Coming from AMD, to get my first Intel PC in years.

Discussion in 'Processors and motherboards Intel' started by soulhunter, Apr 1, 2013.

  1. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    Greetings,

    After having months of PC stability issues, and facing the need to get new pieces to "fix it", with the uncertainty of where the problem is (it is either: CPU or Motherboard).... I decided to get an Intel PC now. I was considering these pieces, and would really appreciate your opinion, comments, flames, ....:

    CPU: Intel Core i5-3570
    MB: AARock Z77 Extreme4 (at least one PCI slot is a must for me).
    RAM: Patriot Memory Viper 3 Series Venom Red DDR3 16GB (PV316G186C0KRD)
    Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 650

    I was planing on keeping my current power supply: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX650.

    My total budged is <US$500 (I can't spend more than US$500, including shipping).

    Thanks!

    Ildefonso.
     
  2. ---TK---

    ---TK--- Guest

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    3570k is that what you are looking at?
     
  3. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    8GB of ram is enough for you.
     
  4. Syidi

    Syidi Master Guru

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    ^agreed... OC friendly
     

  5. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    Nope, because I run lots of VMs, I usually launch:

    1x Windows 7 VM.
    from 1 to 8 Linux VM
    1x Windows 8 VM

    so... I need at least 12GB..... and I already have that 16GB kit, because I bought it to discard RAM issues with my existing PC (and found out that it is still failing with the new RAM :( ).
     
  6. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    True, on the OC part.... actually, I had a really hard time deciding between both of them. The K part lacks this:

    Intel® vPro Technology
    Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d)
    Intel® Trusted Execution Technology

    Not that I need all of these *that* much, however the VT-d is useful for me, as I virtualize a lot.... but I'm not sure if its positive impact on the virtual machines surpasses the potential global performance improvement of OCing.

    Price difference is tiny: ~US$9.

    Any help is welcome here.
     
  7. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    Just curious why you run W8 vm instead of dual boot....?
     
  8. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    Tests. I'm a Linux user, mostly (99% of what I do is in Linux). W8 and W7 VMs are used for testing purposes (test services interaction, authentication integration, ...). Also, I use the W8 machine when I receive an office document that I can't correctly view with LibreOffice, or when I need to access one of those wacky web apps where I *have to* use IE.

    I have considered setting up a dual-boot for gaming, but as I don't have enough time to be an "actual gamer", I keep procrastinating that :p .... also, I believe that I need an additional license for that (because MS considers VMs to be another machine), so, this reduces the "appeal" of doing that (maybe when tests are complete, I'll transfer one of the VMs license to the host machine).
     
  9. ---TK---

    ---TK--- Guest

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    some asrock boards allow you to overclock non k models a bit, I have no experience with them.
     
  10. krisby

    krisby Guest

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    Interesting you are changing for stability issues, I never had any problems with my numerous AMD systems over the years, but I did change from an X6 1090T last December to a 3570k, I was very disappointed, I did not notice any improvement in speed at all, which after all the research I did I expected more, so I've either not tuned my K very well or I had my X6 humming along.

    Either way though, I guess if want it for stability you know whats best, and perhaps Intel is best for VMs.
     

  11. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    I don't believe the stability issues to be AMD-related. I like AMD, and I have been using it for a while. Most likely I just have some faulty hardware piece, I just don't know which one yet.

    The things I believe that could be causing the stability issues are:

    + Graphics driver (partially discarded, because when I switched to alternative driver, things just got worse: with painting issues and all, very similar to corrupted video memory).

    + Bad RAM (I already tried another RAM: the issue persisted, so... I think it is unlikely, unless the second RAM is faulty too.....).

    + Bad MB, this is my best bet... Thanks God, a relative will borrow me a PC tomorrow to test this (it was good someone else had a similar machine).

    + Bad CPU... same here, tomorrow I'll test this CPU on the other MB.

    + Bad power supply (I really don't think it is the PSU, but it is possible). Tomorrow, I'll use my relative's PSU to discard this.

    Fortunately, it doesn't takes that long to get this thing above 60ºC: just 5~10 minutes with 4 or 5 processes running, and that's it.

    Until now (that I got someone to borrow me some pieces to test), I would've to buy another piece just to test! (it is really hard to get a store to borrow you something), so, buying pieces blindly to "test" was really not very appealing, so: it was a good excuse to get another (hopefully better) machine.

    Tomorrow I'll decide what to do: get a new machine, try to repair this one, both, .....

    Additionally, there are several reasons pushing me toward getting one i5 (or up) machine:

    1. I feel AMD's graphical drivers for Linux are not very good:

    + Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0, in Basic presets gives me this results (and this is with beta driver, that I installed in yet another test trying to find-out what is going on, older driver was much, much worse):

    FPS: 11.9
    Score: 301
    Min FPS: 5.9
    Max FPS: 39.6

    nVidia drivers seems to work better (from my previous experience). Additionally, nVidia seems to support older chipsets for a longer time.

    2. i5 CPU supports PCIe 3.0, the graphics card that I intended to get is PCIe 3.0. Not that PCIe 3.0 is a must for that 650 card, but I believe it will be good for it.

    3. I want an nVidia card because of 1, and because I want to work a bit with CUDA.

    However, all of this (nVidia card, i5/i7 machine) can wait as long as I can get this machine stable again. With this machine working correctly for at least 6 more months, I can save some money, and maybe get a better new machine (and then give this one to one of my kids, but *stable*, I don't want to give them a machine to suffer with).
     
  12. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    Sorry, forgot to include this, the resolution of the Heaven benchmark:

    1280x720 2xAA windowed
     
  13. killer_939

    killer_939 Guest

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    PCI-E 3.0 wont help you at all. I strongly recommend Nvidia for linux and the i5 is up to a double in CPU speed once you OC.

    I hope all those VMs are on an SSD? *shudders at thought of using 1 HDD to boot several OSs*
     
  14. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    nope, these are on a *software* RAID1 array, and the RAID members are "green" WD drives :thumbup: .

    Well, actually some of the VMs are on a new SSD drive I got last black Friday, but the important ones are on the RAID1 array.
     
  15. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    why on raid 1?
     

  16. deltatux

    deltatux Guest

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    You stated that you're a Linux user, did your install give you a kernel panic? I suspect there might be an issue with your RAM.

    You stated that when you switched GPU drivers, the problem got worse. Are you using fglrx? Be sure to use fglrx and if you're using a distribution like Ubuntu, be sure to manually tell the installer to generate a distribution-specific package.

    deltatux
     
  17. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    Redundancy, and higher read speed (write speed is slightly less than slower drive), also better random read performance.
     
  18. soulhunter

    soulhunter Guest

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    Nope, I have not seen a kernel panic. RAM *should* be fine, unless I was unlucky enough to have *two* bad RAM sets :( (I tried changing RAM).

    Yep. I'm using fglrx (currently, beta, generated Ubuntu-specific packages), when I switched from fglrx to radeon driver: things got worse, much worse (drawing errors and all).... so, I went back to fglrx, but I still get those nasty slowdowns, freezes, and X crashes :( , that forces me to shutdown the machine and power it up again. Fortunately, this doesn't happen everyday, but it does happens about once a week.
     

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