1600 gskill ram in my rig and no problems yet.
the gskill brand isn't what I had a problem with. it was that it wasn't really 1600, despite being listed as 1600, was really 1333 that you could overclock to 1600.
G.Skill dual channel kits. Perhaps you missed something? A monkey can overclock these ivybridge processors so you won't find it difficult if you decide to (You will need a K series processor) and if you're looking to cut down render times as much as possible it would be silly not to. As enigma said the 212 will be enough for a moderate overclock up to 4.5 Ghz. The amount of voltage that needs to be applied past that increases the thermal output of these processors quite a bit. I would go with a silverstone Heligon He01 (solves the RAM clearance problem) or NZXT havik 140 (RAM clearance issues) over the h50 any day. I own a couple of the silverstone fans in the heligon and they are awesome. They can move a lot of air at a low noise level and can move a massive amount of air when cranked up. You can save yourself 50$ and go with the non pro Samsung SSD if you decide samsung is the brand you wish to go with. Just as I have had a ton of problems with ALL corsair parts in my PC I have had no problems with the 3 OCZ SSDs that I own (vertex 3, Vertex 3 max iops, vertex 4) as Doxy has found. Pcpartpicker Build ^^Build with recommended parts^^ Great site to give you a good idea of pricing. Use it to switch parts in and out to fine tune things. Keyboards will be a tough choice. I wouldn't go with the k90 again if I had a choice. All I can say is don't buy it online. Get it from bestbuy if you have one close to you so that you can return it if need be. They don't ask any questions which was nice when I was returning mine for the 4th time. I haven't used the G-keys once. I do like the backlit keyboard and cherry mx red switches though. You shouldn't need the thermal paste you have as any cooler comes with thermal paste pre-applied. You can get a cheaper PSU than the one in that list (like the cooler master one you posted). Platinum certification means you are paying more upfront and bronze/silver/gold will all do just as well. I don't know if the price of the platinum over bronze actually saves you anything in electric bills. With the RAM you may run into the board not running it at the advertised speed until you enable the XMP profile in the BIOS. You can't get around that.
He needs 32GB though, in 8GB dimms. What Leoben is talking about is there are very few dual channel kits sold with in 4 stick capacities. It really doesnt matter though, you can buy a triple channel kit and use only two sticks and have your dual channel. The memory channels come from the processor, not the RAM. You shouldn't mix different densities and you shouldn't mix different RAM chips, but people still do and it works fine most of the time. And if you buy all the RAM at once and know specifically what you are buying it is easy to buy two kits of 16GB (in 2 x 8GB configuration) and have them matched perfectly fine. The selling of specific matched kits is a complete gimmick in the desktop area of computers these days, the only place it matters is the server realm with very high densities of registered ECC dimms. Either of these kits will work perfectly fine buying two at the same time and putting them in for 32GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231606 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226337 Corsair was the bomb dot com a long time ago. Many of their products are still good. But they also have a habit of having someone make them an amazing product with their logo, get people to review it and then 3 months later swap out the parts for something much cheaper so they can make a lot more money. Especially in RAM sticks, when some new amazing kit comes out and people start buying it, as supply of the chips gets low then Corsair will switch to a different brand with the same specs and not tell anyone or change the model number of the RAM. The new chips will be much cheaper grade and will have very little OC headroom and people start wondering why they cant get the same high overclocks everyone else is doing. When the new users crack open the sticks and compare the chips, the actual product is completely different. Lately the QC of the products has also suffered and what you buy from them may not last through the years. The H100 I just bought 3 or 4 months ago has even started going bad the last couple days. THe pump is making much louder noise than normal and is causing a really strong vibration. I dont have the numbers off the top of my head, but the Corsair H50 is probably a little bit better, but I doubt by very much. The Hyper 212 EVO is just a very well made heatsink that is incredibly cheap. It beats out anything on the market under $50 and many of the more expensive products.
You know, if you're looking at that much ram with that high utilization I'd go ahead and go with 1.35V ram. Under heavy load you're actually going to be burning substantially less power. (Power is proportional to V^2) I know these are low profile...but that matters as much as silly heatspreaders. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148665 Hard to go wrong with Crucial, IMO. You're getting it straight from the DRAM manufacturer there. Micron is nearly as good as Intel from a processing standpoint. Corsair switching chips on people...well I can't really fault them for not exceeding advertized specs. Say you get lucky with an i5 that could have been binned an i7 - you shouldn't expect all i5s to work to that standard. By the way, Maya can make use of both nVidia's CUDA and AMD's graphics-card based computing in the newer versions, I think (I know it can do CUDA, not sure about AMD). It's faster for some things I believe. I know they get a decent amount of use in other HPC environments. our HPC center had or has a rack of nVidia somethings they use...but I'm not a software dude so I can't elaborate.
Figured that out after typing for a bit and threw in the same mushkin blackline you recommended in a 4x8 kit
True, but Intel builds their processors from larger silicon wafers. From those wafers they test all the chips and ones that meet spec get sold as i7's. The ones that don't meet the spec in some ways but are still good enough are sold as lower grade parts like the i5. That isn't the same as what Corsair is doing to specifically overbuild a product in order to get great reviews and hype, only to switch the product without telling anyone to cheaper grade parts shortly thereafter. At that point it is no longer the same product and any reviews for that model are no longer valid. Getting a "golden" i5 is great luck and lots of people hope for it. In the same way a RAM kit can be "golden" where everyone who is buying it is able to overclock like crazy. Yes, it is above the specs and not guaranteed. But the difference between the two scenarios is that one is built specifically to give everyone great overclocking and then switched out, the other is sold lower because we already know it doesn't meet the higher spec but changes are good it can with some tweaking. One way is pretty deceitful to customers and the other or not trying to hide anything. That is one of the reasons I like Mushkin, in addition to being an American company who makes their products in America, they also have the best customer service of any RAM manufacturer. But on top of that, their model number means that is the product you get. When Mushkin switches RAM chips being used they put a completely new model number on it to differentiate the old chips from the newer ones. This way is not only being honest to their customers but also helps stability because you know whether or not you will be mixing different chips.
Yeah, it's somewhat disingenuous. I'm disinclined to think there's malice involved in stuff like this, but yeah, there's better ways of handling it. I guess I just don't trust products to exceed specs consistently by phenomenal values and don't base my expectations on it. Buying off-spec is a great way to lose your job. RAM module manufacturers, really everybody that doesn't do their own chip fabbing, are especially vulnerable because they are somewhat at the whims of their chip supplier. Those chips are binned much the same as a CPU. (There are only like 4/5 players and Samsung is ...40% of the market?). I think just Samsung and Crucial (Micron) market DIMMs directly to consumers? I also just want to plug that 1.35V RAM again. Mainly because I want someone to guinea pig for my coming upgrade.
I havent used those Crucial ones, but they are supposedto be similar to the Samsung chips that came out a few months ago. Should be good stuff.
Never knew that about Corsair... My pump on my h100 randomly stops for 5 secs every hour. And here I was going to build an all Corsair / eVGA box, heh.
Got a question needing answered: I am intending to use a SSD as my boot drive and then a HDD for storage. Lets say I have Adobe After Effects installed on the SSD and then I start building a video thats only about 15 minutes in length in 1080p it ends up being around 250GB in size when exported out (Average). Now obviously I cant export that to the SSD cause it's too big so I export it to the HDD. During the exporting process am I going to be limited by the speed of the HDD or the SSD? If I am going to have to export to the HDD then how am I gaining any advantage by using a SSD other than fast boot times? After effects, vegas and maya are all huge disk drive eaters when video editing so I'm curious where my limiting speeds are going to be coming from? the ssd that these programs are installed on or the export location where these programs are sending to?
Exporting is the process of rendering and then saving the video file? Rendering could be limited by either the calculations on the CPU or the HD's write speeds. Or is it that you're editing a video file already in existence stored on a disk? In the later case loading that file or portions of that file is going to be limited to your HD speeds. In the former it may or may not be depending on how fast things get rendered. I know with Photoshop, you have the scratch disk for when things get bigger than the available memory space. You can assign that to wherever you want - an SSD will certainly speed things up. SSD's only speed up access to data on that particular disk. If you install a program on it, the program will load faster...but if you're editing files with that program that are on a slow disk those files will load slowly. In the example of a game: Lets say the interface and engine is stored on an SSD and the textures and things are stored on a regular drive. The menu is going to boot up super quickly but when you click play, the level is going to load slowly. During play it doesn't matter because it's already all loaded into RAM. Once you change levels you have the long load time again. In some games that load areas "seamlessly" and thus have to access the disk during play, on the other hand, you'd notice if the game had to load new content from a regular disk much more than you would with an SSD (because you might "outrun" the HD's bandwidth and see framerate drops).