I7 975 w/ HD Projector Build

[shotinthedark99]

Projector is: http://www.testseek.com/home_electronics/video/projector/panasonic_pt-ae4000u-p-8307f4d5-30c1-bbb0-5a7e-a91d3420bc45.html

My budget for the computer itself was 3k, as much as the projector cost (w/ equipment) but the projector of course is also to impress women who don't care how nifty a rig I have.

Intel i7 975
Asus P6X58D Premium (option to upgrade to Gulfstream)
6gb Corsair 2000mhz
Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 300 gb Sata 3 6gb/s Hard drive
(I really wanted a OCZ Z-Drive, or at least a Sata3 SSD, but could not afford them . . . next year. . )
Cooler Master Cosmos S chassis
Cooler Master V10 CPU fan
Cooler Master 600w Silent Pro Power Supply
Logitech diNovo keyboard
Razer Mamba mouse (and gaming mouse pad, cause I'm a tool and a bit of a jerk)
Onkyo SKS HT540 7.1 surround system
And as soon as it comes out: nVidia GeForce GTX 480 video card (option to nab another one next year)

The idea of course was so I could play Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3: New Vegas in the way that little baby Jesus wants me to, and that is on a 135 inch screen, at the highest resolution, with the most effects, the hi rez texture packs modders have out there, all the AA money can buy while sitting on my reclining leather couch. Of course I'll have to put aluminum foil over the windows, but I think it'll be worth it. I try to rationalize 6k for the whole set up as . . . some people pay 6k for a flat screen tv that still won't look as good as what I've got ordered.



So now questions:
Watercooling? Never done it before, might try it b/c I want to keep the temps under 60C at all times and still keep the thing quiet.
Overclocking? Never done it either. Don't think I really should need to, but really. . . why the hell not?
SLI? Yeah. Right. 700 bucks a card, I'll do that when the one shows its age.
OCZ Z-Drive? the PCIe 2.0 SSD reads twice as fast as a SATA III SSD, which reads twice as fast as my 15k.7 SATA III. I rationalized not getting it b/c it'll take my projector bulb longer to warm up with the HD I've got.
Blu-Ray? Is there an Sata3 Blu-Ray drive out there? I have a player coming too . . . but I figure I should make the most out of my SATA III.
Raid 0? Never done this one either. Is it worth it? The Cheetah is a buck a gig.

 

[raybob95]

First, the 600W will be a little low for a GTX 480. Go for the Corsair TX750.

Second, why spend $1,000 on an i7 975 when you can spend $300 on an i7 930 which can EASILY be overclocked to the point of greatly surpassing the i7 975?

Third, don't buy a Velociraptor or Cheetah. Get either an SSD or a WD Caviar Black 2TB which holds a TON and is just about as face at even less the price. Gaming and HD video really don't need anything more than a normal drive.

Fourth, there are no Blu-Ray SATA III Drives out there, nor is there any need to be. Being that Optical Disk Drives only transfer at best a few megabytes every second, they can't even come close to maxing out even the old IDE ATA100 Interface. SATA III is completely pointless on an ODD.

Lastly, don't spend so much on 2 GHz RAM. It makes very very little difference to the point you won't notice it, and the CAS Timings matter even more. Save some money and get some good DDR3 1600 MHz or 1333 MHz with a CAS Latency of 7 or lower.

All that should up your budget a big and give you money for bigger and badder graphics cards, like a 3-way 5870 Crossfire setup.

 

[shotinthedark99]

600w a little low, or too low? It's already been ordered.
For the i7 975 I'm actually not spending a grand on it, it's a used one my buddy sold me for the gulfstream he's getting. Good deal on it.

The SSDs I looked at were great except they were all SATA II, or the few that were SATA III were not cost effective. The Cheetah was a judgement call really, I'm still planning on getting SSDs in the future.

ODD: That explains why the DVD drive I got that claimed to be SATA III was not prohibitively expensive. . . I should have known that.

The Ram is also used, but in like new condition, and is costing me less than 1600 Mhz RAM.

I really like the 480 tech, future-thinking features, tessellation, and always the option to SLI up to 3 ways on the mobo with 3x PCIe 2.0 slots

More likely than not over the next two years, one's getting another 480, the other's getting a Z-drive.

 

[raybob95]

You can try the 600W, but it may not work and certainly will not work at all for overclocking.

 

[shotinthedark99]

750W enough for overclocking and SLI?

 

[JackNaylorPE]

850 needed (at least) for twin 4xx series cards.

930 will overclock past a 975, but 975's can be OC'd to....and past 930's.

RAID 0 - unless you have an application where the vendor is saying you will reap benefits (movie editing, rendering, large databases) you won't see much improvement.

Vertx 2 drive, the new performance champ are expected this month.

An air cooler will do 4 GHz e-z on a 920/930 ....where you plan to go that you need WC ?

The optimal viewing distance (your butt to picture) is 33.75 feet for a 135" screen
http://www.dtvcity.com/lcdtv/lcdscreensize.html

DDR3-1600 is the way to go, lowest CAS # ya can afford....best is Mushkin 998692's

 

[shotinthedark99]

Thank you both for input!

AC is fine, but if WC is quieter it's something to think about. I know people who've done it, assumed there was a reason for it.

The optimal viewing distance for an LCD TV may be that far away, but according to:
http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter I only need 10ft. http://www.projectorcentral.com/Panasonic-PT-AE4000U-projection-calculator-pro.htm recommends 14-22ft, but the first article makes a good point about being able to see the improvement of 1080p.

I'm not familiar with CAS timings or latency, what are they? What's important about them?

 

[raybob95]

The MHz is the number of I/O Operations per second the RAM can do. The latencies are the number of clock cycles it takes for the RAM to respond to a data request from the CPU.

For 1,600,000,000 operations per second, and 7 clock cycles to wait, the CPU theoretically has to wait 4.375 nano-seconds (billionths of a second) to get data from the RAM. If you had RAM at 2 GHz but a latency of 14 clock cycles, the CPU would have to wait around 7 nano-seconds for a piece of data from the RAM, thus being slower despite the higher clock speed. However, after it begins responding the 2 GHz RAM will begin to catch up as they are both transfering data only the 2 GHz RAM is doing it more slowly. Thus it was slower to react, but faster to transfer data.

That being said, most RAM transfers are a few bytes or KBytes each, so in this case the 1600 MHz RAM wins by a long shot.

Think of it this way, the RAM Speed in Mhz is like the Sequential transfer rate on a Hard Drive. The CAS Latencies are basically like the access time on a hard drive.



An Example:

Drive 1 has an access time of 20 ms, and transfers at a max of 200 MB/s.
Drive 2 has an access time of 10 ms, and transfers at a max of 150 MB/s.

As such, for large sequential transfer operations where it only has to seek once, only 10 ms is wasted on drive 1 and then quickly made up by the extra 50 MB/s of thoroughput. Drive 1 wins.

For small, random read and writes, like an OS Drive, Drive 1 will lose by a long shot since the drive has to seek many many times per second, and much more time is wasted. Since Drive 2 seeks twice as fast, half as much time seeking is wasted, and it transfers data more quickly.

Hope that helped.

 

[shotinthedark99]

Yeap, much thank you! The 6Gb I have now I got a deal on like I said, but when it comes time to upgrade I'll grab 12 of the 16k, combined it'll probably be cheaper than another 6 of the 2k.

I'm debating whether or not to wait until April for that GTX 480, though I love the idea of it, I might see if I can find a cheap card to tide me over until then if only to watch movies with. Since this is a pretty elaborate system I'm gonna post pictures as parts of it flow in for posterity's sake. The rig's actually going to go in my kitchen pantry, being closest to where I'm hanging the projector. The Screen is going to hang in the middle of the living room (being more than 10 feet wide it would hit the fireplace if I put it further back) as this is the only place in my apartment to get the requisite throw distance for the projector. The speakers are going on the wall, the subwoofer will probably go in the pantry as well as the blu-ray drive. Couch is going where the kitchen table should be, and vice versa. I'll have the only apartment with a kitchen table between two end tables in the state. (not enough room for them where the couch is going to go.

 

[builderbobftw]

Uh, you should have waited for 980X at the same price as a 975.

 

[racermx187]

Uh, you should have waited for 980X at the same price as a 975.

He said he got the 975 used from a friend though

 

[shotinthedark99]

Yeah, no way am I shelling out 1200 bucks for a CPU that won't even be fully utilized until the price drops way down. I'm not designing things or creating media, just gaming.

 

[builderbobftw]

But you shelled out the wasted dollars for a 975.

 

[shotinthedark99]

You couldn't buy a new 920 for what I paid. I mean, it's used, but there's nothing wrong with it.

 

[shotinthedark99]

http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-CMPSU-1000HX-1000-Watt-Professional-compatible/dp/B00154QAXQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1267688599&sr=8-1

Worth getting? Apparently the Cooler Master V10 is a 200W cooling unit since it uses TEC and 3 fans. I don't know if that means it's going to effectively leave me with 400w for my system, or 800w if I go with above, and if so the above is looking much more attractive.

I think I'm going to try this: it answers my earlier WC question, so long as I can find a good after market AC for the GPUs.
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/12000/core_i7_975xe_hits_5015mhz_on_air/index.html
Though I have a property exam in four hours, I can't stop obsessing over my rig, can't sleep, and just keep reading articles. I missed out on the whole 5Ghz project in the end of 2003 with LN2. 6-7 years later to do the same thing with air? How can I not?

 

[shotinthedark99]

After copious amounts of research, leading me to believe the GTX 480 is only better at tessellation and tends to suffer post 8x AA, I decided to go with ATI for the very first time. Perhaps a little bit of that was due to impatience as well.

The Asus model coming out in a few weeks seemed to outperform all other 5970s out there, and the price of them varied from almost $900 on amazon, $700 on new egg, and $635 on onsale.com with free shipping. I have express warranties from them, otherwise I'd be suspicious of the price difference.

http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=mUfimOrLDCnPAFJk&templete=2
http://www.onsale.com/p/6045667?dpno=8018717&store=onsale&source=BWBCJ


I also went with the Corsair PSU, being as one reviewer decided it was orgasmic in some way.

 

[builderbobftw]

You couldn't buy a new 920 for what I paid. I mean, it's used, but there's nothing wrong with it.

Even better. You ripped of you're friend.

 

[shotinthedark99]

So your point is then, in some way you can't explain I'm a dick? You don't need to find a way to explain it, I'll readily admit it. You able to do the same?

If anyone can point me to a 5970 air cooler I would appreciate it.

 

[builderbobftw]

Out of stock at newegg right now. Wait a while. If you realy want it now, they're like 800$ on Ebay.

 

[shotinthedark99]

Thanks for the tip.

I emailed CoolIt about their new Omni universal water cooler http://www.coolitsystems.com/index.php/omni.html to see what price and time frame they can offer. The only other option on the market right now is a full WC system, or as one poster attempted, two AC units- one per CPU, but he did not say whether or not he was successful.

A full system would entail a pump, reservoir, radiator, block, backplate (optional), all the fittings, screws, hoses and such separate, and would not be cheap. I will consider either, as having such a large screen any flaw in the picture will be rather glaring, and as previously mentioned I want the best without an unlimited budget. Having received such a good deal on the processor and Ram, paying retail for the VC and whatever cooling system it takes to overclock (or at least undo the underclocking) does not seem ridiculously unreasonable.

 

[shotinthedark99]

So anyone who's been on ebay knows I lied about the processor and RAM coming from a friend. I'm happy about the price I got on the RAM and didn't want to shell out the 800 for the CPU. Looking at a recent Tom's hardware article about Bad Company, games that are quad-core enabled don't work each core very hard, even at very high resolutions, and at very high resolutions, there only shows a difference in about 1-2 FPS when overclocking from stock. So I'm thinking a $500-600 i7 950 will provide just as good an experience on games for the next 3-5 years or so.

Do any of you with more hardware experience/technical knowledge of the subject find that to be an accurate statement?



In other news, the screen and projector mount have arrived, as have everything but the PSU, CPU obviously, and graphics card. Very happy with the lot of it so far.

 

[builderbobftw]

Wait, what? You lied to us? Why?

Also, you there is nearly zero purpose in buying any CPU faster than the i7-930 for non- major coropation server work.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225&Tpk=i7-930

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103065&cm_re=hyper_212-_-35-103-065-_-Product

i7-930+CM hyper 212> i7-975

 

[touchdowntexas13]

So anyone who's been on ebay knows I lied about the processor and RAM coming from a friend. I'm happy about the price I got on the RAM and didn't want to shell out the 800 for the CPU. Looking at a recent Tom's hardware article about Bad Company, games that are quad-core enabled don't work each core very hard, even at very high resolutions, and at very high resolutions, there only shows a difference in about 1-2 FPS when overclocking from stock. So I'm thinking a $500-600 i7 950 will provide just as good an experience on games for the next 3-5 years or so.

Do any of you with more hardware experience/technical knowledge of the subject find that to be an accurate statement?



In other news, the screen and projector mount have arrived, as have everything but the PSU, CPU obviously, and graphics card. Very happy with the lot of it so far.

Ok why would you lie about the cpu you were getting? That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard seeing as how people on here are only trying to help.

I still don't get it...

Dumb.

 

[builderbobftw]

Honesltly, If he's gonna lie to us about moronic stuff, I don't see why we shoudl help him. A lot of people gave up thier time to help, and he has to just lie and feed us misinformation. Honeslty, i knew he was lying when he said "Friend", he doesn't have any.

 

[touchdowntexas13]

Yea I don't know. I mean the whole thing just seems sketchy now, and what does he mean by "anyone who has been on Ebay" knows that he lied?

Is it just a bad joke, being a troll, or did his "friend" back out? The world may never know...

Honestly the only reason I looked at this thread was because it said something about an HD projector, and I had always wondered was pc gaming would be like on a projector. Well there goes five minutes of my life wasted. Good suggestions by the way.

I'm still confused though...