Hey guys, I'm looking to build a desktop by the second week of January (bring back to school with me). Does anybody have information on the sale history of desktop parts? I'm looking to absolutely maximize the bang for my buck. Will part prices be lower just before or after Christmas? I'm not concerned with having everything exactly by Christmas, but just at some point in that time frame. What types of discounts could I expect to get waiting until after Christmas, and which parts would be best to buy before versus after?
Building before vs. After Christmas?
- Thread starter ericw95
- Start date
geofelt
Titan
- Oct 9, 2006
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PC parts as a rule get lower. Particularly as new products appear.
But, I think you would do better to buy now with black Friday/cyber Monday sales.
You might want to post what you are thinking of buying and what the pc will be used for.
Quality will always be more satisfying than price in the long run.
But, I think you would do better to buy now with black Friday/cyber Monday sales.
You might want to post what you are thinking of buying and what the pc will be used for.
Quality will always be more satisfying than price in the long run.
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/ericw95/saved/mHMypg that's the build I think I'm going with. Build will be used 70% for work, and about 30% for gaming. The games I play are mostly RPG such as Dark Souls and Skyrim, but I'm sure I'll fire up BF4 at some point. First expansion will be SLi GTX760, which is the reason for the 1000 W psu.
How does everything look overall? Will the processor work well with the setup as an OEM/tray model versus a boxed model? I was looking at the FX8350 vs the 9590, and I think the added .7 GHz will be very useful for a lot of the research work I do (mostly parallel processing type simulations, particularly matlab, and virtualization tasks). However, my budget will only allow for the 9590 if I go with the OEM/tray version (approx 120 cheaper than the non boxed version). Looking to the hardware put together for when I return second semester.
geofelt
Titan
- Oct 9, 2006
- 54,380
- 4,185
- 174,240
You might want to research the cpu before buying.
A 9590 is essentially a binned and overclocked FX-8250 at a higher price.
Even at that the cores are no match for intel cores.
My brother-in law is a scientist who uses matlab. we were trying to find how to make compute go faster. It is complicated to get multithreading going. It is essentially a single threaded process.
MMO and strategy gemes are mostly single threaded also.
I really think the absolute best cpu you can buy is a i7-4790K which will be $100 more.
The 9570 has a passmark rating of 10264.
The i7-4790K at stock is 11291.
The 9570 has reached it's max overclock, while you can expect more from a 4790K.
If that is a problem, the i5-4690K with an overclock will be a much better performer whenever 8 cores are not needed.
Even then, you can get perhaps a 25% overclock which would make it comparable to a 9570 under full 8 core load.
As a student, read up on "Amdahl's law" which explains the limiting nature of a may core app.
Most any Z97 motherboard will do. You will pay a bit more for a sli capable version.
sli GTX760 needs only 700w.
I don't really recommend sli when a strong single card will do.
My plan for an upgrade would be to market the GTX760 and replace it with a single stronger card.
The noctua cooler is excellent and comes with a very good tube of paste, no extra is needed.
A 9590 is essentially a binned and overclocked FX-8250 at a higher price.
Even at that the cores are no match for intel cores.
My brother-in law is a scientist who uses matlab. we were trying to find how to make compute go faster. It is complicated to get multithreading going. It is essentially a single threaded process.
MMO and strategy gemes are mostly single threaded also.
I really think the absolute best cpu you can buy is a i7-4790K which will be $100 more.
The 9570 has a passmark rating of 10264.
The i7-4790K at stock is 11291.
The 9570 has reached it's max overclock, while you can expect more from a 4790K.
If that is a problem, the i5-4690K with an overclock will be a much better performer whenever 8 cores are not needed.
Even then, you can get perhaps a 25% overclock which would make it comparable to a 9570 under full 8 core load.
As a student, read up on "Amdahl's law" which explains the limiting nature of a may core app.
Most any Z97 motherboard will do. You will pay a bit more for a sli capable version.
sli GTX760 needs only 700w.
I don't really recommend sli when a strong single card will do.
My plan for an upgrade would be to market the GTX760 and replace it with a single stronger card.
The noctua cooler is excellent and comes with a very good tube of paste, no extra is needed.
My lab does large scale research and we receive the parallel processing toolbox for free. Your brother in law may want to look into that option, as it only costs $50 per license and makes a marked improvement over single threaded processing (especially for simulation running). Learning curve is very small and it really lets you make use of the full power of matlab. For example, running the same simulation with parallel processing on my laptop (4 core i7 2.5 GHz) using 2 workers versus 1 decreases computation time by about 30%; I would expect a 8 core machine to be able to run at least 5 or 6 dedicated to matlab without crashing the computer (on my boss' comp, doing this reduces work time by about 70%), which is pretty huge when you consider that some of these simulations can take weeks to run. Do you think the Intel would still outperform the AMD 9590 or 9570, even with multithreaded processing? I have very little experience with hardware, so I am all ears to you guys who have a ton more experience than me. What exactly makes an Intel "superior" to an AMD option, even with fewer cores and a far lower clock?
As far as psu goes, even if I eventually go with a sli setup down the road at some time (theoretical expansion), do you think 750 or 850 W would be good? I was going to go with one of the EVGA gold psus, which seem to run a bit cheaper than others. And awesome I wasn't sure whether the cooler would come with its own tube of paste so that's good to know.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1800828/intel-temperature-guide.html
http://sites.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_FX_Performance_Tuning_Guide.pdf
these will explain some of the basic differences in 22nm and 32nm chips
your amd build will be good for what your doing you just need one of best liquid cpu coolers around and very good case fans
http://sites.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_FX_Performance_Tuning_Guide.pdf
these will explain some of the basic differences in 22nm and 32nm chips
your amd build will be good for what your doing you just need one of best liquid cpu coolers around and very good case fans
I'm probably not trying to clock over 5 or 5.2 GHz honestly... will my setup allow for that type of sustained performance? ie cooler, mobo, etc. I'd be running things overnight for the most part, probably for about 24 hrs (anything requiring more and I would pop it on our cluster).
appreciate the reading material, always looking to learn a bit as I go since my hardware experience consists 90% of the reading I've been doing the past 4 days while putting together the build. What coolers would you recommend? Also, does the Antec 900 case have good enough case fans do you think?
yes, but you will still need one of the best liquid coolers.
it makes since to go for 5.8ghz with a 9590.
A large fsb keeps your vcore and multiplier low but what is to be understood as you increase the fsb you are also increasing the ram, ht-link, and cpu-nb.
it makes since to go for 5.8ghz with a 9590.
A large fsb keeps your vcore and multiplier low but what is to be understood as you increase the fsb you are also increasing the ram, ht-link, and cpu-nb.
Awesome dude, appreciate all the quality responses I'll pop one of those on. Does the rest of the build look pretty decent? It's the pcpartpicker link about two posts in. Everything is compatible to my knowledge (I went through, and pc part picker also has a built in compatibility feature so I don't think that should be an issue). I'm planning on loading windows and having 3-4 Centos virtual boxes (one main, and a few clones because a lot of what I do is software testing and integration (mostly alpha versions) so I have had a few break in the past (mostly broken bus ports that screw up python and most of the built in tools, so it's much much faster just to have cloned or snapshotted VBs than to fix the issues).
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