Upgrade Time. Need more storage, and a CPU Cooler.

TofuLion

Admirable
so it's time for me to upgrade my system (in my signature), though it's only a couple months old, there are a few things that i would like to have. need more storage, and a cpu cooler. i figured i would ask the like-minded folks on Tom's before i order. for storage upgrade i am torn between the Samsung XP941 (m.2 socket at PCIe 2.0x4) or another 250 GB SSD at raid 0.

i currently have a single 840 evo 250 GB drive that i use for windows, as well as any applications or games that i run. unfortunately, it filled faster than i expected it would, and i am in need of an upgrade. i still have a 1 TB hard drive for media and files i do not wish to lose, so the failure of the raid configuration is not an issue (i have a bootable partition to fall back on if needed).

so do i just add another 250 GB and configure a raid, re-install everything, etc. or do i get the m.2 and use it only for OS and apps, then use the existing SSD for games. the XP941 is one of the only drives that supports PCIe 2.0 x4 (they have a 951 coming out that is 3.0) and the Extreme6 is one of the few boards that supports these speeds on an M.2 socket, so it seems like a waste to me to not utilize this technology. this will, however, occupy 4 lanes which brings my GPU to x8 (i've read that there is a minimal difference), and disable the possibility of SLI in the future (my thoughts are by the time a single GTX970 is not able to handle 1080p, i'll need an entirely new upgrade).
so when you take away any concerns of failure\future upgrades, you are left with price\performance\capacity. they are equally priced (within $10) so that's not an issue. the theoretical bandwidth is 20 gbps (PCIe 2.0 x4) vs 12 gbps? (sata 3 x 2 for the raid 0), so win for the M.2 there. the capacity difference is 128GB vs another 250 GB so that's a win for the sata 3. so it's 1-1 in my book. i need a tie breaker. i was going to go with the XP941, just because i want to use what i have to the best capacity.

and for the CPU cooler, i was thinking Corsair H105. hopefully it will be compatible with my case as a top mount (don't foresee an issue there). corsair has a huge line of liquid coolers, and most of them are highly regarded and recommended. i was set on the H100i, but found the H105 on sale, and about the same price but with a thicker radiator, so i assume better cooler as well. anything is better than this crappy stock cooler, and i can't wait to start toying with overclocking.

so the price really isn't the determining factor here, i just want to make sure i am getting the most for my money.

any thoughts, concerns, suggestions, etc are greatly appreciated.
 
Solution
I was in a similar situation a few months ago.
I bought a 500gb Samsung 850 pro to replace my 250gb Samsung ssd.
The Samsung clone utility made the conversion seamless, and probably improved performance a bit.
After, I realized that I had just created the perfect backup.
It is a snapshot that I know will work if I ever get a virus or such, all I need to do is to pop in the old 240gb ssd and go forward.
That eliminates the really big hassle of reinstalling games and software accumulated over the years.

I have the capability of using a M.2 ssd but I concluded that it was not worthwhile. The potential advantage is better sequential speeds, but the ssd does mostly small random I/o so sequential speed is not worth much.
Plus the issues...
I was in a similar situation a few months ago.
I bought a 500gb Samsung 850 pro to replace my 250gb Samsung ssd.
The Samsung clone utility made the conversion seamless, and probably improved performance a bit.
After, I realized that I had just created the perfect backup.
It is a snapshot that I know will work if I ever get a virus or such, all I need to do is to pop in the old 240gb ssd and go forward.
That eliminates the really big hassle of reinstalling games and software accumulated over the years.

I have the capability of using a M.2 ssd but I concluded that it was not worthwhile. The potential advantage is better sequential speeds, but the ssd does mostly small random I/o so sequential speed is not worth much.
Plus the issues involved with booting from a pcie device.

On the liquid cooler, I would not go that route.

My canned rant on liquid cooling:
------------------------start of rant-------------------
You buy a liquid cooler to be able to extract an extra multiplier or two out of your OC.
How much do you really need?
I do not much like all in one liquid coolers when a good air cooler like a Noctua NH-D15 or phanteks can do the job just as well.
A liquid cooler will be expensive, noisy, less reliable, and will not cool any better
in a well ventilated case.
Liquid cooling is really air cooling, it just puts the heat exchange in a different place.
The orientation of the radiator will cause a problem.
If you orient it to take in cool air from the outside, you will cool the cpu better, but the hot air then circulates inside the case heating up the graphics card and motherboard.
If you orient it to exhaust(which I think is better) , then your cpu cooling will be less effective because it uses pre heated case air.
And... I have read too many tales of woe when a liquid cooler leaks.
google "H100 leak"
-----------------------end of rant--------------------------

I suggest a noctua nh-D15 or phanteks with dual 140mm fans.
Your pc will be quieter, more reliable, and will be cooled equally well

I have become a bit jaded on the subject of haswell cooling for overclocking.
How high you can OC is firstly determined by your luck in the bin lottery.
I had high expectations from the Devil's canyon parts and their better thermals.
I found out that the thermals really do not matter unless, perhaps, you are a competitive overclocker.
Haswell runs quite cool, that is, until you raise the voltage past 1.25v or so.
Once you go past 1.3v, then you really do need very good cooling to keep stress loads under say 85c.
But, the consensus is that voltages higher than 1.30 are not a good thing for 24/7 usage.
I have been unable to find any official Intel recommendation on what is a safe vcore limit.
If you are an enthusiast, you can go higher.
Even if you can handle the heat, how much do you really need that extra multiplier from say 4.4 to 4.6?
My thought is that it is better to use the exotic cooling funds for a quieter and less expensive air cooler.
I suggest a good tower air cooler like noctua or phanteks with 140mm fans.

If you have the itch to upgrade, consider a large ips monitor.

 
Solution
thank you for your response and insight.

the Extreme6 is, from what i've gathered, one of the only boards that doesn't see much of a compatibility problem with the XP941. even still, i'm willing to spend a few hours of frustration getting it to work. i can't seem to justify just getting a bigger SSD and let this current drive sit in the closet til i need it, not since i just bought it about 3 months ago and it seems like a waste. so if anything, i would get a better drive like 850 evo/pro and use it for os/apps and use the current one for games. this also seems like a waste, since that would only occupy ~80 GB and i would at least a 250GB for the better performance.
so by my determination, you recommend the raid 0?

and for the cooler. i do understand the risk of circulating water around in the midst of my sensitive, expensive electronics, however, i would think by now they are constructed with those risks in mind and theoretically be much more safe and reliable. another thought i have is mounting the giant radiator (like you said, it's the same just displaced) on my case (more appropriately called 'chassis' in this argument) instead of the motherboard. taking the physical strain from the previously mentioned sensitive electronics and placing it on something designed to do exactly that.

i did hope to reach at least 4.6 whether i actually gain any noticeable performance or not. for me it's another game to play 😀 so i was thinking that the liquid cooler would be better equipped for dissipating the heat.

i'm not discarding your opinion, just providing my own counter-arguments. i appreciate your suggestions and would like to hear more
 
Since you seem to have already looked into the possible boot issues with pci-e based ssd's.

These pic-e drives are VERY fast once you get them to work as a boot drive(supported board or bios update as needed).

The upside to having 2 SSDs in raid0 is that if one fails you can still use the other(you loose data, but you already mention that is not an issue for you). You can also split hem to use in 2 systems if needed.

SSDs are so fast that I am not sure you will notice the difference with the PCI-e based drive vs 2 x SATA drives. The access times are going to be very low either way. A single ssd has the same low access times because raid0 goes a long way on sequential real/writes, but those are somewhat less common than one thinks(even more so with games as it is almost all random reads).

As for closed loop liquid coolers, it comes down to preference. Some users like the small size or just prefer the look. In general for the same price air coolers perform better(and would be recommended if you have the room). I say this as a user of these systems as well(in one system I have 2 of them, one for my video card and the other for my cpu). The case is on the small side with less then ideal air flow.
 
ok, you have both managed to convince me against the M.2 SSD.

though i am a bit apprehensive to NOT utilize the technology of the Extreme6's 'ultra M.2' that i acquired by chance (i was aware of the feature when i purchased the board, however the only reason i did was because i got a great combo deal with the CPU on black friday for less than $400 for the pair), you are also reconfirming my understanding that just because it's there, doesn't mean you need it. perhaps when i recycle this system into a home server/htpc running multiple VMs, i might fully utilize the increased sequential speed of the socket (probably see the most benefit while actually loading the system after a crash or reconfiguration). but this system will see the most benefit from isolating the OS/apps on to a faster drive, or raid 0 the whole. my hard drive is basically for movies (and sensitive data) that i wish to keep, so the sequential reads are there, not the SSD. i'll go for an 850 EVO (cheaper than 840 actually) and match the size of my current drive and raid 0.

for the cooler... my case gets good airflow. i am judging this according to my GPU keeping low temps under load (around 65 C while gaming) and my CPU idle temps are very low as well (33 C). my CPU also reaches 85 C under full load (OCCT) and i even have turbo disabled. the crappy top-down intel stock cooler is obviously the culprit.

i have only two intake (front-top and bottom-right) and the standard exhaust, and i'm very happy with the noise levels compared to temps. so mounting a noisy radiator and opening two vents might remove this satisfaction, so you've also convinced me to consider air coolers. the cryorig r1 ultimate is on sale right now
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4UF1H68938

the only problem i foresee is the ram clearance, but in all aspects it outperforms the noctua nh-d15 (which is extremely limited) and the phanteks seems less efficient with only 5 heat pipes vs the d15's six pipes, and the r1 has seven.

thank you both for your suggestions and considerations. i feel more confident with my purchase after receiving your opinions
 
I'd like to "add" to the rant about liquid cooling.

A heatpipe cooler, is no less a liquid cooler than a "water" loop cooler. Heatpipes contain liquid, and share similar heat flux performance with water blocks.

The only time a mechanically pumped liquid cooling solution beats a heatpipe liquid cooling solution, is when the effective radiator size and/or thermal dissipation effectiveness is "larger."

Decibel for decibel and size for size, there's no inherent advantage to mechanically pumped liquid cooling over heatpipes, whose pumping action is driven by the thermal energy they serve to dissipate. In fact, one could argue a laundry list of down-sides to mechanically pumped liquid cooling that are not present with heatpipes. (surface to surface seals with opportunity for leaks, no useful passive dissipation capacity, more failure modes, pump vibration, pump noise, often louder fan noise, etc).
 
FWIW:
At one time, I had a Intel 80gb X25-M SSD. It worked well, but I needed more space, so I bought a second.
I really wanted a 160gb single image for the "C" drive, so I combined the two in raid-0.
It worked well, but I could not detect any improvement in my user experience.
Later, I used the 80gb drives in other PC's and replaced them with a single X25-M 160gb drive, and performance was equal, if not better.

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.
 
Geofelt is exactly correct on the matter of raid0, it provides almost no tangible performance benifit to system/application drives. The primary bottleneck for these drives is access latency, not bandwidth. RAID0 has no effect whatsoever on access latency, in fact, in some cases it makes it worse.
 
so i've been researching and reading reviews for about 9 hours now (also taking your comments into consideration), and i think i've come to a conclusion, just want to run it by you guys before i purchase. again thank you very much for your suggestions, i am truly grateful.

i think i will go with a 250GB 850 EVO (the 850 Pro doesn't seem like it's worth the extra $35) just for my OS/Apps. this will leave me with more than enough room to install larger apps in the future. i also like the idea of keeping the games on an entirely different drive (my current 840 EVO) to help me compartmentalize and keep things more organized from a software point of view. my current drive is fantastic and the only reason i feel the need to upgrade is simply because i have almost reached capacity, NOT due to it being too slow for my liking. therefore, a raid 0 couldn't possibly offer better performance than i already have.

the main focus of my research has been on this Cryorig R1 Ultimate. it seems that i would need low profile RAM in both the first two slots for it to be compatible. this is a problem as the heat spreader on my ripjaws set is anything but low profile, without actually removing it. i know that would be an option, but i do not want to take that route. i found a set of ares on sale for $55 on newegg today only, which is low profile and also runs at a similar speed as my current set (the ares is DDR3-2133 10-12-12-31 @ 1.6v and my current is DDR3-2133 9-11-11-31 @ 1.65v). this would allow me to populate the first two slots with the ares, and keep my current in the second two slots.

this also seems like it isn't worth the cost (please correct me if i'm wrong) since cryorig also makes a r1 universal which has a slimmer fan on the front so as to not interfere with the RAM modules. so i was thinking i'll just go with that, as i understand the performance difference is minimal and both models compete with AIO coolers with 280 mm radiators.
 
Ripjaws should just clear it if that is what you have?

Q:
How tall are the memory modules?

A:
The height of the memory modules are listed on each of the product webpages.

TridentX: 54mm (2.13in) with fin; 39mm (1.54in) without fin
RipjawsX: 40mm (1.58in)
RipjawsZ: 40mm (1.58in)
Ripjaws: 40mm (1.58in)

Sniper: 42mm (1.65in)
ECO: 32mm (1.26in)
ARES: 33mm (1.30in)

And the cooler lists
RAM ClEARANCE

The R1’s design and use of the slim profile XT140 fan, allows the R1 to stay clear of the RAM section for the majority mainboards. For a few X79 mainboards and the few mainboards which place their RAM slot too close to the CPU zone will cause the front fan to overlap the first RAM slot. In this case the R1 will allow for all standard non-heat spreader RAM, and RAM with heat spreaders within the maximum height of 40mm.
As long as the memory is not too close to the cpu(do not want to hit the heatpipe). it looks like it should work. You may have some play to move the fan up as well.

Also do NOT expect to remove memory once the cooler is on :)

The NHD14 also had enough space for Ripjaws memorys
2mnrert.jpg
 
right, the RAM clearance on the R1 Universal would allow modules up to 40mm (actually the tech specs list it as unlimited, since it doesn't reach the RAM slots) because the front intake fan is the XT140 which is the slimmer fan (which would offer less performance, and according to reviews also creates more noise).

the R1 Ultimate uses their XF140 which is much thicker, and therefore interferes with heat spreaders over 35mm. they also list the distance from center (cpu socket to edge of fan) as 40mm, and ASRock says the distance to the RAM slot from the CPU is 30mm. so i wouldn't even be able to use slots 2 and 4 with my current kit (yes, my current kit is Ripjaws) since they are 40mm tall.

6083_28_cryorig_r1_ultimate_cpu_cooler_review_full.jpg



as you can see from the picture, even the Trident without it's fin actually touches the fan there, however the low profile kit sits nicely under.

so what i was asking is if it's really worth it to invest in the extra 8 GB of RAM (that i will probably need in the next couple years anyway) and just match the speed and timings as close as i can to my current set (to hopefully eliminate compatibility problems). this would allow me to get the better intake fan, but also cut into my budget a bit. trying to stay under $250 for the cooler and ssd, but will spend more if it's really worth it, just won't be able to buy shadow of mordor.

i really like this cooler and i think it's a very good piece of equipment to match the rest of my rig.
 
i had considered that option, but worried that it might impede performance, and more importantly air flow.

The CRYORIG R1 Ultimate is of course a dual tower cooler, but each tower is comprised of two separate sections of fins. The front half of each tower consists of 42 fins, but the rear half of the towers each have stacks of 53 fins. This is the Jet Fin Acceleration system, which uses the laws of fluid dynamics, where if airflow is squeezed, it will also increase in its speed.

so i'm thinking that a push configuration would be the best set up, but i could be wrong.
 
Push is generally considered as better than pull.
But, with two fans, it is a minor difference and will not impact things.

Can the cooler be mounted turned 180 degrees?
It looks like that might work.
Or, another option is to slide the conflicting fan up about 10mm. It matters little if some of it it sticks up above the cooler.
 
well, yes there is an option for a third fan, so i think it would be able to pull on the second radiator. and this cooler is able to be oriented in any direction, so i could reverse the entire configuration and that would work as well. however, i don't want to cut any corners and just "make it work" for any reason. in fact, i'm much more willing to unnecessarily invest in added components just to make sure i get the best performance i can. so with that being said, this is my cart:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU Cooler: CRYORIG R1 Ultimate 76.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($89.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-2133 Memory ($74.98 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 128GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($104.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $269.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-02-27 20:55 EST-0500

went with the 850 pro for OS/apps, and the extra 8 GB of RAM. just like previously mentioned, i could always use the extra parts when i do eventually split this system and divide it's purposes from home server/htpc/gaming rig. the added RAM will help when i set up a VPN and host a multitude of local devices, all while still gaming. thank you guys for you input and considerations and suggestions, and willingness to help me solve my problem, etc. i can't express my gratitude. 😀

i didn't think this thread would continue as long as it did, and therefore selected the "best answer" prematurely (though it probably does answer the immediate question). if you would like me to select another, i am more than happy to do so, just advise me on which one. thanks again 😀
 
thanks again for the suggestions. just thought i would let you guys know how i made out.

the new RAM worked perfectly with my old kit, no problems at all. the XMP profile actually loaded the faster of the two and has been running without issue. the low profile also fit perfectly as expected, and my ripjaws would not have fit. the cooler runs amazingly and does a very good job. i currently have my CPU running at ~4.7 GHz (46 x 102 = 4692) and even with a stress test it barely hits 80 C. also, the temperature drops back under 40 C almost immediately after finishing. the fans at first were a bit louder than i am comfortable with, but a quick custom configuration in BIOS and it is almost inaudible in my case. very satisfying.

i held off on the SSD for a few various reasons, but went ahead and ordered an 850 EVO 250 GB today because it's on sale for $100 on newegg (ends today in case you're interested). i will use it for my OS and Apps and maybe a big game or two depending on how much space i have left over.