Questions regarding a LGA2011 build, Parts?

[Altek]

Hello people of the forums! I'm a long time reader of Anandtech and I highly trust the information on this site, now I may be a noob to the forum but I'm not to system building. I hope someone can answer a few questions I have about jumping to a 2011 build.

I'm currently rocking this setup:

Asus P6T Deluxe
Core i7 920 at stock speeds
9GB Dominator 1600MHz with XMP
2x GTX 560Ti in SLI
2x 300GB Raptors in Raid 0 (os)
2x 74GB raptors in Raid 0 (steam games)
1x 500GB for other games and apps
Corsair 800d
1200w Thermaltake toughpower

System I'm looking to Build
Core i7 3930K
32GB Dominator Memory (2133MHz or 2400MHz)
2x 128GB SSD in Raid 0 (os)
2x 600GB Raptor in Raid 0 (Games and apps)
2x 2TB in Raid 1 (Storage\San backup)

I'm looking to upgrade to the new socket and I'm curious to know if I should be patient and wait for IV-E, or should I splurge now and get me some SB-E action. If I did I would go with the H100 cooler on the 3930K, but I'm stuck on which motherboard, memory and HDD combo to go with.

The current Asus motherboard I have has been rock solid, and besides the hideous blue color scheme they have, the new boards seem to be the direction I want to go. I looked into EVGA and there selection is limited and leaves a little to be desired with SATA III ports. Which would be preferred, the Sabertooth edition or the P9X79 Deluxe? The Sabertooth seems to have better passive cooling around the CPU with an active cooler on the sb vs the Deluxe. Or am I looking at the wrong manufacturer altogether? Enlighten me, Gigabyte? MSI? These look like toys to me, so I hardly look in that direction. Oh, and ASRock, where the hell did they come from? Their Extreme9 board is packed with goodies including a TON of SATA ports, and I believe I read they are affiliated with Asus, but that confuses me. Plus, I'm still unsure about how to pronounce the name of the company without it sounding somewhat graphic.

As for memory, does anyone think Corsair will release a 2400MHz Dominator kit that's larger than 8GB anytime soon? Will I see much of a difference from 2133 to 2400MHz, if not, I'll just go with the former. By all means I don't need 32GB of memory, but at $300 for 16GB, who can resist. Plus I can go VM crazy if I want. I only do Corsair Dominator, again, maybe some other brand has come up in recent years, but that's my dilemma in that area.

Lastly, Hard Drives. I'm a Raptor whore, I've had the 36, 74 and now 600's all in Raid 0 and I've had very good performance and reliability over the years, without one drive failing yet. So when I think SSD, I get scared about multiple things: Longevity, speed, and price. Considering the new board will have at least 4 SATA 6G/s ports, my current 300GB raptors can finally show me the speed they have, for the other 2 ports, I wanted to do a 128GB Raid 0 combo with the SSD's. Should I even pay attention to the SSD caching thing? I feel as though it's a waste and having two striped would be way faster. Also, which drives should I be looking at? OCZ looks like a toy but has fantastic speeds. However the reviews were horrifying, BSOD's all over the place because of the firmware, I heard it was fixed but I don't like to be the beta tester. Plextor came out with a few drives that were supposed to be enterprise status, and I loved their optical drives, but they just came out of nowhere with some high end promises. Any info would be well appreciated.

All in all, I'm a lost man in LGA 2011 world. I've been waiting for this for to be released for a while and was kind of let down by the specs of everything for the most part, ie native PCI 3.0. Maybe someone is having the same exact predicament as me, maybe someone is going to build this exact system... MAYBE someone is reading this wondering why it's so long, and I don't blame you. This may be too much information, but less is never good. Any info would be greatly appreciated, I'm hoping to build this by the end of the month depending on availability and what's coming out next month.

Altek

 

[mfenn]

The key thing that I didn't see in your post is why you feel that you need a SB-E machine. For all but a handful of purposes, 1155 is just as fast.

As for storage, I see no reason not to keep using your 300GB Raptors for secondary drives unless you are running out of space. If you do need more space on the secondary, I would recommend getting two 7200RPM drives that have 1TB platters like the Hitachi 7K1000.D. The 750GB version is short-stroked, and so will beat 600GB Raptors in most tests while being less-expensive and quieter.

As for the SSDs, even a single one is about 10 times faster than a mechanical drive, so I don't see the point of doing RAID0 on them. With RAID, you lose TRIM, which can cause performance degradation over time. The Crucial M4 128GB is OOS, right now but I don't expect that to last for long.

Finally, do you really have a SAN at home? Or do you mean NAS?

 

[Googer]

I agree with MFENN, I have TWO of the same WD Raptors and a Hitachi 7K1000.D. The Hitachi smokes the raptors and does it at a much lower price point (I paid $50 before the floods in Thailand). I've retired my Raptors to a massive swapfile, downloads, and tempfolder use (keeps my C: drive clean). As for the socket, I disagree and feel LGA2011 is the way to go, leave LGA1155 behind, I like the GA-X79-UD5 over most other LGA2011 boards, especially since it supports 64GB of ram.

As far as ram goes, LGA2011 currently tops out at DDR3 1333 and because it's a quad channel, you proably wont want to waste money on any thing much faster. In this case, I would be more incline to chose lower latency over the added bandwith of some flashy ram. My pick would be plain crucial with out any headspreaders; it's super high quality stuff.

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/comparison/list.aspx?ck=2&pids=4050,4047,4049

 

[Altek]

I just want to be on the bleeding edge, and with IV-E coming out by the end of 2012, I can always throw in a new 8 core 22nm CPU... which is bad ass. I did see the benchmarks for 1155, but I go enthusiast or nothing at all. The parts I currently have will go to my secondary rig, and the parts that are currently in my secondary rig will go to my father's PC.

In regards to storage, I don't even come close to using half of my 2 300gb raptors, those will be strictly for my games and apps. Which is mainly origin and steam, as well as some randoms I currently have installed, and my adobe suite. My 2TB storage drives would be for storage, VM's, my swap files in adobe as well as my page file (which I shouldn't even need with 32GB of ram). I was unaware that Hitachi came close in benchmarks, I just assumed 10,000RPM would beat it out no matter what. And I'm well aware that SSD's destroy mechanical drives in every single way, which is why i need to make the switch. Also, I figured, SSD's are fast, in Raid 0 it must be insane, but I'm not so up to date on the correct way to configure them. And no, I do not have a SAN at home, that would be awesome though, I was working with one at my job the other day and got it mixed up, I have a 2TB NAS I put together about 3 years ago which houses all my downloads, Movies and TV Shows mainly.

I would hate to stop using my raptors really, I got them cheap but I feel like with a Sata III connection, I'd see much better throughput overall. I agree Googer, I too feel 2011 is the way to go, but I'm a go big or go home kinda guy with this stuff. Although, I thought LGA2011 topped out at 1600MHz with OC to 2133 or 2400 depending on the board. Also, I couldn't see buying memory that fast without heat spreaders... plus they look SWEEET! But I'd rather go with 32GB of 2133 than 64GB of 1600MHz. Lastly, it seems all boards with 8 memory slots support 64GB of memory, which I've seen on a good amount of boards so far.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Have you thought about a Romley-EP dual-socket platform with Xeon CPUs? 2 x 8-core / 16-thread processors would be more impressive than just a single 6-core CPU.

 

[Altek]

Woah, that's nutty, that would have to cost at least an extra grand to put together, I want bleeding edge, but I need to pay rent as well bro

 

[Googer]

I have the same Raptors as you, which have higher IO rates than the Hitachi (single). But the Hitachi's minumum transfer rate is as fast as my (single) Raptor's maximum.

I purcahsed my 7K1000.D for $50, just weeks before the Floods which destroyed many hard drive factories and drove prices up 3 fold. If I had bought 5 of them at the time, I would have in RAID 0 a drive array of 5tb and transfer rates that match some of the best SSDs for a fraction of the cost.

I plan on adding more drives to my arrray late in 2012 when prices are expected to stabilize; I'm thinking 4 drives RAID 0+1 and a 2 drive raid 5 incremental back up volume looks like a good idea.

 

[Altek]

Ill look into the hitachi drives, I'm usually a seagate/WD fan though. But what I'd really like to have is four SSDs, 2 for os and 2 for apps and games, but with games clocking in at 15-20gigs these days, i think I'd be starving for space pretty quickly. Both sets would be in a raid 0 config... again, is that the best way to go?

 

[mfenn]

I purcahsed my 7K1000.D for $50, just weeks before the Floods which destroyed many hard drive factories and drove prices up 3 fold. If I had bought 5 of them at the time, I would have in RAID 0 a drive array of 5tb and transfer rates that match some of the best SSDs for a fraction of the cost.

Pure sequential, sure. A single SSD will absolutely destroy a 5-drive RAID0 in terms of IOPS though.

 

[mfenn]

I just want to be on the bleeding edge, and with IV-E coming out by the end of 2012, I can always throw in a new 8 core 22nm CPU... which is bad ass. I did see the benchmarks for 1155, but I go enthusiast or nothing at all. The parts I currently have will go to my secondary rig, and the parts that are currently in my secondary rig will go to my father's PC.

"Bad ass" or not, it is still stupid and a waste of money given the performance difference in typical tasks. Your money to burn though.

I would hate to stop using my raptors really, I got them cheap but I feel like with a Sata III connection, I'd see much better throughput overall. I agree Googer, I too feel 2011 is the way to go, but I'm a go big or go home kinda guy with this stuff. Although, I thought LGA2011 topped out at 1600MHz with OC to 2133 or 2400 depending on the board. Also, I couldn't see buying memory that fast without heat spreaders... plus they look SWEEET! But I'd rather go with 32GB of 2133 than 64GB of 1600MHz. Lastly, it seems all boards with 8 memory slots support 64GB of memory, which I've seen on a good amount of boards so far.

Two points:
- SATA 6Gb/s will do absolutely nothing for mechanical drives like Raptors. You will see no performance difference.
- Overclocking memory doesn't do jack for Sandy Bridge performance.

 

[mfenn]

Ill look into the hitachi drives, I'm usually a seagate/WD fan though. But what I'd really like to have is four SSDs, 2 for os and 2 for apps and games, but with games clocking in at 15-20gigs these days, i think I'd be starving for space pretty quickly. Both sets would be in a raid 0 config... again, is that the best way to go?

If you have endless money, sure. A desktop workload will never be able to push the queue depths needed to take advantage of them though.

 

[Altek]

"Bad ass" or not, it is still stupid and a waste of money given the performance difference in typical tasks. Your money to burn though.




Two points:
- SATA 6Gb/s will do absolutely nothing for mechanical drives like Raptors. You will see no performance difference.
- Overclocking memory doesn't do jack for Sandy Bridge performance.

My bad on the Raptors and 6Gb/s, I swore I saw something that said it improved performance.

And according to this article, there does seem to be some improvement with overclocked memory. I use my system for everything, from gaming to video editing, I like to know that I can do anything I want without being limited by hardware. Plus my dad needs a computer so I can make a sick rig for my girl with these parts.

 

[Altek]

If you have endless money, sure. A desktop workload will never be able to push the queue depths needed to take advantage of them though.

This is true, with my day to day workload, I would be hardly utilizing them. But are you saying Raid 0 wouldn't add a noticeable increase in speed accessing large applications or moving files?

 

[mfenn]

And according to this article, there does seem to be some improvement with overclocked memory. I use my system for everything, from gaming to video editing, I like to know that I can do anything I want without being limited by hardware. Plus my dad needs a computer so I can make a sick rig for my girl with these parts.

I read through the article and the only real improvement was in a purely synthetic environment like Sandra or Futuremark. The encoding gains are paltry at best, matching my statement that is isn't worth it. Saving a couple of percent once or twice per year ain't worth it if you have rent to pay as you said.

 

[mfenn]

This is true, with my day to day workload, I would be hardly utilizing them. But are you saying Raid 0 wouldn't add a noticeable increase in speed accessing large applications or moving files?

Accessing large applications? No, it wouldn't.

Moving large files? Yes, if you have a target that could keep up. But how often do you really do that?

 

[Arachnotronic]

Just get an i7 980 for your current motherboard. SNB-E is only 15% faster than a similarly clocked Gulftown, but some overclocking oughtta take care of that. Also, nothing beats the ease of a drop in upgrade.

You'll easily hit 4GHz with a 980.

 

[Googer]

I couldn't see buying memory that fast without heat spreaders...

DRAM, especially the modern stuff generates very little heat. It would be fine. Crucial after all is owned and manufactured by one of the biggest and best names in the DRAM Business: MICRON. Crucial has been known over the past 15 years for it's stability and old skoolers (before they had heatspraders) know it was (and still is) the RAM of choice for overclocking.

You can get 8GB for the price of 4GB with heatspreaders...

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspe...KIT51264BA160B