Building an i7 970/980x system for < $3000

[cjthibeault]

Hello Everyone,

I'm going to be moving my current desktop (q6600, 8gb) to my university office, and I want to build a new system for my home office.

This system will be primarily be used for software development, image processing, heavy math, and some occasional multi-track music work. In general, this will NOT be a gaming system (how I long for the good old days of early 90's console RPGs... sigh...).

I must keep the budget for this system at < $3000 USD. The closer I can get to $2500, the better...

The only items from my existing system that I will be keeping are my PCI soundcard (EMU 1616-M) and several SATA hard drives for data storage.

With that said, here is what I am looking at:

CPU: Intel i7 970 or a 980x
MB: EVGA FTW3 132-GT-E768-KR
HSF:Thermalright Silver Arrow
Case: Corsair Obsidian 700D
Powersupply: Corsair HX 750w
Graphics:Gigabyte GV-N98TSL-1GI Geforce 9800GT (1GB)
Mem: G.Skill Ripjaws 1333 (12gb or 24gb)
Boot Disk256gb C300 RealSSD

My only three rules: it must be an i7 hexcore, the graphics card must be nvidia (for CUDA support), and I like my computers to be *quiet* as much as possible.

Now, some of this requires some explanation... the first thing is that video card. Yeah, I know that a 9800 is old news. However, this is the best graphics card that I could find that had passive cooling. I'd consider something with a fan, but only if that fan was very, very quiet. Most that I checked out were not.

As for the CPU, I'm leaning towards the 970. Yes, I will make use of all 6 cores, I have no doubt of this. I will be air cooling for the foreseeable future with an awesome cooler (the Silver Arrow), and I do plan on some overclocking. I am willing to push it as far as it can go, but I'd be happy even at stock speed if it doesn't want to budge for me. Is the 980x really going to be worth the extra $100 for the unlocked multi?

For memory, this will be a 24gb system. It might start off with just 12gb, and get bumped to 24gb 6 months from now, I'm not quite sure yet. 1600 memory is still quite expensive, and from the benchmarks I've read, 1333 memory shouldn't be all that bad unless I'm going for massive overclocking. Yes? Can somebody find a better solution (and/or price!)?

I checked out many motherboards, and of course there were complaints on just about all of them. This seemed to be a good board, at a middle-of-the-road price. Any thoughts on this board?

I'm pretty much set on the case. I was thinking about going with the smaller version that is coming, but it won't be until the end of the month, and I'm looking to order this stuff in the next few days.

I'll be using the SSD as a boot drive (Windows 7, 64bit), and I have a few terrabytes of additional non-SSD storage that I'll be bringing in. I understand that this is the only 6gb capable SSD at the moment.

Assuming the 970 with 12gbs of memory, along with a few misc. items (cables, dvd burner), I've got a newegg subtotal of $2461.92, plus about $90 elsewhere for the Silver Arrow. I like that.

Of course, I have to take into account shipping (I'm impatient, so this will run >$100), and potentially about $100 for another monitor if I can't scrounge one up somewhere.

Here is where I need you!
Can I do better than this? Is there anything that seems wrong, out of place, or otherwise just a bad idea? This is my first build since my q6600 a few years ago, and so much has changed. Any and all criticism is welcome.

Thanks so much for your help...
-Chris

 

[Davidh373]

I don't think you need a 256GB SSD. You'd be better off with something like a 60GB Corsair Force or a OCZ Agility 2. These are actually faster than the 6GB/S one you've got there, despite it being Sata 3GB/S.

I personally would get the 970. The 980X is 130Mhz over and a whole $200 more expensive. Not that you'd want to, but you could build almost an entire i7 930 system with the price of that processor alone. I can understand though, assuming you are working in Autocad or Animation software, a renderer like mental ray will suck every bit of power out of that processor. Truth be told though, you won't see that much benefit for your money from 130Mhz.

If you are in graphics or 3D you shouldn't be looking for passive cooling, you should be looking for performance. I've heard the GTX460 is a pretty silent card. Since you are going this high-end with money to spare I'd go with the 480.

As for the Ram, I work in 3D and visual effects and I haven't even capped off my 6GB yet, and I can have close to the entire Adobe Production Premium running (Ae, Ps, Pr, 3DS Max and sometimes ZBrush and Crazy Bump) I haven't noticed my Memory usage spike over 4.5GB. If you really feel you'll be doing more than that be my guest and get 12.

 

[skuzzzzy]

Hello Everyone,

I'm going to be moving my current desktop (q6600, 8gb) to my university office, and I want to build a new system for my home office.

This system will be primarily be used for software development, image processing, heavy math, and some occasional multi-track music work. In general, this will NOT be a gaming system (how I long for the good old days of early 90's console RPGs... sigh...).

I must keep the budget for this system at < $3000 USD. The closer I can get to $2500, the better...

The only items from my existing system that I will be keeping are my PCI soundcard (EMU 1616-M) and several SATA hard drives for data storage.

With that said, here is what I am looking at:

CPU: Intel i7 970 or a 980x
MB: EVGA FTW3 132-GT-E768-KR
HSF:Thermalright Silver Arrow
Case: Corsair Obsidian 700D
Powersupply: Corsair HX 750w
Graphics:Gigabyte GV-N98TSL-1GI Geforce 9800GT (1GB)
Mem: G.Skill Ripjaws 1333 (12gb or 24gb)
Boot Disk256gb C300 RealSSD

My only three rules: it must be an i7 hexcore, the graphics card must be nvidia (for CUDA support), and I like my computers to be *quiet* as much as possible.

Now, some of this requires some explanation... the first thing is that video card. Yeah, I know that a 9800 is old news. However, this is the best graphics card that I could find that had passive cooling. I'd consider something with a fan, but only if that fan was very, very quiet. Most that I checked out were not.

As for the CPU, I'm leaning towards the 970. Yes, I will make use of all 6 cores, I have no doubt of this. I will be air cooling for the foreseeable future with an awesome cooler (the Silver Arrow), and I do plan on some overclocking. I am willing to push it as far as it can go, but I'd be happy even at stock speed if it doesn't want to budge for me. Is the 980x really going to be worth the extra $100 for the unlocked multi?

For memory, this will be a 24gb system. It might start off with just 12gb, and get bumped to 24gb 6 months from now, I'm not quite sure yet. 1600 memory is still quite expensive, and from the benchmarks I've read, 1333 memory shouldn't be all that bad unless I'm going for massive overclocking. Yes? Can somebody find a better solution (and/or price!)?

I checked out many motherboards, and of course there were complaints on just about all of them. This seemed to be a good board, at a middle-of-the-road price. Any thoughts on this board?

I'm pretty much set on the case. I was thinking about going with the smaller version that is coming, but it won't be until the end of the month, and I'm looking to order this stuff in the next few days.

I'll be using the SSD as a boot drive (Windows 7, 64bit), and I have a few terrabytes of additional non-SSD storage that I'll be bringing in. I understand that this is the only 6gb capable SSD at the moment.

Assuming the 970 with 12gbs of memory, along with a few misc. items (cables, dvd burner), I've got a newegg subtotal of $2461.92, plus about $90 elsewhere for the Silver Arrow. I like that.

Of course, I have to take into account shipping (I'm impatient, so this will run >$100), and potentially about $100 for another monitor if I can't scrounge one up somewhere.

Here is where I need you!
Can I do better than this? Is there anything that seems wrong, out of place, or otherwise just a bad idea? This is my first build since my q6600 a few years ago, and so much has changed. Any and all criticism is welcome.

Thanks so much for your help...
-Chris

i wouldnt get the gtx 480 as suggested, but i agree you should atleast get a gtx 460.

although thats a good case, its really made for water cooling, not so good at air cooling.

 

[cjthibeault]

I don't think you need a 256GB SSD. You'd be better off with something like a 60GB Corsair Force or a OCZ Agility 2. These are actually faster than the 6GB/S one you've got there, despite it being Sata 3GB/S.

At the very least, I'm pretty sure I need 128Gb. 3 different versions of Visual Studio, Matlab, Maple, Office, Photoshop, and a number of other development tools and documentation quickly suck up a lot of space.

If I still wanted to go with > 128Gb, would you recommend the 240Gb Corsair Force over the 256Gb C300?

I personally would get the 970. The 980X is 130Mhz over and a whole $200 more expensive. Not that you'd want to, but you could build almost an entire i7 930 system with the price of that processor alone. I can understand though, assuming you are working in Autocad or Animation software, a renderer like mental ray will suck every bit of power out of that processor. Truth be told though, you won't see that much benefit for your money from 130Mhz.

That is what I was leaning towards. If I need 'a little bit' extra a couple years down the road, I can probably pick up that 980x for *much* less than I could today

If you are in graphics or 3D you shouldn't be looking for passive cooling, you should be looking for performance. I've heard the GTX460 is a pretty silent card. Since you are going this high-end with money to spare I'd go with the 480.

I'm not really 'in' graphics or 3D. My work in Photoshop tends to be large photo restoration projects, or image work for software projects, websites, etc. I don't generally play the new 3D games. Down the road, I will need something better for serious CUDA math work, but not at the moment. My main concern at this point would be as quiet as possible without terrible performance. My current card in the q6600 build is a 9500, which has served we well for my purposes.

I just started googling around on the 460. It might be quiet enough. Worst case scenario, if it isn't, I'd just swap it out with the 9500 and put the 460 in my q6600 (I don't care about the noise at work so much).

As for the Ram, I work in 3D and visual effects and I haven't even capped off my 6GB yet, and I can have close to the entire Adobe Production Premium running (Ae, Ps, Pr, 3DS Max and sometimes ZBrush and Crazy Bump) I haven't noticed my Memory usage spike over 4.5GB. If you really feel you'll be doing more than that be my guest and get 12.

I routinely max out my 8gb. Large matrices can take up huge amounts of memory, and working with them can require memory workspaces several times larger than the input matrices. All that, plus I need room for everything else going on in my system. I also would like to throw a 2-4gb ramdrive into the mix.

Thanks for responding!

 

[cjthibeault]

i wouldnt get the gtx 480 as suggested, but i agree you should atleast get a gtx 460.

although thats a good case, its really made for water cooling, not so good at air cooling.

I'm looking around for a quiet 460. As I started in my other reply, if I get one, and it isn't as quiet as I'd like, I can just put it in my other box, and keep using my 9500gt that I already have.

As for the case, I like the size, the clean interior working space, and the separation. The cooler I am using is *huge*, with two 140mm fans. As I don't plan on working the GPU all that hard, I'm thinking it would be alright air cooling wise, and I can always go to water cooling down the road (have had previous bad experience with a Zalman Reserator way back when...)

Have you (or anyone else) had problems with air cooling in this case?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Synesthesia]

You should check this report out for a comparison between the 980X and the 970.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/18581/16

From what I can see, the 980X is a pretty significant jump in processing power from the 970.

 

[cjthibeault]

You should check this report out for a comparison between the 980X and the 970.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/18581/16

From what I can see, the 980X is a pretty significant jump in processing power from the 970.

I don't believe the 970 is on that list (you might have saw the 870?). The 970 is just a 980x that is a little bit slower with a locked multi.

 

[skuzzzzy]

I'm looking around for a quiet 460. As I started in my other reply, if I get one, and it isn't as quiet as I'd like, I can just put it in my other box, and keep using my 9500gt that I already have.

As for the case, I like the size, the clean interior working space, and the separation. The cooler I am using is *huge*, with two 140mm fans. As I don't plan on working the GPU all that hard, I'm thinking it would be alright air cooling wise, and I can always go to water cooling down the road (have had previous bad experience with a Zalman Reserator way back when...)

Have you (or anyone else) had problems with air cooling in this case?

Thanks,
Chris

i personally love the case, cooling is only reason i didnt get, however you wont be gaming so your right.

these two models are said to be quiet,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130571
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125333

source:
http://tech-report.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&p=1035713
and
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/13 <-- scroll to the bottom.
i would get a evga over gigabyte but both should be good.

i7 970 vs i7 980x at stock speeds:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/157?vs=142

ssd, whatever size you feel like you need. but those crucials are faster but i believe those sandforces are more reliable, would look into the corsair or gskill.

 

[cjthibeault]

Ok. I've settled on a new graphics card. I'm now looking at the MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1Gb. From a number of reviews, it is dead quiet, and not too expensive.

 

[skuzzzzy]

Ok. I've settled on a new graphics card. I'm now looking at the MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1Gb. From a number of reviews, it is dead quiet, and not too expensive.

looks nice, make sure you order one of the bundles though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.455033

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.499321

that seasonic would give you a better psu then the corsair + its fully modular, however the corsair has a 7 year warranty and seasonic 5 years. id personally go with the seasonic though.

 

[Googer]

You dont want to fill your SSD up with non-program related stuff. Consider getting a 1tb HDD to store your downloads, doccuments, pictures, video, music, and non-essential or rarely used programs.

 

[Synesthesia]

I don't believe the 970 is on that list (you might have saw the 870?). The 970 is just a 980x that is a little bit slower with a locked multi.

Oh wow, i really need some sleep then =/. My apologies. Still a good chart for reference.

 

[cjthibeault]

You dont want to fill your SSD up with non-program related stuff. Consider getting a 1tb HDD to store your downloads, doccuments, pictures, video, music, and non-essential or rarely used programs.

I've got a few non-SSD drives (about 2Tb worth) from the old system that will be going into this one, so I got that covered. Thanks.

 

[cjthibeault]

looks nice, make sure you order one of the bundles though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.455033

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.499321

that seasonic would give you a better psu then the corsair + its fully modular, however the corsair has a 7 year warranty and seasonic 5 years. id personally go with the seasonic though.

...but it would also be more money. I will probably stick with the Corsair for now, especially since I had a Seasonic die on me a few years ago.

 

[cjthibeault]

Oh wow, i really need some sleep then =/. My apologies. Still a good chart for reference.

No need to apologize! Thanks for trying to help.

I am pretty close to ordering at this point, but I was wondering if anyone had any particular comments about my choice of motherboard and memory. Has anyone had bad experiences with these? Or can I do better for roughly the same price (+/- a bit)?

Thanks again,
Chris

 

[darkewaffle]

From the sounds of it, you're pretty concerned with acoustics. *rimshot*

Get a Seasonic X-650 or X-750 PSU.

Personally the motherboard has a bit of a price premium and I'm not really seeing any reason why, but it's not a huge margin.

Otherwise everything looks about right, though were it me I'd be getting Mushkin ram and not such a large SSD; I would think something like an Intel X25-M 160GB would be good for you, plenty of space (probably?) but not exorbitant.

You also might want to consider getting some good case fans though, passive cards and big cases need airflow. I would even consider a passive GT 240 over the 9800 because it's going to use less space, less power, and put out less heat without a major drop in performance. Though once/if you begin to seriously utilize CUDA, you're going to have a fan whether you like it or not.

 

[cjthibeault]

From the sounds of it, you're pretty concerned with acoustics. *rimshot*

Get a Seasonic X-650 or X-750 PSU.

Personally the motherboard has a bit of a price premium and I'm not really seeing any reason why, but it's not a huge margin.

Otherwise everything looks about right, though were it me I'd be getting Mushkin ram and not such a large SSD; I would think something like an Intel X25-M 160GB would be good for you, plenty of space (probably?) but not exorbitant.

You also might want to consider getting some good case fans though, passive cards and big cases need airflow. I would even consider a passive GT 240 over the 9800 because it's going to use less space, less power, and put out less heat without a major drop in performance. Though once/if you begin to seriously utilize CUDA, you're going to have a fan whether you like it or not.

I'll take another look at the Seasonic. My last one was also quiet (which is why I bought it), but it stopped giving power, which really wasn't what I wanted out of a PS

Is there any particular reason for the Mushkin? The price on those ripjaws is low enough that even with buying 24gbs, if I find I need better for overclocking down the road, I'd be ok with buying a new set once prices come down in a year or so.

From my other posts, I've decided to go with a GTX 460. And for the SSD, I've started totaling up my actual requirements, and I'm pretty sure I will need > 128gb, and so I'd like to leave some extra room for, well... 'extras'...

Thanks.

 

[darkewaffle]

You could even go with the fanless Seasonic SS-460FL, but that's getting unnecessarily unnecessary

Mostly a customer service thing with Mushkin, great company with active reps in the community. When you're using that much RAM, the kits are all pretty evenly specced so I chose based on other factors.

Yea, I have no idea what kind of hdd space you need for those kinds of programs, just a projection.

 

[Davidh373]

At the very least, I'm pretty sure I need 128Gb. 3 different versions of Visual Studio, Matlab, Maple, Office, Photoshop, and a number of other development tools and documentation quickly suck up a lot of space.

If I still wanted to go with > 128Gb, would you recommend the 240Gb Corsair Force over the 256Gb C300?

I would, but I am still confident with all the apps you use that you won't need anything over 60 for apps and OS ONLY. If you get a lot of storage going on the SSD, that is when you'd run into problems.

That is what I was leaning towards. If I need 'a little bit' extra a couple years down the road, I can probably pick up that 980x for *much* less than I could today

Agreed, or something much better for much less.

I'm not really 'in' graphics or 3D. My work in Photoshop tends to be large photo restoration projects, or image work for software projects, websites, etc. I don't generally play the new 3D games. Down the road, I will need something better for serious CUDA math work, but not at the moment. My main concern at this point would be as quiet as possible without terrible performance. My current card in the q6600 build is a 9500, which has served we well for my purposes.

I just started googling around on the 460. It might be quiet enough. Worst case scenario, if it isn't, I'd just swap it out with the 9500 and put the 460 in my q6600 (I don't care about the noise at work so much).

I'm quite confused to why you would need a 970 then. The programs you've mentioned aren't really all that intense on the processor. If you were working in large .raw in Photoshop then you should need more than 6GB RAM, but the processor seems to be an over-indulgence. Either that or you have more than the picture you are restoring open (or rather more than the 16 pictures it would take to eat memory like that). Unless maple is what you need it for, you shouldn't need more than 6GB, although 12 might be fun . I've never heard of maple.

I routinely max out my 8gb. Large matrices can take up huge amounts of memory, and working with them can require memory workspaces several times larger than the input matrices. All that, plus I need room for everything else going on in my system. I also would like to throw a 2-4gb ramdrive into the mix.

Thanks for responding!

Fair enough. I looked up Maple and it seems to be Calculation software which would theoretically eat processor and RAM. I think a 460 would still be best for your GPU though.

You may want to see how often you max out that 12GB of RAM. Again, I've never used maple, so I don't know how it acts.

 

[skuzzzzy]

I'll take another look at the Seasonic. My last one was also quiet (which is why I bought it), but it stopped giving power, which really wasn't what I wanted out of a PS

Is there any particular reason for the Mushkin? The price on those ripjaws is low enough that even with buying 24gbs, if I find I need better for overclocking down the road, I'd be ok with buying a new set once prices come down in a year or so.

From my other posts, I've decided to go with a GTX 460. And for the SSD, I've started totaling up my actual requirements, and I'm pretty sure I will need > 128gb, and so I'd like to leave some extra room for, well... 'extras'...

Thanks.

seasonic makes psu's for corsair, im thinking the hx750 might be one of the models it makes but i could be wrong? but the combo deal on that graphics card is really good.

 

[mfenn]

Does your code scale well with cores? Matlab code should, unless you are doing something wierd.

Is your code cache intensive? (many scientific codes can be)

If the answer to both of those questions is yes, you may want to look into a dual-socket setup with 2 E5620's instead of the 970. You get the same amount of MHz * cores, but with 3MB of cache per core instead of 2MB. You also get two memory controllers, effectively doubling your memory bandwidth.

A dual-socket system also gives you access to boards (such as the SuperMicro MBD-X8DTi-O) with 12 DIMM slots, allowing for future memory upgrades.

The dual socket route would likely require you to go with smaller CPU coolers though.

 

[cjthibeault]

Does your code scale well with cores? Matlab code should, unless you are doing something wierd.

Is your code cache intensive? (many scientific codes can be)

If the answer to both of those questions is yes, you may want to look into a dual-socket setup with 2 E5620's instead of the 970. You get the same amount of MHz * cores, but with 3MB of cache per core instead of 2MB. You also get two memory controllers, effectively doubling your memory bandwidth.

A dual-socket system also gives you access to boards (such as the SuperMicro MBD-X8DTi-O) with 12 DIMM slots, allowing for future memory upgrades.

The dual socket route would likely require you to go with smaller CPU coolers though.

Here is the thing: several pieces of software I use would greatly benefit from as many cores as I can throw at it. Further, the software I am writing will also be taking advantage of more cores. However, I also run a number of single-threaded apps, and I don't want those to be at a disadvantage.

I've looked into some of the Xeon stuff, but I think that short-term, it will be too expensive for me (those 5620's I don't think will do it for the single-threaded stuff). If the new software I'm working on generates some additional income, I may be able to look into a nicely loaded dual Xeon setup (with a 970 as 'my other box'), but until then, the i7 is going to give me the biggest bang for my bucks.

Just curious though, could I use non-ECC memory in the 5600 series?

 

[RaistlinZ]

The C300 or the Corsair Force should do well. I think Anand had a recent article showing Crucial and worked out the kinks in the C300, and they score very well on the Anandtech Storage Bench.

Don't listen to that other guy who says 60GB is all you need for a SSD, has he has absolutely no idea what kinds of programs you'll be installing over the next year or two. Get the size you think will be sufficient.

 

[Googer]

The C300 or the Corsair Force should do well. I think Anand had a recent article showing Crucial and worked out the kinks in the C300, and they score very well on the Anandtech Storage Bench.

Don't listen to that other guy who says 60GB is all you need for a SSD, has he has absolutely no idea what kinds of programs you'll be installing over the next year or two. Get the size you think will be sufficient.

A 60GB SSD for you'd OS, start-up applications, browser, mail client, and other most (daily) used applications is plenty. A 1TB HDD for all your infrequently used apps like spybot, picasa, paint.net, audacity, and any program that gets used only once per week will do fine on a HDD.

I use a 160GB drive for my OS and apps. It's not even 1/4 used. I added downloads and mediafiles to it before things came near a limit. After deletion, it's back to under 1/4 again.

 

[Googer]

You could even go with the fanless Seasonic SS-460FL, but that's getting unnecessarily unnecessary

Mostly a customer service thing with Mushkin, great company with active reps in the community. When you're using that much RAM, the kits are all pretty evenly specced so I chose based on other factors.

Yea, I have no idea what kind of hdd space you need for those kinds of programs, just a projection.

Reminds me of the whole NVIDIA thing where untill they were caught; NV would pay people to go to forums, blogs, amazon, and sing their praises.