5 year upgrade

SAFry

SAFry

SAFry

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Joined
18 Apr 2012
Posts
77
Location
Isle of Wight
Hey all, just wanted to check I hadn't made any obvious mistakes with my component selection for my 5 year upgrade. The old Q6600 is starting to creak under the strain.

Parts list as follows

Intel Core i7-3820 3.60GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011 Processor
Asrock X79 Extreme 4 Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard
G.Skill RipJawsZ 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C9 2133MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit


Fairly sure those bits go together, only issue was that somebody said that the motherboard only supports the CPU if it's the 1.6 BIOS version. Am I missing something, what else fits in that socket? How are you supposed to upgrade the BIOS if it won't run a 2011 CPU?

Getting the HDDs elsewhere, two samsung F3s for a raid 0.

Going to use my HD 5870 from existing rig, think that will be fine, I just want to play Dwarf Fortress anyway ;)

Akasa AK-CC4007EP01 Nero 3 CPU Cooler should do, I'm not planning on OCing it for now.

Corsair Builder Series CX 500W V2 '80 Plus' Power Supply too small? Should I go for the Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 650W V2 High Performance '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply? I just want to be sure it has enough PCIe card plugs and such because I'd hate to have to wonder down Maplins looking for cables on build day.

Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower Case looks OK, got the USB 3 ports. Don't think I need to worry too much about extra fans with no OC. My mates new PC we built off Overclockers runs at 20C with a stock cooler, my old Q6600 goes from 45-80C. Seems like the newer CPUs run a lot cooler.

Thanks in advance for any advice, just got a £500 tax rebate from 2009 to put towards my upgrade so I can afford to go a bit higher up the value curve then usual. Don't want to skimp on the nasty if it's got to last years and it's my main form of entertainment. I have a couple of programs that are poorly optimised for multiple CPUs (Dwarf Fortress and Shogun 2) so I'd rather have 4 strong cores then lots of weaker ones.

Cheers!
 
Hello amd welcome to the forum :)

What is main usage of the the PC?

Ivy Bridge is due to launch this week and might be a better bet.
 
Main usage is watching streaming TV in the 2nd monitor (so full screen flash which does seem to tax the CPU) whilst playing games in the main monitor. I mean I do other stuff with it but nothing my current PC can't handle.

It might seem a bit like overkill but I do actually enjoy Dwarf Fortress which can only really use one CPU so at the moment it's lagging on a single 2.4ghz core on a larger game. Have discussed the hardware requirements on the DF forum I need the best single CPU speed I can get, large CPU cache, large memory aperture and the lowest latency RAM I can find. Apparently the CPU only appears to be the bottleneck but most of the CPU cycles are wasted waiting for data from the RAM.

I must admit I read and re-read the wikipedia article on CAS latency but it's just going over my head. However somebody told me that those 2133MHz RipJawsZ (or at least some very similar ones, I can't find the exact same ones in the UK) can achieve a fetch time of 3ns? In the end I took a shot in the dark and figured I couldn't go far wrong with 16gb of quad channel 2133MHz RAM.

So yeah, I was hoping the Ivy Bridge might knock the price of this down if anything. This is the lowest price 2011 socket CPU at almost half the price of the next one and this is pushing my budget to the max.
 
Oh sry, thanks for the welcome BTW! Wow, 17k posts! I've used OCers for years but this is a major enough project for me that I wanted to seek advice for the first time.
 
I would doubt Ivy will knock the price of the socket 2011 down as these are more enthusiast range rather than main stream.

I would look at holding off until Ivy Bridge is out and have a look at CPU section as there is a lot of revews of the IB CPUs which may make a better purchase than the SB-E CPU speced above.

Sevens years seen to of flown past :p
 
Thanks for the advice, I guess it would be a good idea to at least wait and see, check out the benchmarks, prices and such. Only concern is that I'll get distracted, buy a nice fish tank instead and end up with an AMD ;)

They all laughed at me on the DF forum when I said I was going to buy a 4.2GHz FX Bulldozer.
 
Hi there, for your uses I would strongly recommend you go for an Ivy Bridge CPU (like the i5 3570K), a Z77 board (like this one) and either 8GB or 16GB of RAM (tbh it sounds like 8GB will be plenty for you currently - you can always add more later).

I say this for a few reasons, first an i5 3570K + Z77 will cost less than an i7 3829 + X79. The i5 3570K is expected to cost ~£190 at launch next week.
Second, an Ivy bridge quad core like the i5 3570K is faster per-clock than the i7 3820 - so for lightly threaded tasks - such as games (where the hyperthreading of the i7 doesn't help) this newer i5 will offer more performance.

I really wouldn't go for an AMD Bulldozer system - it has a lot of cores (and they are each clocked quite high) but each core is really quite slow compared to a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge core. Therefore, for games it will be quite a bit worse than the intel option.

As for the PSU, with a HD 5870 I would go with a nice PSU like this one or this one. The 550-600W have the advantage of supporting pretty much any future single GPU graphics card you would like to install in your system.

Finally, if you can find the money I would strongly recommend you install an SSD as a boot drive - even if it is only a 60/64GB one (like this one). This will be big enough to install windows, all your main apps and a game or two. An SSD is worth getting as it has random read/write speeds and response time to the order of 100x better than a mechanical hard drive - as well as much faster sequential read speeds (around 3-5 times faster than a mechanical drive).
 
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SAFry said:
Thanks for the advice, I guess it would be a good idea to at least wait and see, check out the benchmarks, prices and such. Only concern is that I'll get distracted, buy a nice fish tank instead and end up with an AMD ;)

They all laughed at me on the DF forum when I said I was going to buy a 4.2GHz FX Bulldozer.
Click to expand...

Keep focused, stay away form aquariums :D

Don't go for Bulldozer otherwise we will add you to our ignor list :p :eek:

But Ivy Bridge will be ideal and along with a Z77 motherboard from Gigabyte or MSI, I think Cmdr_andi may of linked to.
 
To be honest, SB-E is not worth the extra cash over a s1155 system unless you have a specialised use for the extra cores and memory bandwidth. Playing games and general desktop use you will not notice a blind bit of difference (other than a much lighter wallet). So unless you do a lot of heavy number crunching or just like willy waving and flushing your cash away, go for an s1155 setup ;)

Go for an Ivy Bridge (whatever 2500k equivilent is) and a good Z77 board.
 
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cmndr_andi & RJC, I decided against the FX when I started researching the hardware requirements for my current hobby horse Dwarf Fortress. Don't let the ASCII graphics fool you, this game is a massive number cruncher and only uses one core plus a little GPU at the moment.

I will wait and see the new Ivy Bridge stuff, I'm sure everybody is really excited about it but I'm not convinced it's actually going to be a better option especially as it's really early days and I don't want to get a buggy set-up.

Thing is that 3750K is only £30 cheaper, it's got less CPU cache (6 vs 10), it's slower by 0.2GHz and I'm not really using the graphics that much. My Radeon HD 5870 is doing fine, rarely goes over 40%.

I'd love a SSD but it's just not value for money now, Dwarf Fortress is only 1gb at the most, it sits entirely in RAM when running, drive meter is saying 0% when running. Two samsung spinpoint F3s in RAID 0 should give me a pretty decent read/write speed, I can always upgrade to a SSD in a couple years. Besides a 2gb drive on 4 plates will be nice.

My main concern is the RAM and CAS Latency, that Z77 can only do 1600MHz and I don't see anything about quad channel. This has got to last me 5 years, I don't want to double my RAM speed when I could triple it (although people say that the is no real world difference between 1600MHz and 2133MHz 90% of the time). I really only need 4gb, 8 would be nice but I can't find that nice fast quad channel RAM in anything less then 16gb. They were trying to explain to me about fetch speeds and such and said that this G.SKILL Ripjaws X + Turbulence II Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) Desktop Memory Model F3-17000CL7D-4GBXHD could get fetch speeds of 3ns. I don't want to post a link to the USA shop where it is but you can probably Google it. They reckon that latency speeds these days are generally worse then they were back when RAM speeds were 333MHz.

TLDR; I totally respect your opinions but remember I'm not trying to play Skyrim or whatever here, I can already play any console port fine. I'm brute forcing a decent frame rate out of a poorly optimised massive simulation with barely any graphics.
 
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Ivan, thanks for that but like I said I really was looking for the highest possible single CPU speed, hence the 3.6GHz quad core 3820. I have no need for 6 or 8 cores and I suspect it will be many years before any off the shelf games will require more then 4 cores can deliver.

I wish I could get somebody with an i5 and an i7 to do some benchmarks for me and try it out on an Ivy Bridge as well. Apparently though it's all about the RAM "take the stated speed of the RAM, and divide by the CAS Latency clocks to give yourself a number to compare to other sticks of RAM. Lowest number wins." is what they said but couldn't figure out what they were on about to be honest.
 
Fair enough with the SSD, it sounds like your main usage (DF) just won't make any use of it and it is a quite expensive component - so perhaps not worth it for you with increase performance it would bring for windows booting, general windows usage and applications.

If we are talking about pure lightly threaded number crunching then I would have a look at this review of the i7 3770K vs many other CPUs inluding the i7 3820. The 3770K is effectively just an i5 3570K with a slight clockspeed bump, 2MB more l3 cache and hyperthreading enabled. In a lightly threaded task (like the cinebench single threaded test) these differences won't really affect performance, apart from the small clockspeed difference. As you can see in this test the i7 3770K is 9% faster than the i7 3820, even though the 3770K is clocked 300MHz lower than the 3820 (the 3570K is 400MHz lower).

As for cost, yes the price difference between a i7 3820 and a i5 3570 is expected to be around £40 (with the 3820 at £230). However, there is also a big saving to be made on the motherboard, as X79 boards tend to cost a good deal more than a Z77 board. The gigabyte Z77 I suggested above is £102, which is £66 cheaper than the Asrock X79 board you linked to in the OP. If you aren't really concerned with running a second graphics card in crossfire/SLI then you could go for an even cheaper Z77 board like this one at £85 - and it still overclocks the cpu well and supports useful features like usb3, pcie gen3 and usb3. therefore, if you went for this cheaper board and a i5 3570k - then you would be saving around £123.

as for memory, you are quite right that the lga1155 ivy bridge only supports dual channel ram, while the sandy bridge e supports quad channel. however, the ivy bridge can support higher memory frequencies and has a newer design memory controller. if you look here, the memory performance of Ivy Bridge (in this case the i7 3770K, which uses the same memory controller as the i5 3570K) actually beats the i7 3820. In this test, 1866MHz memory sticks were used for all tests, the ivy bridge uses 2x4GB modules for dual channel 8GB, and the i7 3820 uses 4x2GB modules for quad channel 8GB.

Therefore, the reason I recommend ivy bridge for your uses if because it is as fast or faster than the X79+3820 option while costing a fair chunk less.
 
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Hmm, you know I'm glad you took the time to reply Andi, thanks!

I think you might be right, I was actually thinking about the SSD and without the expensive motherboard plus quad channel RAM I could actually probably afford one of those SSDs. It would be cool just to get the fast boot speeds etc. Although I think you'll find that two F3s in RAID 0 still actually have a better sequential write speed then that SSD but I'll have both so who cares!

I may or may not go crossfire, this old beast had dual 8800GTs that cost £200 each when I got it and they were nothing but trouble. I was actually thinking I would go back to nVidia in a couple years and let the GF had the 5870 for her Sims 3.

Good call on those PSU's btw, they're a bit cheaper then the corsair ones too.

I'll just have to wait until they hit the shelves and see what I can do with i7 3770K, I'd rather have an i7 if possible. Plus we can avoid that issue of the X79 not working on a 3820 without a BIOS upgrade which was worrying me.
 
SAFry said:
Ivan, thanks for that but like I said I really was looking for the highest possible single CPU speed, hence the 3.6GHz quad core 3820. I have no need for 6 or 8 cores and I suspect it will be many years before any off the shelf games will require more then 4 cores can deliver.

I wish I could get somebody with an i5 and an i7 to do some benchmarks for me and try it out on an Ivy Bridge as well. Apparently though it's all about the RAM "take the stated speed of the RAM, and divide by the CAS Latency clocks to give yourself a number to compare to other sticks of RAM. Lowest number wins." is what they said but couldn't figure out what they were on about to be honest.
Click to expand...

The stock clockspeed means nothing with these chips though, as they are such a doddle to overclock ;)

With a half decent cooler it is simple to get 4.5Ghz on any sandybridge K chip.

Get the i5 and with the money saved, buy an SSD.
 
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