i7 New Build your thoughts and advice

Hi all, I have about £900 for a new tower, and have been looking at the i7 system.

here's what I've been working on as a viable system:



This spec comes out to approx £900

Comments please...

 

Don't bother with two 4850s, just grab one solid card. And scrap the case. Get a decent case and buy the PSU separately, because there's no chance 460W will run what you've got there. Look for 750W or around there. The Antec 300 is a decent case and should fit everything, but you can check out the 900 too if you're into LEDs.

 

Bad case with a bad power supply.

 

forgot to add, the PSU is for some else I already have a OCZ GSX600 in my older tower, is that pushing the PSU to its limits? or would it handle this i7 system?

Thought I would kill two birds with one stone so to speak, get a case remove the PSU and add the one from my old system.

Any recommendations on the PSU I should be looking for? I like the OCZ its been a solid PSU in fact I'd say its helped to make my old system super stable.

will take a look at the antec 300, not into pretty lights, I like function over form.

 

"460W of Extreme power"? That must put my 750W into the Stratosphere!:banana:

The timings seem quite high on the Corsair and 32W RMS?
IMO, I think you should start over...and make sure you can "price match".

 

Hows it looking now?

 

First off, you aren't going to get far without a CPU

The Antec 300 is probably the BEST budget case Ive seen. I really like it and routinely use it when building for friends etc who dont want to spend a fortune on cases.

Everything else looks excellent with the exception of the HDD. I'd ditch it in favor of a WD or Seagate. Samsung's RMA policy is for sh*t and Ive had more than one DoA and 1 actually started smoking when I was installing it (and I dont mean cigarettes).

Good choice on ditching the 2nd Video card, absolute waste of cash on a 20" display.

Cheers,

Eth

 

oops! re CPU :coffee: I think its time for dreamtime. will add a cpu and come back lol

 

I have the Antec 300 and I love it. It fit everything including the 4870 x2 and a vigor monsoon III cooler, with no modifactions. Its basic looking nothing and no LEDs but thats what I wanted.

One catch, comes with only 2 fans. One 140mm top mount and a 120mm rear. Not really a catch for what you pay for it. Id recommend getting the 3 extra 120mm fans.

2 for front and one side. Its loud but I just turn the volume up.

 

Case - Cooler Master CM690, PSU- Cooler Master eXtreme Power 500W.

 

I've read that tri-channel memory (tested with a i7 920), did not bring much better performance (2-3% max) vs dual channel, so is it worth it ?
Anyway - more than 4 Go means 64b, means Vista (or Linux 64).

Samsung great HDD, I have a 750 Go I'm very happy with.

 

General desktop applications don't take much advantage of the added bandwidth. Memory intensive applications show more gain. The whole triple versus dual versus single channel memory thing has always been that way. Dual channel only gets a small advantage over single channel (back when CPUs weren't strong enough to make use of the extra bandwidth), and triple is now doing the same thing. 2-3% would be an average though, not maximum at all. Maximum can be up to a nearly 30% difference depending on the app and function.

 

Thanks for the info - I guess then the benchmarks I read were not the whole truth to it !

For my own PC culture, on which app and function would we gain significantly ? ie, which computer use would be worth having tri-channel ? (game, encoding... ?)

thx

 

Here is my build to help you with ideas for what stuff to get

OCZ Stealth XStream 700W PSU - 120mm Fan, 4x 12V Rails
£71.29

Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz Socket 1366 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
£241.50

MSI X58 Platinum Socket 1366 8 channel Audio ATX Motherboard
£209.99

OCZ 3GB (3X1GB) DDR3 1333MHz/PC3-10666 Gold XTC Triple Channel Memory Kit For i7 Motherboard
£53.00

Gigabyte HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 DVI HDMI DisplayPort HDCP PCI-E Graphics Card
£234.98

Total £810.76

 

Folder's get great advantages from more memory bandwidth. Gaming can be up or down, depending very much on the game itself, not even genre's of games can determine that. Some FPS games love memory bandwidth, while other could care less about it. Some RTS games may show nice gains from more memory bandwidth, other show no difference at all.

It comes down to just how the app was coded in the end. While one 3D rendering app may eat up memory bandwidth, another may ignore it totally. It's very hard to nail down any software genre as being more memory intensive then another. It comes down to the individual application itself whether it will benefit or not. Distributed computing tends to be memory intensive.

 

Yah they were.

Memory bandwidth (within the DDR3 realm) isnt going to bring anything significant to the table whatsoever. A few frames here or there at the most.

The differences are so subtle (reads SMALL) that they will rarely (if ever) be visible to the naked eye.

Eth

 

And you fall into the "a few average apps equals all" trap. My points stand. The differences are exactly like the last time we went through this with single to dual channel. Most apps show no difference. Some apps show large differences. Go read some folding at home articles, you'll be surprised how much bandwidth makes a difference to that and other DC apps. It is noticeable when your PPD jumps up to 300-400 points higher with triple over dual channel.

 

Average users dont engage in "folding at home" or run VMs.

For 99% of users, Memory BW is a m00t point that will cost you a lot more money for very small (if any) performance gains.

Bottom line : If you are building a machine with the intention of running VMs or "folding", spending an extra few hundred on RAM will marginally increase your results, for anything else - save your cash.

Eth

 

memory and bandwidth in general doesnt drive performance at all,thats the job of all the varied processors in your system. but bandwidth will limit your performance if you dont have more than what is called for your tasks, whatever they may be. and the larger the gap in bandwidth overhead , the greater the efficiency throughout the system.

so when people say they gain numerical performance from higher speed memory , or more pci-e bandwidth or whatever. thats actually incorrect, its actually that thier getting raw performance back that the systems processors should have been able to deliver at that rate in the first place if there had been enough bandwidth overhead in the configuration.

 

Indeed and Im not suggesting you go and buy the most substandard RAM available. But if you have DDR3 1333 for example, buying DDR3 1600 or higher wont provide much (if any gain).

It will however, cost far more.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/ddr3-1600.html

Eth