Check my gaming/developement build

[stevozilik]

Hi Guys,

please check my build, it's meant for software developement and gaming too (UK):

MOBO
1 ASUS P8Z68-V PRO Z68 MoBo

PSU
CORS 850W CMPSU-850TXV2

GPU
2x 1GB XFX HD6870 Dual Fan PCI-E Crossfire

CPU
Intel Core i5 2500K

SSD
128GB Crucial CT128M4SSD2 M4

HDD
2TB SAMSUNG HD204UI SATA 3GB/S

RAM
Corsair Memory Vengeance LP Blue 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz CAS 9 XMP Dual Channel

LCD
27 Asus VE278Q LED

Case
CORSAIR GRAPHITE 600T WHITE

CPU Cooler
COOLERMASTER HYPER TX3 COOLER

BlueRay/DVD Writer
Ssung 12X BDROM SH-B123L/BSBP

 

[AdrianPerry]

Looks a very nice build!

Since your doing software and development though id suggest maybe aiming for a little more data protection/recovery method.

Grabbing a second 2TB HDD and running a RAID1 set up might be a good idea. Or alternatively grab yourself x3 1TB drives, and run RAID5. Id also recommend looking for 7200RPM drives, 5400 are a little "old" these days and the speeds aren't great in comparison.

Recommended:
SamsungSpoint Point F3 7200RPM
SeaGate Barracuda 7200RPM
WD Caviar Black 7200RPM

Other than that (which is down to your personal choice), the rest looks good.

 

[calguyhunk]

1st things first - Looks pretty good. Looks like somebody's been doing his research

2. If you're not looking at xfiring that 6970, drop down to an 80+ 650W unit from a reputable manufacture. I'll say Corsair/Antec/Silverstone/PCP&C etc.

3. For a few bucks extra, might as well get a Blue Ray burner.

4. Now, GPU: On a strictly frames per dollar basis, a GTX 460 SLI is gonna be much less expensive and much more effective - GTX 460 1GB SLI vs AMD Radeon HD 6970

If you wanna go with a Radeon 69xx though, get a 6950. Here's the authoratative tutorial on flashing a 6950 into a 6970.

This ASUS EAH6950 DCII/2DI4S/2GD5 Radeon HD 6950 2GB will definitely do it among others

 

[AdrianPerry]

1st things first - Looks pretty good. Looks like somebody's been doing his research

2. If you're not looking at xfiring that 6970, drop down to an 80+ 650W unit from a reputable manufacture. I'll say Corsair/Antec/Silverstone/PCP&C etc.

3. For a few bucks extra, might as well get a Blue Ray burner.

4. Now, GPU: On a strictly frames per dollar basis, a GTX 460 SLI is gonna be much less expensive and much more effective - GTX 460 1GB SLI vs AMD Radeon HD 6970

If you wanna go with a Radeon 69xx though, get a 6950. Here's the authoratative tutorial on flashing a 6950 into a 6970.

This ASUS EAH6950 DCII/2DI4S/2GD5 Radeon HD 6950 2GB will definitely do it among others

OP listed x2 6870's?

 

[stevozilik]

OP listed x2 6870's?

yep

 

[calguyhunk]

OP listed x2 6870's?

LOL. I'm used to 2X. As in 2X HD6870 1GB. Without that, in my hurry, I thought he wrote 2GB.

 

[stevozilik]

1st things first - Looks pretty good. Looks like somebody's been doing his research

2. If you're not looking at xfiring that 6970, drop down to an 80+ 650W unit from a reputable manufacture. I'll say Corsair/Antec/Silverstone/PCP&C etc.

3. For a few bucks extra, might as well get a Blue Ray burner.

4. Now, GPU: On a strictly frames per dollar basis, a GTX 460 SLI is gonna be much less expensive and much more effective - GTX 460 1GB SLI vs AMD Radeon HD 6970

If you wanna go with a Radeon 69xx though, get a 6950. Here's the authoratative tutorial on flashing a 6950 into a 6970.

This ASUS EAH6950 DCII/2DI4S/2GD5 Radeon HD 6950 2GB will definitely do it among others

Thanks for the feedback, I've been surfing for a week or so, especially here on TH

1, 2, 4 ) I'm going for 2x 6870 , although a bit worried about the micro shuttering... Was considering the 6950 but 2x 6950 is £100 more, not sure if it's worth it...

3) Hardly ever use DVD Burner. To be honest never played a Blue Ray in my life...

 

[stevozilik]

LOL. I'm used to 2X. As in 2X HD6870 1GB. Without that, in my hurry, I thought he wrote 2GB.

sorry was a typo

 

[AdrianPerry]

LOL. I'm used to 2X. As in 2X HD6870 1GB. Without that, in my hurry, I thought he wrote 2GB.

Ah well never mind Either way id say the build is in a very good position with x2 6870's. Personally i'm not a fan of going Crossfire/SLI right off the bat, i like to leave a slot open for expansion. HOWEVER. Since this is a workstation build, its going to provide all the graphics power you need for work, and for gaming, and with 2 good, mid-range cards, your onto a winner.

I shoved a Blu-Ray reader into my build too! Never used it once haha. Bought with the intention of keeping it "forever" and if games ever started being produced on Blu-Ray disks id be all set Only cost me i think £47, and considering a DVD-RW was going to be £20 anyway, it seemed like a worthwhile purchase.

 

[stevozilik]

Looks a very nice build!

Since your doing software and development though id suggest maybe aiming for a little more data protection/recovery method.

Grabbing a second 2TB HDD and running a RAID1 set up might be a good idea. Or alternatively grab yourself x3 1TB drives, and run RAID5. Id also recommend looking for 7200RPM drives, 5400 are a little "old" these days and the speeds aren't great in comparison.

Recommended:
SamsungSpoint Point F3 7200RPM
SeaGate Barracuda 7200RPM
WD Caviar Black 7200RPM

Other than that (which is down to your personal choice), the rest looks good.

Thanks mate! I'll consider another HDD. However I could not find good benchmarks, is Samsung 1Tb Spinpoint F3 7200RPM going to be faster than Samsung HD204UI 2TB Spinpoint F4 5400rpm ?

 

[Device Unknown]

Umm, get the 2600K if you are a developer. you'll thank me later for it.

 

[stevozilik]

Ah well never mind Either way id say the build is in a very good position with x2 6870's. Personally i'm not a fan of going Crossfire/SLI right off the bat, i like to leave a slot open for expansion. HOWEVER. Since this is a workstation build, its going to provide all the graphics power you need for work, and for gaming, and with 2 good, mid-range cards, your onto a winner.

I shoved a Blu-Ray reader into my build too! Never used it once haha. Bought with the intention of keeping it "forever" and if games ever started being produced on Blu-Ray disks id be all set Only cost me i think £47, and considering a DVD-RW was going to be £20 anyway, it seemed like a worthwhile purchase.

My past 2 builds I've always went for a relatively more expensive MoBo capable of Crossfire and got just 1 good GPU, saying to mysleft that I'll get the second one later... It never ever happened :lol: So now I've decided I might as well go for it from start

 

[stevozilik]

Umm, get the 2600K if you are a developer. you'll thank me later for it.

why?

 

[calguyhunk]

Thanks mate! I'll consider another HDD. However I could not find good benchmarks, is Samsung 1Tb Spinpoint F3 7200RPM going to be faster than Samsung HD204UI 2TB Spinpoint F4 5400rpm ?

7200 RPM>5400 RPM. It's an EcoGreen drive. You do realize that that's gonna mean less performance, right? That's just laptop stuff for less power consumption.

Toms review - Average Read speed

Toms review - Average Write speed

Issues with your drive - samsung.com and sourceforge.net

Advice: Always Google your model version/part number before actually putting down hard cash

 

[calguyhunk]

I'm going for 2x 6870 , although a bit worried about the micro shuttering... Was considering the 6950 but 2x 6950 is £100 more, not sure if it's worth it...

I'm not sure either

For whatever it's worth, here are the benchmarks - Radeon HD 6870 CF VS. Radeon HD 6950 CF.

EDIT: Link changed. This is just the 1GB version. Finally I've got it right

 

[stevozilik]

7200 RPM>5400 RPM. It's an EcoGreen drive. You do realize that that's gonna mean less performance, right? That's just laptop stuff for less power consumption.

Toms review - Average Read speed

Toms review - Average Write speed

Issues with your drive - samsung.com and sourceforge.net

Advice: Always Google your model version/part number before actually putting down hard cash

Thanks for that!

in terms of performance, it works out that 1TB F3 is about 10% faster than the 2Tb F4, which is not a lot. Considering that the price difference is minimal and you get twice as much space, I think it's definitely worh it...

and I'm hoping that the firmware stuff is long resolved right?!

 

[AdrianPerry]

It might be worth running x2 1TB drives in RAID0 if you want a performance increase.

 

[stevozilik]

It might be worth running x2 1TB drives in RAID0 if you want a performance increase.

I already have SSD 128Mb and will put all that matters there. The HDD is just storage and probably Games. What I'm thinking is maybe getting another 64Gb SSD to work as Intel SRT and that would considerably speed up the HDD, when it matters... I dont see much point in building Raid 0 with SSDs, I'm not that desperate about HDD performance...

 

[fb39ca4]

Think about how useful the SSD will really be. Is trading faster loading times better than using the money for more powerful GPUs or an i7 2600k (because it will also be used as a workstation).

 

[stevozilik]

Think about how useful the SSD will really be. Is trading faster loading times better than using the money for more powerful GPUs or an i7 2600k (because it will also be used as a workstation).

The CPU is a good point, somethink worth considering. The GPU power I'm getting is more than I'll utilize, I dont really have much time for gaming, it's more like a nice idea than reallity . Waiting for rFactor 2 and Diablo 3, that's about it...

 

[AdrianPerry]

I already have SSD 128Mb and will put all that matters there. The HDD is just storage and probably Games. What I'm thinking is maybe getting another 64Gb SSD to work as Intel SRT and that would considerably speed up the HDD, when it matters... I dont see much point in building Raid 0 with SSDs, I'm not that desperate about HDD performance...

I had this same idea too when I suggested once on another post that someone grab a 120GB SSD and partition it using 60GB as dedicated SSD and 60GB as a cache. Between my self and another though when we thought about it, the benefit would more than likely be non-existent. All the cache does is add your regularly used programs to cache memory, which chances are you will be doing anyway with the dedicated SSD.

If you put your OS and Applictions onto one SSD, the other SSD is simply going to make a cache of that making it totally useless.

 

[stevozilik]

I had this same idea too when I suggested once on another post that someone grab a 120GB SSD and partition it using 60GB as dedicated SSD and 60GB as a cache. Between my self and another though when we thought about it, the benefit would more than likely be non-existent. All the cache does is add your regularly used programs to cache memory, which chances are you will be doing anyway with the dedicated SSD.

If you put your OS and Applictions onto one SSD, the other SSD is simply going to make a cache of that making it totally useless.

Good point, not much really I'd benefit from it I guess. Kind of makes the whole ISRT pointless

 

[AdrianPerry]

Good point, not much really I'd benefit from it I guess. Kind of makes the whole ISRT pointless

Yeah that's the same conclusion I came to While it seems a great idea on paper to get the best all round performance from your HDD, Cache and dedicated SSD, in practice, I dont think the outcome is quite as good as we would like to think

 

[koogco]

If using them for games, I would suggest 7200rpm drives definatly. The loading times of games and game levels are very directly related to your drive speed.
For storage use only, however. 5400rpm is fine, and you save a tiny bit of power too.

The build looks really solid and well proportioned.

As for i5 2500k versus i7 2600k. It depends if you are going to run anything with more than 4 significant threads. For instance, if your software compiler(s) can utilize more then 4, there will be a benifit from the 2600k's hyperthreading. But if not, there is no real difference between the two.

 

[AdrianPerry]

For storage use only, however. 5400rpm is fine, and you save a tiny bit of power too.

The price and power difference is so minimal it just isn't worth it when running 1-2 drives in a home environment. Stick with 7200RPM drives.