$2500 Build - Feedback?

[Andre S. Veteran]

Anyway, back on topic:

 

- Get DDR3-1866mhz if possible; it does make a small difference over 1600. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/10

- It seems underwhelming to pair such a powerful computer with a 1080p 60hz 23" monitor... If I were you I'd get something with 2560x1440 resolution.

[HawkMan]

The g930 is a surround sound headset,

 

No, actually it isn't :)

 

it's a SOFTWARE surround headset. it has only two speakers. and this is what causes a lot of problems, especially if I remember correctly on youtube if you have the dolby option off you will get a weird sound with audio only on one side. 

 

and then there's issues with games like Rocksmith, to make it work you have to go into the settings, and untick all but left and right speaker. or the game won't detect it. 

 

Logitech should do like everyone else with a software surround headset does, treat it like a stereo headset in the drivers(if you just use windows drivers it will in fact install as stereo, but then the g software won't work) and actually do the dolby surround encoding in software. that way it works correctly with everything. 

[HawkMan]

 

That doesn't compute. The main reason games "barely use cpu" is driver overhead and that's exactly what DX12 addresses, so we should see a lot better scaling on the CPU, meaning games will be able to push CPUs closer to their limits and effectively scale to multiple cores (including logical ones), so that'll be a net win for hyperthreaded CPUs.

 

Well it'll be a net win for actual multi core CPU's at least. well hyperthreaded will gain to since they use so little power form each core. but if you theoretically had a game that actually maxed each core, hyperthreading would then be a net loss. but that's all academic anyway since it's not an issue. 

 

that's pretty much what I meant anyway. 

 

Mantle ha already showed that intel i5 and i7's aren't a bottleneck for games or GPU. BF4 has hardly any benefit from these CPU's whereas the weaker AMD 6 cores will have a great benefit. Simply because the multhtreading don't work very well and only the primary core get much do to, and it can't keep up. i5's and up don't have this problem. This is why Nvidia could claim that high end gaming PC's get a better benefit from their new driver. 

Anyway, back on topic:

 

- Get DDR3-1866mhz if possible; it does make a small difference over 1600. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/10

- It seems underwhelming to pair such a powerful computer with a 1080p 60hz 23" monitor... If I were you I'd get something with 2560x1440 resolution.

 

Depends, he might have size constraints. but if he's going to do heavy video editing he should get either a 30 inch high def screen or two 24 or 27 inches. it helps a lot with the movie editing and CAD workflow, and I imagine UE4 dev workflow as well. 

[spacer]

No, actually it isn't :)

 

it's a SOFTWARE surround headset. it has only two speakers. and this is what causes a lot of problems, especially if I remember correctly on youtube if you have the dolby option off you will get a weird sound with audio only on one side. 

 

and then there's issues with games like Rocksmith, to make it work you have to go into the settings, and untick all but left and right speaker. or the game won't detect it. 

 

Logitech should do like everyone else with a software surround headset does, treat it like a stereo headset in the drivers(if you just use windows drivers it will in fact install as stereo, but then the g software won't work) and actually do the dolby surround encoding in software. that way it works correctly with everything. 

Hmm, I definitely haven't had any problems with any of my games. And stereo speakers or not, the surround sound has been pretty good so far. I guess mileage will vary, but I'm certainly enjoying them.

[Astra.Xtreme]

All those expensive components and you settle for a cheap monitor?  Personally I'd recommend you stretch the budget a little bit more and get a slightly bigger IPS monitor that can do at least 1920x1200.

 

The Asus PA248Q looks nice.

[Draconian Guppy]

it doesn't enable better processing across threads.

 

the problem today is that multicore games use a lot of one core, but then then barely make use of the other cores. This means for high end CPU's like i5 and i7's games today aren't bottlenecked by the CPU because the individual cores are so fast it doesn't bottleneck the GPU. DX12 will like mantle allow the performance to be spread out across the cores. meaning you get more equal usage of the cores so instead of one core having 70-90% utilization. it's more like 30, 20,20,20. or on more demanding games 50,50,50,50. though that's far in the future, cause that's a LOT of CPU power.

 

What's the difference on taxing a single core and keeping the other ones idle for something else, versus spreading the load on multiple cores?

[gohpep]

I'll change my graphics card to a 770 and then get a better monitor, RAM, mouse, and keyboard.

What's the difference on taxing a single core and keeping the other ones idle for something else, versus spreading the load on multiple cores?

I believe then you can execute tasks synchronously with more cores.

So suppose you have Task 1, Task 2, and Task 3.

Single core:

Task 1 runs, task 2 runs, and then task 3 runs

Multicore:

Task 1 starts running on the main thread, task 2 is assigned to run to a second thread,and task 3 is assigned to run on a third thread. Then all 3 tasks run at generally the same time.

[HawkMan]

What's the difference on taxing a single core and keeping the other ones idle for something else, versus spreading the load on multiple cores?

 

Nothing if the single core (i5/i7) is able to do the work, everything if it isn't (AMD Phenom II)

 

there some other benefits of somewhat lower latency of doing 2.6 tasks simultaneously instead of serially as well. but nothing you'll notice for cpu tasks

[NinjaGinger]

Consider Corsair Dominator memory. Ive tried others and always come back to it.

[gohpep]

Consider Corsair Dominator memory. Ive tried others and always come back to it.

I have seen good benchmark scores for Dominator Platinum memory, but I will have to see what will happen to my budget with that memory

[Dotdot]

Get Steelseries for mouse. Razer mice craps themselves after a bit usage.

 

On the other hand, drop that keyboard. Get Razer Black Widow Ultimate (silent if you can order from razer store).

 

For the record: I have naga, naga hex, mamba, black widow ultimate, onza tournament.

Have Razer myself at mo, has been ok for a good while now tbh. But it replaced a Steel series and boy do I wish I`d kept it.

Got my Steelseries setup 6yrs ago and its still going strong. Love it.

Keep thinking I should replace my aging 7G keyboard or whatever its called, but it works and perfectly well.

So did the mouse, I just wanted to try something else and, yeh kinda wish I hadn`t

[Andre S. Veteran]

Well it'll be a net win for actual multi core CPU's at least. well hyperthreaded will gain to since they use so little power form each core. but if you theoretically had a game that actually maxed each core, hyperthreading would then be a net loss. but that's all academic anyway since it's not an issue. 

I'm not sure you understand how hyperthreading works... if a game was using 100% of a non-hyperthreaded CPU it could easily be faster on a hyperthreaded CPU, just like video encoders currently do. The 100% of a hyperthreaded CPU is more than the 100% of a non-hyperthreaded CPU, because the latter wastes more time in thread switching than the hyperthreaded CPU does.

[HawkMan]

I'm not sure you understand how hyperthreading works... if a game was using 100% of a non-hyperthreaded CPU it could easily be faster on a hyperthreaded CPU, just like video encoders currently do. The 100% of a hyperthreaded CPU is more than the 100% of a non-hyperthreaded CPU, because the latter wastes more time in thread switching than the hyperthreaded CPU does.

 

Depends entirely on the calculations being done.

 

say for bucket rendering in 3DSMAX with finalRender which is highly thread optimized. say a 6 core i7 it would render faster with 6 buckets no HT than 12 bucket with HT. since each bucket it relies on as much raw power as the cpu an throw at it. 

[Andre S. Veteran]

Depends entirely on the calculations being done.

 

say for bucket rendering in 3DSMAX with finalRender which is highly thread optimized. say a 6 core i7 it would render faster with 6 buckets no HT than 12 bucket with HT. since each bucket it relies on as much raw power as the cpu an throw at it. 

That sounds like a bug in 3dsmax. 

[HawkMan]

That sounds like a bug in 3dsmax. 

 

ummm why ? it's fairly natural.

 

each bucket will use 100% of a core. with HT one, you dn't have 100% of a core available. you have one core that pretends to be two. with overhead that means you have less total CPU power available. 

 

for other tasks that use a lot of small paralell tasks but very little cpu in each thread HT is a benefit. for rendering where each bucket will max the core it's on, it's not a benefit. 

[Andre S. Veteran]

ummm why ? it's fairly natural.

 

each bucket will use 100% of a core. with HT one, you dn't have 100% of a core available. you have one core that pretends to be two. with overhead that means you have less total CPU power available. 

 

for other tasks that use a lot of small paralell tasks but very little cpu in each thread HT is a benefit. for rendering where each bucket will max the core it's on, it's not a benefit. 

100% of a hyper-threaded core is more than 100% of a non hyper-threaded core. For instance, while an integer operation is executing on one logical core, a floating point operation can be executed in parallel on the same core, since floating point and integer units are separate.

 

It's up to the software to take advantage of that. If a particular workload is pure FP or pure integer, for instance, it can issue a HALT instruction to the 2nd logical core to disable it, which effectively makes the core act as if non-HT. I don't know if 3dsmax does this. It's also possible that splitting the workload in smaller buckets is detrimental to caching performance. In any case, 3dsmax should know how to schedule itself for maximum efficiency on hyper-threaded CPUs; if enabling the feature drops its performance then that's a bug in the software.

[Noir Angel]

In the i5 v i7 debate something to also bare in mind is that i7 CPU's generally have more cache than i5's

[Draconian Guppy]

In the i5 v i7 debate something to also bare in mind is that i7 CPU's generally have more cache than i5's

But performance advantage in most cases is negligible