Perfectionist

Hey I was wondering can anyone recommend good benchmark sites / sections of general benchmark review sites for CPUs and Memory?

E.g. same graphics card etc just the brand and timings of memory changes and measure the FPS

and e.g. same graphics card etc just the brand and timings of CPU changes and measure the FPS

Thanks for any help, trying to find "real" performance data rather than just "we can do that, we do this and oh, clock speed" as it's all a bit meaningless to me really.

Kind of thing I am looking to find out is just exactly how small the difference is between
i5 750, i7 860, i7 870, i7 920 and i7 975
and
6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600) CAS 7 v PC3-14900 (1866) CAS 7 v PC3-16000 (2000) CAS 8 v OTHER BRANDS of DDR3 (I am probably going to be buying my PC from 3xs.scan.co.uk and they mainly sell Corsair which would make it more convenient but I want to see if other brands are better value first)
(I am not sure what the timings on memory actually mean really, though I know higher clock speed is better, and I have no idea what CAS is)

Thank you for any help! Like the title says, any personal recommendations are very welcome too.

Current plan is something like this:

Case: Corsair 800D
Cooling: Scan installed watercooling (The reason I am going for watercooling is to have the PC as quiet as possible while still having good performance - I previously had the misfortune of owning a standard Sapphire 4870X2 card and it sounded like an aeroplane taking off when under load, I really don't want something like that again with my 5870)
PSU: ? Totally unsure on this one. Last PC had Corsair 1000-HX just for longevity and sureness, was told that larger ones are actually MORE efficient than smaller ones? Yet elsewhere I've seen people say smaller uses less energy, so totally unsure on this one.
Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme
CPU: Probably Intel i7, undecided on whether I should go up to 920, 975 etc
Memory: Currently on 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator GT, DDR3 PC3-16000 (2000), 240Pin, CAS 8, may buy lower depending on how much the performance difference is (I don't want to pay lots for a tiny difference in performance, other than that I am going for the best within reason, I am trying to avoid being ripped off)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Graphics: Sapphire ATI 1GB 5870
SSD 1: Intel X-25M (G2) 80GB (Windows 7, page file, background processes)
SSD 2: Intel X-25M (G2) 160GB (Programs, Games)
Storage: External 1TB maxxtor (already have)
OS: Windows 7 Pro (already have, will send for the system to be tested on)
Optical drive: Probably LG BH08LS20 - Want to be able to read/write *dual layer* blu-rays (made the mistake with my last PC of finding out could only do single layer after)

MrLinky

lol your name goes well with your questions

Right off the bat, if a roundup/comparison/benchmark between ANY popular computer part exists, it can be found on the first page of a google search. I'm sorry if i sound rude/unwilling to help, but almost all benchmarks on the web are legit and pretty accurate.

For the graphics card: if its based off the reference design, then it will operate the same as the original model (ie the Sapphire 5870 will score the same as the HIS 5870). One brand might overclock slightly better than the other, but at stock speeds, they are the same.

For the cpus, the i7 920 and i7 975 are the same, except the i7 975 is $700 more, 3.33ghz stock (920 = 2.66ghz stock), and has an unlocked multiplier. If you have the money and are addicted to overclocking, go for it, but all i7 920 D0s can hit 4ghz pretty easy.
The i5 and i7 8xx cpus are intels budget processors. They use ddr2 ram instead of the i7 9xx's ddr3. That being said, the i7 9xx still outperforms the new i7/i5 in most areas. Based on the rest of your hardware, i'd recomend the i7 920 because of the better performance, AND because intel's next cpu, the six-core Sandy Bridge, will use the same socket as the i7 9xx (lga 1366), meaning you could pop it in your current mobo and go.
The i5 vs i7 8xx and i5/i7 vs i7 9xx benchmarks are all over the web.

For the ram, the Corsair Dominator GTs rock. They oc well and look great. If you didn't want to overclock your ram, then get G.Skill ram... better timings for less money than Corsair at stock speeds. Again, different brands of ram dont preform better... Crucial ram will run the exact same as Corsair ram as long as the frequency and timings are the same.
CAS = timings (ie 7-7-7-20-1T). The timings regulate how fast the ram can load, read, and delete data from its memory. The mhz (1600, 1866, 2000, etc) is the frequency the ram operates at, much like a cpu.
*** An important fact about ram: the ASUS Rampage II Extreme will only support 1333mhz and lower ram with default settings. It can, however, overclock the ram up to 1800mhz (and even higher, but its not guarenteed above 1800mhz). The reason you can buy ram upto 2000mhz is the ram is tested to be able to reach 2000mhz guarented by overclocking. That being said, 1333 or 1600 ram is fine.

For the water cooling, DEFINITELY get the cpu on water, the i7 9xx cpus run hot! I own a Sapphire 5870 and it is very quiet. Never gets above 30% fan speed under gaming, and the stock intel cpu air cooler is louder. Do what you want, but if you're concerned about noise, you will be pleasently supprised at how cool and quiet the 5850 and 5870s are.

For the power supply, Corsair and Antec make some of the best PSUs out there. If you plan on having only one 5870 video card, then a 750 watt is fine. If you plan on having two 5870s, get a 1000 watt. Smaller PSUs can be more efficent because they have less energy to convert, but the key to an efficent PSU is to not max it out. If your system takes 650 watts under load, and you have a 650 watt PSU, you're stressing it, which shortens the lifespan and efficentcy goes down the toilet. If you've paired a good quality 750 watt psu with your 650 watt system, you're much better off.

I hope this cleared up or answered your questions I couldn't go indepth as it was already becoming a novel, but if you have any other questions or need clarification, ask away.

Yogi

A lot of good info here but...
i5s and i7 8xx use DDR3.
Water cooling isnt absolutely necessary, but if you have the budget go for it.
The 5800 series run really cool. I run mine at about 30% on idle and 35% when gaming and at 30% its pretty silent.
2 5870s could run on a 750w. A single 5870 & i7 only use ~300w on load (gaming).

Dont have time right now to answer questions but all I can say is you sohuld build it yourself. You can learn a lot and it saves you money. I dont have time to compare prebuilt vs building it yourself but I can do that tomorrow.
Do you have a budget?

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iamwardicus

Good advice MrLinky! My $.02 is try to make sure your power supply is 80Plus Silver or 80Plus Gold rated, and I'd go with a nice 850W unless you plan on doing 3x Crossfire - then you need 1KW+ newegg allows you to search based on these which can help you make a selection. If you decide to go with just air cooling - Get a Megahalem or a TRUE as they're the 2 of the best air coolers you can get at the moment.

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Upgrades yet wanted: Gigabyte UD3P motherboard & a Q9550/Q9650 or really want Xeon x3370 processor.

MrLinky

lol, you are very right, thank you for catching that. I'm very tired and had socket 775 on my mind for some reason

True again, but if you look at the rest of his hardware its right up his alley.

I'd guess that his setup would run in the 500 to 525 range, with one card (overclocked, full load). These babys take almost 190 watts each so i figure 700 watt overall with 2 cards. A 750w psu for two cards would be cutting close imo, and a 1000w psu is only $70 more than the 850w... the future-proofing/peace of mind is well worth $70 extra dollars. But thats all theroy if he only gets one card

Perfectionist

Preferably under £3k, but £4k if necessary, I can go more but I don't want to be stupid and wasteful about it since it becomes out of date and begging for an upgrade every few years anyway. Also thinking while it's very nice and cinema-like to play at home I really need to get thinking about a portable solution also (I looked into Alienware laptops a while ago, but they seem to be a total ripoff now, I guess the thing with laptops is they are less customisable, there must be some more sensible yet good highend laptops around tho?) for when I'm not in the country anyhow

The system I am using as my inspiration is this
(pics 1 -- pics 2)

Anyway. Ok, is it worth having Win 7 + page file + background stuff like firewall on a separate SSD drive like I described? Or is it mostly loaded in the RAM anyway? I read that some people have turned off page file completely, so not sure if it makes sense to instead just get one or two 160GBs and not worry about what goes where (windows 7 is small about 7GB anyway so it doesn't really need an 80GB drive unless it would make much diff performance-wise)?

CPU-wise I think you're right, I'm going to go with i7 920 like you said, I did some research and found what you describe there seems to be next to no difference with the 975, and it's only £30 more than the i5 so seems pretty good value.

Memory: been told I need to buy the case, PSU, mainboard, CPU, memory from them, and they seem to have some kind of affiliate deal with Corsair I think, so yeah Dominator it is. I had Dominator on my last PC anyway (from another builder Overclockers UK that I finally got refunded after various bad things) so all good. What's the difference with the GT version? Is it just the fan on top? The fans look quite small, I wonder if there's memory water blocks that don't cost too much (e.g. the £30ish price difference with GT)

Cooling: Well since I'm getting it watercooled and the pretty nice little setup Scan do with the reservoir on the front of the PC for easy refilling and all I might as well get both done rather than just the CPU (and maybe the memory as mentioned above?)

Graphics card: I did a search of power color, sapphire, xfx, asus, msi 5870s and couldn't find much other than shops selling them, is there no way to find out what ones are better build quality and will OC better then? Since it's being watercooled to be extra quiet I can probably put the ati overdrive driver overclocking to good use

Going for a single 5870 at the moment, two seem overkill for anything at the moment getting good FPS on 2560x1600 from waht I've seen, by the time something comes out that needs two I think there would be better cards for cheaper around anyway!

PSU: As mentioned above single card at least for now, so I am guessing a 1000HX would be energy inefficient

http://www.scan.co.uk/shops/corsair/...icmp=psuconfig
Is recommending 550W-650W when I put it in (picked 2 hard drives for futureproofing a bit)
It recommends Corsair (again that affiliate thing I guess) but they sell others unlike memory:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Index.aspx?NT=....583.120.308-0

Sound: Not sure at the moment, maybe Creative X-Fi Titanium Professional, see here

Yogi, I thought a lot about building my own a while ago, but after looking at things testing the watercooling rig, possible need to replace parts and stuff I think it's better off doing it somewhere where there's easy access to replacement parts if anything fails and also the pricing isn't bad:
http://3xs.scan.co.uk/whybuybuilt.asp
£80 - £172, if you think about it that's about 21.5 hours max on minimum wageish, obviously they will do it a lot faster than I would and less waste of my time, I think it makes sense - plus they do nice things like clean out the system for you if needed

here's some of the pics of that system I am using as inspiration I mentioned earlier (it has the same case and mobo, and same builders), just to pretty up the thread a bit







(I will want nowhere near as many fans as that though and I'll skip lights unless there's an on switch for when actually putting things in/out then it would actually be useful rather than a constant waste heh)

filipin0yboi

for your 5870, i say personally you shouldnt really care right now the difference is probably a few frames and depends how cherrypicked your card is, but what i would strive for is the asus 5870 as they have a really good utility to overclock with.

in regards to the psu, if you want it to stay longer in the system technically you want it to give it a little headroom, you dont have to hit the 1000hx but if you get about a 100w headroom then you can keep your pc more efficiently for years as the capacitor aging adds up and it will become less and less stable, which is less noticable if you do happen to give your rig headroom

only plan on getting a soundcard if your dishing out the money for speakers too, if your only buying say a 50 dollar 2.1 system i dont see the point in really buying a sound card but if your going with some good **** [harmankardon<3] then you could probably look into it, though im not to smart on sound so i cant really really help you on that if you do plan on heading that road, because for me onboard is good enough and im not throwing my volume up to get the interference.

Perfectionist

Thanks, I guess I'll get Asus then - though ATI already include overclocking options in their drivers, from my experience with 4870X2 - Maybe theirs are better, can't hurt to have an extra option I guess.

Is there a better way than that link I posted below PSU to work out what wattage you need? Also modular/not modular

Oh yeah I should have probably mentioned that, I've already got a Creative S750 7.1 speaker system

MrLinky

For a good gaming laptop, visit xoticpc.com. They specialize in highend laptops. And Alienware was a good company back in the day, but they got bought out by Dell and i've been hearing bad things ever since

For the SSDs: My recomendation is to have one ssd (i recomend 128GB or larger) for windows and games/programs, and a regular 500GB or larger 7200rpm hdd for the pagefile, hiberfile, and all your music/movies. You can even turn off paging and hibernation althogether to simplify things but its up to you.

About the ram: you're probably right about the affiliation thing, or they atleast get a good price with Corsair, but either way its a good thing The Dominator GTs are different from the older Dominators in that they have a bigger and better heatspreader attached to them and have a clip-on ram fan.

About the water cooling: The cpu is a great idea, and putting the video card on water is good too, but HOW this company will do it would make or break the deal for me. What i mean is, if this is to be an internal wc setup, they probably only have room for 1 radiator, and if you say you want the video card wc'd too, they'll probably just add it to the cpu loop. This will add alot of unnessicary heat to the coolant, and in turn your cpu will run alittle hotter. If your room doesn't get really hot and you dont plan on doing any extreme overclocking this wont really be a problem, but it is something to keep in mind.
For watercooling the ram, corsair makes great water and tec blocks for the dominator series ram, but its waste unless you're going to be ocing the ram. If you have good case airflow and wont be overclocking the ram, you dont need the ram fan at all. If you have bad case airflow, and/or you will be doing a little ram ocing, then you should use the ram fan. And since the ram fan plugs into the motherboard, you can control the fan speed and make it as quiet or loud as you want.

There are several online PSU calculators you can use but this company wont sell you an underpowered one so you dont have to worry about that.

Yogi

Well this is what I would go with
i7 920, Dominator GT 1600, 5870, 850HX Corsair PSU, 128GB Corsair SSD, Sony DVD drive, tubing color of your choice, Scythe Gentle Typhoon fans, and the rest of the list is more personal options. It came out to about ~£2500.
Overclock CPU +£80, GPU water blocks +£300.00

Do you know if they will install parts if they are ordered from the scan website?
If so get 1TB Caviar Black and the EK Supreme CPU Block

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