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Thread: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

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    Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Hi,

    I won't be using this to play games - maybe finish off half life 2. But that'll be it..

    Main purpose is to run financial resesarch/ trading applications run parallel with lot of excel sheets. I currently have 2x 23" monitors and plan to get a third one after getting the desktop setup. I plan to set up eyefinity with the HD 7750..

    Please feel free to comment/criticise..

    Thanks.

    • AMD FX 6300 Black Edition, Vishera, Six Core, S AM3+, 3.5GHz, 14MB Total Cache, 95W, Retail - £101.56
    • Asus M5A78L-M LX v2, AMD 760G, S AM3+, DDR3, SATA II - 3Gb/s, RAID SATA, PCIe (x16), Graphics On Board, mATX - £35.74
    • 2GB XFX Radeon HD 7750 Ghost Thermal Technology, 1300MHz GDDR3, 28nm, GPU 800MHz, 512 Cores, HDMI/ 2x DVI/ DP - £66.92
    • 450W XFX Pro Core Edition P1-450S-X2B9, 85% Eff', 80 PLUS Bronze, SLI/CrossFire, EPS 12V, Fan, ATX v2.31, PSU - £35.34
    • Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 S775/1155/1156/1366/AM3/AM2+/AM2/939 Up to 130 Watts - £15.95
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    • 500GB Western Digital WD5000AZRX Caviar Green, 3.5" HDD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, IntelliPower, 64MB Cache, 8ms, OEM - £46.54
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    Total £452..

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    I would probably get the following motherboard:

    http://www.ebuyer.com/436858-biostar...herboard-ta970

    It has cooled VRMs and Biostar has made solid budget AMD motherboards in the past. It also has USB3.0 and SATA3.0 ports too.

    It is an ATX motherboard,so you will need to go for the Fractal Define R3:

    http://www.ebuyer.com/236437-fractal...edium=products

    However,the price is around the same on Ebuyer as the Fractal Define Mini.

    I would look at one of these hard drives:

    http://www.ebuyer.com/272944-seagate...ive-st500dm002

    http://www.ebuyer.com/319639-seagate...ve-st1000dm003

    I would get one of these HD7750 cards as they are the GDDR5 variant:

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/VTX3D-Radeon...9841979&sr=8-4

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Club-3D-HD77...841979&sr=8-13

    The GT640 also can support three screens but is a slower card. However,IIRC for the third screen for the AMD card you need an active adaptor, and I am not sure if this is the case with the Nvidia card.

    You also need to include an optical drive too,unless you already have one.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    thanks for that mate

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    I agree with Cat on the mobo side of things, the Asus you selected is not a bad choice, however the Biostar has the AMD 970 chipset which was designed to work with the latest generation of AMD CPUs so you will get more from this mobo than you will from the Asus.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    How important is Excel performance for you? And what kind of load is your Excel usage?

    Anandtech have this Excel Monte Carlo Simulation in their CPU reviews and Vishera did fairly well in that


    But against that there was this guy on the AT forum who had bought an FX 8350 and it didn't do well with his Excel load at all. This post is his summary but the rest of discussion might be worth reading as well:
    http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...&postcount=104

    So if your usage is similar to Monte Carlo, Vishera is good value but if it's not...

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    The problem though is that the OP is running multiple Excel sheets,and its either a Core i3 3220 or a FX6300 looking at their budget.

    An example is for a build,I did for a mate in 2011 who had a budget of around £100 to £130 for his CPU. He was running research related software and looking at the closest approximation in reviews,the Intel Core i5 CPUs were faster by around 20% to 25% or thereabouts as it was single threaded. Victory for the Intel CPUs,right??

    However,what we realised is that he could run upto 6 instances of the software,on the Phenom II X6 1045T,and throughput was quite good on the Phenom II X6,especially if he dedicated one core only for the OS. He would have needed to get a Core i5 2400 for around £140 at the time to get similar throughput,so he went with the Phenom II X6 instead and saved £40.

    Having said that the OP could get a Core i5 if they dropped down to 8GB of DDR3 RAM.
    Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 03-02-2013 at 04:13 PM.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Will 16GB RAM be necessary?

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH View Post
    T
    Having said that the OP could get a Core i5 if they dropped down to 8GB of DDR3 RAM.
    Or leave out the GPU and go onboard for now.

    BTW, did anyone read this thread on AT about the performance hit Intel chips take when both the CPU and GPU are heavily loaded?
    CPU/IGP test
    Especially posts #29:
    if you look at the numbers it shows the Intel IGP is very CPU dependent. Not nice for a laptop. AMD's IGP is quite indepent of the CPU(downside=more powerdraw).
    and #32:
    IMO this is getting to the "snappy" aspect that people subjectively speak to when describing their real-world experiential observations with AMD systems running an iGPU.
    Possibly not very relevant for desktop parts with greater TDP but makes the very expensive ULV Intel CPUs a lot less appealing for Ultrabooks.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by dacads View Post
    Will 16GB RAM be necessary?
    OP said "main purpose is to run financial research/trading applications run parallel with lot of excel sheets".

    I don't think 16GB is really needed for that

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by kompukare View Post
    BTW, did anyone read this thread on AT about the performance hit Intel chips take when both the CPU and GPU are heavily loaded?
    CPU/IGP test
    Especially posts #29:

    and #32:


    Possibly not very relevant for desktop parts with greater TDP but makes the very expensive ULV Intel CPUs a lot less appealing for Ultrabooks.
    I was running a Core i3 2100 with the HD2000 IGP for a while and an A6-3670K. I did prefer the A6-3670K TBH,for general day to day usage,if no discrete card was used.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    cheers for the info guys, what do you think of the graphics card ? i just need something to connect 3 monitors

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by hotjiggy View Post
    cheers for the info guys, what do you think of the graphics card ? i just need something to connect 3 monitors
    Hm, AFAIK that card can drive 4 monitors but there are caveats: two it can do with DVI but for the others I'm not 100% sure but I think one has to be displayport and I think that this means if none of your monitors are displayport you have to buy an active adapter.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by hotjiggy View Post
    cheers for the info guys, what do you think of the graphics card ? i just need something to connect 3 monitors
    You've already started a thread discussing that! : http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-car...ml#post2810349

    It gets really confusing if you try and discuss the same thing in multiple threads, and causes people to just waste post count saying the same thing

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    You've already started a thread discussing that! : http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-car...ml#post2810349
    I've given a fairly complete answer in that thread, but to summarise: get a 760G motherboard and any AMD graphics card and you can run 4 monitors. Job done.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    scaryjim - would the bios configuration for multiple monitors work on the Biostar mobo CAT-THE-FIFTH suggested ?

    Thanks.
    Last edited by hotjiggy; 06-02-2013 at 11:48 AM.

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    Re: Newbie about to pull the trigger - what do you think of this build ?

    Quote Originally Posted by hotjiggy View Post
    scaryjim - would the bios configuration for multiple monitors work on the Biostar mobo CAT-THE-FIFTH suggested ?
    No, the motherboard CAT suggested doesn't have onboard graphics, so if you go for that motherboard you'll have to do it a different way.

    You could get one more expensive AMD or NVidia card which supports 3 or more monitors (for AMD that mean you'd need a 5-series or later card with at least one displayport output; for NVidia that means a 600-series card)*. However, the motherboard does have 2 PCIe x16 slots, so alternatively you could buy 2 cheap graphics cards and run monitors off both of them (using surround view or the nvidia equivalent). In that case it wouldn't matter what cards you used.

    *EDIT:

    Here's some cheaper cards that can run three monitors:
    Powercolor 6450: would require an active displayport adapter *and* for one monitor to be VGA: £32.30 @ ebuyer.
    MSI 7750 GDDR3: would require an active displayport adapter: £64.52 @ scan
    MSI GT640: would require one monitor to be VGA: £61.97 @ scan
    Last edited by scaryjim; 06-02-2013 at 02:13 PM.

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