I want to build me a new computer (warning noob alert)

[polywomple]

So this would be the first computer i've ever built myself, and I'm pretty unfamiliar with this stuff so bare with me.

I'm look at something around 800-900$ and these are the parts I've come up with

- GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128514)

- AMD FX-8120 Zambezi 3.1GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103961)

- 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231568)

- GeForce GTX 550 (2 possibly) link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130625)

- 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706)

- Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042)

- 2TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145369)

- I may take the power supply from my old computer, which I believe is a 700W

I guess my main question is, is all this compatible? Am I making any stupid mistakes?

My second question is, does it matter what brand videocard I choose with this particular motherboard?

Thanks!

[Rbstr]

Save your money and go with 8gb of ram (2x 4gb sticks) and drop the SSD
Use the money to get a 560ti at least and an Intel i5

A graphics card at this budget level is probably way more important than that SSD...unless you're at a low monitor resolution. What does your monitor support?

As far as brand-matching things: It's not important. You can have a gigabyte videocard and an MSI motherboard no big deal.

[polywomple]

Save your money and go with 8gb of ram (2x 4gb sticks) and drop the SSD
Use the money to get a 560ti at least and an Intel i5

A graphics card at this budget level is probably way more important than that SSD...unless you're at a low monitor resolution. What does your monitor support?

As far as brand-matching things: It's not important. You can have a gigabyte videocard and an MSI motherboard no big deal.

My monitor is 1920x1080, forgot to mention.

[Bags]

You shouldn't get 2 cheapo video cards for PS2, and then a cheap SSD that has 20% 1 star reviews imo.

[Vancha]

This RAM. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231422)
This SSD. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147162)
This HDD. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840)

That's $145 extra to put on the GPU.

Motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157296)
CPU (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504&Tpk=3570k)

Far better than what you were going to get for $20 more.

With the case, that leaves you about $320 for the GPU, which scrapes HD 7950 territory.

Edit: See if you prefer this case. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129182&Tpk=Antec%20one%20illusion) Four fans rather than two and from the looks of it, better cable management.

[polywomple]

Oh crap sorry guys I forgot to mention I'm supporting two monitors. My second monitor is a cintiq tablet. Don't know if that effects anything (I don't think it does?)

[NumbaOneStunna]

I would not go AMD at this point. I am not a fanboy at all but for the price/performance you simply cannot beat an i5.

On the other hand, I still have a bomb ass Asus Sabertooth 990FX setup thats waiting for piledriver. Infact I bought the Sabertooth just for the release of the AMD FX processors but those were a major flop.

[polywomple]

I would not go AMD at this point. I am not a fanboy at all but for the price/performance you simply cannot beat an i5.

On the other hand, I still have a bomb ass Asus Sabertooth 990FX setup thats waiting for piledriver. Infact I bought the Sabertooth just for the release of the AMD FX processors but those were a major flop.


im just curious (because I honestly don't know)

what makes an Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504&Tpk=3570k) better than a AMD 3.6GHz Eight-Core (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103960), for example? I would think at first glance the latter, but I'm getting the opposite impression?

[NumbaOneStunna]

im just curious (because I honestly don't know)

what makes an Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504&Tpk=3570k) better than a AMD 3.6GHz Eight-Core (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103960), for example? I would think at first glance the latter, but I'm getting the opposite impression?

i5 has substantially higher IPC (instructions per clock)

Basically the i5 (especially Ivy Bridge) can do more work at 3.4ghz than the AMD Bulldozer.

If you really want an AMD processor, get a Phenom II X6 or wait for Piledriver, its expected to have 20-30% higher IPC than Bulldozer.

[Rbstr]

The tablet won't pose any issues.

Go with vancha's suggestions, except scrap the 64gb SSD, which I think is to small to be of any real use, and get a GTX670 graphics card.

You could also save some money and get an i5 3550 instead of the 3570k. Especially if you don't care to overclock.


what makes an Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504&Tpk=3570k) better than a AMD 3.6GHz Eight-Core (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103960), for example? I would think at first glance the latter, but I'm getting the opposite impression?

Because you really can't use clockspeed or number of cores to compare between CPU's that don't use the same design. You have to look at benchmarks (Really, you can know the FLOPs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS-) or other measures in a sort of theoretical manner but that doesn't always translate to program performance...and companies won't necessarily tell you).
They're even built on top of vastly different transistor geometry and semi-conductor techniques.

[Vancha]

Go with vancha's suggestions, except scrap the 64gb SSD, which I think is to small to be of any real use, and get a GTX670 graphics card.
Even without games and just as a boot drive with some programs it'd be more than appreciable, surely?

[GLaDOS]

I am even more of a noob than this guy, have pretty much no experience in these matters, but I'm still thinking of building a computer instead of just buying one in a store, because I've heard it's much cheaper. I'm trying to stay in the $500-$600 range, and want a laptop. Does anyone have any idea of what I should be looking for? I just don't know where or how to start.

EDIT: Just saw the stickied thread, (I found this one using the search) so I'll go check that out now. Sorry about that.

[Rbstr]

Even without games and just as a boot drive with some programs it'd be more than appreciable, surely?

That the SSD is only 64gb is actually sort of irrelevant to my advice here (which is my mistake...because that is what I said initially).
If you play only a couple of games at a time and they have a lot of loading it would be useful. But as useful as the 670?

Loading times are just not a very large fraction of the computer experience...how many times do you turn your computer off and on in a day? It makes no sense to prioritize it unless your other parts are seeing diminishing returns or you've got a good reason from a non-gaming or secondary usage standpoint.

[Vancha]

It's my understanding that it makes loading everything feel snappier, from browsers to media players.

Is that as useful as a 670? No. Is it as useful as the difference between a 7950 and a 670? Dunno...

[Mutant]

If you really want an AMD processor, get a Phenom II X6 or wait for Piledriver, its expected to have 20-30% higher IPC than Bulldozer.

IPC wont be 30% better, Your letting your expectations run wild and you will get disappointed with piledriver much like everyone did with bulldozer.


Trinity is showing 10-15% IPC improvement but lacks the L3 cache so a few more % might be possible, but it wont be a lot.

(which is a nice bump when you consider SB > IB was 5-10%)

Overall performance may be 30% better, I would hope AMD can up the clocks a bit ect..

[Goku]

Be great if the go Intel posters would stay out of AMD build threads.

It is like a guy doing a Camaro car build, and someone replying dude you
should really go with a Mustang. Not helpful. Let people enjoy their build.

He said he was a n00b, so have to give him proper guidance. If he came in here saying he wanted an AMD build regardless I would help him as much as I can. Still looking forward to the upcoming PD eight core being something worthwhile.

[Mutant]

We all been a n00b. To me it's not proper guidance to change their build.

Especially when their build isn't a bad build. All it needs is someone experienced in that build to help it a long.

I get that Intel cornered the market. Glock cornered the market too, doesn't mean the Kimber I carry is shit.

Intel offer better performance per $ for most user cases right now, this is info that the less well informed people asking about builds should be given.

However the performance per $ gap is not that big, Intel lead by quite some way in pure performance.
And Intel total blow AMD away in performance per Core/thread.

This results in Intel being the clear winner in older code which uses 1-4 threads.

It is my expectation that the FX-8150 will perform quite well for PS2 as the devs have said that PS2 will use every thread it can find.

[Goku]

Last post on this from me anyway. A lot of people are mislead by the core count on AMD CPU. They see octo core think this the greatest and will do the build without looking into the actual performance. We even have people getting the quad core FX 4100, which is just a bad cpu altogether (when that person would be better off with a Phenom II X4 or a Core i3 2100). People often just do not do any research despite dumping nearly a thousand into the computer they will have for years to come.

[Rbstr]

Safe to say the OP heard of Intel. There's no, hey should I go with Intel?
question. Choice is made. S/he is simply asking for help on an AMD build.

Or they picked AMD because it has a higher clock speed and a cheaper price, because people who are n00bs may think clock speed is the important stat?

I don't give any fucks whether a CPU is AMD or Intel or Bob's Friendly Semiconductor Fab. The only thing of importance is performance at the desired application. Intel has AMD soundly beat. If you're looking for advice on a computer build that's what I'm going to tell you to go for. If this was several years ago, I'd be telling people to forget about that stupid prescott Pentium D and go for the Athlon 64 X2 or whatever it was.

[polywomple]

So personally I think I need the SSD because I'm very photoshop heavy (illustration)

I don't nearly play as many games as I used too, but I'm definitely planning for PS2... But at the same time I need to consider my art in the picture in terms of build. Which I should have posted earlier.

That's why I thought the SSD was a good idea because I was planning on making it the boot drive, installing PS CS5 on it and maybe one or two games (definitely PS2).

I'm just wondering, how much space does windows 7 require? Getting a 64g SSD seems small however if I can fit the OS and a few programs I'm content with the package.

OK so I have a few more questions...

The reason I was considering the 16g memory was because I'm so Photoshop heavy (up to 400mb sized PSD's with dozens of layers), but am I over-killing it? 8 gigs seems like a good benchmark but if there's a noticeable difference with 16g, especially with Photoshop, I will definitely get it.

[Rbstr]

With Photoshop I don't know if you'll see a ton of SSD benefit unless you have the files you're working with on the SSD as well. But I am not sure.
I would bet more RAM is a much more useful addition than an SSD for photoshop (and cheaper)

EDIT: here's Adobe's advice

Solid-state disks

Installing Photoshop on a solid-state disk (SSD) allows Photoshop to launch fast, probably in less than a second. But that speedier startup is the only time savings you experience. That’s the only time when much data is read from the SSD.

To gain the greatest benefit from an SSD, use it as the scratch disk. Using it as a scratch disk gives you significant performance improvements if you have images that don’t fit entirely in RAM. For example, swapping tiles between RAM and an SSD is much faster than swapping between RAM and a hard disk.

If your SSD doesn’t have much free space (if the scratch file grows bigger than can fit on the SSD), you can add a secondary or tertiary hard disk (after the SSD). Make sure that these disks are selected as scratch disks in the Performance pane of Preferences.

Also, SSDs vary widely in performance, much more so than hard disks. Using an earlier, slower drive results in little improvement over a hard disk.

Note: Adding RAM to improve performance is more cost effective than purchasing an SSD. If money is no object, you're maxed out on installed RAM for your computer, you run Photoshop CS5 as a 64-bit application, and you still want to improve performance, consider using a solid-state disk as your scratch disk.

As noted above, an SSD doesn't improve performance if the efficiency indicator is already high. The lower the efficiency indicator, the greater the improvement an SSD offers.

That's about what I figured.
(The rest of their advice here: helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-performance-photoshop-cs4-cs5.html)

Windows takes a bit under 20gb. PS2 will likely take 10 considering modern games. You're halfway full with nothing else. 64gb would be a PITA for me on my gaming computer and I would have to jump though "is it ssd worthy?" hoops. It would work OK for my work laptop which only needs office and some work software besides document/picture storage (it actually has a 100gb SSD, I've seen both sides of the picture)...It may work for you but I think there are better things to spend your money on. I wouldn't make it a priority compared to other components.

Being a big user of Photoshop also brings GPU computation into the picture. I have no idea which current cards are best, my GPU computation experience is limited to video decoding. nVidia was the innovator/leader but AMD seems to have made strides there. You should probably google around a bit.

[Mutant]

I think SSDs are well worth it, I will never go back to not having an SSD.

But im not sure it will make much different to Photoshop apart from speeding loading the img into ram, If your a working on one image at a time once it loads into ram you wont be using an SSD.





If you have an older version of Photoshop and want GPGPU support you will need Nvidia.

CS4 & 5 Use CUDA.

Only CS6 + Uses OpenCL for use with AMD cards. Adobes Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE) only supports OpenCL and drops CUDA.

CUDA = Nvidia only (proprietary Nvidia)
OpenCL = AMD + Nvidia + Intel (open standard by Khronos group)


Right now for raw performance the HD7970 is the best GPGPU card you can buy, followed by GTX680 then GTX580, but if your code is DP then the 580 is better than the 680.



GFLOPS(SP) GFLOPS(DP) SP-DPx

GeForce GTX 580 1581 198 8
GeForce GTX 670 2460 103 24
GeForce GTX 680 3090 129 24

Radeon HD 7970 3789 947 4
Radeon HD 7970 GHz 4300 1010 4

[polywomple]

Thanks for the help so far guys

sooo I was thinking about getting an intel i5-3550 instead of an i7-2600 and using the spare money for a liquidcooling system for overclocking the CPU. good idea y/n?

[Vancha]

You can't overclock a 3550, you'll need the 3570k.

Otherwise it's a good idea, assuming you won't utilize the multi-threading of the i7 and you want to overclock the i5 to the point of needing a liquid cooling system...

[Deadeye]

How about for the video card waiting for the 660ti? It's not as good as the 670 but leaked stats say it's better than the 7950 and it's probably going to be about $300 which, if the leaks are accurate, will make it a very good bang for the buck.

[Rbstr]

I wouldn't get the i7 anyway. I'd go with the i5 stock and use the money on a better graphics card or just pocket it. Maybe buy a nice quiet heat sink.