Help me with high end game dev PC

[ranakor]

Hey there,
Building a baseline computer for DX11.2 development & gaming, any advice / improvements?
Note : no overclocking, period, no interest in that & the GPU are set in stone, and yes i need the 32GB of ram (could use a lot more, but couldn't find any non server mobo/cpu that supports more) anything else i'm welcome to hear thoughts in the same price range or lower that would seem like an improvement:

Processor : Intel core I7 4770, non K version (since i don't want to overclock), willing to change but keep in mind it's not a gaming only pc, so single threaded performance isn't the only factor, my main factor is total performance (so single threaded perf x number of cores) not one of those sub performance area over the other, just the multiplication of both. Intel only

SSD : Sandisk extreme 2 480GO : looking for advice here, just picked the best one on rating from bench section, 400-800GB range is fine, PCI instead of sata is fine if it brings more perf (but must be bootable, i want a single drive in there only), this one is around 1$/GB, anything under 1.5$/gb or so is fine, with bang being more important than bang for the buck to me. Also favor more perf over more space (as long as >400GB)

Ram : picked cheapest kit in stock on the online shop i use, 4bars of corsair DDR3 12800 CAS10, should i pick a better CAS or will it be rather insignificant? any advice welcome here, also anything i missed that allowed > 32gig of ram on non server scale mobo is welcome

Motherboard : no idea! pick one for me (& actually switching everything, mobo ram & CPU to server scale "is" an option if it doesn't add more than 2K$ "and" is guaranteed to work with the titans, had a bad surprise buying a dell server once and noticing it's firmware was crippled to not allow graphic card upgrades . . .)

GPU : 2X titan card, so far going for the EVGA one at 999€, however there's one 40€ cheaper, afaik they're all the same (ref boards), but i've seen EVGA recommanded for warranty & quality, is EVGA the best pick? Any advice welcome but titan cards only & no OC.

Case: i hate fancy cases, anything that looks like your 20$ case from 10 years ago is fine, i don't mind paying for a case but i don't want something you want to look at, it's just there to be under the desk & ignored (so nothing eye catching!). Good build quality & space required however!

PSU : no clue what i need, but not something cheap, i want something reliable and 100% sure to have all the connectors i need for what i listed.

Drive : i'd like a blue ray RW / DVD RW combo, speed is irrelevant with my usage of that slot being inserting the windows CD once and maybe burning a dvd once in a blue moon, so anything robust

Special note : no legacy stuff even for small stuff as i'm going to be running solely windows 8.1 64 bit, so it needs to be supported or known to work on modern OS.

No budget set in stone, use will be prototyping work using world machine at semi high res (and pushing that to a much larger server when done with quick interation) and DX11.2 engine development as well as overall software dev with visual studio 2013.

 

[Cerb]

Is being able to use the new instructions in Haswell CPUs going to be an issue? If not, going LGA2011 would allow the Titans, 64GB RAM, and 6-core CPUs. The catch is that you'll be stuck on Sandy Bridge CPUs.

PSU: you'll probably want about a 1kW PSU (you could be looking at 600-650W peak use). I'm not well versed on what's what that high up the power chain, though.

Excuse the Newegg.com links. Their store is easy to browse, so I use them for convenience.

Case: might I interest you in the Camry, Accord, or Taurus? The Corsair, with one of the HDD cages removed, would probably be the best cooling of that bunch. There's also the Antec P183, but it's cooling performance has been eclipsed, unless you do a bunch of work to it. There's also the Fractal Design Arc Midi R2, which is a lot like the above Define R4, but less for quiet, more for air flow.

 

[ranakor]

Thanks for the cases, looks exactly like what i need, clean & simple!
Neweggs links is fine.
Actually you're right maybe i should go sandy bridge, i'm losing a bit of perf per core but i don't think it's insane, so if it gets me more concurrent threads & twice the ram that sounds work it, i didn't realise only haswell was limited to 32GB of ram (sounds odd that something more recent supports half the ram!)

 

[Cerb]

Actually you're right maybe i should go sandy bridge, i'm losing a bit of perf per core but i don't think it's insane, so if it gets me more concurrent threads & twice the ram that sounds work it, i didn't realise only haswell was limited to 32GB of ram (sounds odd that something more recent supports half the ram!)

It's not that it only supports half the RAM. All current CPUs only deal with up to 4 banks per channel, unbuffered, and LGA1150 only supports dual-channel. LGA2011 is pretty much the same, but supports quad-channel, so you can stuff more DIMMs in. I'll complain about Intel's market segmentation all day long, but more RAM channels has a real cost, for the CPU and motherboard, and won't make a bit of difference to most of us.

LGA2011 follows the server release cycle, so tends to get slightly faster CPUs, in clock speeds, but longer times between releases.

The overall performance penalty will probably be 10-30% per core, depending on what you're doing. If you can keep more cores active, that's probably a worthy trade, since most content creation that can scale to many threads can take advantage of more RAM I/O, and the $1k one has 15MB cache, v. 8MB, so more L3 per core (I don't do much anything with this high-end of stuff, so don't keep track of models well, mentally ).

 

[ranakor]

So if i want to compare both roads (haswell & sandy bridge) can you advise me on a sample CPU / mobo for each that is reasonably high end so that i can make the perf/price ratio? With ram being so cheap going 32=>64 shouldn't change the price too much but i don't know what i'd get for the same money on the sandy bridge side vs haswell.

 

[Cerb]

The i7-3970X is basically the LGA2011 CPU to look at, not going into server hardware.

Motherboards...you'll want to find someone else to recommend a model. Several have odd failures and quirks, but being small-market products, many might be just fine, even so (fewer users -> fewer problem reports -> fewer good bug reports -> more long-standing issues that get fixed on regular desktop boards via BIOS updates; but often they can be worked around easily enough). I have enough experience to know to take some negative reports and reviews with more than a few grains of salt, but not enough to know which should be taken as reasonable warnings, and what are just users expecting high-end quirky hardware to be like low-end desktop hardware.

If nobody else responds, you might want to PM aigomorla (cooling subforum mod), and see if you can get pointed in the right direction. The text-speak of some posts might not make it look it at first , but aigomorla is pretty knowledgeable of the high-end stuff out there, and is one those people that seems to always need more performance (but isn't always watching GH or the motherboards subforums).

 

[BrightCandle]

My own experience of Visual Studio C++ 2012 compilation is that it benefits from the 6 cores, in the sense that I can and do see high utilisation of the cores. I haven't however seen any data on just how much Haswell brings in terms of additional performance but based on other legacy applications its unlikely to be dramatic. Compilation isn't really dominated by raw integer performance but branching performance and Haswell isn't a particularly impressive upgrade in that department. Finding some C compilation reviews of Haswell compared to SB might help understand that trade off.

In terms of SSDs for development I actually have found no difference between having any SSD (An Intel 80GB original SSD) and a modern faster one (my m4). Once the seek times and 4K IO is improved enough the compilation speed becomes completely dominated by the CPU performance. With C++ its even more dominated than Java. The only time when I get benefit is when making a large package/distribution like say the generation of documentation or a complete release package where seek times and peak throughput for writes comes into play. Thus the SSD you have chosen will more than do the job and your unlikely to get benefit from going faster except in raw circumstances.

I doubt I would choose SB-E today however. It made sense when it came out but the CPU is about to get replaced with IB-E and the platform is a dead end. Haswell has the new instruction set which when developing software for the future is probably something you will want to at least have available to see if it can benefit some of your code. You might loose a little peak compilation speed but then in many circumstances the moderately improved cores will improve almost everything else. I think Haswell 4770 is the right call, but its not a simple call.

 

[ranakor]

Compilation speed is of no importance to me at all, i'm using .net only & C# pretty much instantly compiles anything (within reason) even on a mid range PC.

 

[mfenn]

The i7-3970X is basically the LGA2011 CPU to look at, not going into server hardware.

I think the 3930K takes that honor. The 3970X is $1030 for a 3.5Ghz six-core whereas the 3930K is $550 for a 3.2GHz six-core.

As for motherboard, they're all pretty high-end with the only ones not worth considering are those that only have 4 DIMM slots or active cooling. The ASUS P9X79 LE is a good pick IMHO.

 

[ranakor]

I'm a bit worried about all the bent pins reviews on that motherboard.

So if i compare the higher priced 3930K with the 4770 it's a tough call

With the 3930 instead of 4770 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/552?vs=836 :
- Relatively similar multithreaded performance (all threads used)
- Substantially less single threaded performance
- More expensive
- No newest extension set
- But allows for 64gig of ram

I'm not sure it's worth it, but the benchmarks could be skewed (i'm not sure any of those benchmarks actually makes much use of all 12 threads on the sandy bridge version?). I was expecting the SB version to have a bit lower single threaded performance but substantially better multithreaded, if it's just flat out much slower ST and no faster MT it doesn't sound so good anymore.

 

[escrow4]

Much slower? Link? I seriously doubt you'd notice any (minimal) slowdowns in real world usage. As for the mobo, I went with an Asrock Extreme 6.

 

[Cerb]

I think the 3930K takes that honor. The 3970X is $1030 for a 3.5Ghz six-core whereas the 3930K is $550 for a 3.2GHz six-core.

With ~$2K, the i7-3970X, a workstation motherboard, and 32GB more RAM are only a little over half that, v. the i7-4770.

If looking for places to save money, another good one might be the GTX 780, instead of Titans.

 

[ranakor]

Much slower? Link? I seriously doubt you'd notice any (minimal) slowdowns in real world usage. As for the mobo, I went with an Asrock Extreme 6.

My real world usage isn't word processing & games, it's actual 100% usage of all cores at once on 10+GB of data during hours at once.

Edit : no links but i used anand compare in bench section.

 

[ranakor]

With ~$2K, the i7-3970X, a workstation motherboard, and 32GB more RAM are only a little over half that, v. the i7-4770.

If looking for places to save money, another good one might be the GTX 780, instead of Titans.

Dual titan is my bare minimum as i said those cards are set in stone really (likely to buy 1 titan now and upgrade to dual a bit later if i want to save cash, but not to any card bellow a titan)

 

[mfenn]

With ~$2K, the i7-3970X, a workstation motherboard, and 32GB more RAM are only a little over half that, v. the i7-4770.

Not sure what you're trying to say here?

i7 4770K ~$300
32GB RAM ~$200
Decent 1150 mobo $180
Total: $680

i7 3930K ~$550
64GB RAM ~$400
Decent 2011 mobo $250
Total: $1200

i7 3970X ~$1000
64GB RAM ~$400
Decent 2011 mobo $250
Total: $1650

Jumping the $520 from $680 to $1200 gets you most of the benefit (6 cores, more memory). Adding another $450 only gets you a few hundred MHz on the CPU. Doesn't seem like a good deal to me.

Note: I am NOT recommending Socket 2011, I'm just saying that the fair comparison point in terms of bang for buck is the 3930K.

OP, I'd say to stick with Haswell 4-core unless you know for sure that you will need more than 32GB of memory. That's the big reason to pay extra for SB-E. The balance will shift again when IB-E comes out in a couple months, but that's then and this is now.