Feedback Please: Custom Build PC Underway

[FMTopfan]

2600K Custom-Build (Completed)

ORDERED PARTS (17th January '11) > Next Step, Building It (3rd February onwards) ...

Finally got a free night to sort out my next PC. I have been putting together a list of main parts that may make it into my final list as a replacement for my current rig that is used for gaming/video editing/Photoshop. All suggestions/improvements from fellow enthusiasts will be appreciated as this PC is built to last the next 3 years.

I will be ordering the final parts by 24th January (updated as we go along) so everyone can see what the latest changes are and what will get ordered. My ideal budget is £1,500, but don't let this stop you posting your suggestions. After all, this is built with overclocking in mind @4.6GHz - hopefully!


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Current Build Log
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CPU Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz (Sandy Bridge) Socket LGA1155 - £267

MOTHERBOARD: Asus P8P67 DELUXE Intel P67 (Socket 1155) - £190

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) 1866MHz CAS9 – £130

POWER SUPPLY: Corsair HX 850W ATX Modular – £141

HARD DRIVE #1: OCZ Vertex 2E Bigfoot 120GB 3.5" SATA-II (write: 285MB/s / read: 275MB) - £180

HARD DRIVE #2: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - £137

CASE: Corsair Obsidian 800D Full Tower Case: OcUK Extreme H2O Pre-Watercooled - £440
LIQUID: Thermochill EC6 Non Conductive Coolant - £

OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium x64 OEM - £84

TOTAL = £1,569 Inc VAT

The changes I've made so far is selecting a Corsair 850W Modular from a Corsair 1200W Modular; WD Caviar Black 2TB SATA 6Gb/s; Ocuk H20 800D case from the standard 800D (build costs went up by £220 on this alone); and took off the Prolimatech Megahalems Rev B since CPU is now watercooled.


Why I Choose Components
If there queries for why I choose what I did, I will explain briefly here.
CPU chosen simply for the best overclock.
MOTHERBOARD I've read lots of great reviews on this Asus mobo and it does everything I require. I have lots of USB 2.0 devices and the additional connections will come in handy over the Pro version. Plus power design of 16+2 is better for overclocking stability.
RAM I require 8GB and read good reviews on the Vengeance. It runs at 1.5v at rated speeds, potential for XMP of 2133 with raised timings. With 4GB each the option is there to add more, but highly unlikely.
POWER SUPPLY I really need modular design for the cable-tidy 800D case and for it to be at least 80%+ energy efficient. Changed from the 1200W Corsair to the 850W as that fits my needs. (Thanks to NathWraith). The 24 pin mobo cable may not reach in a full tower case (or be long enough to keep it tidy) so will order an extension lead such as this..
HARD DRIVE #1 I needed an improvement in speeds/access times from Raptor's and SSD is the next step. Good price/performance at 1.50p per GB. Thinking about Sata 3 6GB/s too with Crucial's C300 256GB £400 at 1.56p per GB.
HARD DRIVE #2 This is a recommendation from Razor-BladE (thanks) and its use is for just gaming. A good review on pcper.com made my mind up plus it comes with 5-year warranty. My current WD RE3 1TB SATA-II will be used for general programs which doesn't need SSD speeds and is adequate - this saves some cash and keeps programs organised. I have x2 external WD Green 2TB SATA-II drives which i connect separately for backups so no worries there.
CASE This case will certainly be an improvement over my current Silverstone TJ-09w in that the cable management is the best I've seen. Changed now from the standard 800D to the H20 version from OCUK which comes pre-filled. I have to check if its non-conductive fluid for protections of components just in case. All I then have to do is connect the CPU block and we have lift off for some pretty good cooling and overclocking!
OS I’m running currently is Vista Home Prem. OEM, and the price of £84 for W7 Home Prem. is more reasonable compared to Pro.


I will be keeping my current Ati 5970 2GB, and LG GGW-H20L blu-ray recorder. I did look at replacing my Creative SB X-Fi Fatality for better gaming support (sick of manually adding games via Alchemy for EAX) and I think its about 5 years old. It also uses a PCI port which adds to the messiness with the cables going to the front 3.5" drivebay. There is a Product Identification Module Update for use in W7 which is good, other than that I’m not sure if there are recent sound cards good enough to replace this. Something else I’ve not decided on is storage for my games which require its own hard drive (not SSD). It needs to be at least 1TB and not noisy. For programs, can use my existing Western Digital RE3 SATA-II 1TB (32MB cache). The RE3 in HD Tach long bench reads at – burst speed: 211.2MB/s; average read: 95.1MB/s; and random access 12.1. Sata 6GB/s would be nice but not had time to look now in the small hours.

Thanks!

 

[stulid]

you do know that a Corsair 800d isn't a very good air cooling case? it makes a epic watercooling case.

and I also doubt the ram and cooler will fit together.

 

[dave_beast]

Personally, if I were spending that amount on a motherboard, that I want to last, I would go for the P67 Sabretooth when it's out (which should be soon)

 

[FMTopfan]

you do know that a Corsair 800d isn't a very good air cooling case? it makes a epic watercooling case.

and I also doubt the ram and cooler will fit together.

Good points stulid. I was originally after the OcUK Extreme H2O but at £470 it is far too much for just CPU. I have never built a watercooled PC and don't really understand how to despite building PCs for the past 8 years. But once I'm told how to do something properly, I never forget.

Also, I can't remember now which CPU cooler it was, but a review mentioned you could rotate a particular cooler so it would fit allowing room for the RAM. From looking just on Ocuk, a radiator CPU watercooler leaves more than enough room but I think even the CoolIT ECO C240 isn't good enough for 4.6GHz clocks from reading Guru3d. Or I could look at other RAM or revise down to 1600MHz speed RAM that don't require heatsinks - this would save on getting an expensive CPU cooler. Otherwise I'm looking towards the Corsair XMS3 for price/performance.

Personally, if I were spending that amount on a motherboard, that I want to last, I would go for the P67 Sabretooth when it's out (which should be soon)

Wasn't aware of that mobo (ASUS Sabertooth P67 TUF), it's a strange/bulky board that guru3d and others said could increase temps. What is surprising is that for a high-end mobo, the power design is only 8+2 versus the Deluxe's 16+2. There are only x2 USB 3.0 port on the rear. At least overclocking to 4.6GHz was simple enough for them which is in line with reference Intel mobos. Rumour has it that the price could be just £160 because of the fewer connections.

The similar performing Asus Maximus IV Extreme isn't as good for overclocking for the price at £300 (due soon). A review on overclock3d reported that the CPU (2600K) would only go up to 4.6GHz and isn't as stable as reference Intel mobos.

 

[Razor-BladE]

Looks like it'll be a nice build.
When you mention price of SSD, 66p per GB. It's actually £1.50 per GB; done the division the wrong way round.

Regarding a HDD for storage/games, the WD Black is a good one to consider. Fast drive but quiet.

And why not look up how to make custom watercooling?

 

[FMTopfan]

Looks like it'll be a nice build.
When you mention price of SSD, 66p per GB. It's actually £1.50 per GB; done the division the wrong way round.

Regarding a HDD for storage/games, the WD Black is a good one to consider. Fast drive but quiet.

And why not look up how to make custom watercooling?

Yes, your right of course. Had a late night as you can see and was quite tired by that point

Thanks for the recommendation on the WD Black, sounds ideal WD is my preferred brand due to reliability and will look this up today.

And I'm looking at getting the H20 version of the Corsair 800D as a starter for watercooling and maybe next time I can do it myself.

 

[FMTopfan]

My setup as it is listed, will be my final build for order on Monday 17th. Hopefully This Week offers won't change - although I have noted that they went up (most notably the 2600K by £10 this morning) which is of a great concern to my budget of keeping it under £1,500. The prices I have listed is when the offer was on and any difference is because of that.

Out of curiosity: how does my current Creative X-Fi Fatality Platinum soundcard compare to the latest offerings?
I've read quite a lot about the Asus/Creative cards and am I not amazed by them enough to just do away with my expensive Fatality Platinum. Maybe it is just as good as what is available. Btw, I bought it in 2005/06.

Nearly forgot, would I be needing a dust filter to keep the inside case really clean? I've looked at the DEMCiflex 120mm/140mm Black Dust Filters.

 

[PhillyDee]

TWO gets updated on a wednesday, so you will be OK.

As for the soundcard, check for drivers, creative drivers are awesomly bad!

 

[FMTopfan]

TWO gets updated on a wednesday, so you will be OK.

As for the soundcard, check for drivers, creative drivers are awesomly bad!

Oh, didn't know that they would be updated. I did want to order before they went up (Friday 5PM) but NathWraith said to wait until Monday which I did. He's been brilliant helping me out, I hope it works out ok in the end. I'm dreading missing out because of that.

As for the drivers, I've been ok and no issues with Vista so far. I'm not sure what problems others are having under W7 - maybe I will be fine as they are W7 compatible once updated.


UPDATE! I've ordered all the items above and happy with the price I paid in the end which I won't say
Expected delivery of order will be later this week (order delayed due to item out of stock!) due to non-conductive coolant not being in stock. I'm very happy with the order and will be a very good setup
Will also post photos of the build, will try to keep it as 'clean' looking as possible for a professional looking install. Something I haven't yet perfected 100%.

 

[FMTopfan]

An Update...

I finished building my PC on Saturday 5th, where each day since Thursday 3rd I'd spend 9 hours a day gradually building it up. I needed to also grab components from my other PC such as the 5970, Fatality Platinum soundcard, and blu-ray drive. Once I took them out they needed a relatively quick clean. I took just as much time building as I did sorting the management of the cables! This is the norm for custom builds and people can spend much longer sorting out the cables than I did. Overall I'm happy with my efforts.

Throughout I took photos to record the build and I will provide more information at a later date with the photos. Since I finished on Saturday, I took the day off to do other things on Sunday, and today will be the usual installation of main programs/games. I'd already updated the Asus BIOS to the latest version and installed the Asus drivers.

First impressions from installing Windows 7 Home Prem. on the SSD has been very quick, 12 minutes once you take out the time to input serial & other options. Startup time with BIOS screen was 20 seconds tops. Shutdown was between 5-7 seconds. This is with using the OCZ Vertex 2E 120GB for OS and vital programs only, and the WD Caviar Black 2TB. Note that I only installed the SSD at first to install the OS to make sure the hidden OS partition is installed on the fastest drive to avoid any slowdown. I didn't format the SSD prior to installing OS. Only after it was installed and updated did I connect the HDD.

I've got both SSD/HDD connected to the 6Gbps Sata ports. The SSD is on the Intel Sata 6Gbps and the WD is using the Marvel Sata 6Gbps port via Akasa Sata 6Gbps black cables. To be honest, these aren't very good for usual Sata ports as the clip to secure connection prevents another one being connected directly above/below the cable securely. In future make sure you look for cables without these unnecessary clips.

As for gaming performance, it's now the case of my 5970 being the limiting factor rather than the CPU. In Black Ops completely maxed out @1920x1200 x8 AA, x16 AF it hits 91fps [Edit: once the 85fps framecap was removed this was actually 290fps max, 200avg) and stays there no matter what. This is with my CPU clocked to 4.2GHz and only a slight oc to the GPU.

You can leave a message of any other benches you want me to run and list the settings, otherwise I will just run them as high as possible. To to give you a taste of the performance so far on a few benchmarks, here are the results I've ran to date:

FarCry2: Very High. Average results from 3 loops
Settings: Demo(Ranch Small), 1920x1200 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(None), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Very High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Very High), Terrain(Very High), Geometry(Very High), Post FX(High), Texture(Very High), Shadow(Very High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High)

FarCry2: Ultra High. Average results from 3 loops
Settings: Demo(Ranch Small), 1920x1200 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(None), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High)

SuperPI: 1MB CPU test @4.1GHz

HDTach SSD Sata-II test (not updated firmware yet)

HDTach HDD Sata-III test

The results from FarCry2 is amazing from my old PC where I only managed to top 55fps at these settings on the same GPU but clocked 15% higher. The difference from the 2600k-based bench is the maxfps is lower but the min/avg is about the same. If I find an old bench of SuperPI I will post a comparison, but I expect it to be worlds apart.
The SSD performance is capable of up to 285MBps read/write, 250MBps sustained. A slight let down there on the Sata-II drive, but the burst speed is an amazing 1.83GBps! Good burst speed again from the WD Black but an average read of 125MB/s is slow for a Sata6Gbps drive. You certainly don't notice any level-loading slowdowns in games.
As for the mainstream benchmarks, you can see the results in my sig. I will post the links once I'm happy with my setup and get used to the new motherboard in order to push the CPU clocks higher since I'm running it on water. On the ol' QX6700, Vantage would only rank my PC at P16,755 tops, so to nearly hit 29K @4.2Ghz shows you the difference a 2nd-gen Sandy Bridge will do

 

[FMTopfan]

More build info + benchmarks

I'm back from holidays and didn't get around to posting all my build photos but here is my what my PC looks like in this photo. I should point out that since I took these two photos (from the many I still have) I filled all DRAM slots but otherwise its what it looks right now....

I haven't posted benchmarks from current sig stable clocks of 4.6GHz and 16GB 1,867MHz DDR3 RAM (9-10-9-24 1). Ran AIDA64 v1.6 as that's the current version available that included stock Sandy Bridge 1155 tables as well as the recent Intel 990x stock for comparison of my 2600K overclock. I'm sure the expensive 990x would do well to match the 2600K overclocked but your paying a lot less for similar performance. Plus I'm working with 4/4HT-cores compared to 990x 6/6HT-cores. I know the RAM featured in the table for comparison isn't the fastest but 1.3GHz/1.6GHz is what most people are using and isn't too far off.

AIDA64 1.6 Benchmarks

RAM Bench

Memory Read

Memory Write

Memory Copy

Memory Latency

CPU Bench

CPU Queen

CPU PhotoWorxx

CPU ZLib

CPU AES

CPU Hash

CPU Floating Point Bench

FPU VP8

FPU Julia

FPU Mandel

FPU SinJulia

​

 

[redrooster303]

Nice pc their mate, same motherboard and chip as me. Just got my 2 570's to add to the mix and 8gb of 1866 ram and I'll be sorted. Your benchmarks have given me an insight into the kind of performance I'll be getting and its looking good.
Gonna add watercooling later.

 

[FMTopfan]

Benchmark Update (previous results)
Basic Rig Info (more: see sig): 2600K @4.6GHz 1.38v H20 + 5970 @780/1080MHz(4320 DDR5).

A repeat of previous tests as I didn't push my rig that much. There is quite a lot of performance here that previous results didn't show the full potential. Even so with my current hardware, a better GPU in September is needed in the 7000-series since the 5970 is the weakest link. I'm after image quality (mainly for my YouTube channel videos) otherwise I'd happily purchase from Nvidia.

FarCry2: Ultra High. Average results from 3 loops
Settings: Demo(Ranch Small), 1920x1200 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(None), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High)

(previous result) avg: 146.66, max: 188.49, min: 109.10.
Finally, with 8x AA... avg: 103.82, max: 164.32, min: 74.89. Note: FC2 bench used 50% CPU.

SuperPI: 1MB + 32MB CPU test @4.8GHz

(previous result) 1MB 9secs

HDTach SSD Sata-II test (OCZ Vertex2e) - Long-bench 32MB
Note: Previous test have shown average read 200MB/s but not as fast burst speeds. Odd how my graph doesn't show an even line (edit: I suspect this is because of the Intel Controller otherwise a dedicated controller would be more consistant). You can see random access at an disappointing 0.2ms rather than 0.1ms. I haven't ran a SSD test for 2 months, has 60% free space and I've often left idle overnight.

(previous result) access: 0.1ms, avg read: 199.7MB/s, burst: 1834.7MB/s.

HDTach HDD Sata-III test (WD Caviar Black) - Long-bench 32MB
Note: burst speed looks silly but this may be down to it using the generous 64MB of HDD cache.

(previous result) access: 11.9ms, avg read: 125MB/s, burst: 380.1MB/s.

AIDA64 1.6 Benchmarks
No change from last run so please refer to last page.

CineBench 11.5 x64 @4.8GHz

Heaven 2.5 DX11 (1650x1050, 4x AA+AF)

If there's another bench you want me to add then leave a reply and I will add them.