$2000 dev / gaming system - need feedback / advice

[archzeratul]

Sigh, the motherboard / CPU / RAM combo and the case went out of stock nearly instantly ... Despite me being at the ready to get it right away...

Any secondary options then? Back to the previous suggestions?

At least now I don't have to return the CPU ... lol

 

[lehtv]

Hm, well. Pretty much back to the original plan then. Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 $155 AR + 8GB Mushkin $38 AR.

Did you buy the H60 and the case? What about the monitors?

 

[archzeratul]

All memory express items got sold out, so that means no cooler, no mobo, no RAM, no case, no NAS, and no cheap CPU.

The monitors were from Dell, so I will get those at least!

I ended up ordering from NCIX the individual parts that made up the sweet combo from Memory Express. Applied individual price matches on them using Newegg / other sites... The case and cooler I PM'd directly to Memory Express. The only problem is that my CPU / mobo / RAM come in different orders, and come as individual parts, so price matching to the combo was not possible... I did send them a message asking if they'd be willing to match the combo price... I'm expecting a big FU from them, but I might be happy even if they meet me halfway...

Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 $159.99 after PM
Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B Vengeance Blue 8GB $44.49 after PM
Intel Core i5 2500K $189.99 (boxing day sale at NCIX in prior order)
^
Hopefully gets PM'd together to $309.99 ...

If that fails I will go with your post I suppose, or possibly suck it up...

However, for the sake of educating myself... how does the Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 compare to the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3?

 

[lehtv]

Not much difference between those two boards. Z68X-UD3H has DVI, VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, while Z68XP-UD3 only has HDMI. In addition Z68X has eSata which you won't need, and black PCB. Both are PCIe 3.0 compatible as long as you get the newest revision. That will come into play once you upgrade your video card in the future.

 

[mfenn]

Isn't the H60 a water cooler? I thought it was recommended against using one? Or is there something I'm not getting..

Yes it is. The recommendation is against paying a premium for the water cooler just because it uses water. At $30, it is a good deal.

 

[mfenn]

Not much difference between those two boards. Z68X-UD3H has DVI, VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, while Z68XP-UD3 only has HDMI. In addition Z68X has eSata which you won't need, and black PCB. Both are PCIe 3.0 compatible as long as you get the newest revision. That will come into play once you upgrade your video card in the future.

Yeah, the IGP can be nice for troubleshooting or for running a secondary (or tertiary) display, but it is completely not necessary.

 

[archzeratul]

Regarding the water cooler, it went out of stock I bought it from another store with hopes of doing a price match.. if not, oh well.. I'll just stick with the purchase to avoid the prolonging of the shopping hell.

Regarding the mobo, I looked up some spec sheets and it seems like the Z68XP-UD3 has more SATA ports and supports 2x PCI-E x16 whereas the other only supports 1x or 2x PCI-E x8 or something? Seems like the former is a more "premium" product, as it may support more components or better SLI/Crossfire performance, as opposed to the UD3H-B3 which caters towards using the IGP? No idea what I am talking about honestly though, and it's probably too late to change my purchase. I'll just pretend the black PCB's better looks justify the purchase - as this seems to be the decision point for others...

Any idea if the board I got is PCIe 3 compatible?
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=61002&vpn=GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3&manufacture=Gigabyte

I do have a third and even fourth monitor in addition to the two I bought.. so maybe I can use that as an excuse to use the IGP... Is there any configuration needed to make the discrete card and IGP work together?

I probably don't have very many other pressing questions.. maybe once the parts come in and I start assembling the computer, or if the price matching becomes a complete failure and I look for cheaper parts...

Thanks again.

 

[lehtv]

Seems like the former is a more "premium" product, as it may support more components or better SLI/Crossfire performance, as opposed to the UD3H-B3 which caters towards using the IGP? No idea what I am talking about honestly though, and it's probably too late to change my purchase.

Erm. UD3H is also Crossfire/SLI compatible. It is priced higher so it is a more 'premium' product (there is really no other metric for premiumness). In addition to pretty much every feature that's on the Z68XP-UD3, it offers better connectivity with the IGP. That's just one reason it's more expensive. The black PCB is another.

Any idea if the board I got is PCIe 3 compatible?

If it's the newest revision of the board (rev 1.3) then yes.

 

[pitz]

My personal suggestion -- forget the NAS, build yourself something with older parts or even a cheap AMD or Intel combo, put Linux (or FreeNAS) on it, and expose some SMB/CIFS and iSCSI targets on it. The whole thing would be a good learning experience for you. And you could even boot your other computer directly from the NAS using iSCSI, and a package like iPXE, or even the iSCSI bootROM on PCI-E Intel gigabit NICs. Very convenient if you want to try out a new operating system (just create a new iSCSI target for it!) but don't want to repartition your hard drive or worry that you're going to 'clobber' something in your existing setup. Easy to back up iSCSI images as well!

I agree with the others -- a $400 SSD probably isn't necessary. I think you'll probably get better mileage out of buying a 160gb Intel SSD (ie: $160 right now), and either buying a second one, or simply going without for now.

Fancy heatsinks and water cooling are a waste of money, especially with the 90W Intel chips.

$205 for a PSU, certainly that's pretty much on the high side.

LCDs -- my suggestion would be a Dell U2412hm or U2312hm (maybe a pair of the U2312hm's, they're ~$200 a piece!). IPS panels, LED backlit.

I had my own seperate "linux box/server" in undergrad CS, and it was immensely useful. It was a Pentium-66 at the time, but over the years, I've just kept on upgrading it, first with older parts, and now that I am into virtualization, I have some pretty powerful hardware in there.

As for the IGP, I really like that -- because it keeps the power consumption down, especially if you end up using the hardware as a server later on in life. Many of the video cards out there add 30-40W, which means $40+ out of your pocket every year the machine runs as a server.

 

[pitz]

BTW, if I was going back to CS these days, I'd buy a nice business laptop, ie: a Lenovo T420 or T520, Dell Latitude E6420/E6520, Precision m4600, etc., for ~$1000 -- and use the other $1000 to build a decent fileserver and virtualization machine.

Is this $2000 the entirety of your money to spend on computers, or just a portion? Chances are, you're going to want a laptop sooner or later...

 

[archzeratul]

Erm. UD3H is also Crossfire/SLI compatible.

Right, I was just looking at the PCIe speeds, or whatever they are, when being referred to as X16 vs X8...

If it's the newest revision of the board (rev 1.3) then yes.

Can't seem to find the info on the NCIX page... oh well.

My personal suggestion

I actually did consider building a server instead of a NAS, but the two do seem to carry different functionality.. though the server can act as a superset of the NAS... For now though, I just wanted something small that can run all the time and run quietly, store media and whatnot... Down the road I may build a server though real estate is quite precious though, so I would have to look into building a very small box that runs silently. Something feasible, I'm sure.

As to the actual suggestion, I will need to look up a couple of your TLAs It does sound like a much more techy solution to what I had in mind, and sounds kind of fun...

As per your part suggestions, I actually made the order already, as seen in the quote below, although the actual prices are more than what I stated for the mobo, cpu, ram, case and heatsink, because I missed out on the good deals.

Funny enough, I did get the very same monitors you mentioned, so I hope this means they were a good buy. I know even less about monitors than I do about the rest of the hardware so.. Different SSD suggested by lehtv, although same size as you mentioned. As to why this one was a better choice than Intel, I'm not quite sure... my guess is it has something to do with the controller, but I haven't looked into it yet...

Case - Antec 1100 $80
Mobo - Z68X-UD3H +
CPU - i5 2500k +
RAM - 8GB Vengeance $310
Heatsink - Corsair H60 $30
SSD - [FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Crucial M4 SSD Micron C400 128GB[/FONT] $200
HDD - 2TB Caviar Black $180
Monitors - 2x Dell Ultrasharp U2312HM $400
PSU - XFX 750W PRO750W $60

Unrelated
USB Flash drive 32GB $25
Keyboard / mouse $9
Corsair Gaming Audio Series CA-HS1A Headset - $30

BTW, if I was going back to CS these days, I'd buy a nice business laptop

I do have a very cheap laptop (salvaged Presario x1000), which I intend to replace down the road... My intention was to get something that doubles as a laptop/tablet, mainly for the purposes of taking notes in class and being able to do some light work. This probably means I can be quite cheap on it... I see people spending well into $1-2k on "gaming" laptops, I don't quite understand the purpose of them, at least no purpose for someone in my position.

Is this $2000 the entirety of your money

Nope... It was, what I thought to be a fairly generous upper bound for spending on a desktop... I still intend to replace the laptop / tablet as mentioned above, get a new smartphone, and possibly a server as you described.

The desktop just seemed like the highest priority item in the list...

 

[mfenn]

Right, I was just looking at the PCIe speeds, or whatever they are, when being referred to as X16 vs X8...

They are both x16 single, x8/x8 dual. You don't get any more than that from an 1155 CPU unless you have an NF200 or PLX PCIe bridge chip, which no boards in this price range have.

 

[archzeratul]

Hey again,

So I will probably start building the computer today. I have had the parts sitting around in my room for nearly a week now and all I managed to do so far was send in the rebates... I just lacked the time to put it all together.

Any quick tips for this, or should it be pretty straight forward? I will probably follow the Arch guide with regards to setting up my OSes on the SSD...

To those interested about my budget limit, I ended up going over, unfortunately. The system ended up costing roughly $2150 after tax. This is probably due to a couple of factors... mostly involving buying parts I didn't absolutely need. The GPU I bought was about $220 (and for the same price, a 6970 showed up later), a blu-ray player for $60, an extra 8 GB of RAM for $45, the NAS for $80, I missed out on that wonderful i5 bundle, (three times! twice from MemEx and a similar one from NCIX), and lastly that Micron SSD went on sale later for $160 when I bought it for $200 ... ugh.

Anyway, I guess this is the nature of sales and I should be happy about the other parts I saved money on.

Thanks again for all the help, I'll probably provide another update upon the hopefully successful assembly of the machine...

 

[mfenn]

Should be fine. Just remember to set the SATA controller to AHCI before you install the OS. That isn't as big of a deal with Linux as it is with Windows, but you might as well do it before the install. Other than that just take your time and don't force anything that doesn't seem right.

 

[archzeratul]

Hey,

Just an update about my situation.

I finally assembled the computer... took me about eight stressful hours. A few scares along the way, but it looks like nothing horrible has happened so far... I can get into the BIOS at least, and nothing is exploding...

Scare #1
Placing the CPU on the motherboard, then pulling down the latch over it... The latch required quite a lot of force applied to the lever, and the CPU even made a bit of a grinding sound...

Scare #2
I attached the H60s rad to the back panel's fan area, that's the only area it will reach anyway. Unfortunately, when placing the heat sink on the CPU, I had to use quite a bit of force, while trying to line up the screws from the back plate, and avoiding collisions with the memory slots sticking out. In this struggle I scraped off a bit of the thermal paste that had been pre-applied...

Scare #3
When I first powered on the computer, everything seemed fine. However, I notice the standard / included 200mm fan was not running. Clearly, I forgot to attach the switch area to the power supply. I took apart the computer, connected the power supply to the switch area (which seems to route power to 4 possible fans) and powered it on... and nothing happened. Either I am messing this up somehow, or there is a short, because when I removed the power supply's connection, the computer was able to start back up again.

Either it is that one set of pins, or the switch itself is shorted... Not sure if it's worth messing around with or investigating...

I'm now looking at the PC health status while typing this, and I also have a few questions...

Does the fan I connect to some mobo connection really matter (eg. POWER FAN)? From what I can tell, the only special thing is that each one has a unique name, and you can monitor that fan's RPM... and possibly send a warning to the system if one of them. Should I set up any warnings, are these even relevant once you boot into the OS?

Does everything seem okay from what I have said? I will install the OSes tomorrow...

Vcore - 1.224
DDR15V - 1.5V
+12V - 12.073V
Vcc3 - 3.334V
Vcc - 5.021V
Vtt - 1.076V

Sys Temp - 27C
CPU Temp - 28C

CPU Fan Speed - 1293 RPM (Rad fan intake)
SYSTEM FAN2 - 812RPM (Side panel fan intake)
POWER FAN - 4299RPM (HS Pump)
SYSTEM FAN1 - 703RPM (200mm top fan exhaust)

+one fan on the back plate exhaust
+one fan intake front panel

Does the fan setup make sense?

 

[mfenn]

Seems fine. By "back plate," do you mean the fan behind the motherboard? I honestly wouldn't use that at all because it doesn't do anything. The mobo's fan header labels don't matter, though usually the CPU fan one will have an alarm that trips if no RPM sensor is detected.

 

[archzeratul]

By back plate, I mean the fan behind the motherboard indeed.

I noticed the manual for the case mentioned basically everything should be an intake fan, except the 200mm fan at the top. This didn't seem to make sense to me... shouldn't I be trying to maintain roughly neutral pressure inside the system?

Having that many intake fans... I figured at least one other should be an exhaust one... So I decided I should do intake fans where filters are available, and exhaust where there are no filters...

How are the alarms handled? By BIOS before the OS boots, and by the OS after the OS boots..? Or is there some kind of a hardware shutdown..?

 

[mfenn]

Ideally you want to keep a positive pressure inside the case. That ensures that air is only entering via the intake fans, where it can be filtered.

As for the alarms, it can be any of the above. Some mobos will sound the PC speaker like crazy, force you to press F1 to boot, or initiate an auto shutdown, it really just depends. It's easy enough to avoid though, just plug something into the CPU fan header. Ideally, you should use something that is related to cooling the CPU because the mobo will alter the fan's speed in response to CPU temperatures.

 

[archzeratul]

Any way to determine if there is positive pressure within the case? Doing a summation on the approximate cfm airflow from the fans?

I have only two exhaust fans... the 200mm on the top, and the 120mm on the back panel.

I have two intake fans, one on the side (no filter, will probably pull in dust...), one on the front... I also have the PSU pulling in air, and the radiator pulling in air...

Inside the case, there is a bit of stupidity going on, I think... because the GPU's two fans are oriented downward, when it would make more sense to me to have them pointing upwards to help push air through the 200mm exhaust fan...

I have the radiator hooked up to the pins designated to CPU... and the pump to POWER.. I guess the other way around would make more sense but the cables don't reach that far... The cables for the fans are actually pretty inconvenient, the majority of them are quite short... the molex adapter connectors don't fit very well, and I'm using (all two of) the ones I have to connect the front and back panel fans...

Any ideas on what part may be faulty regarding the switching area on the back part of the case? My only guesses are that the pins are shorted, or the whole switching component is shorted out...

I guess all of the above aren't too imported, but I have two more questions... which you might be able to help with...:

Any suggestions on how I should modify Win 7 to accommodate for the SSD? Disable paging? Indexing?

I'm also having second thoughts about putting the Caviar Black 2TB drive into the NAS... I might buy another disk drive to put into that, and use the caviar black inside of my computer case... What file system should I use? As far as I know, Windows can only use FAT16/32 and NTFS? If I want to install Linux in a dual boot configuration, should I partition all of the disk to be NTFS? Half and half NTFS / EXT4? I'm guessing the NAS uses EXT4 and that shouldn't matter.. since I'd be accessing files remotely from there ...

Thanks again for all your help. I'm glad I didn't break anything, and I'm happy with the machine I have... despite some parts of it being overkill. Probably the most impressive part is the SSD for me...

 

[mfenn]

Any way to determine if there is positive pressure within the case? Doing a summation on the approximate cfm airflow from the fans?

I have only two exhaust fans... the 200mm on the top, and the 120mm on the back panel.

I have two intake fans, one on the side (no filter, will probably pull in dust...), one on the front... I also have the PSU pulling in air, and the radiator pulling in air...

Inside the case, there is a bit of stupidity going on, I think... because the GPU's two fans are oriented downward, when it would make more sense to me to have them pointing upwards to help push air through the 200mm exhaust fan...

Use a barometer? :awe: But seriously, CFM intake - CFM exhaust will work. If the number is positive, you have a positive pressure setup. The orientation of fans that don't intake or exhaust is not exceptionally important.

Also, I highly doubt that the PSU is serving as an intake for the rest of the PC. If you have it such that the PSU fan is facing the bottom of the case, it is taking in air from the outside and exhausting it out the back.

I have the radiator hooked up to the pins designated to CPU... and the pump to POWER.. I guess the other way around would make more sense but the cables don't reach that far... The cables for the fans are actually pretty inconvenient, the majority of them are quite short... the molex adapter connectors don't fit very well, and I'm using (all two of) the ones I have to connect the front and back panel fans...

What you have is fine, you definitely do NOT want to run the pump at a lower speed. Remember that a radiator does exactly the same think as heatsink fins, it just has water to move the heat all of 6 inches from the base of the CPU. The airflow over those fins is what will determine the overall cooling ability.

Any ideas on what part may be faulty regarding the switching area on the back part of the case? My only guesses are that the pins are shorted, or the whole switching component is shorted out...

No idea really without looking at it.

Any suggestions on how I should modify Win 7 to accommodate for the SSD? Disable paging? Indexing?

You honestly don't need to do anything special for performance and longevity. Windows should automatically disable defragmentation when it detects an SSD. If you want to regain some capacity, you can shrink the page file and turn off hibernation.

I'm also having second thoughts about putting the Caviar Black 2TB drive into the NAS... I might buy another disk drive to put into that, and use the caviar black inside of my computer case... What file system should I use? As far as I know, Windows can only use FAT16/32 and NTFS? If I want to install Linux in a dual boot configuration, should I partition all of the disk to be NTFS? Half and half NTFS / EXT4? I'm guessing the NAS uses EXT4 and that shouldn't matter.. since I'd be accessing files remotely from there ...

Depends on whether or not you want to share files between the OSes. The main Linux directory hierarchy should always be on a native Linux filesystem such as ext4. If you don't care to share files between the OSes, you could just partition and format the entire drive with ext4 (standard /, /boot, /home, yadda yadda). If you want to share files, I would format as normal with ext4, except leave whatever portion that you want to use for bulk storage as NTFS. It is much easier to have Linux read/write NTFS than it is to deal with the limitations of FAT32.

Thanks again for all your help. I'm glad I didn't break anything, and I'm happy with the machine I have... despite some parts of it being overkill. Probably the most impressive part is the SSD for me...

No prob.