Hardware recommendations
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I've been looking at the pcspecialist website and I've come up with the following spec for £1300. Is this good value for money? Will it give me a really fast computer capable of dealing with several intense programmes and the internet all running at the same time without any noticeable slowdown?
Processor (CPU) - Intel
Core
2 Quad Q9550 (4 X 2.83GHz) 1333MHz/12MB (Special Offer)Memory (RAM) - 8GB CORSAIR DOMINATOR 1066MHz - LIFETIME WARRANTY (4x2GB)
Motherboard - ASUS
P5K SE: DDR2, SATAII, PCI-e x16, 2 PCI, 3 x PCI-e x1Operating System - Genuine Windows Vista
Home Premium 64-bit Edition + SP1, CD (£59)USB Options - 8 x USB 2.0 PORTS (6 REAR + 2 FRONT) AS STANDARD
Memory - 1st Hard Disk - 1000GB SERIAL ATA II HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
1st CD/DVD Drive - 20x Dual Layer LightScribe DVD Writer ±R/±RW/RAM
2nd CD/DVD Drive - 16x DVD-ROM & 52x CD-ROM Drive
Graphics Card - 1024MB GEFORCE 9800GX2 PCI Express + DVI (Special Offer)
Sound Card - ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Facilities - ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT
Memory Card Reader - INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (READS XD, MS, CF, SD, etc)
Case - Stylish Black Aluminium Trigon Case + 2 Front/Side USB
Power Supply & Case Cooling - 700W Quiet Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£79)
Processor Cooling - ASUS SILENT KNIGHT II PURE COPPER ULTRA COOLER (£36)
I'm just so clueless about all this stuff.
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I can't say that I'm overly knowledgeable, but from what I do know, that looks to be an awesome system. Where I had problems when I upgraded from win xp 32 bit to Vista 64 bit was in my peripheral hardware. Well, specifically my wireless card. It just wouldn't work with vista 64, and it was really new. I had to buy another one. Otherwise, I've had no problems with vista 64bit.
I think its a great system and the price (based on some real loose calculations done in my very flawed brain) looks to be about right, though I might have thought that at that price a monitor would be included. But heck, that is a great system. If you willing put the cash in to it, that one will be good!
Chris
EDIT: Thats good advice from remus about shopping around.
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Hard to say wether its good value for money as i havent been keeping up with developments as of late, but it will certainly give you very good performance, especially for multi tasking.
If you want to get a better idea of value, try and spec a similar machine form a few other manufacturers and see how the price compares.
edit: i tried getting a similar spec machine form dell and thers came out about 100 quid more, so id say youve got yourself a pretty good deal there
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Seems like a good machine kevsterman, a few comments though:
- upgrade path is very limited due to DDR2 based RAM and motherboard.
- why do you need two optical drives? I used to have two in my last machine (it made sense at the time) but my new machine (built it November last year) only has one optical drive, a DVD-RW, and I have not had a situation whereby I require two yet...
- try rather getting two HDD's; one (fast, smaller capacity) for OS and program installations, the other (regular, large capacity) for data.
- that graphics solution requires a bit of power and could be replaced with something like a nVidia GTX 280 or even a GTX 260 (less expensive than the GTX 280) that will give you similar (if not better) performance for roughly the same energy usage. Pricing should be competitive on the GTX 260.
Power requirement according to eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite v2.5 for your machine (specified by you, using 85% TDP for CPU, 90% load and 25% capacitor ageing) should be approximately 485W, so your 700W PSU is probably an overkill. Power requirement using the same tool with a GTX 280 graphics solution is 498W approximately and 403W with a GTX 260. Changing from one SATA HDD to two SATA HDD's adds 30W to the power requirement, changing from two optical drives to one optical drive reduces power requirement by 33W.
DDR3 RAM is slightly more expensive than DDR2, and motherboards that support DDR3 are also a bit more expensive than DDR2 motherboards, but the higher rated memory will work really well with the newer CPU's and DDR3 uses less power than DDR2.
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What card have you got and what version of the drivers are you using for it? its quite hard to help if we dont know what hardware your using
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@unknownuser said:
that graphics solution requires a bit of power and could be replaced with something like a nVidia GTX 280 or even a GTX 260 (less expensive than the GTX 280) that will give you similar (if not better) performance for roughly the same energy usage.
I've compared the GTX 280 and the GTX 260 against the 9800GX2 on the nvidia website and the 9800 seems to outperform the other 2 quite a bit. For example, graphics performance for 9800 is 45x and for the other two its 35x. Texture fill rate for 8900 is 76.8billion and for the other two its 36.9 billion. Max memory bandwidth for 9800 is 128GB and for the other two its 111.9GB. Standard memory config for 8900 is 1GB and for the other two its 896MB.
So isn't the 9800GX2 a better graphics card to get than the GTX280 & 260?
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@kevsterman said:
So isn't the 9800GX2 a better graphics card to get than the GTX280 & 260?
Only to applications that will / can make use of a SLI setup. Even though it is not strictly speaking a SLI setup since there is only one graphics card the implementation is still quite the same.
SU benefits from stronger GPU and stronger (higher clocked) CPU components. You need to consider what application you're doing the upgrade for and if it will benefit from the technology offered or not, I made that mistake when buying a 2.4GHz quad core CPU thinking SU will be all over it like white on rice.
AFAIK SU isn't optimised for dual graphics card implementations (or multi core CPU's) and as such wouldn't benefit from these technologies at the moment. Hopefully that will change with SU7, but who knows when that will be coming to market since there is not so much of a peep from Google, apart from "working on it" about SU7 release date.
Also:
The 9800GX2 has 512MB video RAM, 128 stream processors and 256-bit memory interface width per GPU. The higher the number in the memory interface width the better the graphics card is my rule of thumb.I must say, for the price these 9800GX2's are going at they would be awesome for gaming, but I'm not convinced that SU would benefit that much from it, but then again I could be wrong.
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think you.
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hi all.i found that there would be some problem using ATI video card.something like there are some problems when you chooseing the face.
is there anyone have the same problem? -
not here, yet
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@sky2779 said:
hi all.i found that there would be some problem using ATI video card.something like there are some problems when you chooseing the face.
is there anyone have the same problem?Ya, that's pretty common w/ ATI cards. I had the same issue. You can try different drivers but that didn't work for me. I ended up having to turn off Hardware Acceleration (basically the same thing as yanking out your ati card and throwing it at the wall but less satisfying). I ended up buying an nVidia card.
-Brodie
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Ati cards have been known to have a few glithes in the past for GPU intensive non game apps, however recently AMD merged/aquired them and it is said that the new generation cards coupled with AMD mobo's would not only solve such issues but also exceed nvidia benchmarks.
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Hi All,
This topic is very interesting. I'm using an old 128MB 1400 quadro board, and I`m looking for an upgrade. My system is fast with everything (XP64SP2), except SU - my gigantic models take up to 10~15 minutes just to change views (transitions/shadows disabled). Those models, on wireframe mode, it still take some minutes to change views too. Can the new GTX boards handle SU like professional boards? On SU, I'm in doubt about the advantages - if any - of the quadros over the newer GTX. Since I render Maxwell on a farm, this SU performance problem matters. Also, can anyone post any links to benchmarks of nvidia versus amd? I found that ati/amd drivers still have less support for OpenGL than NVidia.Thanks for any advice.
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I was wondering why everyone only talks about Nvidia cards? Surely, they are great cards, but AMD seems to have some very competitive cards out right now. They big draw to Nvidia for me, right now, is the prospect of CUDA, but as that hasn't come out yet I think I could wait and in a year or so, buy a budget Nvidia card that would be easily comparable to their current high-end.
The problem with AMD seems to be that the cards run really hot. Still, at such a price difference you could afford a better cooling system and/or ventilated case.Is there a real problem with SU using AMD cards? That would be hard to believe considering the amount of people using their cards. Does anyone here use a current-gen AMD card?
Here is an article [ http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4870,1964.html ] reviewing the 4870 by tomshardware.com -- a very reputable online tech source. Also, notice the 4850 [which can be found for $150 or less] which is not much behind the more expensive 4870/GTX 260... I would imagine a crossfire 4850 setup [~$300] could be pretty sweet -- again, if you could keep it cool.
I would love to hear people's thoughts on this.
[Here's a section from the conclusion on this review]
@unknownuser said:
**For once, our assessment of this Radeon HD 4870 will be simple: It’s an excellent high-end graphics card! With the same architecture and most of the strong points of the Radeon HD 4850, it’s in a higher category performance- and price-wise. The bottom line: Though it’s faster by an average of 6% (and in the majority of our tests) than the GeForce GTX 260, it sells for $299 – $150 less than the competing Nvidia card! Even the top-end card from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 280 – souped up with more transistors, twice as much memory and higher clock speeds – is not that far ahead. It showed only 13% better performance than the Radeon HD 4870, though it costs twice as much.
A few points enter into the picture to make it bit less idyllic, however. First, the Radeon HD 4870 suffers slightly from the competition with its own stable mate, the HD 4850, since the smaller card has a better performance/price ratio (only 23% less performance at a price that is 60% lower). And, AMD has totally reversed its strong and weak points compared to the preceding generation, and in particular to the Radeon HD 3870 — The Radeon HD 4870’s performance is good with antialiasing enabled (despite having only 512 MB of memory), but it consumes a lot more power at idle and also under load (and more than the GeForce GTX 260). And it’s not exactly a model of silent performance, though it’s still a lot quieter than the GeForce GTX 260, and without heating up the inside of your case.**
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The problem with AMD/ATi graphics cards is not about the incapability of hardware, it seems like a driver coding issue that isn't getting resolved.
However some people seem be using it without a problem, like when I had my old machine with the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, didn't have any trouble using it with SU, just frikkin slow and almost unusable at times.
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That card would've been before the ATI/AMD merger, I think. I've heard that they're graphic line is much better since the merger.
I'm not such a fan of AMD but I imagine I'll be buying a system sometime in the next year and have been starting to look around to see what's out there.
Personally I think that CUDA looks amazing... I really hope that pick's up in the very near future. Intel's philosophy of continually adding more and more cores seems ridiculous -- much too brute force -- while GPU [through CUDA] seems a very elegant use of hardware we already have [to a much larger result that merely CPU].
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Regarding ATI/AMD it would be interesting to start hearing some feedback as to whether the 'old' issues still exist or not. However, at this point I think for SU users it's still risky to run out and buy an ATI card even if they're 'better.' You can buy a card w/ uber framerates and clockspeeds that'll make you dizzy but if you can't pick the face of a wall it's worthless.
-Brodie
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This can have real significance under SU:
Where can we find info about OpenGL resources used by SU? Google people, anyone?
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Could well be, maybe if anyone is experiancing any GPU issues this may be an option ... any lab rats out there wanna give it a go?
Nice find Zilonex, you may have a cure for many distressed users.
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