Maximum performance - new comp parts

[Baddcog]

OK, so I've got my new system running. It has quite a few new features that I really know nothing about. I generally know a bit about computers, have built a few systems now, but i am by no means an expert and am out of touch with new terminology.

 

So I figured I'd post here, maybe it will help other too as they move to new systems.

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New system specs:

 

Intel i5 2500K (K means unlocked clocks)

Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 Mobo (budget game mobo, aimed more towards business app?)

Corsair Vengance 1600 DDR3 (2x 4Gigs) Ram

WD 500 Gig 7200 RPM Sata 2 (3.0 Gig transfer speed) Hard Drive

Seatgate 650 watt PSU

AMD 5850 Black Edition 1 Gig DDR5 (Stock OC'ed)

 

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I'm tired, blah... will pick this up tomorrow. Basically I'll have questions about which options I should use, etc...

[Bikerdude]

Looks good, not far off what Im running :-), whats yer sound and gfx..?

[Xarg]

If you want maximum performance out of those, slapping an aftermarket cooler on that 2500K and overclocking it to 4.5ghz is a good start IMO. You can probably get 3.9-4.0ghz with the stock cooler, and probably up to 3.7 or 3.8 without even upping the voltage, Sandy Bridge overclocks stupidly well, which makes Ivy Bridge sound like it'll be another monster..

 

From memory he has an HD 5850 1gb, so possibly examine some overclocking on that too.

[Bikerdude]

and probably up to 3.7 or 3.8 without even upping the voltage.

 

The 2500k has a Turbo mode which raises the clock on either one or all of the cores to 3.7Ghz as standard. And as far as o/c goes I have had 4.2Ghz on stock volts using an aftermarket cooler.

[ECHELON]

i suggest to add a corsair force gt 120 gb sata3.

 

and corsair tx650w instead of seagate

[Baddcog]

Added my vid card, it's factory OC'ed, I can bump it up more but I had actually underclocked it before for better performance, possibly it was bottlenecked at my old CPU or ram?

 

I've got a X-Fi XtremeGamer sound card but it has just been in the case for awhile not being used. I have just been running onboard sound. I don't think I ever really saw an improvement in performance with it and it made setting sound complicated (Of course some issues were with TDM and they got fixed I believe)

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Probably do an SSD in the future, but since i started just trying to replace a malfunctioning HDD and it took a month and a lot of money to realize it was in fact the PSU I know have a pretty sweet system so any upgrades would have to wait quite awhile.

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This mobo has a Quick Boost prog with it (Easy Tune 6). I've got it clocked at setting 2. 4.3 gigs, 103mhz x 16 and it ran TF2 and L4D2 flawlessly last night.

I did try to bump up my ram from 1600 to 1833, but when I restarted I got a flash screen saying it crashed and needed to reset BIOS.

 

No reason to go with a corsair PSU when this one works fine and is brand new. It had great reviews, was all 4-5 eggs. All the 4 eggs were because it was advertised as modular but the main power connectors aren't. Which leaves a 4 or 8 pin (actually a 4x2 or 8 pin) cable in the bottom of your case. I don't care, tucks in right under my HDD bays.

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I've heard the stock cooler wasn't that great but it seems to be working. CPU is sitting at 35-39* C right now. Wavers a bit, but the fan hasn't started to ramp up at all as far as I can tell, even last night gaming. The mark is 40* C so I imagine when it hits that the fan will ramp up.

But my case has 3 large fans going, so I'm not all that sure I really need one. I guess I'll see how it goes. I don't have to run it so fast, 3.7 is already a bit faster than my old machine.

 

======================

 

OK, so now on to performance questions:

 

 

---------HHD

 

So right now Windows is on my WD Raptor 10,000 rpm 1.5 ghz drive. That was always my fastest drive so I used it. (it was advertised as 3.0 ghz but was an early model or something that was locked, I don't know)

 

My other HDDs are 500 Gig 3.0 ghz 7200 rpm. So even though they have a slower spin time I'm probably better off putting My OS on one of them for the transfer speed?

 

Window performance index shows it as 5.9 due to transfer speed. (everything else is like 7.2 and up)

 

------RAM

I've got 2 sticks 4 gig dual channel Corsairs in there.

During trouble shooting I ended up buying a 4 gig PNY stick (dman you psu!). Should I go ahead and throw that in there too? I know they say you shouldn't mix/match (at least dual channel) but it would be on a separate channel, it's same size/speed.

 

--------RAID

This mobo has an 'xtreme hard drive option for quick setup of Raid. But that's just using one HD as a back up of another right? So I don't think I need it.

 

-----Sata mode

 

Currently it's IDE. But i can set it to AHCI, I did this quickly with my last system and it actually seemed to slow it down a bit (at least on the windows index, I think the HD went from 5.9 to 5.7)

 

-----Vid card OC

If I do choose to OC the vid card should I just use Catalyst Control or the Mobo turbo program?

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I was thinking I had more performance related questions... but i guess not, mainly the HDD and ram issues.

[Serpentine]

Try to get another 4gb that roughly matches the PNY 4gb. You use modelling/PS etc, 16gb will come in handy in the future and is a fairly cheap to round off now.

 

When using AHCI, make sure that you have the AHCI driver installed - else you will get degradation.

 

Don't — EVER — use RAID at home, though others will claim this to be BS and mention how ~amazing~ it is, it's simply not worth it. Unless you're running a NAS with ZFS or something.

 

Use your soundcard and dont use any USB sound crap, while you cant see the performance difference much these days, its there (sometimes 5%-10%, good chips about 2%). The XFI stuff also seems way happier on win7/new intel boards. I have also found that the PAX drivers avoid a _lot_ of the installing trouble and dont come with fluff.

[Baddcog]

I'm not gonna by another stick that's for sure. I overpaid for this one just because I found it in town and was able to use it to trouble shoot right away. (it was the only one in town)

Would be cheaper to buy another matching set of what I have and wait 3 days for delivery, I just can't spend more money right now.

 

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been playing TF2 and monitoring the cpu temp.

 

Was getting 100+ FPS with vsynch (not sure, but before was probably getting 60- with vsynch). Really smooth.

 

CPU was getting up to around 50*c, found a couple forums that said you should try to stay below 70*c. So I think the OC is going to be fine.

 

--edit--

I went ahead and plugged the pny ram into my 3rd slot. It registers.

[Xarg]

I had to uninstall EasyTune6, apparently BFBC2 regards that as a hacking tool, it's the only BSOD I've had on win7 (though attempting to skip the mfg logos on mech commander 1 gave 32b win7 a hard lock). It's easy enough to OC from the BIOS itself, should you need to, but it seems like that isn't the case with you so far. Look into getting another RAM stick to match the PNY - at a later date in the future, to take advantage of the dual channel. Is the PNY stick the same speed as the other 2? If you're worried about temperatures on your CPU, you could go get a tube of aftermarket thermal compound (arctic silver... 5? seems to be highly rated), that could shave up to 5-10 degrees off depending on how crappy the compound your heatsink came with, and the distribution of it, which of course allows you to up the overclock even more.

 

One thing to note - be aware of where your bottlenecks are. For gaming, the 3 biggest bottlenecks I can think of are, CPU, GPU, and RAM. RAM not so much, it's generally fast enough and available in quantities that you can avoid running out. That leaves CPU and GPU. The methods I use to determine where my bottlenecks are, are task manager dragged across all 3 screens for cpu load, coretemp widget to monitor current and max temps, and MSI Afterburner to provide the same services for the graphics card (temp, vram usage, gpu usage, etc).

 

I can tell that my HD 5850 1gb is the bottleneck in MWLL because my cpu doesn't top 60 degrees C, none of the cores seem to sit higher than 60-70% load, yet the gpu itself is 90-100% constantly and the vram is pretty much full the entire time.

 

Hope some of this helped.

[Baddcog]

Yeah, I don't think I need to worry too much about the temp now that I've looked into it/watched it a bit. Maybe during the summer I will. It hasn't gotten really hot yet, it's actually still a bit chilly here at home.

 

I had just never looked into that at all so wasn't sure where those temps should be.

 

I assume that my GPU is probably the bottle neck now too. The ram and CPU are a few years newer. But I think it was probably ram before, maybe CPU. Which is fine, it's running pretty smoothly. I only have one monitor too so I'm not pushing the gpu all that hard. My mobo does allow you to run a screen off the chip itself which is cool, but I don't think I'll ever have multiple monitors.

[Xarg]

Depending on what you were playing, it could have also been the CPU. I know that cryengine2 is very cpu-hungry, often to the point swapping from an AMD quad at 4ghz to a Sandy Bridge quad at 4ghz nets a performance increase just due to the IPC increase on Sandy. If you notice higher fps in everything you play, it was the CPU bottlenecking you. There are probably some games you won't notice a difference. For a single monitor, a 5850 should be more than fine provided you don't require your games at max res + max settings to be playable. From what I can tell the multimonitor is really eating up my vram and gpu on CE2, it's the only game I even bother to test fps on (aside from total war: shogun 2) because I know I'll get playable fps no matter how high the graphics are set at max res on pretty much any other title in my library.

[AluminumHaste]

Don't — EVER — use RAID at home, though others will claim this to be BS and mention how ~amazing~ it is, it's simply not worth it. Unless you're running a NAS with ZFS or something.

 

RAID IS Amazing. It's a cheap way to get amazing performance. And it's quite easy to set up backups for important directories of work that you can't lose. I guess YOU had a bad experience but in 10 years of having RAID0 in my laptops and desktops I've never had a failure.

 

EDIT: I did want to mention, that one drive was having issues and I replaced it, Acronis makes backing up and restoring volumes really easy.

[Serpentine]

Nope, I have never needed to RAID other than for my fileserv which uses a zpool. I have have lost one drive in 15 years and retired one that had issues(ironically bad firmware to avoid a firmware bug), I have all of my app profiles from nearly 8 years ago (I still use an Opera profile which has been updated from 6.x as well as my Miranda-IM db from 2002). I've never had to use a non-live backup of pretty much anything

 

I only use single partitions (and sometimes, like with win7 a recovery partition) drives, they are well looked after and have no active power management enabled, meaning that they pretty much live forever(the last drive I retired was a Maxtor 120gb sata disk from 2003, 9 years with maybe a week powered down in that) and don't have any slow spin-up times.

 

Over the years I've had to help with a good number of broken RAID arrays, listen to tales of how X lost everything, Y's controller ate some stuff. Read through countless patch notes addressing RAID issues. BIOS updates warning and disabling RAID features. Laughing about nvidia raid eating arrays on friends boxes. Felt the underwhelming difference in performance between friends with quad 15k raptors (which later were jbodded - controller died). Dice rolls sure are fun.

 

If you're getting benefits other than load time, you should spend the cash on memory and push up all of your caching, buffers and make sure your disk is well laid out.

 

RAID in industry, fine - it's got many reasons for existing and is essential for some (but understand why there's also a large number of recovery companies that deal specifically in array recovery - and that's with expensive, good controllers), at home, a powertool for powerfools betting on beating the odds.

 

But then again, I also feel that my SSDs were a waste of cash, about the only benefit to me is that they're silent, meh.

[Baddcog]

Just to update:

 

I tried OCing a bit which is easy enough to do with this CPU. But I got a few blue screens, one while playing a game, another while I was away and my comp was idling.

I didn't have it turned up much, the multipliers (x100) were up from 3.3/3.7 to 3.7/4.0. It was causing weird double restarts too. (start comp, it fires up, shuts down then fires up).

I didn't go high because i have no aftermarket cpu cooler. But it's running fine and fast at stock speeds so I'm going to leave it.

 

I found manually cranking my GPU fan up to 40% during games instead of the 23% it sits at gives me smoother performance in game. So now I'm looking into an aftermarket gpu cooler. They are about $50 have bigger fans etc.. Should run cooler and quieter.

[Xarg]

When you overclocked the cpu, did you adjust any of the other settings, ie vcore? I have a Sandy overclock guide here somewhere, see if I can dig it out for you...

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/01/03/intel-sandy-bridge-review/5

 

Hopefully this guide helps, the steps are half a page down.

[lost_soul]

I too recommend an SSD to get the most out of a modern system. The other day, someone gave me a busted up old laptop (dead HDD, slightly messed up keyboard). I put an SSD in it and I'm surprised how fast the old thing goes now with Linux. It is only a Turion 1.6 ghz dual-core with 2 GB of memory, but while doing lots of updates yesterday, I couldn't help but think "damn this is fast!". I fixed the keyboard as well with some junk I had laying aroumd.

[Baddcog]

When you overclocked the cpu, did you adjust any of the other settings, ie vcore? I have a Sandy overclock guide here somewhere, see if I can dig it out for you...

 

http://www.bit-tech....bridge-review/5

 

Hopefully this guide helps, the steps are half a page down.

 

I actually saw that already. Basically I just adjusted the separate clocks per core up a bit and gave the auto voltage a bit more to work with. I followed a guide but went with lower numbers. Really barely bumped it up at all and it was running. But the two blue screens (one after lowering it more) worried me so I'm fine with stock.

I too recommend an SSD to get the most out of a modern system. The other day, someone gave me a busted up old laptop (dead HDD, slightly messed up keyboard). I put an SSD in it and I'm surprised how fast the old thing goes now with Linux. It is only a Turion 1.6 ghz dual-core with 2 GB of memory, but while doing lots of updates yesterday, I couldn't help but think "damn this is fast!". I fixed the keyboard as well with some junk I had laying aroumd.

 

I looked into it some, but honestly most of what I read just seemed like performance really wouldn't be that much greater than my 10,000 rpm drive anyway. Silent yes, boost, meh. Sounds like the OS would boot up faster for sure, but at 20-30 seconds once a day my comp isn't all that slow.

 

And as bad luck has it, I now have about 2 tb of hd space. And I've only got 650 GB plugged in now and have tons of room left over (working on installing all games). So I don't need more hd space, just a waste of cash I can't afford. I don't need what I have, I just ended up with it. I would've been fine with the 500 GB I had originally if my PSU hadn't gone wonky and made it seem the the Hd's died. (of course that wasn't enough for all games to be installed, but enough for the ones I played)

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I'm actually reconsidering the gpu cooler now too. Even with the fans cranked I am getting some shadow artifacts in TF2, so that didn't solve the problem. Just filed a support ticket since i have a lifetime warranty card.

[Xarg]

Were you attempting to modify the BCLK at all, or just the multiplier and the other values in that link? Apparently a lot of different functions are tied to the BCLK in Sandy so overclocks to that that actually work, are very minimal.

 

Perhaps manually setting the voltages (instead of using auto)?

Edited April 17, 2012 by Xarg

[Baddcog]

I actually went by this guide at the end. 'dynamic oc' which lets it use the 'turbo modifier', basically lets it ramp down on all cores and when it's not needing the peak. You only change 5 things, the auto volatge and the 4 core multipliers.

 

http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,4072.0.html

 

He was OCing to 4.5, I was going to 4.0 max.

 

As far as I can tell you really shouldn't touch the blck much at all. I think come people take it up to 1.05 but that seems to be max.

[Xarg]

That's the gist of what I got too, don't touch the bclk. Did you manage to get your overclock going in the end?

[Baddcog]

nah I gave up. 3.3 is still quite a bit faster than my 2.7 oc was, plus faster ram and all that anyway. I could keep messing with it but I'm happy enough as it is and don't want to fry anything so... Plus it's a pain to keep screwing with it.

[Xarg]

Probably a good idea, I don't personally plan to start overclocking my 2600k until I get a faster GPU, been thinking a 7870 but not at the prices they want. I figure NVidia will release a couple more 600 series cards that aren't as good as the 680, forcing AMD to drop prices on the 7870 and 7850, then I'll look at it again. I think you'll find part of the speed increase was the 600mhz gain, but also the IPC efficiency boost Sandy Bridge has over the AMD cpu's. Either way, you'll be happy with what you've got for years to come I'd imagine, and if it starts chugging, you can always OC it.

[Baddcog]

Yeah, my old set up was a Q6600 2.4, my abit mobo oc'es it to 2.7. Still it's a decent backup system too (no psu/case though)

 

Actually XFX is giving my an RMA for my 5850 due to the shadow artifacts/ fan not being auto controlled it looks like. Sucks I have to send it back again and deal with my 8600 for a time being, thought I was through all of this. Bleh.

 

Still, for the price I'm glad I paid a little more and got the black edition with lifetime warranty. (last time the fan was going out, they said they replaced the fan but i think they just lubed it, it had the same dust in the vents as when I sent it in). It wasn't a new fan and I don't see why they'd put a different used on in. Either way they solved the noise issue, but now it's a graphics glitch.

[Xarg]

Do you have to pay for the RMA? As long as they honour their warranty - and any prices for couriering the goods are reasonably low - you're on to a good thing. I'm gonna get mad if I can't find a displayport to minidisplayport converter though... seriously the damn things are 5 bucks in the USA, and the only thing here I can find that'll do the job is a 3m cable for 20 bucks... which would leave my 40 dollar cable rolled up in the cupboard I keep my spares in... hate living on an island in the sea, the options are limited badly unless I want to pay a bunch for overseas shipping. Might see if my mate in Aus can find one.... either that or I hang out and hope a 7850/70 model (or theoretical gtx 660/670) comes out with a full sized displayport on it.

[Baddcog]

I believe they send the call tag, so I just have to have it boxed and ready.

 

Believe me, I know how you feel. I live in a small city (maybe 250,000, not sure) and I only found one Hard Drive in town, then someone dropped it on the floor (think it was the last one they were ever going to stock). Nobody else stocks internal drives anymore. Such a basic part and it's a 3 day mail order to get one..