Building a compootah

[L[0ne]R]

So I want to get a new comp in a month or two. I really want it to perform well in games on highest settings, so the build is starting to get a bit pricey (for one - I decided to go with GeForce GTX 570 instead of 560ti). So I'm thinking of sacrificing a sound card and using a built-in MOBO one (since I don't have a badass stereo system anyway).

Basically my question is: just how much difference do sound cards play in terms of sound quality, and will a built-in card be enough if I'm using headphones?

[dnmr]

Basically my question is: just how much difference do sound cards play in terms of sound quality, and will a built-in card be enough if I'm using headphones?

the built-in sound cards suffice for everyday needs. Don't bother with a pro one unless you will actually need quality for recording music and such.

[RafiPZ]

What's your build looking like?

[L[0ne]R]

the built-in sound cards suffice for everyday needs. Don't bother with a pro one unless you will actually need quality for recording music and such.

Thanks, now that I know this it should save me a bit of money.

What's your build looking like?

So far this is what I have:
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500k
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 570
PSU: either SeaSonic S12II 620 or SILVERSTONE ST60F-ES 600W
Not sure which one is a better option...

MOBO: ASUS P8P67 LE or GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3P or ASUS P8Z68-V
RAM: G.SKILL (2x 4GB) Ripjaws X DDR3 1600 or Ripjaws DDR3 1333
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Blue WD3200AAKX 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
Case: Corsair 400R

I'm still undecided about the PSU and the Mobo, but basically I'm looking for whatever can handle my CPU and GPU without any problems, so any suggestions are welcome.

[RafiPZ]

Very nice processor. For the power supply I got this one:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371031&Tpk=neo%20eco%20620c
I read somewhere that it's a re-branded S12II.
And this motherboard:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131730&Tpk=p8z68-v%20pro  looks like its 5 more than the regular p8z68-v
I had a tough time deciding between my Asus mobo and this one by MSI:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130611
The cool thing about it is you can unlock PCI-E gen3 if you choose to upgrade your processor later on.

Oof just noticed .ca doesn't give you a break on shipping. I didn't pay for shipping on any of my parts 

[L[0ne]R]

Well, with mobos I'm not looking for anything fancy - just as long as it can run all the other hardware without any issues. I'm not planning to mess around and overclock stuff or anything like that. ASUS P8Z68-V PRO is a bit too pricey for me, and MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) is kinda pushing it too. A friend of mine suggested ASUS P8P67 LE, which apparently is good and fairly inexpensive ($140), so I'll probably go with that if there are no major issues with it.

I don't know much about PSU's, so I'll have to reasearch some more on them. One you suggested seems a bit more powerful than Silverstone one and is cheaper too, so I'll look into that one as well.

[RafiPZ]

Yeah, i'll admit I probably won't be using most of the features my board has. Plus you'll still have overclocking capability whether you need it or not with what you have picked out. The 2500k is unlocked and p67 allows OCing. (as opposed to 2500 and h67)
Good luck with your build.

[Marquis]

You know, Intel is a fucking piece of dumb monopoly capitalist dingbats that produce overpriced processors that are fucking slow as hell (I have personally tested the i7 2600K on Asus P8P67 LE, sucks balls and is overheating on stock cooling, changing the cooler didn't even help, processor was on 65°C or 150°F), so i am here to recommend something that is based on an AMD platform.

Motherboard - ASRock 870 Extreme 3
Processor - AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3300 MHz
Cooler - Arctic Cooling Alpine 7 Pro Rev. 2
Graphics - Asus ENGTX550Ti 1024 MB GDDR5 DirectCU
RAM Memory - Corsair XMS3 2x4 GB DDR3 1333 MHz
PSU - BeQuiet Pure Power 530W

I've bought all of that shit myself and have because i am a fucking normal person that has a job as a Zeitungsträger that does 250 euros per month and spares 25% of it for the next month.

Fuck Intel and Microsoft, AMD + Ubuntu for the win.



About your PC-Aufrüstung:

Intel Core i5 2500k - Fail copy of i7 2600K with lower speed. Does practically nothing good and everything it brings to your PC is a sticker with "Intel Inside - Core i5" inscription and fucking big temperature.

EVGA GeForce GTX570 - A decent and fast GPU paired with an idiotic and shitty CPU. Btw, EVGA is OK. But i'll be glad if you will pick something from MSI next time.

PSU: Pick the Silverstone, my friend uses the same one and he is as happy as a mo-fuckin crack addict on...guess what.

MOBO: Asus P8P67 is an OK motherboard, but Gigabyte is better. I was using their motherboard once, very stable and good.

G-Skill Ripjaws: Huge heatsinks, big speed and big price. My corsairs have costed only 45 euros compared to this. I can't see a difference between 1333 and 1600 MHz.

Western Digital 320 GB: Hooah, 320 Gigabytes. I am doing well on my 250 GB.

Corsair 400: Woohoo, a case with some fans, but CoolerMaster Sileo 500 is a better case.


I hope that my piece of wasted time has helped you very much in choosing between the components for your PC.


impact removed to make this otherwise slightly useful post less fugly to read /jrgp

[Chariot]

If you want to save a little money on your processor/mobo, running an AMD system with a phenom card won't take you down too much. I run an 1100T ($175 right now on newegg) with no issues in BF3.

From: October 07, 2011, 11:46:45 amIf you want to save a little money on your processor/mobo, running an AMD system with a phenom card won't take you down too much. I run an 1100T ($175 right now on newegg) with no issues in BF3.

[RafiPZ]

Hmmm, gotta disagree. The biggest difference between the 2500k and the 2600k is hyperthreading and cache size. Hyperthreading doesn't really help a whole lot in most games and the 2500k is actually a bit faster in some.
Also my 2500k idles at 32c on stock cooling.
The 1100t can clock itself to 3.7ghz like the 2500k but only by utilizing 3 of its 6 total cores while the i5 can go to 3.7 on all 4.

It's fine if you want to save ~$30.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20
(The 1100t shows up on the last few charts)

[pavliko]

Why such a shitty cpu?
Get i7 Extreme :3

[L[0ne]R]

Well, from what I see - it's a great CPU, it got really good reviews from many people and performs very well in games. Sure there probably are some better ones out there, but Intel i5 2500k isn't too far behind and it's almost $100 cheaper. So I'm gonna stick with that, at least for now.

If you want to save a little money on your processor/mobo, running an AMD system with a phenom card won't take you down too much. I run an 1100T ($175 right now on newegg) with no issues in BF3.

Well, I prefer sticking with the brands I trust, which are Intel and NVidia. AMD has proven to have crappy software and poor driver support, and Intel has proven to have very stable CPUs, and stability is not something I want to sacrifice.

EVGA GeForce GTX570 - A decent and fast GPU paired with an idiotic and shitty CPU. Btw, EVGA is OK. But i'll be glad if you will pick something from MSI next time.

The MSI one actually seems to have faily custom-made coolers, so a lot of people complain about it overheating. The EVGA seems pretty decent, keeps the temp. low enough and is the cheapest one of them all.

PSU: Pick the Silverstone, my friend uses the same one and he is as happy as a mo-fuckin crack addict on...guess what.

Yeah, the instability of the Neo Eco bothers me, so Silverstone is probably my only option in this case. :S

MOBO: Asus P8P67 is an OK motherboard, but Gigabyte is better. I was using their motherboard once, very stable and good.

From what I was told, Gigabyte mobo is better for SLI cards, but since I don't plan to SLI anytime soon - that functionality would be a waste of money.

G-Skill Ripjaws: Huge heatsinks, big speed and big price. My corsairs have costed only 45 euros compared to this. I can't see a difference between 1333 and 1600 MHz.

Big price?? I'd say it's an awesome price for such good RAM :O I've looked through Kingston and Corsair ones on newegg, and they all were more expensive than this one. And yeah, I dont think there's much difference between 1333 and 1600, but hey, the 1600 are only 8 bucks more expensive, so why not.
CORSAIR Vengeance <-- is the only alternative I found for the same price, but people complain about heatsinks being large and flimsy, while for G.Skill everything's solid and most people don't have any issues with it at all. Blue color would match the mobo better though <_<

upd: Also, you say yours is 45 EUROS - that's like $60 USD. The RAM I'm getting is $10 cheaper. :/

Western Digital 320 GB: Hooah, 320 Gigabytes. I am doing well on my 250 GB.

I was actually looking for a good 250gb hdd, but I haven't found one with good enough reviews. That 320gb seems to be nice and stable, so I'll probably go with that.

Corsair 400: Woohoo, a case with some fans, but CoolerMaster Sileo 500 is a better case.

Sileo 500 is using a design with PSU in the top-back, but designs with PSU at the bottom-back are proving to have better airflow, which is what Corsair 400R has. Overall it does look well-designed in terms of airflow and got very good reviews.

I hope that my piece of wasted time has helped you very much in choosing between the components for your PC.

It kind of did, thanks.

[Clawbug]

AMD cpus are just as stable as Intel ones, there's absolutely *no* difference between manufacturers on this regard. Otherwise e.g. Cray wouldn't be using yet unreleased CPU's from AMD(Bulldozer microarchitecture) in their supercomputers.

Driver issues between AMD and Nvidia are more or less personal opinions, both have problems at times, neither of them is superior to each other. I myself dislike Nvidia for their shady business tactics and strategies which limit competition and technology to progress. Consumer loses while Nvidia wins, which is not good. AMD sucks for their Linux drivers and Intel sucks for their graphics capabilities, which are laughable(not only performance wise, but driver and API support wise too) at best.

[jrgp]

Intel sucks for their graphics capabilities, which are laughable(not only performance wise, but driver and API support wise too) at best.

I'm liking your posts in this thread, but can you please elaborate a little? Are you referring to Intel's very ubiquitous onboard graphics and saying they have lame performance and drivers, or something else? (forgive my ignorance; I do my best to avoid having to deal with hardware)

Fuck Intel and Microsoft, AMD + Ubuntu for the win.

I'm not going to deny that this brightened my day a little. I'm certainly for the Linux > Wintel (term popular in the 90s for referring to generic Windows + Intel boxes which were everywhere) argument when it comes to non-gaming purposes.

[Clawbug]

Intel sucks for their graphics capabilities, which are laughable(not only performance wise, but driver and API support wise too) at best.

I'm liking your posts in this thread, but can you please elaborate a little? Are you referring to Intel's very ubiquitous onboard graphics and saying they have lame performance and drivers, or something else? (forgive my ignorance; I do my best to avoid having to deal with hardware)

My posts are always good!

Intel's OpenGL support is from none to poor in Windows platforms and pretty much non-existent in Linux/Unix platforms. There's no stable OpenCL implementation from their part. This is "understandable" though(as in they have a clear reason), and probably a strategic decision even. Intel focuses on CPUs and doesn't want GPUs to become applicable in mainstream software, because it would hurt their business. As such, consumer loses(delaying the switch towards heterogenous computing which utilizes both CPU and GPU for general purpose parallel tasks) while Intel wins. What makes this worse, is that Intel is a key member of Khronos Group, which is behind OpenCL(and also known for OpenGL and OpenAL).

While I am at this, are you aware of the Intel's C/C++ compiler being shady towards non-Intel CPUs via it's CPU dispatcher? It has quite big impact on software in circulation(especially games and benchmarking software).

[L[0ne]R]

Just found something amusing. I think Marquis would've liked it ;O
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186211

[jrgp]

While I am at this, are you aware of the Intel's C/C++ compiler being shady towards non-Intel CPUs via it's CPU dispatcher? It has quite big impact on software in circulation(especially games and benchmarking software).

I think I remember reading that their cpus might have undocumented instruction sets (or something similar) that only ICC is aware of.  But is that really important if msvcc and gcc (and its derivitives) are king?

And yes, I'm happy to see you're back..at least partially. I love it when techie people (as in those well rounded with hardware, unix, and windows) are active in computer discussions here. It's a shame that mar77a, toumaz, yourself, elephanthunter, flab, and others have been largely absent in recent years and all we have are single-minded people like virtualtt who only care about microsoft.

[Clawbug]

While I am at this, are you aware of the Intel's C/C++ compiler being shady towards non-Intel CPUs via it's CPU dispatcher? It has quite big impact on software in circulation(especially games and benchmarking software).

I think I remember reading that their cpus might have undocumented instruction sets (or something similar) that only ICC is aware of.  But is that really important if msvcc and gcc (and its derivitives) are king?

And yes, I'm happy to see you're back..at least partially. I love it when techie people (as in those well rounded with hardware, unix, and windows) are active in computer discussions here. It's a shame that mar77a, toumaz, yourself, elephanthunter, flab, and others have been largely absent in recent years and all we have are single-minded people like virtualtt who only care about microsoft.

As far as I know, there are no such (undocumented)instructions because they wouldn't work on AMD platform and as such they would be against the whole x86 instruction set. There are, however, instruction set extensions(such as MMX, SSE, AVX) which might be what you mean. E.g. Intel's current Sandy Bridge CPUs support AVX instruction set(focusing on vectorizing floating-point code, integer equivalent coming later) which aren't(yet) supported by any AMD hardware, and as such recent Intel CPUs gain efficiency and performance when running such code, compared to a CPU which can't run such code(earlier Intel's CPUs, current AMD CPUs). However, this is far from the actual problem with ICC, and this applies to all compilers anyway and is an old "nuisance" within the x86 instruction set.

Briefly speaking, the actual problem with ICC however is that it includes/embeds a dynamic CPU dispatcher in the binaries it creates. This means that if you have two machines, one with Intel CPU and one with non-Intel CPU, the binary automagically selects the appropriate "optimal" codepath for the architectire of that machine. This sounds good, indeed. The problem is that ICC is by no means fair with this. For any non-Intel CPU the compiler generates very generic code, even though the target CPU would support exactly the same feature-set as the Intel CPU does. Say you write a program which could use MMX and SSE instruction set extensions. On Intel-architecture the code would take advantage of MMX and SSE instructions to increase performance, but on non-Intel ones it (usually) would not use such instructions regardless of the CPU. The only thing the CPU dispatcher does is to check the CPUID string of the target CPU ("GenuineIntel", "AuthenticAMD", "CentaurHauls") and then choose the right code-path. It has been verified that by manipulating the CPUID string of a CPU(Via Nano allows this, also possible via virtualization) the actual performance changes. To my knowledge there hasn't been a single occasion where Intel codepath would have been slower than non-Intel one, but infact when non-Intel CPU executes an Intel codepath, there are gains in performance. This suggests that Intel in their ICC compiler intentionally cripples performance on non-Intel targets.

Intel, however denies any kind of performance crippling(for obvious reasons) and defends the behavior by claiming that it can not test non-Intel CPUs for errata issues and as such it can't rely/trust them to be 100 % compatible with all the optimizations(mainly the instruction set extensions, which *are* supposed to be compatible as verified by CPU manufacturers themselves, if they weren't the CPU with errata would run into issues all the time on code using that extension, not just with code generated by ICC. Also AMD would have been willing to co-operate with Intel to fix this, but Intel refused to do so.).

The *true* problem with this however is that ICC is known to be a very well optimizing C++ compiler, beating GCC and MSVC for example. As such it is often used for high performance targets such as math libraries. For example Intel's Math Kernel Library which is used for scientific uses by e.g. MATLAB. Funnily enough AMD's own AMD Core Math Library is compiled with ICC too, namely for performance reasons. Because ICC embeds the CPU dispatcher this dispatcher is used by libraries too. As such every program which relies on libraries compiled with ICC also includes the CPU dispatcher in a way or another. If you use Intel's MKL your software runs poorly on non-Intel targets. It doesn't change with AMD's CML either! For example benchmarking software PCMark 2005 uses Intel's CPU dispatcher in some of it's tests. See this:

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/reviews/2008/07/atom-nano-review.ars/6
and the quote:

My my. Swap CentaurHauls for AuthenticAMD, and Nano's performance magically jumps about 10 percent. Swap for GenuineIntel, and memory performance goes up no less than 47.4 percent.

In the test which uses ICC's dispatcher the Via CPU doesn't seem to fare well against Intel one, until they both start using the same codepath. That's where Via's Nano outperforms Intel's Atom, even though it would seem otherwise because Intel's CPU dispatcher cripples the performance.

FTC ruled Intel to "fix" their issue with ICC some two years ago, but to this date there hasn't been much change in the way it's CPU dispatcher works, according to Agner Fog who has done extensive research on the subject: http://agner.org/optimize/blog/

Knowing this(and their shady business practices from 2003-2006 when AMD's Athlon64 dominated intel's Pentium 4), I'm openly boycotting Intel hardware whenever I can, and outright despise anyone using ICC regardless of reasons behind it. Shit like this hurts the competition, slows down technological progress and as such hurts the consumer in various ways.

[L[0ne]R]

I have to agree, all those details about Intel's business tactics are rather disturbing. But from what I'm seeing so far, their i5 2500k seems to be one of the best choices at the moment, so in this case Intel's past doesn't bother me as much. Also from what I remember, NVidia and Intel are sort of partners, so I imagine the compatibility between NVidia cards and Intel CPUs would be a bit better.

Anyway, this is the new mobo I'm going with: ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3
And this is the PSU: PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II PPCMK2S650 650W Found a much better deal nvm


One thing I'm still a bit undecided on, is if I should go with NVidia GTX 570 or 580.
On one hand, 580 has a noticeable increase in performance compared to 570, so it might last me a bit longer. (linky 1; linky 2) On the other hand - while the numbers show better performance - i heard that in reality it's only noticeable in certain cases. From what I've read on other sites - better performance is only noticeable if you have a large monitor or a multi-monitor setup.
Is this true? Would a 580 still be worth getting even if I don't have a large display or a multi-monitor setup? And what about a setup with 1920x1200 monitor for games + a 1290x1024 for IRC, IM windows, Steam, Winamp and other non-3D crap?

[Clawbug]

Briefly saod, Intel and Nvidia pretty much hate each other. Their views and visions of computing today and tomorrow differ very much. Nvidia is a GPU focused company(they coined the term GPU, btw) and GPUs are highly parallel, as such very fast in embarrassingly parallel problems. This means that Nvidia advocates parallelism to accelerate common applications and the use of GPUs in general purpose computing. Because GPUs are so much faster than usual x86 CPUs in parallel tasks, Intel isn't happy about this, because their main business is traditional not-so-parallel CPUs which aren't fast in those embarrassingly parallel problems. The two clash with their visions and hence why the rivalty between the two.

There's some humour made of Intel (and others): http://www.intelsinsides.com/page/home.html

AMD is releasing their new next-gen architecture, Bulldozer based CPUs tomorrow, so it might be wise to wait for a week or two, just in case they happen to spawn some competition and make Intel drop their prices. I myself don't believe Bulldozer based CPUs to actually compete with Intel's current offerings(we'll see tomorrow, I'll write some words here about my thoughts), but they can very well force Intel to drop their prices due to aggressive marketing and pricing tactics by AMD.

It is true that resolution you use to game on significantly affects the performance(this is obvious, more pixels to process). As such, it depends on the resolution you are using(and multi-monitor setups obviously have huge resolutions). It also depends on the game you play and the settings you play it on, and a bunch of other things which are out of the scope of this thread.