Could use some feedback on proposed build

[thesimster]

Hi All,

I'm getting pretty excited about a proposed build of mine.
I could use some feedback or suggestions base on other people's experiences.

CPU: Intel Core i7 3930K
MBoard: ASRock X79 Extreme 9
RAM: Corsair 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 1600Mhz Dominator
GPU: 2x Gigabyte GTX 780 OC Edition in Dual SLI
Chassis: Bitfenix Shinobi XL Window
PSU: Corsair 860Watt Modular ATX AX860i
ODD: 2x LG Blu-Ray Combo Drives
Primary HDD: OCZ RevoDrive 3 PCIe SSD 120GB
Secondary HDD: Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDD
Expansion Slot: ASUS PCE-AC66 Dual Band Wireless PCIe Adapter
Cooling: Corsair Hydro H100i Liquid CPU Cooler

Current concerns are PCIe configuration (do I have room?) and PSU wattage (considering I'm adding another 1-2 legacy hard drives).

I'm also looking at getting some Bitfenix Spectre Pro fans and alchemy cables, anyone have thoughts on these?

I've been tweaking the setup, so I'm open to changes and suggestions.

Cheers all!

 

[thesimster]

Just realised I should clarify on a few things 😛

For some it may be overkill, but other than gaming I am also a professional 3D animator/modeler and I do a lot of photo-realistic rendering. My next PC will be Xeon Based purely for the purpose, but until then i7 it is!

I live in Australia, so that's where I'm sourcing the parts. I'm not too concerned about price (hence not listing them).

Brand preferences are Intel, Nvidia, Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte.

In the near future this will probably be running three 27" IPS 1440p screens.

 

[mfenn]

That build is overkill like crazy and really unfocused. Is gaming important to you at all, or is this strictly a work machine?

 

[thesimster]

Yes gaming is very important as both a player and dev.
This will be replacing my current all-rounder pc that is 6+ years old. It is not particuarly focused because it is for doing a bit of everything. My work pc will be a stock xeon/quadro system.

 

[Termie]

So if you are a game developer, I could see the rationale behind a 6-core: perhaps you want to try actually coding for more than four cores, although it will leave many gamers behind at this point. Same thing goes for 780SLI - if you're interested in testing whether SLI works with your apps, it makes sense. For everybody else, a single 780 is probably fine, paired with a 4770K.

The only other items that I'd question are the OCZ PCIe SSD, which is well over a year old and probably isn't worth messing with - just get a Samsung 840 Pro (128GB or 256GB). And then there are the dual blu-ray burners - I can't see any possible reason to have that unless you're trying to copy blu-ray discs. That's up to you...

The PSU has plenty of capacity for that system, and as for PCIe slots, well, you'll be fine if you don't use that OCZ drive - you can check the configuration yourself if you really want to try to add it in along with SLI, but again, I see no reason to bother.

 

[thesimster]

Thanks Termie I'll take a look at the Samsung 840 Pro, looks interesting. I have some friends who recommended the Revo Drive as they love it.

To clarify, I'm not a coder per say, I'm an environment artist. So i rely heavily on both Post process rendering (CPU heavy) and realtime rendering (GPU Heavy).
As an IT enthusiast I also like metting around with VMs and other such things, so I'd like to have plenty of RAM available.
On top of all that, I'm a hardcore gamer 😛

I could lose one DB drive, but I have found it handy to have two ODDs, and the extra is <$100. First thing to go if it needs to.
Thanks for clarifying the PSU, all the system checkers out there have a rather large margin between them.

 

[mfenn]

Yes gaming is very important as both a player and dev.
This will be replacing my current all-rounder pc that is 6+ years old. It is not particuarly focused because it is for doing a bit of everything. My work pc will be a stock xeon/quadro system.

I guess I don't understand your component choice then? You have a big Xeon machine to do your rendering on, so why do you need a 6-core with 32GB of RAM for your play machine?

Agree with Termie on the RevoDrive. The compatibility headaches are not really worth it when you consider that it is just SATA drives in RAID on a PCIe board.

 

[thesimster]

I guess I don't understand your component choice then? You have a big Xeon machine to do your rendering on, so why do you need a 6-core with 32GB of RAM for your play machine?

Agree with Termie on the RevoDrive. The compatibility headaches are not really worth it when you consider that it is just SATA drives in RAID on a PCIe board.

You missunderstand, I do not have a Xeon machine, it is on the wishlist for the future. This machine is for work and play, and it needs to do both well.

What sort of compatibility issues have you experienced with the Revo Drive? I've heard only good things so far about the Revo 3 X2...

 

[lehtv]

CPU If budget is no concern and you need to do heavily multithreaded work, 3930K is the obvious choice.
Mobo Asrock X79 is good
RAM There's nothing special about dominator, just get the cheapest standard or low profile 4x8 1600 kit you can find, if 1.35V all the better (e.g. Crucial Ballistix low profile)
GPU What monitor resolution? For 1080p@60hz, all you need is one GTX 770. For 1440p, 2x 770 4GB, for 120hz, 2x 770 2GB
Case Good
PSU Good I guess but it's pretty expensive for its wattage, and doesn't provide any real benefit over similar quality 850W Gold units e.g. PCP&C MK III 850W, XFX 850W gold, Corsair AX850 non-i
SSD I'd just get a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB
HDD Good, I guess
Cooler How much are you planning to OC?

 

[thesimster]

CPU If budget is no concern and you need to do heavily multithreaded work, 3930K is the obvious choice.
Mobo Asrock X79 is good
RAM There's nothing special about dominator, just get the cheapest standard or low profile 4x8 1600 kit you can find, if 1.35V all the better (e.g. Crucial Ballistix low profile)
GPU What monitor resolution? For 1080p@60hz, all you need is one GTX 770. For 1440p, 2x 770 4GB, for 120hz, 2x 770 2GB
Case Good
PSU Good I guess but it's pretty expensive for its wattage, and doesn't provide any real benefit over similar quality 850W Gold units e.g. PCP&C MK III 850W, XFX 850W gold, Corsair AX850 non-i
SSD I'd just get a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB
HDD Good, I guess
Cooler How much are you planning to OC?

Thanks for the input lehtv! 😀
I've not heard of Crucial Ballistix before, my local retails mean I am restricted mostly to Corsair, some G.Skill and maybe Kingston. Any recommendations there?
I'll be running 3x 1440p (60hz I think) and I'm pretty set on the 780s, I do both realtime and post process GPU rendering so I'm after a lot of power (would go 2 Titans if I were rolling in dough). I've chosen Gigabyte, but can anyone make any recommendations for other brands?
I'm a bit restricted to PSU choice also, if the AX850 is full modular I'll see if I can get that.
I might look at getting 2x Samsung 840 Pros seeing you guys recommend them.
As far as OC goes, I have no idea, probably more as the system ages. The cooler choice was more for acoustics and keeping the area around the CPU open for airflow.

 

[lehtv]

Corsair Vengeance with the standard height is fine, so is Corsair Value Select. Any G.Skill is good, I would get Ares since it's standard profile unlike Sniper/Ripjaws. As for Kingston, they're top notch but watch out for the 1.65V kits, you'll want 1.5V.

3x 1440p? Wow. Too bad the 780 doesn't come in 6GB variants, at least yet. GTX 770 4GB Tri-SLI should cost about the same as two 780's, and it'd be a lot faster with more VRAM. But the cards would be closer together and run hotter/noisier. If you don't want 3 cards, then I guess go with 780 3GB SLI. I would get Asus cards since they have a backplate which keeps them straight

AX850 is fully modular yes.

If you just want good acoustics for the CPU cooling, look at Arctic Cooling i30. 300-1350RPM, cools the same as 212 EVO which is 600-1800 RPM

 

[mfenn]

What sort of compatibility issues have you experienced with the Revo Drive? I've heard only good things so far about the Revo 3 X2...

Issue #1: It has OCZ in front of the name. OCZ is one of the few brands that most people around here (myself included) will not touch under any circumstances. Their idea of "validation" is "hey, it works in my desktop, ship it!"

Issue #2: It uses SF-2281 controllers. This means that you are susceptible to the whole litany of Sandforce issues that have been well documented in the tech press. They are also quite old at this point and have been eclipsed in performance and consistency by newer controllers.

Issue #3: It uses a PCIe RAID controller with SATA interface. This is bad for a few reasons:

Issue #3a: You're running your SSDs in RAID 0, with all the usual reliability issues that RAID 0 creates.

Issue #3b: It's running RAID at all. means that the TRIM command does not get passed through to the controller, which means you're completely reliant on SF-2281's background GC to keep the SSDs fast.

Issue #3c: It's the exact same thing as two SATA SSDs using your motherboard's RAID 0. You are basically buying (very cheap and crappy) SATA RAID controller hardwired to SSDs. You could replicate the exact same config only better by just buying SATA SSDs.

Issue #4: The drives are only 60GB each, which means that they don't have all the flash channels populated. Thus they are about half as fast as a normal 120GB drive, meaning that the PCIe interface would give you no benefit (3c notwithstanding).

Issue #5: Now instead of needing drivers for a very standard Intel SATA controller available during OS install, you need drivers for some unknown RAID controller, meaning there are long-term maintainability issues.

So yeah, the Revodrive 3 120GB is just a couple old, unreliable, tiny SATA SSDs behind a crappy RAID controller made by the worst SSD vendor out there. Just get a good SATA SSD like the Samsung that lehtv recommended.

 

[Cerb]

Issue #3c: It's the exact same thing as two SATA SSDs using your motherboard's RAID 0. You are basically buying (very cheap and crappy) SATA RAID controller hardwired to SSDs. You could replicate the exact same config only better by just buying SATA SSDs.

http://www.custompcreview.com/reviews/ocz-revodrive-3-pcie-ssd-review/6514/3/

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5379/crucial-m500-960gb-ssd-review/index9.html

http://archive.benchmarkreviews.com...k=view&id=1070&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=6

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4470/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480gb-preview/2
^ 480GB model, still only really shines in big transfers, which are going to be uncommon, and/or HDD-limited, and/or OS cache/VFS-limited, in practice (Windows and Linux kernels/drivers often end up being limiting factors, for actual large file copies between devices on different controllers, since their primary job is keeping a sane state at every buffer flush, and new buffer creation). With a smaller model, you won't even get the big read/write advantages, though (they didn't send a 480GB to test by coincidence).

Just to help give some numbers to this. And, they are actually worse than I expected. Quite a few oft-recommended single SATA SSDs perform as well or better, even in terms of peak throughput. The Revodrive 960GB needs a RAID to match it, today, but the lesser models haven't been updated sufficiently, just on performance (their Marvell implementation, FI, would probably perform very well...I wonder if they don't have the spare R&D funds, these days). TBH, I was at least expecting typical 2 drive RAID 0 performance. Technically, it can get faster, slightly, than most single drives, with a good workload, but not by enough that it will matter, and having TRIM on the single drive will give the single drive a major edge, after 6-12 months of actual use.

 

[Termie]

Wow, mfenn, you really ripped into OCZ there. Tell us how you really feel!

(I agree with everything you said of course)

 

[thesimster]

Thanks guys! That is very helpful, always good to learn more.
I think i'll just get two of the Samsung's as recommended, and I do love Samsung...

 

[mfenn]

Wow, mfenn, you really ripped into OCZ there. Tell us how you really feel!

(I agree with everything you said of course)

Yeah, that post is like a Baptist sermon. I knew that 3 points were really all I needed, but I got on a roll. :awe:

 

[Wolfereign]

Just to let you know the wifi card doesn't work with X78 or B75 intel chipsets \ Boards. It causes the computer to crash on startup. Don't know if that will affect your product choice as it may not pertain to your specific build

 

[thesimster]

Just to let you know the wifi card doesn't work with X78 or B75 intel chipsets \ Boards. It causes the computer to crash on startup. Don't know if that will affect your product choice as it may not pertain to your specific build

Thanks for the heads up Wolfereign, I'll investigate that.