PC Hardware and building thread

[DELTAprime]

So teraflops are not a great metric for graphics performance, but I am encouraged by AMD Vega being a 13 TFLOP card at the top end and Nvidia's Volta accelerator card the V100 being 15 SP TFLOP part which will get cut down to lower performing consumer part. We might just have a bit of competition in the GPU market to bring down prices. I never want to have to pay $1299 for a GPU again.

[DELTAprime]

So now that AMD is back with avengeance and hopefully taking some market share from Intel, Intel have revealed some actual good (but expensive) CPU's. The biggest of which is a 18 core, 36 thread, $2000 USD monster Core i9 that will turbo boost up to 4.5ghz.

This just goes to prove that Intel will coast along not improving their products until there is some competition.

http://www.techspot.com/news/69504-i...ding-2000.html

[DELTAprime]

Anyone ever tried to do an RMA through Kogan or their new Dick Smith site? I'm thinking of buying a 7700k from them since it's about $20 cheaper than anywhere else, but since they are grey market imports I want to make sure Kogan / Dick Smith will help me if the CPU is a dud and the reviews on product feedback don't encourage me.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Personally I'd rather spend the extra $20 for peace of mind, especially if it means buying from my local store down the road who can instantly help me with any issues.

[DELTAprime]

Personally I'd rather spend the extra $20 for peace of mind, especially if it means buying from my local store down the road who can instantly help me with any issues.

If I bought from the local store I bet I'd pay something like $1000 or more for a $450 to $480 CPU. The local guy is a ripoff merchant. I needed a specific motherboard model a few years back to rebuild an Intel raid that the backup had failed on and I didn't know till it was too late and the motherboard failed also. This was in the days of bad leaking capacitors coming out of China and what started the trend of solid state Japanese caps. The exact model motherboard cost about $300, it was just a stand consumer grade Intel motherboard. He wanted over $1000 for that exact board. Needless to say I bought online.

[prjkt]

I think the time is approaching that I should be replacing my old 2008 model Mac Pro.

It's lasted a long time, handles almost anything I throw at it, including games, but it's showing it's age (due to it's early EFI support, SSD support in Windows is basically non-existant)

As I've been slowly moving away from OS X and Mac only programs I've come to the realisation that I don't actually need a Mac any more, so it's time to build my first PC in probably a decade. I still may want the option of running OS X, so for compatibility reasons Intel is the way to go here.

This machine will be a dual purpose system - for gaming and photo editing - on the Mac I'd use Windows for gaming, and OS X for photos (and music in the past) but with Apple killing off the program I was using and forcing me to migrate across to the cross platform Lightroom, I no longer need to worry about that.

I've been researching a fair bit, and I've decided on the following specs to aim for:
I've had a look at the different options from Intel, X270/X299 etc, and based on my budget and needs,
Intel i7 7700K (four cores/8 threads will be a close match to my current dual quad system, and I've barely ever maxed them out)
MSI X270 Gaming M7 - has enough I/O for most of what I want to do, with the option of Intel's Optane if it's worth it.
Corsair 2x 8Gb DDR 4 3ghz Ram - enough headroom to have a play if I need to, with the option of doubling the Ram later if I feel the need
Corsair 280mm AiO watercooler for the CPU.
Corsair Carbide 600Q case - Inverse ATX matches my Mac's board orientation (access from the right, not the left) so I won't need to swap my desk around, enough room for decent airflow and the water cooler, and it's nice and quiet (not looking to show off the contents)

Keeping my current GTX 960 card as it's decent enough for now, and I can always upgrade later when I can afford to.

Storage wise, thinking of getting 2, maybe 3 M.2 SSDs (hence the mobo choice) - 1Gb SSD solely for games, a 256, maybe 512gb one for the Windows install, and either a small one for OS X/Intel's Optane option. Might use a SATA drive for OS X if I go down that path.
I'll still have one or two HDDs installed, one 4tb unit for my photo storage pulled straight from the Mac and possible one of the 1tb drives for backup purposes. Tempted to get a small SSD (~128gb for "scratch" purposes - use it for any current photo projects for quick I/O, then "archive" them once a month, or whenever it fills up to the 4tb HDD)

I will miss the cable management from the Mac Pro I think, but I can deal. Any thoughts/suggestions at all?

[DELTAprime]

Ok. So I suggest you look up in Google your photo editing software's Ryzen benchmarks. ie: Photoshop Ryzen Benchmark. A Ryzen 1700 is cheaper than a 7700k, it can be overclocked normally to around 3.9ghz to 4ghz depending on the silicon lottery and includes a fairly good air cooler so you might not need to buy an AIO. No need to pay for a Ryzen 1700X or Ryzen 1800X as they all overclock very similarly. A Ryzen B350 motherboard which is all you need for Ryzen is cheaper than a Ryzen X370 motherboard which again is cheaper than a Intel Z270 motherboard. So if your workload looks good in Ryzen benchmarks I really suggest getting Ryzen not Intel for the cost savings and potential similar to better performance depending on use case.

The only reason I recommend Intel these days is if your goals fall into very specific categories, for instance I want the absolute maximum FPS I can get so I went with a 7700k. If you can sacrifice a few frames, like 5 to 10 frames but still keeping the total framerate above 60fps then I don't think the 7700k is the best choice because of price of the CPU, motherboard and cooling plus the fact the 7700k is super hot.

After you have done the research as to i7 vs Ryzen for your use case goto https://au.pcpartpicker.com/ and make a build and post the link in this thread so I can give you better advise.

As for what you posted so far, M.2 drives are great in theory, but in reality you don't get a huge increase in access speeds over SATA because 99% of what users do is at low queue depths and you only get the benefit of M.2 NVMe SSDs at high queue depths so I really suggest a single M.2 SSD for your Windows install at most and the rest of your drives as cheaper SATA SSDs. Also Optane slows down SSD's so forget about it until the Optane PCIe SSD comes out next year (that will require an Intel system not Ryzen), but that drive will be something like $1000 for 256gb so very bad bang for the buck. Also if you do get that MSI Z270 motherboard or any other motherboard with a "heat shield" for the SSD remove the heat shield because it actually increases to temperature of the SSD and can lead to thermal throttling.

[prjkt]

Thanks for the advice. I have looked into the Ryzen series, the only thing holding me back is poor compatibility if I want to run OS X on the system, something I'm still not 100% sure about, but if I ever want to be able to access my old music projects will be a must. So far hackintoshes using Ryzen aren't the most stable, using modified kernels (as Appl have written for the Intel architecture.) Still open to the idea though, as I've still got an old MacBook Air I can boot up if needed...

What are the noticeable differences between the B350/X350 platforms?

Thanks for the info on Optane, it wasn't part of my initial look, just "would be cool if it works" type of thing, but considering I'm upgrading from 7.2k rpm HDDs any SSD will be a huge performance boost, I just like the M.2 option as there's no cabling to worry about, but I can deal with it if SATA is the way to go

[DELTAprime]

Thanks for the advice. I have looked into the Ryzen series, the only thing holding me back is poor compatibility if I want to run OS X on the system, something I'm still not 100% sure about, but if I ever want to be able to access my old music projects will be a must. So far hackintoshes using Ryzen aren't the most stable, using modified kernels (as Appl have written for the Intel architecture.) Still open to the idea though, as I've still got an old MacBook Air I can boot up if needed...

What are the noticeable differences between the B350/X350 platforms?

Thanks for the info on Optane, it wasn't part of my initial look, just "would be cool if it works" type of thing, but considering I'm upgrading from 7.2k rpm HDDs any SSD will be a huge performance boost, I just like the M.2 option as there's no cabling to worry about, but I can deal with it if SATA is the way to go

Yeah I don't know anything about hackintoshes and we probably shouldn't discuss them here so as not to get Griff in trouble with Apple's attack lawyers. So Ryzen's B350 and X370 boards are very similar in features except B350 can't do SLI and Crossfire. The current state of SLI and Crossfire is that most game devs don't care about users with more than one GPU in a system.

Right now is actually a really bad time to buy SSDs or RAM. The chips inside them come off the exact same production lines and there are not enough lines to keep up with global demand for SSDs and RAM, plus a factory that makes them got flooded with Nitrogen gas the other day shutting it down for who knows how long. You will pay a premium for any SSD's and RAM.

The best performing SSDs are made by Samsung, the 850 EVO is the best one to get in SATA format and 960 EVO in M.2, don't buy a 850 PRO or 960 PRO as you are paying extra for the extended guaranteed life of the drive and getting slightly lower performance. Intel also make great SSDs but they cost more per GB normally, there are some models of Intel SSD that review very badly but they are fine for day to day use, just not a review torture test. Overall Samsung and Intel have an extremely low failure rate compared to the smaller SSD brands like Corsair, Patriot, Kingston, etc.

Also really good idea to not buy a graphics card now. There is a global shortage of them because Bitcoin miners are buying dozens of them at a time right now so unless you are buying a GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti you can't get one for a good price. (1080 and 1080 Ti don't work well for mining)

Just to follow up on Optane. The modules on the market right now are made to only accelerate the HDD that your OS is installed on. If you OS is installed on a SSD instead of a HDD you will find things go slower because the Optane that is out right now is slower than a good SSD.

Goto PC Part Picker, make a i7 build and then make a Ryzen build and post the permalink for each, they don't have to be complete. That's the best way to scope out your build and then I can really find any issues with the build.

EDIT: Here's my systems permalink https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/BYLfBP

[prjkt]

Thanks again for the advice.

Here's my Intel build

and here's the AMD build

If I go the AMD build I'd definitely have to forego using OS X, as the nV card isn't supported until drivers are installed, meaning I'd have to use a second GPU (as I currently do on my Mac Pro) to boot, install drivers, reboot each time I run a version updated. Don't really want to do that. The integrated GPU in the Intel build would be able to handle that, but as you can see, the price is quite different...

EDIT:hmmm, after checking this review for Lightroom performance, looks like saving for the 7700K might still be the way to go.