Quick build check!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My mate is upgrading his current computer(E6320 and HD4670), to the following parts:
1.)95W or 125W TDP Phenom II X6
2.)Asus M5A97 PRO
3.)8GB DDR3
4.)A new case

There will be no overclocking. Upgrade is primarily NOT for gaming.

His current PSU is a 400W Silverpower SP-SS-400:

http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware/...-thoughts.html

It is basically a Corsair CX400W.

A few questions:
1.)I assume 1.65V RAM will be fine(will try to get 1.5V RAM) with a Phenom II X6. However, does Bulldozer need 1.5V RAM?? TBH,it is more a question of whether Piledriver will need it. However,I don't see the CPU being upgraded for a while.
2.)With the 400W PSU and say a 125W TDP Phenom II X6 I assume an HD6770 or HD6850 should be fine?? Again,the GPU upgrade is a maybe as the games my mate runs are fine on an HD4670.

[Rob_B]

I'm not sure myself, just wait till CAT pops into the thread....oh....wait....?

Whats going on here?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'm not sure myself, just wait till CAT pops into the thread....oh....wait....?

Whats going on here?

I am making some confirmations!!

AFAIK,BD does not need 1.5V RAM but TBH info is rather vague ATM. Secondly,I know the PSU is decent. It "should" be OK,but I just want to confirm a 125W Phenom II X6 and a HD6850 1GB will be fine. The Phenom II X4 CPUs tend to be a bit better under load when compared to a Phenom II X6 even if both share a 125W TDP rating.

[Biscuit]

if there hasn't been any significant noise about voltages for RAM by now then i think its safe to say BD is just as flexible with RAM voltages as P II. 1.5 will be fine.

6850 and a hex core might be pushing a 400W a little bit. Don't see why it wouldn't work, might be quite high on the load for a lot of the time making the PSU a bit nosier due to the fan spinning up to keep it cool though. I would put it to him that if he wants to upgrade his GPU he might also want to look at a new PSU just to be safe.

[scaryjim]

6850 and a hex core might be pushing a 400W a little bit ...

Don't see that, tbh. Hexus tested the HIS 6850 IceQ X Turbo on an i7 980X / X58 platform, and pulled 221W during gameplay and 254W in Furmark. The stock card in those reviews was even less power hungry (197W/235W). As a platform PII Hex + AMD 970 should be less power hungry than i7 980X + Intel X58, so a 400W PSU should have plenty of overhead.

[Biscuit]

Fair point. Its worth pointing out that in real life, once you have plugged up all your hard drives, USB devices, fans, DVD drives etc that can add up to an extra 50-100W depending on what you have. Its also worth poinging out that we dont know how old the PSU is so the componants may have degraded, dropping its actual capabilities even further.

[Pob255]

PSU will be fine with the 4670, I'd stick with a single pci-e connector card (ie 6850 or 6770) for safety.

How I do question a Pii x6 over an i5 2500, does depend on the use, but for the majority of things the i5 will beat the Pii x6 and cost around the same.
If you're not overclocking then there's no need for a higher end motherboard

Just checked the x6 have dropped in price with the 1075t coming in at around £125 now, which does make it about £25 cheaper than the i5 2400, just the 2400 still beats it in a the vast majority of tests.
It's also less power hungry

Ram voltage wise the PhenomII and AthlonII are very resistant as they where designed for the original 1.7-1.8v DDR3 and also to cope with DDR2 1.8-2.4v.
AFAIK there's been no real change in the core i ram controller, so it's rated as 1.5-1.65v Personally I'd not like to run 1.65v ram on a core i as you'd be pushing that to near it's limit constantly.
But there's plenty of cheap DDR3 1.5v around, 1333mhz or 1600mhz cas9, around £35
I don't think we've seen any major complaints on ram voltages, because it's very hard to find the old high voltage stuff now and much of it was 1333mhz.
Interestingly most of the current DDR3 ram chips don't seem to respond much to voltage increases for overclocking so having 1.5v ram is no great issue.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Don't see that, tbh. Hexus tested the HIS 6850 IceQ X Turbo on an i7 980X / X58 platform, and pulled 221W during gameplay and 254W in Furmark. The stock card in those reviews was even less power hungry (197W/235W). As a platform PII Hex + AMD 970 should be less power hungry than i7 980X + Intel X58, so a 400W PSU should have plenty of overhead.

Fair point. Its worth pointing out that in real life, once you have plugged up all your hard drives, USB devices, fans, DVD drives etc that can add up to an extra 50-100W depending on what you have. Its also worth poinging out that we dont know how old the PSU is so the componants may have degraded, dropping its actual capabilities even further.

PSU will be fine with the 4670, I'd stick with a single pci-e connector card (ie 6850 or 6770) for safety.

Thanks!! Considering the budget too an HD6770 or HD6850 would look fine for the rig. The was bought in January so is not too old and still has a warranty from Scan. OTH,the HD4670 might suffice for his needs for a while longer(seems OK ATM).

How I do question a Pii x6 over an i5 2500, does depend on the use, but for the majority of things the i5 will beat the Pii x6 and cost around the same.
If you're not overclocking then there's no need for a higher end motherboard

Just checked the x6 have dropped in price with the 1075t coming in at around £125 now, which does make it about £25 cheaper than the i5 2400, just the 2400 still beats it in a the vast majority of tests.
It's also less power hungry

Do you think I would suggest a Phenom II X6 for the lolz??

The closest competition to the 95W 1045T(£104)and the 125W 1075T(£123) is the i3 2130 at £112:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel...tio-65w-retail

My i3 2100 is great but probably not so much in this case.

The main use of the PC is for running a specific program.

He is keeping one core free to run the OS so he can actually use the PC for web-browsing and word processing when the PC is running the application. Before on a dual core(the motherboard cannot run quad cores properly) he could run one instance of the program. With two instances 4GB of RAM was not enough.

Sciencemark is the nearest I can find to a similar sort of program(the actual program is not that new so does not take advantage of newer extensions and is single threaded). From the results I have seen,the worst one indicates a Core i5 2300 is 25% faster per core than a Phenom II X6 1055T in this program and 21% faster than a Phenom II X6 1075T. It would put the 1045T at around 27% slower per core. Some other reviews show closer results though.

However,the X6 can run two more instances concurrently. This is a 67% increase in throughput over a Core i5 2300. Basically 5 cores against 3. It actually works out better as it means more data is generated in one run overall(even if it takes a bit longer on the Phenom II X6). So say one run(three instances) is for 24 hours on the Core i5 2300. The Phenom II 1045T might take 30.5 hours for five instances. However,with the Phenom II there would 67% more data sets(5 against 3).

I was also looking at the MyriMatch proteomics results on The Tech Report and a Phenom II X6 1075T is ahead of a Core i5 2500K if all cores are used(this is multi-threaded though).

TBH,power consumption is not his major concern as he probably is going to get the 1045T if possible. It is a 95W TDP CPU. However,this has been out of stock for a while from Scan.

Regarding the motherboard, I looked at some cheaper motherboards too. They need to be full ATX and have 4 RAM slots as 8GB might not be enough. The motherboard needs at least one SATA3.0 port(SSD might be added at some point in the future), at least a USB3.0 port and e-SATA. It was either Gigabyte or Asus(not sure about MSI motherboards now for AMD setups). These motherboards tend to be between £70 to £80 anyway.

Anyway he got the Asus for £77.

Ram voltage wise the PhenomII and AthlonII are very resistant as they where designed for the original 1.7-1.8v DDR3 and also to cope with DDR2 1.8-2.4v.
AFAIK there's been no real change in the core i ram controller, so it's rated as 1.5-1.65v Personally I'd not like to run 1.65v ram on a core i as you'd be pushing that to near it's limit constantly.
But there's plenty of cheap DDR3 1.5v around, 1333mhz or 1600mhz cas9, around £35
I don't think we've seen any major complaints on ram voltages, because it's very hard to find the old high voltage stuff now and much of it was 1333mhz.
Interestingly most of the current DDR3 ram chips don't seem to respond much to voltage increases for overclocking so having 1.5v ram is no great issue.

I forget the AMD memory controllers are probably a bit more robust so any reasonably modern DDR3 RAM should be fine.

[kalniel]

Hi Cat,

Did you know we have a dedicated forum for build checks - you can find it here:
http://forums.hexus.net/review-my-build/



(In all seriousness - it'll help to move this thread there if not for this query, then because it'll build up a forum of useful builds that someone can browse before asking for a new one themselves)

[Pob255]

@CAT, ahhh I see what you're doing here, running multiple instances each on a single core, with one core to run everything else.
Very cleaver.

Have you looked at the BD? granted if it's doing floating point calculations then it's not going to be much use but if you can get 2 instances running per "module" then this might be an even better cpu.

It's a bit more money but would lower cas ram be of any help?
http://www.ebuyer.com/180490-g-skill...2800cl7d-4gbrm
http://www.ebuyer.com/274059-g-skill...2800cl7d-8gbxh

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Hi Cat,

Did you know we have a dedicated forum for build checks - you can find it here:
http://forums.hexus.net/review-my-build/



(In all seriousness - it'll help to move this thread there if not for this query, then because it'll build up a forum of useful builds that someone can browse before asking for a new one themselves)

Old habits die hard - did not bother checking! It would be a good idea though.

@CAT, ahhh I see what you're doing here, running multiple instances each on a single core, with one core to run everything else.
Very cleaver.

Have you looked at the BD? granted if it's doing floating point calculations then it's not going to be much use but if you can get 2 instances running per "module" then this might be an even better cpu.

It's a bit more money but would lower cas ram be of any help?
http://www.ebuyer.com/180490-g-skill...2800cl7d-4gbrm
http://www.ebuyer.com/274059-g-skill...2800cl7d-8gbxh

I was thinking of Bulldozer but ATM a Phenom II X6 seems a safer choice. The upgrade path will be I suspect an 8 thread PD or later stepping of BD(depending of it is any good at the application). Regarding the RAM he said he got this:

http://www.dabs.com/products/kingsto...T1.html?src=15

It is 1.65V though. Hopefully,BD and PD will be fine with 1.65V RAM although it can run at 1333MHZ at 1.5V it seems. Funnily enough OcUK uses it in their SB builds??

[shaithis]

Is there enough of a price difference between the 1.5 and 1.65v RAM to not go for the 1.5 stuff? It seems to me that it is a minimal cost future-proofing.....and as history tells us; while RAM may be dirt cheap today, it might not be tomorrow!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Is there enough of a price difference between the 1.5 and 1.65v RAM to not go for the 1.5 stuff? It seems to me that it is a minimal cost future-proofing.....and as history tells us; while RAM may be dirt cheap today, it might not be tomorrow!

I would have preferred 1.5V RAM but,the main issue he has to consider postage too as the budget is tight. We had a look at Dabs and Amazon and the 1.5V stuff we wanted was not in stock at the time. Ideally we would want the parts to be here next week.

Supposedly,it will run fine at 1.5V and 1600MHZ according to a few forums,so hopefully it will be fine!

[Pob255]

even if it doesn't, running at 1333mhz 1.5v which it can do shouldn't be a major issue (although it does depend on the software) for general use the only reason I suggest 1600mhz is because it's often cheaper than 1333mhz.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I got round to building the computer this weekend. The Fractal R3 is quite a nice case. I managed to get hold of the 125W TDP AMD stock cooler to replace the bundled cooler. The build actually is relatively quiet even under OCCT.

The specifications are as follows:
1.)Phenom II X6 1045T 95W
2.)Asus M5A97 Pro
3.)8GB Kingston HyperX Genesis
4.)Sapphire HD4670

[Behemoth]

Nice clean build that, would love to get mine a s tidy as that !