new system advice please

[bigduke6]

Hi All

I am planning to get a new scan pc early march (my old scan one is nearly 4 years old). I only really play games with the odd internet use. I see everyone seems to be going with the intels overclocked i7 systems. I have had no problem with my amd system and was thinking of buying scans am3 dragon system, so the 1st question is am i going to notice much diffference in performance?. Should I have the build overclocked as i see on the forums here and else where, windows 7 seems to cause issues when overclocked or am i wrong? I need a quiet case as it will be placed right close to the monitor on the table so was thinking of the antec 193? My old case was sound proofed by scan, do they still do it and is it worth it? I will be using the 1GB XFX HD 5870 XT, grapics card and 4gb dominator ram, will it be worth it to go to 6GB? and last of all a 15000 GB Western Digital, Caviar Green, 32MB Cache system drive and a 500 GB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200 rpm, for storage? I need to keep the price around 1500-1600 max
thanks

[Server: 503]

I can't honestly point you reliably one way or the other regarding the case, soundproofing etc, but you may want to consider a faster HDD if it's a gaming system. RAID is nice

Also, from what I understand, there's a reason everyone seeking high performance is going for the i7s, but also keep in mind that the majority of people on a computer hardware channel are likely to be hardware enthusiasts.

I just built an AMD system for my dad and have found it a touch buggy, but likely my fault for not researching the components thoroughly enough, whereas you have had a very good experience from the sound of things.

The other thing, I'm wondering is if it's really worth the money for you to tackle a completely new system. Is there any way you could upgrade from your old one? It would save you some cash initially, and likely spread the total cost out over another year or so, at which point you would have replaced all the components anyway, and they would be cheaper.


Server: 503

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Bigduke6

The I7 Systems are ideal for gaming and we have had far better Overclocking with these CPUs

I recommend as you are having a 64 Bit OS that 6 Gig is the minimum you should have for a Core I7 Setup

You can have a 10-20% Overclock on the CPU which should be sufficient, the main issues as outlined on the sticky on our 3xs Support Page are down to all the advanced power saving features in windows 7, once these are disabled the system stability is increased, there will always be the odd game that has an issue with overclocking however and this is why we create a Standard and Overclocked profile for each overclocked system.

Please bear in mind that if a system is overclocked the fans need to run faster to cool the inner componetnts more so if noise is an issue depending on which case you choose soundproofing can be fitted (The Antec Case has built in Soundproofing) . On a side note if you opt for the 193 Case and one of the bigger CPU coolers (Thermalright or Prolima) the Fan that goes on the side doesnt fit and has to be removed alternate case suggestions can be discussed with our sales team when you decide to order....

If you opt for Raid as Server: 503 has suggested its always a good idea to have a storage drive if you have a Raid 0, if one drive fails in a Raid 0 you lose everything...

We can setup various different types of Raid and Partition drives if you require and again this can be discussed with the sales team


If you need any more advice please let us know

Regards

Ben

[bigduke6]

thanks Ben and 503,
Sorry for being thick but I am unsure, and have no knowledge on raid and its uses and configerations?

[bigduke6]

so will this system be better than my 1st amd one?


Antec P183 Advanced Super Mid Tower (£93.97)

CPU Compare
Intel i7 920, 2.66Ghz, 4.8GT/s QPI, Overclocked to 3.8Ghz!! (£188.17) 1

CPU Coolers Compare
Prolimatech Megahalems Super 6 Heatpipe Tower Cooler (Performance Option) (£35.97) 1

Overclocking Compare
*No System Overclocking* (£0.00) add £0.00 1

Intel i7 920 professionally Overclocked by our 3XS engineers to 3.8Ghz (£0.00) 1
Memory Compare
6GB (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), CAS 8 (£121.12) 1

1GB XFX HD 5870 XT, 865Mhz GPU, 1600 SPs, 5200Mhz GDDR5 (£299.58) 12
Power Supply Unit Compare
550W Corsair CMPSU-550VXUK - (Single Graphics Card) (£55.97) 1
System Drives Compare
500 GB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache (£32.97) 12
Storage Hard drives Compare
*Storage Hard Drive Not Required* (£0.00) 1
Optical Drive 1 - DVD/Blu Ray Compare
Sony AD-7240S-0B - 24x DVDRW (£15.41) 12

Optical Drive 2 - DVD/Blu Ray Compare

Sony AD-7240S-0B - 24x DVDRW (£15.41) 12

Floppy Drive / Flash Card Readers & Writers Compare
Akasa AK-ICR-07S 3.5" Internal Multi Mem. Card Reader Incl. M2, Micro SD & USB port (£4.79) 1
Creative X-Fi Titanium - PCI-E (x1) (£69.00) 1
Case Cooling Fans Compare

120mm Akasa Amber Case Fan, Ultra Quiet and Long life with NO LEDs (£13.78) 123 x2

What about the omega case that comes with the premium i7 build for quietness?

[Server: 503]

That whole rig sounds delicious. It takes me back to when I built my gaming rig two years ago and I just chose the best of everything, lol.

two things though; neither of especial importance for performance's sake, but potentially vital nonetheless:

Check with a professional about using a 550w power supply for that system, if you ever intend to run crossfire, you may have problems with that. In my rig I went completely crazy an used an 1100w for absolutely no reason, considering I ended up selling it before getting a second GPU. Such is life.

Secondly, there are significantly better fans than the Akasa, spec-wise:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/120mm...bber-A-V-Plugs

You do need to be wary of some claims, as a significant amount of fan manufacturers seem to have some way of testing which takes their cubic feet per minute (CFM) well outside the realms of realism.

The other thing to look at is the shape of the fan blades if it says it's silent, because standard straight-edge fan blades cause turbulence which generates noise. You're looking for something which is designed to reduce that. Noctua makes good fans for that, with decent performance, but I'm not sure the price of £14 is necessary for a 120mm fan, lol.


Server: 503

[Server: 503]

Secondly, the issue of RAID.

I wanted to leave this in a separate post because it's honestly complicated enough on its own.

The most common types of RAID supported by high end mainboards are 0, 1, 5, and 10.

RAID 0, or striped drives, essentially sends half your data to one drive and half to the other, hence the term, "striped". This makes reading and writing much faster because whenever you save something to a drive, you can actually save half the data to each of two drives simultaneously, and the same in reverse for reading information. This layout is favored for very high performance, but only use it if you aren't afraid of losing what's on these drives because, as our handy, local 3XS expert says, "if one drive goes down, you lose all your data!". Not really, but you lose half of it, and the computer won't be able to read what's on the remaining drive, because none of it will make sense without the parts saved to the dead drive.

Confused yet? Think of your data stream as numbered units; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 etc. coming to be saved in that order. In order to write as quickly as possible, the even numbers will be saved to one drive and the odds to the other, so both drives are reading and writing in tandem.

You end up with this:

DRIVE A) 1, 3, 5, 7, 9

DRIVE B) 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

Meaning that 1 and 3 would likely fail to make any sense to your computer without 2 in between, so if DRIVE B fails, the rest of the data becomes useless. Errors are rare to be perfectly honest, but statistically, somebody somewhere will switch on their computer for the third time, all excited to play ultra-fast loading games on RAID 0, only to find they lost everything. Don't let it be you! Of course you can get around this by having your operating system and data storage running on a backup drive, then just playing your games on RAID 0, (or having an awesome dual RAID system like the SCAN Jellyfish ) but you'll need more drives for this and I would recommend having it set up by a professional either way. I would be lost setting up a RAID system even with what I know.

RAID 1, or mirrored drives, is essentially a redundant array of drives for safety, and can increase your read speeds somewhat, but at the cost of buying more drives and having slightly longer write times. In RAID 1, all the data you save is saved to both drives identically, so if one drive fails, you just swap out the dead one and copy the data from the remaining drive into a replacement second drive. Easy and safe. Having the data on two drives means you can still read data from two drives simultaneously, enhancing your read times somewhat. However, because all data must effectively be copied by the RAID controller on to a second drive as data is saving, it's a little bit slower than a single drive when writing, though this likely won't be noticeable unless you have another system next to it for comparison.

Using the previous data stream example:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 etc.

becomes:

DRIVE A) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

DRIVE B) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

So from what has been said, you can see there would be no immediate data loss resultant from a single drive failure here, and if you needed data pieces 1, 4, 3, and 9, you could read any two of those from one drive and any two from the other, to speed things up, or at least that is my understanding, though it may not be as fast as RAID 0 due to sorting which data is coming out of which drive.

RAID 5 is a way of having backup data for your system spread across all the drives you have, meaning, in any situation, ANY drive could fail, even if you have 4 or 5 drives, and data regeneration is possible from the backups buried in the remaining drives. This is best if you have large numbers of drives, and don't want to need two copies of the data for every drive in the system. The actual functioning which allows this is honestly too complex to explain unless you have an especial interest in it and I generally wouldn't recommend this RAID layout unless you're running a server or some other application where you need lots of drives to be protected. RAID 5 also isn't as reliable as RAID 10 on the whole, for reasons which I'll get to now:

RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0 - but not to be confused with a system using two independent RAID arrays; one set of drives configured in RAID 0 and a separate set configured in RAID 1 - a good example of this being, again, the SCAN Jellyfish, which uses a pair of drives in RAID 0 for operation and a second pair in RAID 1 for data storage. This is not RAID 10.) But it is somewhat similar... The concept behind RAID 10 is the best of both worlds from RAID 0 and RAID1. To achieve this, the data is copied and stored identically to each "drive", just like in RAID 1, but the "drive" it's being saved to is actually two drives configured in RAID 0, hence double the write/read speed after copying.

Using our example to clarify:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 etc.


Becomes:

"DRIVE" A) containing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10


but configured as:

DRIVE A-1) 1, 3, 5, 7, 9
+
DRIVE A-2) 2, 4, 6, 8, 10


and,

"DRIVE" B) also containing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10


but also configured as:

DRIVE B-1) 1, 3, 5, 7, 9
+
DRIVE B-2) 2, 4, 6, 8, 10


Look it over a few times, lol, obviously a full illustration would be better, but effectively, all the data is saved twice, so you can lose a drive, or even a whole set of drives without losing any data, but the actual drives holding the data are striped, so the read/write speeds are much higher. The other advantage is that, although you need a minimum of four drives to implement this, you can lose as many as two (for example A-1 and B-2) drives with no data loss, it's close to being as fast as a RAID 0 setup; just the initial data copying which makes it slower, as well as the data processing required by the RAID controller. There is also a way of reversing the process known as 01 (as opposed to 10) in which the data is striped first then copied, rather than copied then striped as in the above example. I'm not aware of particular merits associated with configuring the array one way as opposed to the other, but most on-board RAID controllers are RAID 10 configured and so will follow the above example, more likely than not.

Hope you enjoyed the article, lol.




Server: 503

[Philipp]

Server 503, thank you for the in depth replies

bigduke6, that system looks great the 550W PSU is more than enough for any single GPU configuration however as Server 503 has pointed out if you are looking to add a second card down the line its worth getting a upgraded PSU now.

Feel free to post up any questions and I will do my best to answer them

Cheers

[bigduke6]

Again 503 many thanks for the reply and also from Philip. I am halfway through a nice bottle of scotch and the raid explanation seems to be making sense!!!

Again i would ask is the intel set up going to be much better than my original amd dragon 3?
, Asus M4A79-T Deluxe, AMD 790FX - AM3 DDR3
Antec P193 Advanced Super Mid Tower Case, Black, Door, w/o PSU (£104.29)
AMD Phenom II X4 965, AM3, 3.4GHz, 8MB Total Cache, 140W, Retail (£122.65) 1
CPU Coolers Compare
Titan Fenrir TTC-NK85TZ 120mm PWM (£26.98) 1
Overclocking Compare
*No System Overclocking* (£0.00) subtract £40.00 1

3XS System Core-Logic Overclocking *0 - 10%* (£40.00) 1
Memory Compare
8gb(4x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Dominator DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), CAS 9 (£163.96)
ATI Graphics - First GFX Card Compare
*ATI VGA Card Not Required* (£0.00) subtract £299.58 1
1GB XFX HD 5870 XT, 865Mhz GPU, 1600 SPs, 5200Mhz GDDR5 (£299.58) 1
Power Supply Unit Compare
650 Corsair HX Series Modular PSU (Single Graphics Card) (£79.49) 1
System Drives Compare
150 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor, 10,000 rpm, 16MB Cache (£102.98) 12
Storage Hard drives Compare
500 GB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache (£32.97)
Floppy Drive / Flash Card Readers & Writers Compare
Akasa AK-ICR-07S 3.5" Internal Multi Mem. Card Reader Incl. M2, Micro SD & USB port (£4.79) 1 Optical Drive 1 - DVD/Blu Ray Compare
Sony AD-7240S-0B - 24x DVDRW (£15.41) 1
Optical Drive 2 - DVD/Blu Ray Compare
*DVD Writer Not Required* (£0.00) subtract £15.41 1
Sony AD-7240S-0B - 24x DVDRW (£15.41) 1
Sound Card Compare
Creative X-Fi Titanium - PCI-E (x1) (£69.00) 1

A question on overclocking - for instance if you over clock a i7 2.6 to 3.4, wont that be the same as buying a 3.4 processer? so will a i7 overclocked to 3.4 be better than a amd 965 already at 3.4?

The reason I wont be buying till march is thats when my xmas overtime money gets paid in!!. Is there anything coming out in the next 2 months or so to wait for?

With reference to raid - thats why i was thinking of getting a raptor drive for my system drive and just a normal HD for storage, as I thought a raptor drive would be fast loading?

[abs_rio]

In reference to the processor, the i7 920 at stock speed can outperform an overclocked Phenom II X4 965 in certain tasks.
The following article has a few benchmarks comparing the two:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-965,2389.html

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Again 503 many thanks for the reply and also from Philip. I am halfway through a nice bottle of scotch and the raid explanation seems to be making sense!!!

Again i would ask is the intel set up going to be much better than my original amd dragon 3?
, Asus M4A79-T Deluxe, AMD 790FX - AM3 DDR3
Antec P193 Advanced Super Mid Tower Case, Black, Door, w/o PSU (£104.29)
AMD Phenom II X4 965, AM3, 3.4GHz, 8MB Total Cache, 140W, Retail (£122.65) 1
CPU Coolers Compare
Titan Fenrir TTC-NK85TZ 120mm PWM (£26.98) 1
Overclocking Compare
*No System Overclocking* (£0.00) subtract £40.00 1

3XS System Core-Logic Overclocking *0 - 10%* (£40.00) 1
Memory Compare
8gb(4x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Dominator DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), CAS 9 (£163.96)
ATI Graphics - First GFX Card Compare
*ATI VGA Card Not Required* (£0.00) subtract £299.58 1
1GB XFX HD 5870 XT, 865Mhz GPU, 1600 SPs, 5200Mhz GDDR5 (£299.58) 1
Power Supply Unit Compare
650 Corsair HX Series Modular PSU (Single Graphics Card) (£79.49) 1
System Drives Compare
150 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor, 10,000 rpm, 16MB Cache (£102.98) 12
Storage Hard drives Compare
500 GB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache (£32.97)
Floppy Drive / Flash Card Readers & Writers Compare
Akasa AK-ICR-07S 3.5" Internal Multi Mem. Card Reader Incl. M2, Micro SD & USB port (£4.79) 1 Optical Drive 1 - DVD/Blu Ray Compare
Sony AD-7240S-0B - 24x DVDRW (£15.41) 1
Optical Drive 2 - DVD/Blu Ray Compare
*DVD Writer Not Required* (£0.00) subtract £15.41 1
Sony AD-7240S-0B - 24x DVDRW (£15.41) 1
Sound Card Compare
Creative X-Fi Titanium - PCI-E (x1) (£69.00) 1

A question on overclocking - for instance if you over clock a i7 2.6 to 3.4, wont that be the same as buying a 3.4 processer? so will a i7 overclocked to 3.4 be better than a amd 965 already at 3.4?

The reason I wont be buying till march is thats when my xmas overtime money gets paid in!!. Is there anything coming out in the next 2 months or so to wait for?

With reference to raid - thats why i was thinking of getting a raptor drive for my system drive and just a normal HD for storage, as I thought a raptor drive would be fast loading?

I would ask for hardware advice on the HEXUS.hardware section!!

In March newer hardware is going to be released. The new Nvidia DX11 cards should be out by then and the AMD 890 series chipsets will also be released. AMD and Intel will also be releasing new 6 core processors too AFAIK and there have been rumours of a faster Phenom II X4 part being released.