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ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor HDT90ZFBGRBOX

LITE-ON Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM 8MB Cache SATA Internal Blu-ray Burner 12X Blu-ray Burner with Blu-ray 3D feature Model iHBS112

SILVERSTONE Fortress Series FT02B Black Aluminum / Steel Computer Case

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive x 2

CORSAIR XMS 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) Desktop Memory Model CMX8GX3M2A2000C9

SILVERSTONE ST1200 1200W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

Creative 70SB088000004 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Express 1x Interface PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium

GIGABYTE GV-R687D5-1GD-B Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity x2

These are the general parts I am currently going with. Any advice or personal experience with these on why I should or should not just order it up now?

Whaddya wanna do with it? List everything. In order of preference, if possible.

--Patrick

Well, I'm going for a gaming monster for one, but I do bits of most things with it from internauting to photoshoppery. It'll also be my home's media server.

I'm also trying to keep it around 2 grand (Canadian).

If it were me, I would not put a western digital hard drive in it. Some disagree, but I've never had a WD that didn't fail catastrophically after 2 years.

Which brand would you suggest?

I personally like seagate. There was a certain model of seagate drive a year or two ago that had some widespread problems, but I personally have had great experiences using seagate drives exclusively in my own personal PCs for 10 years now. Meanwhile, at work and in friends' rigs, I continue to hear horror stories of (and experience firsthand) Western Digital drives suddenly and completely ceasing to function with no warning.

That's not to say I've never had a seagate drive fail.. but generally, when they go, they go slowly and with a lot of noise and warning, malfunctioning in odd ways so that you know you need to get your stuff off that drive. Then a few days later it will keel over.

I'll probably plop a couple of these assholes in instead:

Newegg.ca - Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pricier, but they're probably as fast as I can get without going solid state.

Just to make sure you're aware, you know about AMD playing a bit fast and loose with their naming conventions for the 6000 series, right? The 6870 is a great card (and priced pretty nicely), but it's only moderately better than a 5850 or GTX 460.

I'm pretty aware of the current issue there, it's still a good card. It should be the 6700 series but because they plan to continue the 5700 series they didn't want confusion or some such horseshit.

I'm currently bandying about Gtx 285s. They perform well enough, but I want more and new and the 6870s outperform them handily at like half the cost.

Gaming monster + media server + Internet + Photoshop = No real need for more than 4 cores. Also no need for Hyperthreading.

-Best AMD CPUs, then, are the Phenom II x4 965/970 (3.4/3.5GHz, for Locked/Unlocked, about $200US). Intel has either the i5-760 (2.8-3.4GHz, about $205US) for Micro-ATX systems or systems which will only have one graphics card, or the i7-870 (2.9-3.6GHz, about $300US) with Hyperthreading turned off in BIOS for full-size systems or ones which will use multiple GPUs in SLI/X-Fire. The only way to get more performance than this would be something in an LGA1366 (i7-9xx), but then we're talking $500 or so for just the cpu.
-Board should be something based on 890FX (for AM3), or P55 (for LGA1156). If you went crazy with an LGA1366 CPU, then you're stuck with X58 as pretty much your only choice (at around $200-300 for the MLB) but at least you get lots of PCIe slots.
-OS should be Win7 x64. At this time, I don't believe there is any other reasonable choice.
-8GB RAM as 2x4GB modules should be ideal.
-Right now I tend to recommend Seasonic PSUs, they have the X-850 which is incredibly efficient at low power draw and which has an extremely silent fan design (to the point of actually turning the fan off when it is not needed). 850W should be plenty, even for dual 6870s (even a high-end X58-based system can get by with under 400W* if it is using only a single 6870)
-Either ATI 6870 or GeForce GTX 460, making sure they have at least 1GB memory onboard. Remember that almost any board with multiple PCIe x16 slots can do Crossfire, but only certain ones (ones NOT made by ATI) will do SLI for multiple NVIDIA cards. If you get the AMD motherboard, you will be limiting yourself to only a single GPU if you want to use NVIDIA graphics cards (and if you use Photoshop a lot, you might).
-For sound, get whatever turns you on. Unless you're doing some sort of audio editing, built-in sound these days is usually good enough (5.1/7.1 surround) for most people.

--Patrick
*Test done with that system at full load shows 247W draw at the wall outlet for the entire system. Assuming 80% efficiency for the 1000W PSU tested (which should actually be a little low), that means the components in the system are using about 310W worth of PSU capacity (247W / 0.8 = approx 310W).

Thanks for the advice Patrick, much appreciated.

GasBandit said:

There was a certain model of seagate drive a year or two ago that had some widespread problems, but I personally have had great experiences using seagate drives exclusively in my own personal PCs for 10 years now. Meanwhile, at work and in friends' rigs, I continue to hear horror stories of (and experience firsthand) Western Digital drives suddenly and completely ceasing to function with no warning.

That's not to say I've never had a seagate drive fail.. but generally, when they go, they go slowly and with a lot of noise and warning, malfunctioning in odd ways so that you know you need to get your stuff off that drive. Then a few days later it will keel over.

Click to expand...

I believe that was the Barracuda 7200.11 series that had the problems. I will say that I've had exactly 2 drives fail on me and both were WD, but they also fell out of my car, so I wasn't surprised. Thing is, I wouldn't rely on any single drive, no matter who the mfr might be. FWIW, I have a Seagate 120GB drive that came stock in my G4 Mac back in 2002 and which 'failed' within the first year. I reformatted it and it's back to use again and has been going for the past 7 years. Every now and again, it will start to chatter noisily, make a high-pitched vibrating beep like plucking the tine of a fork, and then it will resume normal operation. I'm incredibly impressed, but I still don't keep any critical data on it, either.

If you're building a system from scratch, I'd think about going with one of the newer Advanced Format drives (the ones with 4k sectors). Might as well make the jump now. Right now, some of the best drives look like the Samsung Barracuda XT 2TB (ST32000641AS - even though it's a 512/sector drive, it's the one you were already considering) as a boot drive for its capacity and speed and low noise (assuming you don't want to boot from SSD), and the Samsung EcoGreen F4 (HD204UI - this one's a 4k/sector drive) for drives which will just serve data.

Y'r welcome. You said gaming, which is why I recommend the quad-core processors. Adding cores to a CPU gets you faster rendering, audio & video editing, transcoding, etc, but for gaming (as of right now), it's clock speed that matters, and it seems that for every extra core you add to a CPU, you have to back off the speed somewhat.

Make sure you keep us posted on what you go with. I'm going mostly from published specs and reviews, the only things listed that I'm going to personally invest in are the Samsung EcoGreen F4s for my external backup box and my next upgrade will probably be replacing the guts of my Micro-ATX system with an 880G MLB with the 95W version of the Phenom II x6 1055T on board...but I purposely intend for that one to be a low power/low heat (and therefore low noise) media server and/or render/transcode node, which is why I'm deliberately going for the most non-hyperthreaded cores I can get for the least power/heat (and the least $$$).

Once you have the requirements all laid out, the hardware almost chooses itself.

--Patrick

Hmm, they don't have Seasonic x850s on the Canadian Newegg site. The best I can do is an x750. Would that be enough?

They best I can do Seasonic wise there is http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151100

a Seasonic SS-850HT

I think the difference is that one doesn't have the fan cut-off at low draw, and the number and type of connectors are slightly different. Yes, a 750 should be enough for dual 6870s or even dual GTX 460s (which would even work with a 600W PSU), but I wouldn't be so sure about higher wattage cards, such as dual 5870s, or trying to SLI a pair of GTX 465s or GTX 480s.

Check to see what power connectors you'd need and get the one that has what you're looking for.

--Patrick

+Rep Pat

Yeah, I could only rep him once. Dude is a well of information.

Still have my blazingly amazing PC thanks to him.

Shego, that thing should be coming up on its 1yr anniversary soon. Might be time to think about replacing it since it's so outdated now.

--Patrick

It's still destroying everything in it's path. If anything I'd add another 2gb of Ram, a second XXX 5870 and that would be it.

I'm thinking to maybe go with the new GTX 580 or two and an I7-960 quad core and just blowing out the budget I had. What does herr Patrick of technical advice think?

Having trouble finding good benchmark data on the GTX 580 because it's so new. The 580's most direct competition (price-wise) from ATI right now is a pair of 6870's in XFire. The best performance data I've been able to find (so far) shows the GTX580 performs 10-15% better than the GTX480 but at 10% less power draw, with the single card GTX580 performing almost neck-and-neck with a pair of CF6870's in nearly every benchmark (1xGTX580 ≈ 2x6870CF in performance, fps, power draw, price, noise) except for certain ultra-high resolution tests where the pair of CF6870's can't trade memory fast enough to keep up (at least some of which is likely due to the GTX580 having 1.5GB RAM attached while the 6870's only have 1.0GB). A pair of GTX580's are monstrous, both in performance and on the balance sheet (Almost $600 after tax/s&h? Each???).

So yes, right now the GTX580 is the big kid on the block, though of course ATI is readying its 6950/6970 series, which they say will be officially launched on November 29th. Rumored benchmarks put the 6970's single-card performance as being around 5% faster than the GTX580 but of course these are only rumors and we have no idea what sort of power/heat/noise/price will be going on. I have no direct source of insider info so I can't even craft some sort of veiled hint for ya.

As for the i7-960, for $20 more you can buy yourself an i7-880 which runs 35W cooler and can go up to 300MHz faster...and that's before you overclock it. Or you could go with the i7-860 which has the same top speed as the i7-960 (3.46GHz) but costs half as much. However, whether you go with native speeds or play with overclocking, keep in mind that these chips tend to top out around 3.8GHz before they start needing something extra (dramatic power draw increase and significantly more cooling needed) to push them higher while keeping them stable. So right now my recommendation for gaming is really the i7-880 with HT turned off (BTW, the i7-880 should be a drop-in replacement for anyone currently using an i7-860 who might be looking for a 10% CPU speed increase...).

--Patrick

I finally went ahead with some parts and just got them up and running.

Ended up with two 6950's in crossfire. GAT DAYUMN these two pricks are monstrous. They dwarf my old gtx 285's in size. The improvements graphically are astounding. Nothing isn't silky smooth. In fact. Most games are now so smooth that it creeps me out.

I'm actually surprised at how long it's been since your last post. Intel has rendered those 3-digit CPUs (i7-880, etc) almost obsolete with the new Sandy Bridge chips, but they're still more than good enough for most games. Glad to hear you're sailing now. Keep 'em cool and they'll keep you going another couple years.

--Patrick

Yeah, I went with a I7 2600K. Haven't gotten it yet. I got the cards first and really, really wanted to try them. Only took like 10 minutes to get them going.

I went the other way 'round. Got the i5 2500K last week. I'll be getting at least one 6950 next payday.

Apparently they can be unlocked to 6970 performance very, very easily. I haven't done that yet, and won't until I do a little more checking up on them. Which model did you get DA? I went with the older ASUS model, the one before they decided to make them 3 cards thick (and tack on 40 bucks for no discernable reason). They're monstrous enough as is.

I'm looking at the XFX one. ~$234 on newegg and just got a plug on Techzilla.