P67-based HTPC/gaming/encoding combo- critique!

[JMS3072]

OK, here's the deal. I want to build a computer that can meet the following criteria:

-Decent at gaming (nothing fantastic, just enough to run well on most games at medium to medium-high settings). Resolution for that will vary. Right now I have a three-monitor array running at 3840x1024, but I've been eyeing an upgrade to a decent 27-inch IPS at 2560x1440. I've used IPS and TN both, and while I can't really see the ghosting that's there in IPS, I can definitely tell the color gamut and viewing angle differences, and it's an extra investment that will (eventually) be worth it to me. For now, though, my 3 17" PVAs are just fine.

-Great media-center capabilities. I have a TV tuner and a Blu Ray drive in my current build; the Blu-Ray will be coming over; I'll be moving to a slot-based solution for the TV tuner. I'll also need to factor in storage space (I'll be bringing over 2 1TB drives as well as a 1.5TB) and processor speed (Blu Ray and DVD ripping and re-encoding will be a primary function).

-The cooling must be extremely quiet; near-silent would be best. This is going to be a media PC as well as a gaming PC; although I wouldn't mind having the thermal headroom to overclock, I'd much rather lose a few decibels.

-Must have plenty of memory. A few friends and I frequently play Minecraft together, and I'd like to be able to allocate several gigs to it.

-Must be stable. I'll be going with a higher-end power supply on this build, with probably more wattage than is strictly necessary. This also shows in some of my storage choices.

-Must have a fast response time. I'm sick of platter spin-up and UI lag, and as you'll see, I've allocated a fair portion of the budget to a high-speed storage system.

-Must support several video outputs. This is a requirement for my current display setup, and something nice to have for the future. This also basically narrows my GPU choices down to AMD.

Plenty of USB ports, and plenty of slots! This unfortunately eliminates MicroATX.

-Must look classy. I've picked a case from Lian-Li below, but really, anything of a similar style will fit the bill.

My budget is ~2000USD, and will likely be spent mostly at Newegg.

I will be bringing quite a bit of hardware over:
-Two optical drives; one BD/DVD-RW, and one plain DVD-RW
-All my peripherals; mouse, keyboard, IR remote receiver, etc.
-3.5TB of storage in the form of 2 1TB drives and a 1.5TB
-I have USB solutions for wireless and TV tuning, but I'd prefer to bring those inside the box, as it were.

I looked through Snarkie's post, but I think he's looking for something different from me, at a different budget, and with different starting components.

Like I said earlier, I may overclock if there's the headroom there for it, but much more important than that to me is a quiet computer. For the foreseeable future, I'll be gaming with about 4 million pixels onscreen, either at 3840x1024 or 2560x1440.

I'll probably be building this sometime in the mid-to-late spring. If it's out when I build, I may go for the i7-3820 on X79 for the extra memory and PCIe bandwidth it offers- thoughts on that?

All that said, here's my current hypothetical configuration and my reasoning:

CPU: i7-2600K
I think that, for video encoding, the 2600 is worth it over the 2500. That's really the only reason, and personally, I feel that it's worth the upgrade. I do wish there was more benchmarking available on that subset of the 2600's abilities, but the Tom's Hardware Handbrake results are pretty impressive. The K version rather than the standard simply because it's not that much more for something that might be useful.

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6950
This will probably change when the 7000 series finally gets released, but for now, I think that the 6950 will provide the right level of performance for me, while also giving me the ports I want. I'd likely go for a model with the 2x mDP, a single dual-link DVI, and an HDMI. HDMI for the TV, and the others for my desktop screens.

Motherboard: ASRock P67 Extreme4 Gen3
I think this mobo is the P67 that best represents what I need. Eight onboard USB ports, with coax and optical audio out, and the slot arrangement is near-ideal. It also comes with a fair number of cables, and a USB 3.0 extender that can either go in an external 3.5" bay or in a rear slot (I'd probably go with the slot).

Power Supply: Corsair HX750
I've had nothing but good luck with Corsair power supplies in the past. Maybe this one pushes a bit more power than I strictly need, so if there's a consensus on that, I could definitely see going with a SeaSonic X650. The ability to spin down the fan on it would definitely be a nice advantage for HTPC use. Either way, those are both modular supplies; I'll need it to keep the cable routing good- I'm planning on using a relatively small case.

Case: Lian-Li Lancool PC-K7B
This seems like a nice, classy case at a decent price. Cooling is decent, and there's good expandability. I like the concept of the hard drive securing mechanism; seems like a good way to keep things quiet. Reviews say the fans are slightly loud though, so those will be pulled and replaced.

Case fans: 3x Cougar CF-V12H
These seem to get decent reviews for maintaining a decent level of airflow while still being extremely quiet; they also have a rep for having "flow" type noise rather than "whir" type noise, which I much prefer.

CPU cooler: Cooler Master GeminII S
This is the part of the build that I'm least sure on. This cooler seems to be a good balance between silence and heat control, but I'll certainly take suggestions on other good, quiet coolers could fit in this case.

RAM: 4 sticks of RAM at 4GB each. Probably 1600 speed
For these, I'll probably just pick them out when it comes time to buy. RAM fluctuates, so I'm not going to pretend to be able to pin down a particular set right now.

Wifi: A moderately nice 300Mbps N card. Preferably 5GHz capable, but that's not essential.

TV Tuner: AVerMedia AVerTVHD Duet
A nice dual-tuner PCIe card with good reviews at a decent price. Really, what more can you ask for? I considered the Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe version, but the fact is that it's just not worth it. I'm unmarried with no immediate plans of having kids, and there's only one show that I really watch on cable. It's much more economical for me to just hook a standard tuner into a cable split off from my modem and record the local channels in ClearQAM, then rent Psych the next day off of iTunes.

This leaves us with about $700 left in the budget and the storage system. As I mentioned already, I already have 3.5TB of mass storage available in hard drives, and I also have Blu-Ray and DVD drives. I wanted to do something special with this, so I did.

RAID controller card: Adaptec 6805E
A nice PCIe controller with two internal connectors. It also comes with two fanout cables, supporting up to 8 internal SATA III drives at 6Gbps. One of those fanouts will go towards the previously mentioned hard drives- possibly having them in a JBOD array. The other...

Boot Volume: 4x Crucial M4 64GB SSDs in RAID 0
This was one of the harder decisions in the build. The Vertex 3 is an incredibly fast drive, and four of them RAIDed together would have been that much faster. However, I'm not entirely comfortable with the Vertex's reliability track record, especially in RAID 0. I think it's worth the slower write speeds and the small added financial cost to get the reliability of the M4. They'll fit into the case by way of two sleds that can adapt two 2.5" drives to fit in one 3.5" bay. This system should scream. I understand that I won't likely see increased boot times over a hard drive, as a RAID controller takes time to start up, but the difference in everyday computing should be palpable, and as this computer won't be shut down very often (has to be on to record TV!), that shouldn't be an issue.

Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Have I missed anything, or made a fatal oversight? Let me know!

 

[JMS3072]

Oh, I forgot to mention. I did think about the possible benefits of using a Z68 platform to leverage QuickSync for video encoding, but for now, with the limited program selection available that takes advantage of it, and the slight quality decrease from using it, I'll stick with x86-based encoding, not only due to the extra cost of a decent Z68 motherboard.

 

[Zap]

Hello JMS3072, and welcome to AnandTech forums.

I had a much longer/better response typed up, but an errant thumb on my notebook touch pad erased it. Thus, here's the short, short version with much less explanation.

1) Come back a week before you are ready to actually spend your money, because it is halfway useless to plan so far ahead of time.

2) Forget X79. If you don't actually know for sure why you need it, you don't need it. Benefits are more cores and more PCIe lanes. Drawbacks are that it will eat half your budget.

3) Get Z68. Why not? Spending $2000 and concerned about that last $30? Srsly?

4) Don't worry about case fans. Noise = how fast they spin = how much airflow you want. There is slight variation but basically "quieter" fans just spin slower. Make the stock fans spin slower = quieter fans.

5) PSU is seriously overkill. Save $30 on the PSU to put towards the motherboard. You don't need modular if you don't buy a PSU that is way too much, so another $30 saved. Just buy a nice 500W-ish PSU that has the cables for a single graphics card. Done!

6) Consider another case. You are concerned about noise? How about a Fractal Design R3? Or an Antec Solo II? Those are designed to muffle noise a bit more than your typical case.

7) Why 2600K? $40 more gets you 2700K. $90 less gets you 2500K.

8) Why so much RAM? Minecraft by default only uses something like 500MB. You can manually allocate more RAM, I think up to 2GB. Thus, 4GB system memory is sufficient, and 8GB is already overkill. 16GB?

9) The GeminII S isn't the greatest "quiet" cooler. At a base level, any BIG cooler can be quiet, but if you are serious about quiet (which BTW your graphics card will probably be the most noisy - look for a dual fan card) then you need a cooler specifically made to be quiet. This means two things. BIG (which many are) and widely spaced fins (which many are not). Good choices are the Thermalright HR-02 and HR-02 Macho, Zalman CNPS10XQUIET (they make multiple versions with different fin spacings, make sure it is the "QUIET" model), Scythe Ninja 3 SCNJ-3000. Those are the heatsinks with wider fin spacings.

10) If you hate HDD spin-up time, don't buy "green" drives (spin down by themselves) and don't let Windows power management put drives to sleep.

11) Don't RAID a bunch of small SSDs. Small SSDs have slow writes, so RAIDing them just catches them up to the write performance of larger SSDs. Sure you will get better read performance, but then you lose Trim which will cause performance to decay over time (mostly writes). Thus you are much better off with a single big SSD. I've also heard that the Marvell controller (used in the Crucial C300, Crucial m4, Intel 510 among others) doesn't work too well without Trim. If you really, really want to run RAID, then consider a pair of 128MB drives using RAID off the Intel controller. Heck, for the price of four Crucial m4 64GB ($110/ea) and the Adaptec RAID controller ($270?) you can almost buy two 256GB Crucial m4 ($370/ea). Heck, the Plextor PX-M3S which also uses the Marvell controller is $325 for the 256GB version and even comes with a 5 year warranty!

 

[lehtv]

Agree mostly with Zap. Antec P280 is another nice quiet case.

7) Why 2600K? $40 more gets you 2700K.

$40 more for 100MHz more? Really?

$90 less gets you 2500K.

Good idea unless encoding is the primary use

 

[Zap]

$40 more for 100MHz more? Really?

Why not? What's another $40 when considering 30x more RAM than the software uses by default, $270 RAID cards and $440 worth of SSDs? And the OP "might overclock" and the 2700K "might or might not overclock better/easier" than the 2600k.

 

[JMS3072]

3) Get Z68. Why not? Spending $2000 and concerned about that last $30? Srsly?

Fair point! I suppose Z68 would also provide a potential benefit if x264 supported QuickSync in the future.

5) PSU is seriously overkill. Save $30 on the PSU to put towards the motherboard. You don't need modular if you don't buy a PSU that is way too much, so another $30 saved. Just buy a nice 500W-ish PSU that has the cables for a single graphics card. Done!

Thanks for clarifying! I thought it might be, but all the power supply estimators online pegged this spec as needing a 650W+ PSU, and I wanted some headroom.

7) Why 2600K? $40 more gets you 2700K. $90 less gets you 2500K.

I don't think a 100MHz bump is worth $50, and the potential for a better-binned piece isn't attractive enough either. The 2600K rather than the 2500K because of HyperThreading- HandBrake can seriously take advantage of the extra threads.

8) Why so much RAM? Minecraft by default only uses something like 500MB. You can manually allocate more RAM, I think up to 2GB. Thus, 4GB system memory is sufficient, and 8GB is already overkill. 16GB?

Sorry, I should clarify. I usually host the server, using 64-bit Java, which I like to allocate ~8GB to (it uses it!). I have 12GB right now, and allocating 8GB plus running the client does sometimes cause the computer to swap a bit. RAM is cheap right now, and I think it's worth the small extra expenditure to get the extra.

9) The GeminII S isn't the greatest "quiet" cooler. At a base level, any BIG cooler can be quiet, but if you are serious about quiet (which BTW your graphics card will probably be the most noisy - look for a dual fan card) then you need a cooler specifically made to be quiet. This means two things. BIG (which many are) and widely spaced fins (which many are not). Good choices are the Thermalright HR-02 and HR-02 Macho, Zalman CNPS10XQUIET (they make multiple versions with different fin spacings, make sure it is the "QUIET" model), Scythe Ninja 3 SCNJ-3000. Those are the heatsinks with wider fin spacings.

Thanks for the tip!

11) Don't RAID a bunch of small SSDs. Small SSDs have slow writes, so RAIDing them just catches them up to the write performance of larger SSDs. Sure you will get better read performance, but then you lose Trim which will cause performance to decay over time (mostly writes). Thus you are much better off with a single big SSD. I've also heard that the Marvell controller (used in the Crucial C300, Crucial m4, Intel 510 among others) doesn't work too well without Trim. If you really, really want to run RAID, then consider a pair of 128MB drives using RAID off the Intel controller. Heck, for the price of four Crucial m4 64GB ($110/ea) and the Adaptec RAID controller ($270?) you can almost buy two 256GB Crucial m4 ($370/ea). Heck, the Plextor PX-M3S which also uses the Marvell controller is $325 for the 256GB version and even comes with a 5 year warranty!

Completely valid point. Another friend pointed out to me that I was spending nearly half as much on the RAID controller as I was on the actual SSDs- I suppose there are certainly better routes to take. Options include a RevoDrive (although those DO have reliability issues) or simply picking a nice 128GB SATA III SSD. That would certainly cut the overall cost on the computer. And, thanks for pointing out the TRIM issue- that's something that I hadn't considered.

 

[lehtv]

Why not? What's another $40 when considering 30x more RAM than the software uses by default, $270 RAID cards and $440 worth of SSDs? And the OP "might overclock" and the 2700K "might or might not overclock better/easier" than the 2600k.

It's another $40 mostly wasted, just like spending on too much RAM is cash wasted or buying too much SSD space is cash wasted. Spending too much on one component doesn't justify spending too much on another. Unless you were implying that $270 RAID cards and $440 worth of SSDs are completely justified purchases, in which case I don't understand your argument at all.

 

[Zap]

Fair point! I suppose Z68 would also provide a potential benefit if x264 supported QuickSync in the future.

Exactly! If you get P67 and they do release support in the future, you'd be kicking yourself.

It's another $40 mostly wasted, just like spending on too much RAM is cash wasted or buying too much SSD space is cash wasted. Spending too much on one component doesn't justify spending too much on another. Unless you were implying that $270 RAID cards and $440 worth of SSDs are completely justified purchases, in which case I don't understand your argument at all.

I guess my "argument" would be "what's another $40 in light of all these other frivolous expenses."

 

[mfenn]

Sorry, I should clarify. I usually host the server, using 64-bit Java, which I like to allocate ~8GB to (it uses it!).

I assume by "allocating memory" to a Java process you're referring to setting the heap size. You will always see the Java process use the amount of memory that you've told it to allocate for the heap, no matter if the actual program uses it or not. This is because Java just allocated the entire heap at once and does its own internal memory management which is invisible to the OS. I'd wager that your Minecraft server with a couple of friends on it actually uses far less than a gig. You will generally bottleneck at network upload speed long before you run out of memory.

As for the SSDs, buying a fairly low-end RAID controller to pair with small SSDs gives you the worst of both worlds. You lose TRIM, etc. as Zap mentioned and you will also run into the IOPS limitations of the I/O processor on the RAID controller long before you actually max out the drives themselves. To give you an idea, a $20,000 enterprise-class disk enclosure with dual RAID controllers will max out at something like 80K IOPS. A single M4 is good for 20K, which is probably about the limit of your $270 RAID controller. To make a long story short: just get a single larger drive.

As for the rest, I agree totally with Zap and lehtv. I'll even say that planning too far out is actually worse than useless because it can cause you to make decisions on parts far too early and thus have blinders on with respect to any new developments.

 

[Zap]

I assume by "allocating memory" to a Java process you're referring to setting the heap size. You will always see the Java process use the amount of memory that you've told it to allocate for the heap, no matter if the actual program uses it or not. This is because Java just allocated the entire heap at once and does its own internal memory management which is invisible to the OS. I'd wager that your Minecraft server with a couple of friends on it actually uses far less than a gig. You will generally bottleneck at network upload speed long before you run out of memory.

When I was researching Minecraft before my earlier reply, people were reporting it uses around 500MB RAM. IDK if hosting a server uses more, or not.

Ok, just did some research and various places peg Minecraft servers as using up to 2GB RAM. A couple sites say that you will run out of bandwidth and storage throughput (when using normal HDDs) before you run out of CPU and RAM.