Considering upgrading

D

darktiger

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2007
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Apr 10, 2003
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Currently my system is a Q6600 (oc 3.2ghz) with a 260GTX. I bought a new GTX260 from BB clearance a few months ago to do SLI. I currently do a lot of video editing and photoshoping so if I can save time, it helps since my raw files for photos are 35mb then I convert them to TIFFS so they end up being 130-140MB. Also some of my graphics can be up to 400-800mb due to layering.

I have been considering upgrading to a
17 920 (plan to oc)
Corsair H50 (going to use Noctua NF-P12 fans for push/pull config)
SLI both of my 260GTX (maybe get the Artic Cooling XTREAME GTX 280)
12GB of memory.

I have been thinking about the ASRock x58 because it is priced pretty good for the price.

What MB do you think I should be considering. I am sortof on a budget since I bought a house, remodeled, security system installed, etc so I am "poor". But still since I work alot now, time saving is my goal. Even if it is 15-30 seconds on each photo or 2-5min on each 1080P video would be worth it. I was waiting for the i5 chips, but I do not think (spec wise) it will be worth the wait. What do you all think?
 
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
I will be doing mostly word processing, gaming, internet surfing, and video/photograph

Programs will be: Office 2007, Visio 2007, Adobe Photoshop CS4, Video Editing programs, Windows 7 64bit

2) What's your budget? Open, good price/performance ratio

3) Where do you live? Houston, TX

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? MB, CPU, CPU Cooler

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? 2 260GTX SLI, 1k PSU, 1 150GB Raptor, 2 1.5TB HD, SB X-FI soundcard, Antec 900 case

6) Will you be overclocking? Yes

7) What size monitor do you have or plan to have? 2 dell 3007wfp-hc

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Maybe soon
 
ASRock boards, in general, have few overclocking features. You would be better off with the Asus P6T or the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P (two of the relatively cheaper boards with some decent overclocking features).

With the H50, you lose the rear case fan, which much be configured to serve as an intake fan. Corsair also recommends that one of your additional fans becomes the new exhaust fan in place of the rear fan. Though Noctua makes good fans, I believe that they're a bit expensive for use as case fans. Cheaper fans, like the oft-mentioned Yate Loons, are easily available and would work just as well.

Truth be told, however, you can push the Core i7 920 to at least 3.6GHz with a good air CPU cooler. The Xigmatek S1283V and the new Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus are two relatively inexpensive CPU coolers that allow for high overclocking.

As for RAM, just make sure that the RAM that you choose can run between 1.5V and 1.6V. Many of the G.Skill and Mushkin series RAM kits can, but many of the OCZ series RAM kits don't. This is important because Intel recommends RAM that runs no higher than 1.65V when using the Core i7/X58.
 
Thanks for the info. I will use my Yate Loons, I have a few of them not being used. Actually I think all my fans in that case (other than the 200mm top fan) are Yate Loons.....

How is the noise level with the Xigmatek or the hyper 212 Plus? The room I plan on using it in can get warm (due to it being on the second floor, the sun is hitting the house from every angle during the day, no radiant barrier(coming soon)). I am aiming at 3.6-7-8. Does water coolers preform better than air coolers in a 78-82°F ambient temp room? I am thinking air might not work better, but this is a cost savings that I should consider. Plus Microcenter, Fry's and Directron are all less than 15mins away from where I live.
 
I believe that reviews for both the S1283V and the Hyper 212 Plus can be found at FrostyTech, among other sites. I can't give you actual information on the temps or the noise level, since I didn't use the S1283V for very long nor do I have personal knowledge on the Hyper 212 Plus.

I remember someone saying that MC price-matches NewEgg, but I haven't tried that out myself.
 
Dark Knight is little better than the hyper 212 plus, I would say about 5% of each other.
 
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If you want blissful speed, get RAMDisk for your extra RAM and PS scratch disk, and/or get 2 OCZ Vertex drives in RAID0.

http://www.alphaq.org/enginurd/hdd/ocz_vertex.html

http://www.superspeed.com

Joe Average said:
... I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em. ;)

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week... ;)
Click to expand...
 
So in my current rig I have 8GB of DDR2. Would I see a gain in performance in CS4 if I make a 3GB Ramdisk for a scratch drive?
 
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