New Rig Plans - Thoughts and Suggestions Welcome..

Hi All,

Having been here on Hexus for a number of years I come in and out of up to date knowledge on hardware, however it's time for my Core2Duo to get replaced with something new. This will be replaced entirely and take it's place as my second rig, as main backup solution for the home network.

The plan for the new machine from what i've researched as as follows :-

Asus P8P67 Pro Rev3
Intel Core i5 2500K Unlocked Retail
Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Jet Black, PC3-12800 (1600)
240GB OCZ Technology Vertex 3, 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Sandforce SSD
1TB Seagate ST31000524AS Barracuda 7200.12, SATA 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache
1GB XFX HD 6870 Black Edition, 4600MHz GDDR5, GPU 940MHz, 1120 Stream Processors,
Lian Li PC-A04B Black Mid Tower Aluminum Case w/o PSU
850W Corsair HX Series V2, Modular
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit SP1

I'm after a small midi machine, and i'm drawn to the Lian Li so if you are commenting on this can you please bear this in mind.

Anything i've missed, think I should get. The likelihood is that it won't be O/C for a few years, so i'm also fairly comfortable with the retail cooler for now.

Will be used for a mix between CiV5, Witcher2 type game play (which is why the 6870 fits, i'm not really a FPS player any more), and home development, MS-SQL, IVR development etc.

Anything that springs to mind, even if it's confirmation that i've done my research and it's right on the money is well received, as i say it's a while since i had to catch up to speed and want to use your collective knowledge to just double check it :)

Thanks
TiG

Looks good. My only point of improvement would be the power supply - you've got such efficient components that you'll be running 120-250W most of the time, even when fully loaded. An 850W supply is going to be running pretty inefficiently at those loads, meaning more heat generation and electricity consumption.

A supply around 400W would be much better matched, but seeing as they're hard to get, around 550-600W with a good rating at low loads might be a good target.

I would consider getting a Z68 based motherboard especially with an SSD. The PSU is OTT.

This modular PSU is around the same as other 700W and 750W ones and gets excellent reviews:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/850w-...35mm-quiet-fan

TBH,even the cheaper 600W to 700W modular PSUs are not much cheaper:

http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-...ular-425w-700w

This PSU is not modular but should do the job:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/620w-...-fan-atx12v-23

If you want to spend less this one is good for the price:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/550w-...l-power-supply

I would avoid the current OCZ SSDs and any other current SandForce ones:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...34nm-test.html

The Crucial,Intel and probably the Kingston ones seem to be more reliable.

The OCZ SSDs have throttling which means actual speeds start to drop over time to artificially boost the life of the drive.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/480w-...-189db-eps-12v is a really solid and whisper quiet 480W modular PSU, albeit fairly expensive for its wattage.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/cruci...-write-260mb-s would save you £60 on the SSD and unless you need super high IOPS, it is probably the way to go over a Sandforce.

Thanks for all the comments so far, quick question on the SSD.

The information on the Vertex appears to be pretty extreme?, 30TB of deliberate high intensity writes?. I've gone and trawled the thread on XtremeSystems, I just can't see that i'm going to nail the drive that hard. This system has a lifespan of 3 years, It's vary rare i take components from one system to another.

Z68 - all I can see with respect to the SSD's is slaving it to be a cache drive so you've got no control over what does or does not get placed on the drive?. Anything i'm missing with the advantages here?.

Thanks

TiG

On my Vertex 2, I've put in just over 10TB and 13,000 hours of operation over the past year or so (just under), and it still benchmarks as per the reviews, so over three years you should actually be OK unless you really hammer it.

There is another thread on the throttling:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ime-Throttling

Even then the Intel ones seem to have lowest failure rates overall(it was on a French website and based on retail data) which were around one fourth the rate of the next most reliable company. Of course it does not necessarily mean that the latest Intel drives will be as reliable but I do get the impression the drives seem to fine ATM. The OCZ Vertex 3 has has some teething problems and even the similar Corsair Force 3 was recalled:

http://buzztechno.com/ocz-confirms-v...re-issues.html

Intel also has 3 to 5 year warranties on its latest SSDs too. Other companies top out at around two to three years.

The Intel SSDs however are not as fast as other ones:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/300gb...205mb-s-retail

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/250gb...plus-free-game

The first one has the five year warranty:

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/...-intel-ssd-320

I would consider getting a smaller SSD for boot and a bigger hard drive. The Samsung F3 1TB is one of the fastest 1TB hard drives and relatively quiet too. BTW,no hard disk will be really able to take advanatage of a SATA 3.0 interface and it was only SSDs which could do so relatively recently. I would also make sure that you don't spend more than £130 to £140 on an HD6870 1GB too. Anything above this and you are htting GTX560TI and HD6950 territory.

The Z68 also has the ability to use Quick Sync and improved overclocking ability AFAIK. The P67 was more of a rushed job by Intel to meet the initial Sandy Bridge launch deadline. If anything the P67 chipset should have been what the Z68 was all along. Anyway,if these features are of no use the P67 motherboards tend to be around £10 to £15 cheaper.

Anyway,here is another CPU you might want to consider:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel...tio-80w-retail

It is basically a Core i7 without an active IGP(meaning no Quick Sync ability AFAIK) and very limited overclocking due to the partially locked multiplier. However,it does have more L3 cache per core than a Core i5 and has hyperthreading.