
Power Supply: Seasonic M12II SS-850AM
By now, my reduced budget is starting to feel a little constrictive. But power is one place where I cannot cut corners. I estimated that I’d need at least 800 watts, and the unit I chose to reach that level in September is now too expensive. Thankfully, Seasonic was ready to take care of my needs.

Read Customer Reviews of Seasonic's M12II SS-850AM PSU
Semi-modular and manufactured by one of the industry’s most-reputable firms, the only feature Seasonic’s value-priced M12II-850AM forces me to give up is a small amount of efficiency. Coming in just shy of the Gold certification with an 84.52% full-load efficiency rating, that’s not much of a sacrifice.
SSD: SanDisk Ultra Plus SDSSDHP-256G-G25
Still shaving nickels to collect scrap metal, I turned to our Best SSDs For The Money column. First recognized for its performance and value in SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD Reviewed At 64, 128, And 256 GB, this drive remains atop our list of 256 GB models.

Read Customer Reviews of SanDisk's Ultra Plus 256 GB
Hard Drive: Western Digital Green WD20EZRX
A 200-300 GB SSD fills up quickly with programs and games, and most users still need additional space for all their movies, pictures, work files, and documents. September’s build had 3 TB of extra storage, but budget restrictions scaled this build back to 2 TB.

Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Green WD20EZRX
Apart from compatibility issues with a few older systems and some shipping damage complaints, Western Digital's 2 TB Green drive looks fairly good from Newegg's user reviews. It's not a top performer, but does serve up plenty of capacity quietly, and features 64 MB of cache to help it along.
Optical Drive: Pioneer BDR-208DBK
Short on cash but still full of dreams, I looked to previous System Builder Marathon stories to find a cheap, full-featured Blu-ray burner for redundant storage and media playback. The trick was to find an OEM drive with the software suite typically lacking from OEM packages.

Read Customer Reviews of Pioneer's BDR-208DBK
Unfortunately, I lost the bet on this one. Unlike its BDR-206DBK, Pioneer's BDR-208DBK really doesn’t include software. It’s still a good drive though, and I really couldn’t afford to pay any more than its low $60 price.
- Making Tough Choices In Volatile Markets
- Graphics, Memory, And CPU
- Motherboard, CPU Cooling And Case
- Power Supply, SSD, Hard Drive, And Optical Drive
- Radiator Installation
- Finishing The Build
- Overclocking Through Firmware
- Final Touches
- Benchmarking Configurations
- Results: 3DMark And PCMark
- Results: SiSoftware Sandra
- Results: Battlefield 3 And Far Cry 3
- Results: F1 2012 And Skyrim
- Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: File Compression
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Value Conclusion
Seeing that it is impossible to break even doing bitcoin mining with GPUs, i expect sooner than later a flood of barely used cards will hit the used market.
Seeing that it is impossible to break even doing bitcoin mining with GPUs, i expect sooner than later a flood of barely used cards will hit the used market.
But in the case of the Bitcoiners, there's a better method to mine, why bother with the GPUs? Seems to me they lose out no matter how they end up.
But in the case of the Bitcoiners, there's a better method to mine, why bother with the GPUs? Seems to me they lose out no matter how they end up.
Forum members often call a machine that burns far too much energy for the amount of useful work we get out of it a "space heater". But if you compare THIS machine to an ACTUAL space heater, you can clearly see the benefit of using THIS machine RATHER than an actual space heater to heat your workspace. Let mining pools pay a portion of this winter's heating bill!
I'm completely against the CONCEPT of crypto-currency mining because they produce no USEFUL data. We're producing GARBAGE data of increasing difficulty generation-by-generation and wasting all those resources to do it. It's worse than raising cattle for the leather and throwing away the meat. It's more akin to raising cattle for photographs of the cow and throwing away the cow!
These machines might actually benefit society if they were using a program like F@H, and we'd at least have a solid argument between their cost to society and their benefit to society. Someone should have beat the bitcoin guy to the punch and developed F@H coins.
Or take a look at cloud servers. Large companies are renting out their excess computing resources during low-traffic periods. Now look at PC-based, self-serving distributed computing platforms like Skype. The per-user cost is low but the number of users is high, so hosting the program across those same "clients" makes sense.
Why don't we have companies knocking down our doors begging for our excess data resources? Someone with a great marketing plan AND excellent technical knowledge should set up a distributed computing platform that pays individuals for their contributions. Environmentalists should praise that move as reducing the number of data centers needed world-wide, but me?
I'm just trying to reduce waste. I even collect my small bits of scrap metal (broken car parts, etc) and give them away to scrap metal collectors because it costs more to take these in than these are worth. Those guys collect enough small batches to make it worth the 15-mile trip. And you don't need to be a tree hugger to see that everyone benefits from that type of effort.
If we're to believe what we're told and crypto-currency mining is to blame for retailer spikes in the highest-tier AMD cards, then I expect to see AMD make some changes in its next generation of cards, especially if AMD isn't cashing in on the rush for its cards and the price hikes are solely due to merchant mark-ups. Considering AMD's business concerns over recent years, I don't expect AMD to make any such profitability mistake ever again. Instead, I think AMD will follow nVidia's example.
When nVidia capped GPGPU performance on the majority of its cards, then went on to produce the Titan and Tesla cards without such GPGPU restriction at higher prices, I was OK with that. It meant gamers could buy cards built for gaming at a reasonable price, people who used their cards for both gaming and GPGPU-related tasks could buy a card built for both for a premium, and researchers could buy cards that were fully-optimized for GPGPU use for an even higher premium. If AMD had done that with the R9-series, we'd have quite a few more gamers sporting brand new AMD cards this holiday season.
And back to the article... Heckuva build! It's an improvement over the previous build in just about every way, with the exception of its current cost.
If we're to believe what we're told and crypto-currency mining is to blame for retailer spikes in the highest-tier AMD cards, then I expect to see AMD make some changes in its next generation of cards, especially if AMD isn't cashing in on the rush for its cards and the price hikes are solely due to merchant mark-ups. Considering AMD's business concerns over recent years, I don't expect AMD to make any such profitability mistake ever again. Instead, I think AMD will follow nVidia's example.
When nVidia capped GPGPU performance on the majority of its cards, then went on to produce the Titan and Tesla cards without such GPGPU restriction at higher prices, I was OK with that. It meant gamers could buy cards built for gaming at a reasonable price, people who used their cards for both gaming and GPGPU-related tasks could buy a card built for both for a premium, and researchers could buy cards that were fully-optimized for GPGPU use for an even higher premium. If AMD had done that with the R9-series, we'd have quite a few more gamers sporting brand new AMD cards this holiday season.
And back to the article... Heckuva build! It's an improvement over the previous build in just about every way, with the exception of its current cost.
I figure there will be a flood of used cards on the market in three months as it gets more difficult to mine the most profitable currencies. But someone mentioned that before I responded. It would be REALLY REALLY bad for AMD to spend 6-weeks increasing production volume, only to see a flood of cheap used cards knock the market out from under their new card sales. Once again, AMD is probably doing best to stick to its plans. Nobody remembers when Intel blamed overproduction by AMD for the CPU market collapse of 1999..in fact those news articles were buried within three months. But I remember
That said, I think this build really missed the mark. My current build would come fairly close to your BF3 numbers and yet my system can easily be had for around the $1300 range. While it might not compete on some of the other compute tasks, it still does pretty damn good.
Give me $2400 and I'm sure I could smoke this rig. I'd expect more from Tom's.
There is a heat/power/efficiency section but In the conclusion I would just like to see Qx vs Qy dbl and system temp along side the % performance gain for a more big picture view. Anyone else ideas on this?
"When nVidia capped GPGPU performance on the majority of its cards... It meant gamers could buy cards built for gaming at a reasonable price"
Uhm, what? Noone got a price drop, gamer cards didn't become cheaper. Reduce in power consumption ? yes, cheaper ? no.
But in the case of the Bitcoiners, there's a better method to mine, why bother with the GPUs? Seems to me they lose out no matter how they end up.
Forum members often call a machine that burns far too much energy for the amount of useful work we get out of it a "space heater". But if you compare THIS machine to an ACTUAL space heater, you can clearly see the benefit of using THIS machine RATHER than an actual space heater to heat your workspace. Let mining pools pay a portion of this winter's heating bill!
I'm completely against the CONCEPT of crypto-currency mining because they produce no USEFUL data. We're producing GARBAGE data of increasing difficulty generation-by-generation and wasting all those resources to do it. It's worse than raising cattle for the leather and throwing away the meat. It's more akin to raising cattle for photographs of the cow and throwing away the cow!
These machines might actually benefit society if they were using a program like F@H, and we'd at least have a solid argument between their cost to society and their benefit to society. Someone should have beat the bitcoin guy to the punch and developed F@H coins.
Or take a look at cloud servers. Large companies are renting out their excess computing resources during low-traffic periods. Now look at PC-based, self-serving distributed computing platforms like Skype. The per-user cost is low but the number of users is high, so hosting the program across those same "clients" makes sense.
Why don't we have companies knocking down our doors begging for our excess data resources? Someone with a great marketing plan AND excellent technical knowledge should set up a distributed computing platform that pays individuals for their contributions. Environmentalists should praise that move as reducing the number of data centers needed world-wide, but me?
I'm just trying to reduce waste. I even collect my small bits of scrap metal (broken car parts, etc) and give them away to scrap metal collectors because it costs more to take these in than these are worth. Those guys collect enough small batches to make it worth the 15-mile trip. And you don't need to be a tree hugger to see that everyone benefits from that type of effort.
Protein Folding Coins do exist.
I have a similar-model Seasonic PSU, an i3570K (stock) and a pair of the Superclocked EVGA GTX 570 in an old InWin Q500 case--I've experimented with the various fan speeds once the system had been on for a while, and the PSU fan was (subjectively) the nosiest *by far*. Even setting both blowers and the case/CPU fans to max (when the system was cold) didn't generate nearly as much noise as the PSU alone...
Such mad
So Angry
Wow
Now excuse us as we head towards the moon.