System Builder Marathon, June 2010: $2,000 Performance PC

[shovenose]

[citation][nom]killerclick[/nom]$2000 for a PC, are you crazy?? For $2000 I can buy like 4 iPads![/citation]
why would i want 4 ipads, let alone 1?


anyway, with the leftover money a corsair hx850,
and 2x WD caviar black 750GB mirrored...who needs 1tb anyway?...

 

[gfg]

[citation][nom]a4mula[/nom]Can't say I agree with much here. You pick up a budget case that's going to restrict airflow due to lack of wire management, and then drop 75 on a cooler. Megahalems are spectacular, I own one myself but you've defeated any gain by placing it in a subpar enclosure. Should have just went with a 902 and a CM 212+. Would have been cheaper and less restrictive.I still fail to see the love of 1366 in these builds where there is no intention of upgrading to hexacore. Save the $100 and do a p55 i7-860 build. You're going to get performance that rivals the 930 on every benchmark including those that take x8/x8 into consideration. You'll surpass the 930 in a few.700 for dual 470s when you can get dual 5850s for 560.PSU that is being heavily overtaxed. You're risking the entire 2k machine by running 100w over the psus rated value. The only thing keeping this machine running is the fact that Silverstone makes high quality parts and you have a single rail. Had this of been a multi-rail you would have been pulling out a gpu, scaling back your overclocks, or buying a new psu. At some point you have to wonder if this is a safety hazard.Sorry Thomas, just not feeling this build at all. I see about $400 of budget that could have easily have been trimmed and would have been within a few percentage points of the current build. This could have gone towards anything from your much wanted redundant storage to SSD drives.[/citation]
I agree with you in the psu, but for a high end pc: tripple channel, pci-e 2x (16x) and future upgrade to hexecore is the way to choose. Maybe for mid-range pc what you say is the right choice. Then you can compare the value of each, but not the potential in the future of both systems.
That's my opinion.

 

[Otus]

Nice performance build, though I can't say I agree with all the choices.

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]Nobody thought it would draw more than 750W peak load. If anyone involved with the project had known this, a larger unit would have been purchased.[/citation]
Even going by official TDP numbers, 750W is cutting it awfully close. 2x220W for the GPUs and 130W for the CPU, add some for the rest of the system and you are above 600W stock. GTX 4xx has been shown to sometimes exceed the TDP without overclocking.

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]Would you build a $1000 machine that can't run DVD's?[/citation]
Personally, I would

Games from Steam and movies form whatever online shop offering downloads. Windows installation is the only thing requiring an optical drive, but that can be played around or omitted in favor of other OSes. My current rig didn't have an optical drive for the last few months, but I put in an old CD drive to quickly reinstall XP.

 

[cknobman]

Sorry this build was fail before you even put it together.

While the performance of dual 470s is great the extreme cost and extreme heat are just too much for most experienced builders to want to deal with.

Should have gone with dual 5850's and been willing to live with the reduced performance for power and heat advantages.

Plus the tinker toy case you used is just a disgrace for a high performance build. You could have at least used a Panzer box or a cheaper model Lian Li.

 

[Otus]

Oh, and IMHO the build budget shouldn't include highly subjective choices like case, redundant storage or (probably) optical drives. Alternatively, a preset amount should be put aside for those. You don't include a display or peripherals either, after all.

 

[Trueno07]

[citation][nom]maydaynomore[/nom]save yourself $1,700 and buy a PS3 or a Xbox. Games are ported to the PC anyways (except for a few titles). Fifa Soccer looks horrible on a pc, or any other sports game (which is what I mostly play anymore). Spend the money on a vaccation, college fund for your kids. How about a 50" TV with an xbox and a blue-ray player. PC gaming is dying...as much as I hate it, its true. Used to be an avid PC gamer. Defended PC gaming against console fanboys. Not anymore. I've given in... We lost, they won. This was somewhat of a close fight. Next round the PC will get knocked out. I hate it as much as you do, but its inevitable. You want someone to blame? Blame Pirates. They killed PC gaming.[/citation]

Games or no games, pirates or no pirates, there is nothing like custom building your own PC.

 

[Snipergod87]

[citation][nom]kallamamran[/nom]Another thing that would be reeeeeally interesting to see what kind of performance one could squeeze out of some of the absolutely cheapest parts. How well does hardware from the smaller and/or virtually unknown brands perform? =)I mean... How many times have you not choosen the well known brand over the one with the strange or unknown name only because of just that - The name? I know I do... Thank you for some interesting reading... As allways =)[/citation]

I agree that would be a pretty cool article

 

[doron]

[citation][nom]maydaynomore[/nom]save yourself $1,700 and buy a PS3 or a Xbox. Games are ported to the PC anyways (except for a few titles). Fifa Soccer looks horrible on a pc, or any other sports game (which is what I mostly play anymore). Spend the money on a vaccation, college fund for your kids. How about a 50" TV with an xbox and a blue-ray player. PC gaming is dying...as much as I hate it, its true. Used to be an avid PC gamer. Defended PC gaming against console fanboys. Not anymore. I've given in... We lost, they won. This was somewhat of a close fight. Next round the PC will get knocked out. I hate it as much as you do, but its inevitable. You want someone to blame? Blame Pirates. They killed PC gaming.[/citation]

The aforementioned pc does much more and performs wayyy better than a ps3 platform. A pc which equals PS3 performance costs roughly 500$ and is way more versatile than a ps3 - Can be hooked to a tv, monitor, can surf the web, download / upload anything I want from any source, upgrade / change / repair very easily. And I'm not even talking about the overpriced ps3 games compared to pc.

 

[wildeast]

why are you guys whining about temperatures as long as its in the safe zone and wont affect performance, i mean its over clocked already and gives a really high performance, you are not going to sit over it and feel the "high?" temperature..
absolutely great choices, gj

 

[sandypants]

Great article! I really like it when things don't go as perfect as possible because I learn from it. Experimental builds is what makes me want to read, if you were to do another CF 5850 + whatever it would be safe, but not interesting. Props to taking the unpaved road.

Thanks!

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]maydaynomore[/nom]save yourself $1,700 and buy a PS3 or a Xbox.[/citation]

No Hearts of Iron on the consoles. Consoles = fail.

 

[Onus]

I first read most of the article, and the comments, around 5:15 AM this morning. I finally got to really go through all of it now though.
A4mula, I understand your comments, but they miss what I think is the point of the SBM articles, which is to test and learn things. If someone built this identical machine today, after reading the article, I'd join you in calling them a fool. Beforehand though, I don't think a lot of the downfalls could have been predicted.
I think this was a very interesting build. Among its lessons, SLI with Fermi is infeasible unless the build is planned from square one to include it, and then it becomes merely wasteful. Another is to not count on particular OC-ing results. We're told time and time again that each chip is different; well here's an example of one that didn't do so well. That's another reason though, to focus on stock performance in a value comparison, because only that is a sure thing.
As the article states, this machine was designed to win benchmarks. I think that is how its results should be judged. Personally, I think many of us are more likely to build for usability, I know I am; but that may not be a fair way to judge how this one turned out.
If I win it, the only things I think I'd do is yank one Fermi, put in a SSD, and make the OC a little more conservative. Now THAT machine would do very well on usability, and my non-twitch games would do quite well at 1920x1080 on one 470.

 

[Onus]

Exactly, Sandypants.

 

[wolfram23]

tl;dr the comments, so I'm just going to point out in Test Settings you show that you're going to run Crysis at very high settings with 8xAA but you ran all the benchmarks at 0xAA. Seriously, you're just skewing results. Nobody with a top end machine is going to run 0xAA ever. Let's at least see 4xAA!!

 

[JohnMD1022]

When you found the power draw was so high, why didn't you switch to a larger PSU? I'd say at least 1200 watts would be right.

I tell my customers that a good over-speced PSU is cheap insurance. I prefer a minimum of 50% greater capacity than maximum draw.

 

[ordcestus]

i thought the build was overall pretty good. I don't understand why you didn't add another spinpoint for a Raid 0 array and an extra dvd drive. that would have been easily within the budget and while the dvd drive would have done nothing for performance its an extra many people would like. The raid would have added some performance and for $60 it would have been worth it

 

[youssef 2010]

A very illuminating article.It seems the performance gap is getting narrower while the price gap is getting wider.BTW,the board you used is UD3 not UD7(typo in the test settings page).Also, Please remove AVG from your benchmark suite along with TMPGEnc as their results are unreliable,to say the least.Last but not least, your PSU is stable but,is it durable???!!!

 

[skora]

Finally, something that can play Crysis!!

Love the approach of entry level capable parts with left over room to customize the build.

As far as storage, there's a deficiency in your testing in that you're aren't tracking load times for windows or game levels. Gaming is more than just FPS and settings, but the experience overall. An SDD or a 2tb HDD that's short stroked may or may not make a difference, but we won't know until you test and track the results.

 

[ionut19]

CPU cooler: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181010
And it is about 20$ more expensive.
Total Current Cost $1,808 It could have fit into the budget. Wouldn't it be a better cooler for the CPU?

I saw this by mistake, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-cpu-gpu,2643.html you have the UD3r and here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-cpu-gpu,2643-8.html you have ud7. A small mistake.

Nice article though. I like reading these.

 

[coldmast]

Great build.
I love the wiring, Tom's why didn't you paste some shots of the inside along with the blue glow of the illusion.

To the fans of the CM 212+, I like it a lot(! for $), but there are better heat-sinks. I like the Decepticon-ish look of the Megahalems Rev B.

 

[cadder]

I enjoyed this article and I think this is a good build (except I can't comment on the video setup because I'm not experienced in that area). I like that this build used relatively common parts, no water cooling, etc.

I've built a lot of computers for AutoCAD and Revit and I usually use an i5-750 and 8GB of ram, because it is a little cheaper, but then I used a slightly faster drive for C: (velociraptor) and then put a normal drive in for D:.

I think your cable routing looks good!

AND I LIKE THE ANTEC 300 CASE! I've used 5 of them recently and they have all worked well. They seem to be made well, they are easy to build, they have plenty of openings and places to put fans. I wasn't able to buy the Illusion version but I always add a pair of Xigmatek fans on my own.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]lapoki[/nom]Some minor changes and this can be converted to a nice build1. Temps are too high for 24/7 use. Maybe clocking the CPU down a notch should help.[/citation] It could help, but you do understand this is the highest possible reading (from the CPU die, not surface) under the highest possible load right? You don't get a load like that 24/7, most people never see a load like that. I've seen stock i7's run in the low-70's under the same circumstances. [citation][nom]lapoki[/nom]I dont understand why no review site mentions IOH temps for X58 but whenever i see a build there is always a fan attached to it even with high end boards like Classified and Rampage series.[/citation] Yes, it's unfortunate that there is no way to get an accurate reading from the Northbridge. Most people just ignore that their temperature reading is wrong and report it anyway.[citation][nom]lapoki[/nom]The PSU used is already overtaxed and should be upgraded to 900-1000W unit (if using 470 SLI). Forget room for expandability, i doubt it would last a couple of months of rigorous use. This PSU should do well with 2 5850s though.[/citation]I seriously doubt that you've ever used a program that maxes out the CPU and GPU simultaneously. On top of that, according to the power supply's efficiency rating it should have been outputing around 670W (less than its rated limit) while consuming 858W, so this isn't the end of the world.[citation][nom]lapoki[/nom]A SSD for boot is definetly required...[/citation]SSD does nothing for benchmarks, and there will be a value comparison on Friday that uses ONLY the cost and benchmark results.[citation][nom]lapoki[/nom]A better case is also needed like Antec 902 or CM 690 II[/citation]Again I refer to the competition. A so-called "better" case that is no more durable and doesn't even make the CPU cooler is just a waste of money.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]mlcloud[/nom]-Antec Three Hundred Illusion. Really? Take a look at the CM 690 II Advanced for just a couple dozen bucks more... that might have solved much of your case-related problems. *cough* temperatures *cough*[/citation]I know you probably missed it, but the answer was already mentioned in several posts above yours and it all comes down to the point that the case used was almost perfect and those who've criticized it are simply wrong.[citation][nom]jedimasterben[/nom]No, dude, last time you squeezed an overclocked i7 and a freakin 5970 into a single 2x120 radiator. That was your problem.That was a bad idea. There's a reason that that kit doesn't include a GPU block, or even hint at the idea of it. A 2x120 is good for an i7 at 4GHz with no additions.[/citation]You have no idea of what you speak, why don't you read THAT thread, or at least read THAT article? The radiator of THAT system was "ice cold" as the CPU got "fire hot" because of a restriction in the coolant flow. The card was made for a 3/8" high-pressure pump and the CPU block was made for a 1/2" high volume pump, end of story. You don't have to believe it any more than you have to believe that the earth is round.[citation][nom]cknobman[/nom]You could have at least used a Panzer box or a cheaper model Lian Li.[/citation]Have you ever used a Panzer Box or a low-end Lian-Li? Put those two next to the Three Hundred, and find that the Pazer Box is built sloppily (though a decent design for holding a radiator cheaply) and the low-cost Lian-Li is made out of something that resembles foil.

 

[foscooter]

Althought I love my Antec 300 case, note the complete build picture, side open view. Image if you had more than one drive, look how the graphcs card take up space of at least 2 bays! At least the PCI-e power plugs into the "top" of the card, unlike my 4870.

And I can't believe the DVD they picked (muchless as a THG recommended pick). Have you read the reviews on NewEgg? No BD support, it's $99.00 more for the software. Push that price up to $198.00. Why buy a Blu-Ray player, and then have to pay more to use it? Poor choice guys.

Still, I'll take it! I mean, I hope I win it!

 

[foscooter]

Was there room for a side fan? Was it included or additional? Could it really cool the GFX cards?

What is the difference b/t my Antec 300, and the 300 Illusion? Fans included? All 3: 2 front, 1 side? Top and back are included?

**EDIT**

I found out myself: The Illusion comes with blue LED fans, fronts and top, no side. Rear is regular fan.

Still, did they add a side fan?