Yet another (re)build thread - OPINIONS / SUGGESTIONS?? - Page 2

Depends on the game. Torchlight II was helped a lot moving from my 3ghz Phenom II X4 to my 4ghz FX-8350. From a variable 35-60fps to a solid 55-60fps. Team Fortress 2 is exactly the same at a solid 60fps. You'll see a bigger jump than I did, as you are starting with an architecture of similar speed, but with half the cores and ending with a CPU of roughly the same performance when it comes to gaming. Modern games want 3-4 cores. Anything dual-core regardless of speed is holding you back.

Rage is the only thing I've seen so far that will really use eight cores.

The new consoles are around the corner, even though I have suspicions the power increase isn't going to be very big. You never know.

Are you looking for specific games to play on the PC? There's really nothing out there exclusive to PC games that are going to crush that C2D. You can get by with it, you don't even have to buy a video card over $200 to get a big increase. FPS under 60 are still completely playable. I personally don't have big issues with below 30 even. But that's me. I pretty much max out everything I play on my 6870. Tone down useless things like shadows and plant filling. Games still look amazing.

Can you wait for the Haswell chips? I'd wait for that, get a video card in $150 range now. Or go balls to the wall and get that same card you were planning. Just wait for the new intel architecture to upgrade the rest. The CPU is going to bottleneck your performance, but you'll absolutely get an upgrade in visuals.

Hell your current PC is a next gen console. Aside from gimmicks (3D Kinect, etc.) power-wise I wouldn't expect as big a difference as last time. Maybe now they'll start to take PC gaming more seriously with console ports.

"Hell your current PC is a next gen console"

The 360 CPU gets about as much work done as a Core 2 Quad 2.2ghz. He has far greater OS overhead, half the cores, and only 50% better instructions-per-clock. Simply put, no.

Flipping over to his GPU, I don't even recall what he has, and it doesn't even matter. Again, with API overhead on Windows it takes far more brute force to get the same amount of work done as a console. There is very good reason that the 360's GPU that is 1/10th to 1/20th the spec of what we're running in our PCs still spits out renders that look roughly half as good as what a maxed PC spits out.

"3D Kinect"

Kinect is already a 3D camera. That's kind of the point.


The only thing you can say with certainty about the next pair of consoles is that games will be able to be written a whole lot closer to the hardware than they can be in Windows, just like it has always been. Proclaiming anything else about what they'll do is simply wanking.

Don't worry. You done good.
Different games balance CPU and GPU load differently. So it depends. FC3 seems to lean more heavily on the GPU side, but I'm not sure how much a disparity in CPU power will affect performance overall.

Put what you ordered together and don't look back. That 3570K + 670 will not disappoint you.

Have you investigated the $40 motherboard discount at Microcenter when you purchase a CPU and board together?

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/946fc66b#/946fc66b/33

Just checked on the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H it is currently listed at $134.99 on their webpage with the $40 combo discount that would bring it to $94.99

http://microcenter.com/product/387556/GA-Z77X-UD3H_LGA_1155_Z77_ATX_Intel_Motherboard#

If you get the combo discount you could possibly purchase the board and CPU for a total of $ 284.99

There's no such thing as a good, or crap, HDD brand anymore. Things have consolidated so much that they are all of roughly the same quality now. Pick one based on size, cost, and rotation speed. Storing media and want it to be quiet? 5400rpm. Want better response for game storage and don't mind a bit of noise? 7200rpm.

I would recommend a pair of identical drives. Then either use your board's RAID 1 or Windows' drive mirroring functionality. Data redundancy is a very nice thing to have. That way when one of the dirt-cheap drives inevitably does take a crap on you, you don't lose everything. I'd also use Windows backup functionality to backup your single SSD to the large HDDs. Last I checked, 1.5TB drives are kind of the sweet spot. A tiny bit more cost than 1TB, but a significant size increase.

Yeah, IDE is dead. There are IDE to SATA/USB adapters, but they cost the same as your $25 DVD writer.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151256

Good to hear. I almost cried when I read that first post.

Awesome.
Yup. DVD drives are dirt cheap these days. I got a $20 credit from newegg with my order, so I used that to buy a new Sata DVD drive (cost $19 with tax and shipping). In the meantime, just use a thumb drive for any necessary transfers and whatnot.

As with most things, I have a slightly different opinion on backup drives. It's a waste of space to mirror drives completely IMO. I just use backup drives for media storage--music, movies, games, pics. For things like documents, I just use a cloud service. Everything else is pointless (for me) to back up. And if you're just using an SSD for OS and everyday programs, I'm not sure why you'd need to back it up. But YMMV.

I'm probably senselessly stingy about space, and I am often sharing content between a handful of different desktops, laptops, and mobile devices throughout the day. So "storage" means something different to me than it might to you.
Edited by confidenceman - 12/29/12 at 8:29am

Maybe a BIOS setting? Default for many boards is for fans to be on max. You can adjust speed settings to specific internal temps, or your board probably has a few basic presets (like "quiet" or "performance").

When you use an SSD as your OS drive, you should have AHCI enabled. That's a bios setting. It's also not something you can do just by flipping the switch. You have to install windows while that mode is enabled. Otherwise you are not getting full speed on your drive. Windows is not happy if you just go and flip that switch. There are registry hacks for doing it, but sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't, I would not recommend.

Since you've set your SATA to IDE, you're slowing down your system.


My guess is the fan is spinning up backwards like the MSI Frozr fan. It's supposed to do that to blow out the dust. Maybe your card is doing the same thing.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html?ltr=A

The simple process of changing a single registry key worked fine for me on WIndows 7. I did a fresh install with AHCI already on when I installed Windows 8.

Also too, I added you Daver and invited you to our AVS group on Steam.

Oh, and the fan thing is pretty normal with a 4-pin fan. My stock AMD heatsink does the same thing. Boot up, high speed for a couple seconds, spins down. Previously I used a 3-pin fan dropped to 7v which always ran at it a single speed.

http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?download_id=9

AS SSD benchmark will help you figure out if you've got AHCI running correctly.

The upper-left box where it says "amd_sata - OK" will say "blah blah - BAD" if IDE mode is on. Using your board's RAID mode will usually break AHCI also, so drive mirroring will have to be in software if you go that route.



In IDE mode, you'll likely see your read speeds down in the 150MBps range. Run a benchmark before you change AHCI, then a set afterward. Then say "wow".

Yeah here's mine. Not too terribly impressive but eh, I'm cool with it.

The point was not to turn this in to an SSD bragging thread, but to show him where the item he needed to check was located. You'll notice that mine didn't even finish running before I made it to the snipping tool...

Yes everything on sata will work fine in AHCI mode. They will start showing up like USB devices in your USB list of hardware you can eject.

Depending on your motherboard, and because of certain limitations I think this applies to all motherboards, you will have mutliple SATA controllers. So you might be able to set one in AHCI and another in IDE. Depending on BIOS options.

For certain, you want your SSD on AHCI mode.

BTW, since you've installed the new gear. That means you have the old hardware available to run your old CD drive. You could setup a thumb drive to install windows.

I think you said you reused the PSU, so it might be a pain...have a laptop with a CD drive?

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_install_windows_7_usb_key

This was another thread where somebody recommended 8GB of ram in a new build. The following is a bit of a write-up on 32GB that I'm going to go ahead and double-post from my response to a General Gaming thread so that the data is also in the HTPC Gaming section. The short of it, Daver, is that 16GB was the correct choice over 8GB, and provably so.

---

I'm just going to drop this right here.



In my recent upgrade I threw 32GB at the machine, partially as an experiment. With Chrome and nothing else running, you'll notice that Committed is sitting at 4.3GB. It was a bit higher when the system had pretty freshly booted, but then some stuff got written back out at the system's leisure. You'll also notice that Cached is sitting at 21GB. This is stuff that Windows knows I'll want to use at some point. When I do go to use it, it won't need to be read in from a drive, improving my experience. Then there is 8GB just free at the moment.

Sitting on the desktop with just Chrome open I have seen total Commited reach in to the 11GB range. This is before I've even thought about loading a game.

What does this tell us? Well, 32GB is currently a bit overkill, with 24GB as the current ideal. Long-term though it just made more sense to dump all the ram in now. 16GB would also be a very acceptable amount of ram. Windows would still have 12GB to cache stuff with. Most importantly though, nothing would have to be dumped back to disk when the user wants to run something new. There is still plenty of space for Windows to instantly dump a bit of mispredicted cache and fill it with new data.

Here's where it gets interesting. Running 8GB means wasting IO. First, with only 3.5GB for caching, the new thing you want to run probably isn't already in ram. This means waiting for it to read in, effecting your experience. On a 2GB game you'll be okay loading in without too much dumping back out to the swapfile, but only for a bit. Windows really does want to keep some ram open for new stuff, so even though 4.3+2.0 only equals 6.3GB Windows is still going to dump stuff to your swap. While you are trying to play a game. Ugh. Oh, you'll have to wait for that dumped data to read back in too, when you are done with that game for that session. Double-ugh.

What happens when you have 11GB Committed on an 8GB system? Ah, crap. 4GB of data is already dumped to your swapfile on disk. Now you want to read in a 4GB game? Ha! Alright, now we're waiting for 4GB to write out at the same time 4GB is reading in. This is dog slow.

So, as I've repeatedly said, 8GB is starving a machine to death. 16GB is a reasonable amount and certainly the best value. 24GB is roughly ideal, but ram is cheap, why not dump in all 32GB if you're already populating the board with 4 sticks?

Anybody telling you that 8GB is great and 16GB is overkill or pointless is a person speaking from a place of ignorance. Yes, 8GB works, but by no means is it delivering the experience that even a cheap $40 more worth of ram will give you at 16GB. Not knowing that you are starving your machine is not the same as not starving your machine.