Building this system this week. Thoughts?

[sakete]

Hi guys,

I'll be building the following system this coming week (parts are on the way so budget is irrelevant for now):

i7 4790K
Asus Z97-Pro (non USB 3.1)
G.Skill Ares DDR3-2400 C11 2x8GB (low profile sticks)
Noctua NH-D15 heatsink/fan
EVGA GTX970 FTW (will probably upgrade to 980Ti / 390X down the road)
EVGA GS 1050W PSU
SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB
2x HGST Desktar NAS 4TB in RAID 1
Fractal Design R5 case
Corsair K70 MX-Brown (non-RGB version) keyboard
Logitech G502 mouse
Dell U2715H monitor
Sound: Schiit Magni 2 Uber/Modi 2 Uber Stack > 2x JBL LSR305 / Sony MDR-7520 headphone

Will overclock the i7 to a higher speed and down the road will probably want to have a SLI / Crossfire setup depending on what I upgrade to down the road (hence the 1050W PSU).

Main uses: gaming (I really do enjoy playing games but don't consider myself a hardcore die-hard gamer), photo editing, video encoding, some music production/mixing and everything else one uses a PC for. And hell, I just wanted to go mostly all out on a PC for once

Only real concern I have is the Asus board. On Newegg about 20% of reviews are 1 egg with lots of issues. Other brands such as Gigabyte seemed to have a lower percentage of 1 egg reviews. Perhaps its skewed due to the relative popularity of Asus boards, I don't know.

I decided to just go for a non G-Sync/FreeSync monitor as from what I've read so far I've concluded that the technology isn't ripe for prime time yet, especially the display panel technology for IPS type screens (IPS is a must for me as I need good viewing angles and color accuracy for photo work). I can probably live with some screen tearing and I'm not a competitive gamer so will probably not notice the ghosting that much.

Also decided to go for the GTX970 now as that's the most bang for the buck and I think I might have a slight preference for Nvidia overall (although I've mostly had AMD/ATI cards in the past)

Anyway, would appreciate any feedback. Just because parts are ordered doesn't mean they can't be replaced or exchanged.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

This is good:

"Industry leading digital 12-phase power design"

That being said, you can probably get the 4790K to 4.7Ghz, but benchmark scores aren't going to show much or any gain. You can consider finding stability at that setting, but tuning it for the 4.4 Ghz turbo "on all cores" would still be great, and you'll still need good cooling.

NOW. That being said. The D15. I've got the D14 in one system, and the various bench reviews where the D15 gets compared to either the D14 or another cooler in the D14-inclusive review pretty much shows it will get you between 2 and 4C better cooling performance than its predecessor.

What that means -- this cooler should prove between 2 and 4C better than that:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...re=EVGA_ACX_CPU_cooler-_-35-288-004-_-Product

The reason I say this -- everyone complains about massive heatpipe coolers. I got my initial information on the ACX (formerly the "SuperClock") in a Hardware Secrets review -- which you can find. I tested it on an identical system, identical clocks, identical cases, identical fans -- against my D14 installation, and verified the 6C better cooling. You can only mount a single fan on it, but you could also buy a $5 ThermalRight accordion duct, port it to the rear exhaust fan and essentially get the same result as a dual fan setup without the weight on the cooler or the mobo. This is a single-tower cooler, not that much bigger than the Hyper 212 EVO. And -- it costs less. With the rubber ducty, you should expect about 5C more improvement in cooling over the published bench results, so that's about 11C better than the D14 and about 8 or 9C better than the D15 with the Noctuas in stock installation.

The only drawback: Dump the LED fan and replace it with something like a Noctua iPPC. [There goes your savings for spending less than the D15 price.]

Also, take a look at the Corsair C70 case as an option against the Fractal.

The Sandisk SSD gets stellar reviews this month from Maximum PC.

That leaves the PSU. It's more than you need, even for 2x GTX 980 in SLI, so it won't be as efficient. There've been enough exchanges and threads about this in the PSU forum: the recommendation seems to be a high-quality 750W unit -- 850W gives a double margin when the 750 should already have enough. But the EVGA's in general seem to be good PSUs with great warranty.

Nothing wrong with the HGST HDDs if you need that much workstation storage.

About the customer-reviews on the ASUS board. That's normal. You will find a lot of motherboards that are otherwise top-end and stellar with ratings like that. A lot of folks just don't know what they're doing, so they blame in on the motherboard. You can analyze the one-eggers: How many DOA, what sort of other problems, complaints about ASUS warranty.

Figure that more dissatisfied buyers, some of whom may have bent their socket pins or any number of things, will post reviews, while many fewer happy campers will post. This will bias the ratings.

You could also look at another Z97 board: For instance, the Sabertooth costs $270, only has a 10-phase or 8+2 phase-power design; the mobo plate will give great cooling; has 5-year warranty as all of those Sabertooths did through the generations. there are the Maximus boards, more expensive, likely to have at least 12-phase design. And there are at least a few other incarnations of the Sabertooth -- some less expensive.

Someone else can recommend an AsRock, Gigabyte, EVGA, etc. I usually buy ASUS boards, so . . that's where this comes from.

I wouldn't let those one-eggers deter me from trying the Z97-Pro, though.

 

[sakete]

Thanks for your suggestions! I think either way I'll keep the 1050W PSU, as at 500-700W loads it's very efficient (~90%). And it will not use more power than the system is drawing, no modern PSU does that. And since it's a Seasonic build it should be very reliable, so who knows what I'll end up using it for in the future.

Will also stick to the D15 cooler I think, unless it turns out to be too big for my case, which it shouldn't (I checked the specs).

Appreciate the feedback on the Asus board. As far as reviews are concerned, that was my suspicion as well, that generally people who are happy with their product will not bother posting a review and you'll usually see relatively more negative reviews than positive ones. Thankfully this will not be my first build, but my sixth or seventh so I like to think I somewhat know what I'm doing

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thanks for your suggestions! I think either way I'll keep the 1050W PSU, as at 500-700W loads it's very efficient (~90%). And it will not use more power than the system is drawing, no modern PSU does that. And since it's a Seasonic build it should be very reliable, so who knows what I'll end up using it for in the future.

Will also stick to the D15 cooler I think, unless it turns out to be too big for my case, which it shouldn't (I checked the specs).

Appreciate the feedback on the Asus board. As far as reviews are concerned, that was my suspicion as well, that generally people who are happy with their product will not bother posting a review and you'll usually see relatively more negative reviews than positive ones. Thankfully this will not be my first build, but my sixth or seventh so I like to think I somewhat know what I'm doing

I never bothered to confirm who the OEM had been for the EVGA PSUs, so that's also handy information for me. The XFX BEFX PSUs were also confirmed to be Seasonic.

There's nothing particularly wrong with running a PSU that has an excessive margin of capacity, but the proper measuring stick is really something like a weighted average of total time spent at a certain power-draws times that wattage. In other words, your system will spend time at idle; it will spend time running only at near-idle for office apps and web-browsing; it will spend so much time running intensive games, etc.

In certain gaming situations, power consumption even with 2x SLI graphics might not exceed 400 to 500W. At the extremes -- idle versus extreme bench-testing -- efficiency drops below 90%, adding an extra trickle to your power-bill -- which you will likely never notice. It would ultimately boil down to whether you're ever going to add enough hardware to your case and rig to increase power-draw in the more extreme situations -- enough to approach the PSU's rating. But since PSUs are rated for the average maximum sustainable wattage, the really good ones (like Seasonic) will likely handle sustained wattage in excess of 100W over the rated spec. So if you pick the PSU with a rated spec to cover all the extreme, overclocked stress-test situations for the chosen hardware, that should be all you'd ever need. Ultimately, it would then be only an issue of spending more for a capacity you'll never use.

HOWEVER. If the motherboard has both the PCI-E lanes and x16 slots to admit a 3rd graphics card, and you are even thinking of 3x SLI in the future, you would definitely be better off getting the 1,000+W-rated EVGA now.

As far as the D15, you'll still fall short of the ACX's potential by about 3C, and it will consume more space in the case. The cooling difference is probably insignificant. The single-tower cooler is a good option to relieve the cumbersome case-clutter. There would also be the additional weight @ ~ 7 oz per Noctua fan, if that sort of thing worries you -- but it shouldn't. There shouldn't be any issue of noise between the coolers; and you'd use fewer fans with the EVGA.

In my project late last year, I was prepared to buy the D15 until I discovered the benchmark reviews revealing the ACX performance, and I just had to test it out of curiosity. They designed it to a certain level of "bling" -- in both the shape and LED fan choice -- which I consider a bit banal. The LED fan DOES generate barely-noticeable motor noise and there are plenty of replacement options. So it seemed odd to me -- even weird -- that the cooler performs better. But it definitely does.

 

[PhIlLy ChEeSe]

New egg head reviews, Smmmh!
I wouldn't base a decision on any input from someone who doesn't know what they are doing. Asus makes great boards, you will be happy if you do get one unless its there cheapest one.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

New egg head reviews, Smmmh!
I wouldn't base a decision on any input from someone who doesn't know what they are doing. Asus makes great boards, you will be happy if you do get one unless its there cheapest one.

It's a decision tool if you KNOW that some people "don't know what they're doing." It's worth sorting out the one, two and three-egg reviews to see the incidence of the same chronic problem, for instance -- "DOA" experiences. But as a quality-control measure, the bad experiences are likely to considerably exceed what the manufacturer measured or required at the end of the production-line, because customer-reviews are voluntary, and the discontents will post their whines and bitches with greater enthusiasm than those who are happy.

I had noticed for some time now that 5-egg reviews of motherboards that exceed 60 to 70% are less likely, although it would depend.

Mainstreamers, dabblers and noobs may not be inclined so much to spend $350 for a top-end motherboard, and those who do are likely to be veteran builders and configurators. Even so, I'd seen 50% 5-eggers here and there for what had been "promoted" to be expensive top-end boards, but published lab-test reviews might show those products a tad disappointing. But with motherboards, making all the connections, pushing something like a "Mem-OK!" button at boot-time, and configuring the BIOS introduces a lot of steps and increase the chances of mistakes.

Compare to some other component, like RAM, which requires less hands-on fiddling. One often sees some of those products with 5-egg reviews at the 80+% level. If you see RAM kits with as many 1-eggers as 5-eggers and distribution in between, you look more closely at the details. There are plenty of RAM kits from less-known manufacturers, perhaps at a lower price-point, for which reliability can be questionable. And we all know -- RAM is the last thing -- or one of the last -- where any kind of imperfection can be tolerated.

In the end, it's all an exercise in assessing probabilities. "What are the chances that I'll receive a defective or DOA item?" In other cases, for instance reviews of SATA controllers, one discovers that a controller works great with Windows, but not with Linux, and the customer-reviews can reveal that.

Other reviews show trivial concerns that would leave the experienced DIY-er undaunted. "The PSU cables were too short," for instance. "The software was inadequate." "I didn't like the color of the item." In my own particular case of concerns, if a certain CPU cooler has noisy fans that can be replaced, the only thing user reviews give me is a heads-up to start shopping for fan options.

If I'm shopping for an expensive part, I wouldn't base my choices on customer reviews. I'd start with the published test reviews one finds at Anandtech, Xbit Labs, TechReport and so on. But I'd always look at the customer-reviews to see if there's some detail the lab reviews missed, some configuration problem, incompatibility with an OS.

If the customer-reviews show a lot of DOAs, one has to consider just what that means with the review bias I mentioned. The actual percentage of DOAs will always be lower than the review percentage, because pissed-off people will post in revenge -- or just to warn others. Often, if we're pleased with a product, we're just as likely not to voice our praises.

 

[sakete]

Yeah and that's why I picked the Asus Z97-Pro. Has all the features I need and gets good reviews on all the professional sites. And it's not an entry-level board either, so likely to use good components.

Anyway, thanks guys!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Yeah and that's why I picked the Asus Z97-Pro. Has all the features I need and gets good reviews on all the professional sites. And it's not an entry-level board either, so likely to use good components.

Anyway, thanks guys!

The other thing about motherboards are their "life-cycle" circumstances. Every now and then, you find a version 1.0 of a board just released, with a BIOS that is every bit up to snuff with a minimum of bugs. But -- always -- there are BIOS bugs in the early releases.

So the errors or complaints might actually be related to that factor. That's another reason to look at the cus-reviews to assess the dates and chronology of problems, and it's likely that getting a board a bit later than other users would benefit from newer BIOS' either shipped with the board, or just available for immediate download and flashing before proceeding with the configuration and building.