Is the ASRock Z77 Extreme6 any good, and the brand in general? It seems quite popular.
Choosing a motherboard is probably the hardest part of this whole damn process. There are too many models and I have no idea what's good right now and what's not.
Here are the other parts I'm looking at for my new machine (let me know if there's anything I should change or consider):
ASUS GTX 680 DC2T
Corsair Vengeance 8GB
Fractal Design R4 Case
Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Processor
Corsair HX 750 PSU
ASUS Xonar DGX Sound Card
Samsung 830 Series SSD 128GB
Isn't there still about zero reason to buy a 680 over a 670 still?
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
I'd personally go with 4gig 670 over 680 but even at 1080p there are potential gains for the higher card, especially if you aren't interested in overclocking
Somewhat off topic, anyone who got a AMD 7800, did you get your copy of Far Cry 3 yet? I'm still waiting.
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RhalloTonnyOf the BrownlandsRegistered Userregular
@Djeet - How interesting! I'll be looking into AMD in the next few days to see how it stacks up. Thanks for mentioning that, as I was prepared to write them off almost entirely.
@Foomy and @Day of the Bear - I'm looking at 4 VMs being on 24/7, with each VM having a few specific tasks- I'll have to look into specific benchmarks for VMs under vSphere, but that definitely puts enough doubt in my mind to not immediately pick up the build I posted.
Minecraft and Plex will be the heavy hitters (Minecraft being barely multithreaded, and that's with the help of some mods last time I checked). Plex will use as many cores as it can when transcoding, and the remaining 2 VMs will be very low cost on the processor side of things (development/apache testing).
My general budget for this thing is $1500-$1600, so I'm not too keen on jumping into a multi-processor price point, but I can definitely see the advantage in adding another one much later for cheaper.
I suppose it all boils down to if it's appropriate to go with AMD (and throw more cores at Plex) if only those 4 VMs will be on consistently?
!
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proyebatGARY WAS HEREASH IS A LOSERRegistered Userregular
I'd personally go with 4gig 670 over 680 but even at 1080p there are potential gains for the higher card, especially if you aren't interested in overclocking
I've got a 2GB 670 in my i7 3770k machine at 1080p and there's absolutely nothing I can throw at it that it won't play flawlessly at ultra settings. I just don't understand paying the premium at this point.
I think its hard to justify the premium if youre gaming at 1080p with a single monitor, but if youre at 1200p+ and running multiple monitors the extra GPU power can be justified. Personally I run at 1200p with a second 1680x1050 monitor to fuck around on and its going to take a lot of convincing to get me to buy a card with only 2GBs of VRAM.
2gig is solid for right now in the 1080/1200 range without a second display, but i feel like if you're paying for a high end GPU you should have an eye on using it for a little while and i don't see 2gigs really doing a whole lot in a year or two, depending on what you run and how you run it.
granted you can do a lot to free up more vram but i'm a fan of being able to have my desktop running normally and then just fire up a game rather than needing to toggle stuff off or disable my other display.
Yeah, I could live with my current 1.25GBs on my GTX 570 if I tell Windows to ignore my second monitor (although that doesnt really help all that much in games like Skyrim where Im running a bunch of mods and Arkham Asylum where PhysX actually uses resources), but I have 2 monitors and Id like to use them.
Id also like to upgrade my second monitor to 1200p. Or get 2 of whatever is right above 1200p (2560x1440?).
I'm tempted to wait a few months on building a new machine now, what with all these GTX 7xx/AMD HD 8xxx rumors flying around. I hope we'll hear some concrete information soon.
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
Considering that the gk110 teslas and quadros haven't been available for all that long at all i'd be very surprised if nvidia is actually close to releasing a new line.
what i'm saying is if you wanted to do a build it's probably not worth the wait, there's a lot of life left in this generation.
So the link in the OP is a little outdated, so I'm looking for opinions on the best AMD graphics card for around $200USD (+- $50). I'm running an AMD A10-5800K for my processor, so I'm looking for something that will play nicely with it to give me the best possible performance for my dollar.
Similar to above, Far Cry 3 has taken my 560ti to task and has me thinking that it might be a good time to do a video card upgrade (accompanied with some weird stuttering during diagonal camera movement that is now taking place in Skyrim... wasn't there when I played the game at launch but I started up again a couple days ago to play Dawnguard and get ready for Dragonborn and I guess somewhere along the lines one of the patches introduced this issue). I'm running a 2500k with a mild (4.2) overclock and 8GB of memory, so I'm pretty substantially more GPU limited than CPU limited right now, I believe. Any input on a solid upgrade? I'm thinking in the $300-350 range, and I've used Nvidia cards for the past few years, but I've been hearing excellent things about the 7970s and the new driver support, so I'm kind of drawing a blank here.
If I get a new graphics card I was also thinking it might be an ideal time to get a new (quieter) case; the Corsair 550D looks pretty solid and it's on sale a few places right now - anyone have any input or thoughts there?
Finally, again if I do the above, I was thinking of maybe getting a better aftermarket cooler so I could do more than my 4.2 overclock reliably. I have a Corsair H60 closed loop cooler right now, which works well but with the ambient temperature in the room the computer is in I don't think I can reliably get it past 4.2 in terms of CPU temps. Any suggestions regarding nice but quiet coolers (sound is a personal pet peeve of mine) would be much appreciated!
It's read/write/seek times are certainly slower than my desktop, for a couple of reasons. One it's only SATA 2, two I use Caviar Red drives.
That said, speed is rarely the point with a NAS, long term capacity is. A NAS needs to be fast enough to stream music and videos, for the most part. I think you'd be hard pressed to build a decent, easy to manage, NAS enclosure for the 200 bucks that our enclosures cost us.
I just got the DS713+ and it is pretty awesome. I kinda wanted a 4bay but I can alway buy an expansion for this one later if I need to. The read and write speeds are pretty amazing on this thing. I would have saved quite a bit of money if I had gone with a freenas build. While I usually like building everything myself in this case I didn't want to fool with it.
At $350 you can snag a 670 2gb, which will crush most everything out there at 1080/1200p. For a bit more (or if a good sale happens) you can get a 7970 3gb which is the fastest single gpu option with the current drivers.
corsair makes some great cases but I sadly don't have any more specific input on that case in particular.
Either the h60's big brother the h80 or h100 if case allows, or a big double tower style air cooler such as the noctua d14 would be your best bet for high end cooling.
I've personally used a d14 to run a 2500k at 4.5 in a cramped sli packed mATX case before with no issues. It also stood up to keeping a 3930k at 4.5 cool enough without much noise.
At $350 you can snag a 670 2gb, which will crush most everything out there at 1080/1200p. For a bit more (or if a good sale happens) you can get a 7970 3gb which is the fastest single gpu option with the current drivers.
corsair makes some great cases but I sadly don't have any more specific input on that case in particular.
Either the h60's big brother the h80 or h100 if case allows, or a big double tower style air cooler such as the noctua d14 would be your best bet for high end cooling.
I've personally used a d14 to run a 2500k at 4.5 in a cramped sli packed mATX case before with no issues. It also stood up to keeping a 3930k at 4.5 cool enough without much noise.
Awesome, thanks for the input. I'll look into the 670 and 7970 and see what kind of prices are available out there.
I'm not especially married to the 550D either, but I'll do some more reading there too. Mainly just looking for a more quiet case and the Fractal Design R4 and 550D were the first ones that popped up when I started looking into it.
So the link in the OP is a little outdated, so I'm looking for opinions on the best AMD graphics card for around $200USD (+- $50). I'm running an AMD A10-5800K for my processor, so I'm looking for something that will play nicely with it to give me the best possible performance for my dollar.
A good sale/rebate and you could potentially get a 7870 for two hundred, although they normally run 30-50 more than that. Otherwise a 7850 would be the best bet. The 2gig ones come in at or a little under two hundred.
Note to people using Asus MB's with Fan Control 2... If you update the ASUS software suite it resets things back to not using Fan Control 2. I walked by my computer this morning and was wondering why the fans were loud given the machine should be idle... Luckily it only takes a couple minutes to run through the wizard again and get it working again.
At $350 you can snag a 670 2gb, which will crush most everything out there at 1080/1200p. For a bit more (or if a good sale happens) you can get a 7970 3gb which is the fastest single gpu option with the current drivers.
corsair makes some great cases but I sadly don't have any more specific input on that case in particular.
Either the h60's big brother the h80 or h100 if case allows, or a big double tower style air cooler such as the noctua d14 would be your best bet for high end cooling.
I've personally used a d14 to run a 2500k at 4.5 in a cramped sli packed mATX case before with no issues. It also stood up to keeping a 3930k at 4.5 cool enough without much noise.
Awesome, thanks for the input. I'll look into the 670 and 7970 and see what kind of prices are available out there.
I'm not especially married to the 550D either, but I'll do some more reading there too. Mainly just looking for a more quiet case and the Fractal Design R4 and 550D were the first ones that popped up when I started looking into it.
I love my 550D, dead silent even with an overclocked 3570K and an HD7870. Only notable sound from it is my mechanical hard drive that stores movies/music. The case is also very easy to build in and in my opinion looks great inside and out. As you can see even my lazy cable management does wonders for airflow, temperatures all remain low
I like my antec, it's just an old design, been using this case since '05 and haven't had any real problems with it. Just technology has moved on to produce much better cases.
boot into your bios, if there is an option to enable XMP(extreme memory profile) do so and it should automatically set your timings assuming your IMC/northbridge can handle it. which it should be able to those aren't very aggressive timings/clocks.
If you do not have an option for xmp then you'll have to set them manually by hand. I have no experience with bios on a gigabyte board of that gen but there should be options for memory somewhere in there that you can futz with.
e: you are using all new ram correct? If you're mixing kits of different speeds things will be tricky at best
doubleedit if the bios is laid out anything like their old p67 non uefi bios there should be an option called something like intelligent tweaker. under that should be your OC options including memory frequency and timings. I have some screengrabs of my p67 bios i can post but it won't be one to one since the lynnfields had a pretty different OC setup from sandybridge
all new ram, yes, 2 matching sticks and took out the old sticks
i booted into the bios and found the XMP settings, and set that to profile 2, which put the speed at 1870mhz (which is above 1866 but that doesn't matter right?)
and successfully booted and things seem to be working fine
Posts
Isn't there still about zero reason to buy a 680 over a 670 still?
I'd personally go with 4gig 670 over 680 but even at 1080p there are potential gains for the higher card, especially if you aren't interested in overclocking
@Foomy and @Day of the Bear - I'm looking at 4 VMs being on 24/7, with each VM having a few specific tasks- I'll have to look into specific benchmarks for VMs under vSphere, but that definitely puts enough doubt in my mind to not immediately pick up the build I posted.
Minecraft and Plex will be the heavy hitters (Minecraft being barely multithreaded, and that's with the help of some mods last time I checked). Plex will use as many cores as it can when transcoding, and the remaining 2 VMs will be very low cost on the processor side of things (development/apache testing).
My general budget for this thing is $1500-$1600, so I'm not too keen on jumping into a multi-processor price point, but I can definitely see the advantage in adding another one much later for cheaper.
I suppose it all boils down to if it's appropriate to go with AMD (and throw more cores at Plex) if only those 4 VMs will be on consistently?
Bought a 7870 on Nov 16th, still have no unique id
Just throws an error that says not uninstalled when i try it.
Anyone got any idea?
screw it going with a clean windows install after all, i don't want clients having issues
I've got a 2GB 670 in my i7 3770k machine at 1080p and there's absolutely nothing I can throw at it that it won't play flawlessly at ultra settings. I just don't understand paying the premium at this point.
granted you can do a lot to free up more vram but i'm a fan of being able to have my desktop running normally and then just fire up a game rather than needing to toggle stuff off or disable my other display.
Id also like to upgrade my second monitor to 1200p. Or get 2 of whatever is right above 1200p (2560x1440?).
let me tell you about skyrim
3gigs is not enough vram
My computer would beg to differ.
Considering that the gk110 teslas and quadros haven't been available for all that long at all i'd be very surprised if nvidia is actually close to releasing a new line.
what i'm saying is if you wanted to do a build it's probably not worth the wait, there's a lot of life left in this generation.
both sli and cfx mirror the frame buffer across all cards.
If I get a new graphics card I was also thinking it might be an ideal time to get a new (quieter) case; the Corsair 550D looks pretty solid and it's on sale a few places right now - anyone have any input or thoughts there?
Finally, again if I do the above, I was thinking of maybe getting a better aftermarket cooler so I could do more than my 4.2 overclock reliably. I have a Corsair H60 closed loop cooler right now, which works well but with the ambient temperature in the room the computer is in I don't think I can reliably get it past 4.2 in terms of CPU temps. Any suggestions regarding nice but quiet coolers (sound is a personal pet peeve of mine) would be much appreciated!
I just got the DS713+ and it is pretty awesome. I kinda wanted a 4bay but I can alway buy an expansion for this one later if I need to. The read and write speeds are pretty amazing on this thing. I would have saved quite a bit of money if I had gone with a freenas build. While I usually like building everything myself in this case I didn't want to fool with it.
corsair makes some great cases but I sadly don't have any more specific input on that case in particular.
Either the h60's big brother the h80 or h100 if case allows, or a big double tower style air cooler such as the noctua d14 would be your best bet for high end cooling.
I've personally used a d14 to run a 2500k at 4.5 in a cramped sli packed mATX case before with no issues. It also stood up to keeping a 3930k at 4.5 cool enough without much noise.
Awesome, thanks for the input. I'll look into the 670 and 7970 and see what kind of prices are available out there.
I'm not especially married to the 550D either, but I'll do some more reading there too. Mainly just looking for a more quiet case and the Fractal Design R4 and 550D were the first ones that popped up when I started looking into it.
A good sale/rebate and you could potentially get a 7870 for two hundred, although they normally run 30-50 more than that. Otherwise a 7850 would be the best bet. The 2gig ones come in at or a little under two hundred.
Nintendo ID: Incindium
PSN: IncindiumX
I really need to upgrade my case to one of those, running with an antec p180 atm, and the lack of cable management and noise from the case bothers me.
or is there a case that is even more silent? that's the main thing that I want from a case now
I like my antec, it's just an old design, been using this case since '05 and haven't had any real problems with it. Just technology has moved on to produce much better cases.
Any luck for you today, still nothing here. Placed a support ticket, nothing from there yet either.
Solution? Sketchy as fuck bench rig
(it's only a temp solution
question
so i put in my new ram sticks, how do i make sure they are running at the proper speeds... are they now?
my motherboard is uh http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128417
and the processor is a lynnfield i5 750
and the ram is DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)
Timing 9-10-9-28
Cas Latency 9
Voltage 1.5V
and when i run CPU-Z it says the DRAM frequency is 666mhz which means 1333mhz
If you do not have an option for xmp then you'll have to set them manually by hand. I have no experience with bios on a gigabyte board of that gen but there should be options for memory somewhere in there that you can futz with.
e: you are using all new ram correct? If you're mixing kits of different speeds things will be tricky at best
doubleedit if the bios is laid out anything like their old p67 non uefi bios there should be an option called something like intelligent tweaker. under that should be your OC options including memory frequency and timings. I have some screengrabs of my p67 bios i can post but it won't be one to one since the lynnfields had a pretty different OC setup from sandybridge
i booted into the bios and found the XMP settings, and set that to profile 2, which put the speed at 1870mhz (which is above 1866 but that doesn't matter right?)
and successfully booted and things seem to be working fine