Top of the range system build

xy16644

xy16644

xy16644

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10 May 2009
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221
Hello All!

This is my first post! I am wanting to spoil myself by building a top of the range system from scratch. I have been wanting to do this for ages but before I pull the trigger and buy the parts, what do you guys think of the following setup:

Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME motherboard
Intel Nehalem i7 920 S1366 2.66GHz
Corsair Memory Corsair 6GB 1600MHz DDR3 CL8 x2 (12GB RAM in total)
BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Western Digital 300GB Velociraptor 10,000RPM S300 16MB (can someone recommend a good affordable SSD drive maybe?)
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 7200RPM S300 32MB (two of these)
Corsair 1000W HX SERIES ATX PSU
LG Electronics BLU-RAY-RW/HD DVD-ROM SATA BLACK
Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor (two of these)
Lian Li PC-V1110A/B (I love this case!!)

Would all this work together successfully?

I am keen on making the machine as quiet as possible. Would adding a Zalman RESERATOR1 V2 Fanless Water Cooling System be worthwhile?

I'm not a gamer but I am a power user...;) I will be playing games occasionally but its not my main purpose.

The one thing that I would like to know is how much power this machine will consume with a 1000W PSU? Does havng a 1000W PSU push up your electricty bill lots? :confused: (I leave my PC on 16hrs everyday)

For the OS I think I will go with 64 bit Vista/7 and/or PC-BSD.

Thank you!
 
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xy16644 said:
The one thing that I would like to know is how much power this machine will consume with a 1000W PSU? Does havng a 1000W PSU push up your electricty bill lots? :confused: (I leave my PC on 16hrs everyday)
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No it just means its capable of 1000 watts but you will only use the leccy your system requires ;)
 
Spec seems fine, If you dont game much then id change the graphics card for a 4890 to save some money. And also if you can afford such a high end pc why are you bothered about your electric bill :p
 
nbkpsycho said:
Spec seems fine, If you dont game much then id change the graphics card for a 4890 to save some money. And also if you can afford such a high end pc why are you bothered about your electric bill :p
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I'd prefer to stick with an Nvidia based card...:D

Where I stay electricity is really expensive. Its almost doubled in cost in the last year or so...
 
How about this:

BFG Graphics GeForce GTX 275 648Mhz 896MB DDR3 PCI-Express DVI OC

I stay in the Channel Islands. You can't believe the cost of electricity here, its insane!! Mines more than doubled in the last year or so.
 
If you aren't playing games then go with the 260 or 250 and save the electric though I cant help feeling that it would be negligible :)
 
Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME motherboard
Intel Nehalem i7 920 S1366 2.66GHz
Corsair Memory Corsair 6GB 1600MHz DDR3 CL8 x2 (12GB RAM in total)
BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Western Digital 300GB Velociraptor 10,000RPM S300 16MB (can someone recommend a good affordable SSD drive maybe?)
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 7200RPM S300 32MB (two of these)
Corsair 1000W HX SERIES ATX PSU
LG Electronics BLU-RAY-RW/HD DVD-ROM SATA BLACK
Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor (two of these)
Lian Li PC-V1110A/B (I love this case!!)
Click to expand...

Don't bother with the Extreme motherboard, the regular UD5 is the same apart from the space wasting radiator thing. If you were water cooling you'd replace the chipset block anyway.

Get 2 * BFG 275 instead of one 285 - not that you need this much power to game at 24" resolutions.

Ditch the raptor for either the Crucial 120GB M225 or Intel X25-M2 80GB. Ditch the 2TB drive for 1.5TB drives instead, much better £ per GB ratio.

You don't need 1000W PSU, 850W is overkill.
 
I think I'll stick to one BFG 275 for now. I dont game...

I am keen to hear more about the SSD drives though. Why would you choose the Crucial drive you mentioned over the Intel and vice versa? I see their read speeds are quite different. They not too badly prices. I really don't care about capacity as thats what the SATA drives are for.

I think 1000W is nice, allows for plenty growth so I can add more drives, video cards etc!
 
xy16644 said:
The one thing that I would like to know is how much power this machine will consume with a 1000W PSU? Does havng a 1000W PSU push up your electricty bill lots? :confused: (I leave my PC on 16hrs everyday)
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As already answered - no. You need to look at the actual efficiency of the power supply at different power loads to determine more accurately.
A 1kW psu that's only 65% efficient at 1kW load will be drawing about 1,540W from the wall.
The Corsair, like any decent modern PSU, is rated at over 80% efficiency:
http://www.corsair.com/_images/charts/hx1000w_efficiency.jpg
So at a 1kw load your Corsair would be drawing about 1,177W from the wall.
If your psu was at full load for 16 hours it'd use about 18.8KWh which would cost £2.47 assuming you're on Jec general domestic tariff.
Your computer's unlikely to be drawing 1000w for the full 16 hours though - usually that'd only happen if you were running 3dmark or something similar continually while rendering in another thread with fans on full, all drives spinning, etc.
EDIT - to be honest you'd need to make a particularly special intentional effort to have your computer use 1000w.
 
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Xappy said:
As already answered - no. You need to look at the actual efficiency of the power supply at different power loads to determine more accurately.
A 1kW psu that's only 65% efficient at 1kW load will be drawing about 1,540W from the wall.
The Corsair, like any decent modern PSU, is rated at over 80% efficiency:
http://www.corsair.com/_images/charts/hx1000w_efficiency.jpg
So at a 1kw load your Corsair would be drawing about 1,177W from the wall.
If your computer was on at full load for 16 hours it'd use about 18.8KWh which would cost £2.47 assuming you're on Jec general domestic tariff.
Your computer's unlikely to be drawing 1000w for the full 16 hours though - usually that'd only happen if you were running 3dmark or something similar continually while rendering in another thread.
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Thanks for that!!!

How much elec would I use if the machine was just downloading files during the day? I would probably only push the machine on weekends. I am more keen to know what it would cost if the machine was sitting there *mostly* idle?

I would imagine its a fraction of the £2.47 per day at full load! Maybe 50p?
 
xy16644 said:
Thanks for that!!!

How much elec would I use if the machine was just downloading files during the day? I would probably only push the machine on weekends. I am more keen to know what it would cost if the machine was sitting there *mostly* idle?

I would imagine its a fraction of the £2.47 per day at full load! Maybe 50p?
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50p sounds about right, maybe less.

If you don't game, then i'm not sure why you want a gaming graphics card? Do you fold? code?
 
xy16644 said:
I think I'll stick to one BFG 275 for now. I dont game...

I am keen to hear more about the SSD drives though. Why would you choose the Crucial drive you mentioned over the Intel and vice versa? I see their read speeds are quite different. They not too badly prices. I really don't care about capacity as thats what the SATA drives are for.

I think 1000W is nice, allows for plenty growth so I can add more drives, video cards etc!
Click to expand...

1000W is overkill ;) Drives only use like 8W or so. But it's your call.

As to SSD's both mentioned ones are good, it's really down to your tolerance for price. The Intel is better (not a huge amount in it), but is £170 for 80GB as opposed to £200 for 120GB (I think). There's good discussion in the Hard drives forum on this.
 
xy16644 said:
Thanks for that!!!

How much elec would I use if the machine was just downloading files during the day? I would probably only push the machine on weekends. I am more keen to know what it would cost if the machine was sitting there *mostly* idle?

I would imagine its a fraction of the £2.47 per day at full load! Maybe 50p?
Click to expand...

Assuming screen off, your computer would almost certainly be using no more than about 150w when doing something simple like that. About 32p. Most modern pcs would use less than 100w while doing that tbh. 21p.

That's depending on whether your fans are temp controlled or not, whether you leave other things running, how much you have running/charging off usb power, etc.. edit - also if Windows is on a different drive to the one that you're saving the files onto then you'd likely have more than one drive running so that'd push it up a teeny bit.

To be honest, a gaming PC under full load is actually unlikely to consume much more than 600w. (£1.26) Even with SLI. A wc pump, extra fans, lights, etc would push that up, as would powering and charging devices by USB and so on.

Higher wattage PSUs than that are normally only needed because a lower wattage one can't provide enough current to the 12v rail, and not because the machine actually needs that many watts.
 
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If you're worried about your electricity bill then get a 1KW permanent magnet generator and make a windmill, and get some solar panels for when it's not windy. Voila, free electricity.

And the cheapest SSD at the moment is pretty good, the 64GB one from Crucial. I would go for that. And maybe two 1TB drives, or just one and then another one later when you need it.

If you want to measure power then you could buy a Kill-a-Watt.
 
I would not use the Reserator 1 if I were you. It is only a passive cooler and doesn't handle the 130W i7 too well - never mind overclocked.

Get something like this (corsair h50) instead, if you want it very quiet - use two of these fans (noctua p12) on it and control them using this (zalman fan control panel). if you want the system very quiet, replace all the case fans with these (noctua s12b) and control them using the zalman fan controller. also, add an aftermarket cooler to your graphics card, a good one will keep the noise and heat down much lower than the stock one. if you go for a 4800 series gpu - then this cooler is a good bet. if you go for a gtx 275 or 285, this (Thermalright T-Rad2 GTX) is a good choice (personally I would add a single noctua P12 fan to it).

For PSU, this one (Corsair HX 750W) will do the job perfectly.

As for SSD, this one (Crucial M225 128GB) will be worth a look when it arrives.
 
Xappy said:
Higher wattage PSUs than that are normally only needed because a lower wattage one can't provide enough current to the 12v rail, and not because the machine actually needs that many watts.
Click to expand...

It's worth noting that efficiency varies based on load. PSU's tend to be inneficient at low loads because you have general operating overheads and efficiency drops off a cliff at or near to peak load. There isn't a great deal in it really - i'd only worry about it if I was building a data centre :)
 
sldsmkd said:
It's worth noting that efficiency varies based on load. PSU's tend to be inneficient at low loads because you have general operating overheads and efficiency drops off a cliff at or near to peak load. There isn't a great deal in it really - i'd only worry about it if I was building a data centre :)
Click to expand...

True, but the variation for the Corsair 1000W HX SERIES ATX PSU the op mentioned seems to be between 83 and 86.5% efficiency on 230v (according to their graph anyway) and that variation isn't really enough to make much diff.
You're right that most PSUs work most efficiently at about 50% load, but an 80 plus compliant PSU should be more than 80% "at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load with a true power factor of 0.9 or greater" ( http://www.80plus.org/80what.htm ) so not too much to worry about with a good psu.
 
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