System Builder Marathon: The $4,500 Super PC
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Page 1:Why Limit Yourself?
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Page 2:Motherboard And Processor
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Page 3:Graphics And RAM
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Page 4:Storage And Audio
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Page 5:Case, Cooling, And Power
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Page 6:Hardware Settings And Overclocking
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Page 7:Benchmark Settings
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Page 8:Benchmark Results: 3D Games
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Page 9:Benchmark Results: Encoding and other Applications
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Page 10:Synthetics
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Page 11:Performance Analysis
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Page 12:Conclusion
Conclusion
We’re pleased with the overall quality and performance of our newest extreme-performance PC, but we’d like to remind readers of a few shortcomings.
We regret that we used a PCI Express—rather than a PCI—audio card, given our change in motherboards. The results were still pleasing, but not perfect.
A more significant setback was the inability of our OCZ PC3-12800 Platinum Edition memory to run at anything close to its rated speed and timings. The problem was overheating, caused partly by the use of four modules packed tightly together. We’re far from alone in experiencing this problem, as even professionally-built high-end gaming machines are being sent out with memory at slower BIOS default speeds. A RAM cooling fan might have helped, but the additional fan we’d selected—the Antec Spotcool—isn’t available from NewEgg at this time.
If our budget had been unlimited, one of the first things we would have considered adding would have been a hardware-based RAID controller. We still would have faced the problem of finding a slot for it, since the only open PCI Express slot was partly blocked by the cooling system of our Zalman LQ1000 case.
As a final caveat, we’re going to keep mentioning the defect in Zalman’s LQ1000 case until the company addresses it. Motherboard mounting holes are slightly out of position, and this type of problem is only exacerbated by the high-quality materials that can’t flex enough to compensate.
Our finished system was a pleasure to use. It’s extremely quiet most of the time and extremely fast, and it looks great sitting on a desk. We question why anyone would want to hide such a piece of art under a desk, and the smaller case of this month’s high-end system meant that we didn’t have to.
The reason we partnered up with NewEgg on this was to have access to a much wider range of hardware then we'd otherwise have. My hope is that this is an asset to our readers and does not interfere editorially.
Just to clarify, all of the hardware goes straight back to NewEgg once the story is done. The arrangement simply gives us access to the hardware, straight from e-tail, to build, benchmark, and write about. It's good for us because we're saved the effort of finding manufacturers who want to send out their hardware and we think it's good for our readers because we can construct the systems we'd *really* build on these budgets. =)
Why would anyone spend $500 on a video card or $1,000 on a processor? ;-)
This is why we do three stories with a trio of price targets--something for everyone!
ie. Anyone who'd pick an alfa romeo or a lexus over an ordinary honda accord would want a more expensive case.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I am not thrilled by the intel raid controller. Perhaps the ich10 is better than the ich9 in this regard, but I only scored about 90mb/sec max read speed in raid5 (5x500gb) on my p35. That's the same speed as my 3x 35gb raptors in raid 0 on my secondary system, so it's okay. But still. A single new spinpoint is faster than the raid 5, so I'm quite sure my ich9r controller is requiring too many resources to work properly fast. Or it's my oc that causes it to slow down somehow. Dunno yet.
Anyway, my experience with intel software raid running raid5 isn't that it's speedy.
ps. wouldn't it have made sense to save a few bucks on storage (2x1,5tb or something) and added memory cooling blocks to go with the water cooled chassis?
it's still a corsair psu according to the picture. (page 6)
@ randomizer : If you'd replace the 4 drives with 2 bigger ones you'd only lose 1tb of storage, and half your theoretical read/write speed (and slightly improve your seek time). Anyway, if memory is running hot I would definetly want some cooling for it. My first choice would be to throw away the sound card and see if 90 bucks was enough for a decent cooler (onboard sound is excellent really), but since toms is rather happy about the sound, I think storage is the best place to compromise.
Anyway, my point is - add a cooler to the modules! actually ocz already have models out there with watercooling built in - since they picked ocz they could've gotten those if newegg had em.
Thanks for the catch. Fixed!
EDIT: Can somebody remove the first two comments?
It's a shame you couldn't have included this new vapor chamber tech ATI is adopting. Time marches on I guess and there will always be some new thing.
What is the problem with running half the system on a 500W rail? My system at home (conroe @ 1.6v, 7xsata 2xide, 4870 & fans) could make do with something like 550w total according to the online psu calculator, so I'm sure a 500w rail would be plenty for 'half a system'
However, its useful to note that this build comes at the heels of the release of X58 platforms with mobo manufacture's already demo'ing retail to near retail packages and the shipment of Nehalem chips a couple of months or less away, its going to make this $4500 build obsolete. While there is always something new around the corner, this isnt just an extra doo dad added to an existing platform but a completely new platform non compatible with the current line of chips.
Its a big deal. Its also very likely GPU companies will release revamped special edition cards to go with all those shiny new icore chips, likely leaving those 4870's behind.
If Corsair wants to approve this PSU for quad crossfire, and they do, with the 5 year warranty and service to back it up, that's good enough.
if it doesn't last 5 years... you get a new one
i dont like the idea of using a RAID 5 solution- write times are bad, recovery time is too big and with large drives there is a real chance that an error during recovery will make the whole array unusable. I went with a RAID 0 system drive and an external drive for dayly drive image backup. the intel approach for RAID 10 (instead of the 0+1 mentioned) is also great: mirror first and stripe later, and it works with an uneven number of drives: just createc a RAID1 setup with more than 2 drives on the Intel RAID manager.
I would also point out that the "new" Asus sound card with HD audio/HDMI 1.3a support is already available for sale in the USA, so choosing a last generation sound card for a $4500 system at least strange.
last but not least : running DDR3 at CAS 8/1333Mhz will make the system actually SLOWER than currunt top end DDR2 based results, even at 8GB! P45 is THE king in the pre Nehalem era.
instead of the 4tb : / I duno If I even come close to half a tb waste of money if ya ask me unless your a highly addictive to downloading stuff but even then it is hard
You're saying that people who use more than 500gb disk is a highly addictive downloader?
I've got over 3tb of data at home, and I've only got a 2mbit/512kbit internet line. How much do you think I'm downloading ? No sire. In this modern world where any game or productivity title takes up space in gigabyte notation 500 is actually a rather small number.
Easy- you record HD video with your computer. Uncompressed, full-bitrate 1920x1080p HD video takes up 19 GB/hour. A 500 GB HDD has about 465 GB of space, which would let you record about 24 hours of video. That's about 8 to 10 movies, which is ridiculously small for a DVR. Even heavily-compressed HD signals that cable and satellite companies like to send out are still something like 8 GB/hour. 500 GB would be a little small as you could record 58 hours of video. 500 GB would be fine if you only record SD stuff, though as that is more like 2 GB/hour and 500 GB would give you about 230 hours of recording time, which is quite a bit.