Soldato
- Joined
- 14 Mar 2011
- Posts
- 5,443
Hey all,
Looking for a sanity-check/bit of advice on a pair of builds before I go ahead.
### Build 1 ###
My ageing Q6600 on Abit IP35 which I bought from OcUK around 5/6 years ago now is finally getting to the point where I feel it could do with upgrading. It's not *struggling* as such, but the CPU fan is beginning to get a bit noisy (or at least spin up more frequently than it used to) and I've been seeing some benchmarks that suggest I'd see decent enough improvements to justify it.
I've already upgraded a couple of things: The case and PSU - to an Antec P183 with their CP-850 PSU designed for that case. I also picked up an MSI GTX 560Ti a year or two ago so I *could* hold off a little longer in that area. I've also got a pair of 500Gb drives in there at the moment (one has my current OS, the other I use as a dump for things like FRAPS), but I've got plenty of storage on a seperate server machine, so can hold off on this too.
Here's what I was planning on getting:
i7 3770K
Gigabyte Z77-D3H
16Gb of Corsair Venegance LP (or similar)
256Gb Crucial M4 (or maybe a Samsung 840 Pro)
Cooler - maybe a Dark Rock Pro
Basic soundcard - Asus 5.1 DG or something
Basic optical drive (mine is still IDE)
Any recommendations/advice? I feel the above is informed by a fair amount of reading on the forums etc. but I'd like to be sure. The machine is used for gaming, but also a reasonable amount of 3d modelling+rendering, some video encoding, messing about with VMs and such like - which I think makes the extra cost of the i7 worthwhile. I did consider the SB-E i7 3820 which could be had for a *similar* sort of price overall, but I honestly don't think that A. I will ever be able to justify upgrading to a £400+ Hex-core in the future, and B. Many of the features of the X79 boards would be wasted on me. Budget-wise around £600 - £700... of course anything I save here could be put towards the other build and/or a new GPU (I may try to sell off my Q6600 and 560Ti to raise a bit towards a GTX 670 or something).
### Build 2 ###
I also have a little server machine, originally bought on a bit of a whim to mess around with when I had no real idea what I would end up using it for. It's one of those integrated Intel Atom boards (quite an old one, can't remember the exact model number) with 1Gb of RAM, installed in a Fractal Design Array R2, currently it only has a scavenged 320Gb drive for the OS and a single 1Tb drive for storage.
I'd like the machine to be a bit more powerful, I use it as a file/media server at home (running Ubuntu) but have also messed around running TeamSpeak on it, Minecraft as one point (which worked OK), had a go with a TF2 server (did not work OK, but it was running MvM which I think must be pretty CPU heavy). I'd also like to be able to use it as a general mess-about linux machine, do a bit of web stuff, mess around with some random development things, maybe try setting it up as a render-slave for the 3d stuff on the other machine.
So my plan was if I get a mini-ITX H61 board and put a cheap-ish processor in it (I guess a pentium/celeron?) then that would give it a bit of a boost for now, but down the line when I next upgrade the other machine I can recycle the i7 and maybe a few other bits to give it another kick... Does that sound like a reasonable plan or am I overlooking something?
I'd also like to expand the storage with a RAID5 or RAID6 setup at some stage, and looking at the mini-ITX offerings it seems my best bet is a standalone controller card, but I've not really looked into this before, any suggestions? For now I think I'll just be upgrading the other components, but I'm just considering options for buying a few 2Tb/3Tb drives and a controller card in the future.
I don't want to spend a lot on this system if possible, so would be going for mostly budget parts where I can. It's got to be quiet and suitable for 24/7 running (currently the tiny fan on the Atom is very loud and irritating - I don't want to be able to hear it from the next room whilst going to sleep as I can at the moment). Budget for this one would be as little as possible, certainly no more than about £200.
Any and all comments + recommendations welcome
Looking for a sanity-check/bit of advice on a pair of builds before I go ahead.
### Build 1 ###
My ageing Q6600 on Abit IP35 which I bought from OcUK around 5/6 years ago now is finally getting to the point where I feel it could do with upgrading. It's not *struggling* as such, but the CPU fan is beginning to get a bit noisy (or at least spin up more frequently than it used to) and I've been seeing some benchmarks that suggest I'd see decent enough improvements to justify it.
I've already upgraded a couple of things: The case and PSU - to an Antec P183 with their CP-850 PSU designed for that case. I also picked up an MSI GTX 560Ti a year or two ago so I *could* hold off a little longer in that area. I've also got a pair of 500Gb drives in there at the moment (one has my current OS, the other I use as a dump for things like FRAPS), but I've got plenty of storage on a seperate server machine, so can hold off on this too.
Here's what I was planning on getting:
i7 3770K
Gigabyte Z77-D3H
16Gb of Corsair Venegance LP (or similar)
256Gb Crucial M4 (or maybe a Samsung 840 Pro)
Cooler - maybe a Dark Rock Pro
Basic soundcard - Asus 5.1 DG or something
Basic optical drive (mine is still IDE)
Any recommendations/advice? I feel the above is informed by a fair amount of reading on the forums etc. but I'd like to be sure. The machine is used for gaming, but also a reasonable amount of 3d modelling+rendering, some video encoding, messing about with VMs and such like - which I think makes the extra cost of the i7 worthwhile. I did consider the SB-E i7 3820 which could be had for a *similar* sort of price overall, but I honestly don't think that A. I will ever be able to justify upgrading to a £400+ Hex-core in the future, and B. Many of the features of the X79 boards would be wasted on me. Budget-wise around £600 - £700... of course anything I save here could be put towards the other build and/or a new GPU (I may try to sell off my Q6600 and 560Ti to raise a bit towards a GTX 670 or something).
### Build 2 ###
I also have a little server machine, originally bought on a bit of a whim to mess around with when I had no real idea what I would end up using it for. It's one of those integrated Intel Atom boards (quite an old one, can't remember the exact model number) with 1Gb of RAM, installed in a Fractal Design Array R2, currently it only has a scavenged 320Gb drive for the OS and a single 1Tb drive for storage.
I'd like the machine to be a bit more powerful, I use it as a file/media server at home (running Ubuntu) but have also messed around running TeamSpeak on it, Minecraft as one point (which worked OK), had a go with a TF2 server (did not work OK, but it was running MvM which I think must be pretty CPU heavy). I'd also like to be able to use it as a general mess-about linux machine, do a bit of web stuff, mess around with some random development things, maybe try setting it up as a render-slave for the 3d stuff on the other machine.
So my plan was if I get a mini-ITX H61 board and put a cheap-ish processor in it (I guess a pentium/celeron?) then that would give it a bit of a boost for now, but down the line when I next upgrade the other machine I can recycle the i7 and maybe a few other bits to give it another kick... Does that sound like a reasonable plan or am I overlooking something?
I'd also like to expand the storage with a RAID5 or RAID6 setup at some stage, and looking at the mini-ITX offerings it seems my best bet is a standalone controller card, but I've not really looked into this before, any suggestions? For now I think I'll just be upgrading the other components, but I'm just considering options for buying a few 2Tb/3Tb drives and a controller card in the future.
I don't want to spend a lot on this system if possible, so would be going for mostly budget parts where I can. It's got to be quiet and suitable for 24/7 running (currently the tiny fan on the Atom is very loud and irritating - I don't want to be able to hear it from the next room whilst going to sleep as I can at the moment). Budget for this one would be as little as possible, certainly no more than about £200.
Any and all comments + recommendations welcome
)... I'll have to double check it will fit in my case but I think the P183 is pretty large so should be alright. I'm not bothered how it looks (no case window) so long as it performs well.
