Gaming build/backup server

[TeeJayHoward]

Looking to increase capacity in my primary file server, which means moving my backup pool to a new box. My plan is to sell my MBPr and build a gaming box with 18TB of drives from the proceeds and a few bucks I've got laying around.

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
High-res gaming, video transcoding, web browsing, and storage of files.
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
I'm hoping to keep the build around the $3,000 mark. That number can increase if the purchase is justifiable.
3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.
Colorado Springs, CO, USA
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.
Case, Motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU, GPU, HDD, SSD, BluRay burner, and all the associated screws, wires, cables, nuts, and bolts.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
I will be reusing my monitor, my OS license, my keyboard, and my mouse.
6) Will you be overclocking?
It's not essential, but sure. I'd love to do some OCing.
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?
It's a 2560x1440 27" monitor. Note that there is no place to plug in a DVI cable - The MiniDP is permanent, and the only available input.
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Within a month.
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.
I need a minimum of 8xSATA ports (6x3TB, 1xSSD, 1xBluRay). I would like to have a pair of PCIe 3.0 x16 ports available. I'm also a fan of USB 3.0.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If so, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
Yes, Win7 Pro x64.


I'll repeat it in case ya missed it in the above list, but whatever video card is included in the build MUST have a MiniDisplayPort slot in it. The case must be capable of holding 6x3.5" drives, an SSD, and a BluRay burner, along with whatever GPU is chosen. I want to crank every setting on every game up as far as it will go. I want to play at the monitor's native 2560x1440 resolution. I do not want to be limited by my hardware. I also, however, do not want to hear some 50dB fan going while I'm gaming. Noise level is pretty important to me, but if I have to choose, I will err on the side of performance.

I've done some preliminary shopping, and this is what I've come up with. Feel free to bash on my choices, as long as you provide a reason for it!

Spoiler: Parts List

Case: $110 - Fractal Design Define R4. I have the Define Mini and it is quite possibly the best computer case ever made, bar none. The R4 is the same case, just ATX sized. I'd like to give it a shot.
Mobo: $230 - EVGA Z77 FTW. EVGA's a good brand, from what I understand. This is also one of the only 1155 motherboards I could find which support 2x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, in case I need to upgrade to an SLI setup. Is it worth the extra cash to switch to a 2011 motherboard/CPU?
CPU: $220 - Intel i5-3570K. Allows me the ability to overclock should I so desire, and is nice and cheap. Is there a performance benefit at 1440p to using an i7 instead?
RAM: $75 - G.SKILL 16GB (4x4GB). I don't know a damned thing about RAM anymore. I don't see a point to having more than 8GB, since it won't be used for just about any application I run, but at the same time I sure as hell don't want to not have enough. I selected this stuff because... It's red, and that matches the motherboard. So there.
PSU: $200 - Seasonic X-1050. Seasonics are known for being quiet. I like quiet. This one's fully modular, which lets me rice out my computer when I get the urge without ripping into the PSU. It's also big enough (barely) to support another video card, if I were to need another one.
GPU: $1000 - EVGA GTX690. I MUST have a MiniDP slot, which means it's a 690 or it's AMD. Since more cards = louder system, and the 7990 produces more heat than the 690, I went with the 690. I chose EVGA because... Well, it "matches" the motherboard.
HDD: $900 - Seagate 3TB 7200RPM SATA drives. Six of them. These are the same drives I have in my existing server. I like 'em. No applications will be loaded from these drives - They are strictly a backup for my NAS.
SSD: $220 - Crucial M4 256GB. I don't know much about this generation of SSDs, either. The M4s seem to be recommended fairly often, so I went with one of them. I doubt I'll ever fill the 256GB, but the 128GB has less speed, and I do like my speed. This would be my OS, application, and game drive.
BluRay: $70 - LG 14X BD-R. Don't know a thing about BluRay drives. All I know is that I want to rip and digitize my movie collection, and I don't see a point to buying a drive that can read, but not write. Maybe someday I'll need to burn 25GB of data on a disk instead of using a USB thumb drive. Doubtful, but who knows?

Total: $3025

 

[Dangman]

In this case, no, it's not worth going to socket 2011 since you're not doing anything to warrant the possible extra CPU power or RAM. Not to mention that PCI-E 3.0 doesn't work with the GTX 690 on that platform IIRC.

Case wise, I don't think that case will provide sufficient cooling for a single GTX 690 let alone two. Considering that level of hardware, I'd aim for the Silverstone Raven 3 or Silverstone FT02 cases.

Motherboard wise, I'd aim for this Gigabyte to make more room in the budget for a better case and get a slightly better reputation:
$189 - Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H Intel Z77 ATX Motherboard

You're also missing a 3rd party HSF. Since you want quiet, the stock HSF won't do the trick. I recommend this HSF:
$30 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus HSF for LGA 1366 and LGA 1156

PSU wise, that 1000W is not anywhere close to the definition of "barely" suppporting another video card.

GPU wise, this is where things get really complicated. The GTX 690 isn't that good of a choice considering that it only has 2GB of VRAM per GPU. No that VRAM isn't shared. Considering your high resolution, you'll need more VRAM. Not to mention that it's slightly gimped since the GPUs have been downclocked. Since there's no such thing as GTX 690 6GB or 8GB yet, if you truly want high performance, you're looking at two GPUs with 3GB to 4GB of VRAM each right off the bat.

Now AFAIK, there's no Nvidia card with 4GB of VRAM AND a mini-display port. Closest is the GTX 690 cards but that's not truly 4GB of VRAM as mentioned earlier. AMD doesn't have any 4GB per GPU cards yet. So that leaves us with 3GB VRAM options. Since you really need mini-DP, that pretty much rules out Nvidia's 3GB options since none of them have a mini-DP. So that leaves us with AMD. I'd go for two of these Gigabyte cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125439

Though another option would be to use a displayport to miniDP adapter. If that solution works for you, just grab two GTX 680 4GB cards like these since SLI provides a bit more smoothness in games:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127695

 

[Deleted member 88227]

PSU wise, that 1000W is not anywhere close to the definition of "barely" suppporting another video card.

Just to clarify this, what Danny means is that PSU is not only closer to the definition of of being overkill for a single or even double GPU setup. In fact, that PSU could easily handle three GPUs with todays graphics cards since they use a good bit less power than previous generation of cards. In fact, depending on the GPUs you're going with it could support quad GPUs.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

Case wise, I don't think that case will provide sufficient cooling for a single GTX 690 let alone two. Considering that level of hardware, I'd aim for the Silverstone Raven 3 or Silverstone FT02 cases.

Damn. I loved the Define, too... What is it about the Silverstones that make them superior thermally to the Fractal? Is it the motherboard orientation?

Motherboard wise, I'd aim for this Gigabyte to make more room in the budget for a better case and get a slightly better reputation:
$189 - Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H Intel Z77 ATX Motherboard

The extra $40 isn't going to push me over a limit. Is the Gigabyte a superior board? If so, I'll swap that in. The color would certainly go better with the Gigabyte card you recommended below!

You're also missing a 3rd party HSF. Since you want quiet, the stock HSF won't do the trick. I recommend this HSF:
$30 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus HSF for LGA 1366 and LGA 1156

Aah, thanks! Knew I was forgetting something. Does the 212+ Support 1155 as well?

GPU wise, this is where things get really complicated. The GTX 690 isn't that good of a choice considering that it only has 2GB of VRAM per GPU. No that VRAM isn't shared. Considering your high resolution, you'll need more VRAM. Not to mention that it's slightly gimped since the GPUs have been downclocked. Since there's no such thing as GTX 690 6GB or 8GB yet, if you truly want high performance, you're looking at two GPUs with 3GB to 4GB of VRAM each right off the bat.

Now AFAIK, there's no Nvidia card with 4GB of VRAM AND a mini-display port. Closest is the GTX 690 cards but that's not truly 4GB of VRAM as mentioned earlier. AMD doesn't have any 4GB per GPU cards yet. So that leaves us with 3GB VRAM options. Since you really need mini-DP, that pretty much rules out Nvidia's 3GB options since none of them have a mini-DP. So that leaves us with AMD. I'd go for two of these Gigabyte cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125439

Though another option would be to use a displayport to miniDP adapter. If that solution works for you, just grab two GTX 680 4GB cards like these since SLI provides a bit more smoothness in games:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127695

The 7970s/680s would be cheaper, and there's something sexy about a wall of GPUs occupying every available PCIe slot. I didn't realize that the VRAM limit was something modern games were actually hitting! Would you mind linking to a DP->MiniDP adapter? I've been unable to find one online anywhere.

PSU wise, that 1000W is not anywhere close to the definition of "barely" suppporting another video card.

I threw the system I built into a power supply calculator and came up with 935W, so that's where the "barely" comes from.

Just to clarify this, what Danny means is that PSU is not only closer to the definition of of being overkill for a single or even double GPU setup. In fact, that PSU could easily handle three GPUs with todays graphics cards since they use a good bit less power than previous generation of cards. In fact, depending on the GPUs you're going with it could support quad GPUs.

If I'm not doing 1x690 with the option for another, quad GPUs are a very real possibility. From what I read during my research, the high-end cards use the following numbers:

680: 200W
690: 300W (advertised, can spike higher?)
7970: 250W
7990: 350W

Going with a mild overclock on the CPU, all those HDDs and four GPUs, would the 1050W PSU I looked at still be a good choice? The same PSU calculator I used recommends 1115W, so... Should I go with a 1200W?

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Where are you getting those wattage numbers from? If you look at HardOCPs review of the 690 here. I'm assuming that you wont be going with four 690s, since it's two GPUs in one type card you mean two 690s and possible four of the other cards. With that being said, I'm gonna focus on the Nvidia stuff.

If you take a look at this graph from the review I posted above:

You'll see that a single 690's total system wattage can barely exceed 500W at 510W. So let's go with 520W. Just to give ya a little breathing room. At 520W of total system power, we need to calculate how much power the PSU is actually outputting, since those numbers reflect the power BEFORE the PSU (IE: Rated at the wall) We all know it takes power to convert power, so lets assume that PSU is a highly efficient one and has a 95% efficiency rating. This means that PSU is putting out 494W for a single 690 setup. We also know that the total system wattage is 67W (Though I am pretty sure that system wattage calculation is done from an idle CPU with no discrete GPU installed) so lets subtract those watts from our figures. 67W - 494W = 427W is what a single 690 consumes theoretical. So we can take that total number, 494W and add another 427W to it for a total of 854W. Therefore we can conclude, that in theory Quad SLI with 690s can consume 854W of total system power. Think you're 1050W PSU is plenty yet?

I think so, even with 4-way SLI on 680s since 2-way SLI on 680s has a at the wall rating of 549W, lets fill in some quick math. 95% efficiency equals 505W of PSU output minus 67W equals 440W then we add that back to the PSU's total out of 505W and we end up with 945W of total system power.

I will also add that hard drives also use 5V power and since that 1050W PSU you linked has 87A on the 12v line, that's 1044W for the 12v rail and it has 25A on the 5v rail for a total of 125W (Theoretical) so even with all those hard drives, your PSU will still be able to handle the load.

So yes, I think a solid 1050W PSU will handle 4-way SLI or Quad SLI for yoursetup.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

So yes, I think a solid 1050W PSU will handle 4-way SLI or Quad SLI for yoursetup.

If we operate under the assumption that the games HardOCP uses for benchmarking represent the maximum draw that a system can pull from the wall, then yes, you are correct. Your math, however, doesn't seem to work for me. You're taking wattage from the wall and adding/subtracting to wattage post-conversion. If we leave everything on one side of the equation, you can see how I'm concerned.

Let's assume that a 690 will never draw more than 450W from the wall, which is only 7W more than it did in the [H] scenario. A pair of them sits at 900W. Adding in the (let's say) 70W draw of the rest of the components puts us at 970W that the system is drawing from the wall.

970W < 1050W, so the PSU would work. However, that provides less than 10% headroom. It's cutting it close. If I ever make the mistake of running something that fully stresses the GPUs, I could run over the PSU's rating. I love HardOCP for their real-world scenario tests, but unless I'm misunderstanding something, their methodology doesn't bring the peak load of a system to 100%. Running something like FurMark should, in my mind at least, draw more juice from the wall than just playing a game, even with everything cranked up. I have no evidence to support this claim, however, and no reason to believe in it aside from "it makes sense to me."

And the numbers I posted were wrong. I read the bits I wrote down at 1AM last night thinking they were power draw. They're heat dissipation numbers. I was looking into watercooling last night! >.<

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Do note that a PCI-e 2.0 video card with 2 8 pin connectors can draw a maximum of 450W by specification. Since the slot can provide 150W and each 8 pin connector can provide 150W, you're 450W scenario is the absolute maximum power a single card could draw. Highly unlikely.

My numbers were already pretty high on the "worst case scenario" since my calculations assumed the PSU they used had a 95% efficiency rating; but after briefly looking over the review done by HardOCP of the PSU they used it seems to be between 85% and 90%, not 95% so my power draw figures is going to be less on the PSU, not to mention the system itself draws more than 67W playing those games since the CPU isn't exactly idle. If you look at this review done by HardOCP here you'll see this graph.

You'll see that a stressed overclocked 2600k can draw 197W of power by itself. Therefore, if we were to use that number in the calculations above you'll see that a 690 uses even less watts than my worst case scenario used.

So lets do those calculations again to reflect a closer real world scenario.

520W total system draw means an 87% rated PSU will output 453W of system power; then we conclude that the overclocked 2600K uses 200W, that brings the 690 down to a 253W of total system power, playing Deus Ex Human Revolution. So lets add another 253W of power to the total system power of 453W and we're at 706W of total PSU output.

I wasn't clear when I posted above. I thought you understood that I was giving the most worse case scenario in those calculations so you could see that consuming 1050W of power in a modern system will require a LOT since systems are getting more and more power efficient these days.

Therefore, as I said before a 1050W PSU is capable of handling 4-way SLI or Quad SLI with the new GPUs.


One other thing. A 3570k uses less power than a 2600k. So you're power ratings will be even less with a 3570k. Now you see why Danny said "..that 1000W is not anywhere close to the definition of "barely" suppporting another video card." because we consider 750W PSUs for single card setups to be overkill.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

Clarification

Aah! Thanks for correcting me. Love coming here. I always learn something new!

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Aah! Thanks for correcting me. Love coming here. I always learn something new!

I still learn new things here as well. Do note though that the system used for the CPU power consumption has a 470GTX video card and HardOCP doesn't go into detail on the steps they took to get the "CPU" power draw. I can only assume they used programs that ONLY stressed the CPU and the GPU was used for the gaming benchmarks earlier in the review of the Sandy Bridge processors. So chances are the actual power draw of the 2600k is probably a little less than 200W. Even then, you still get an idea of just how much power 1050W is in a modern system.

 

[MrGuvernment]

i dont see a raid card in there... how do you plan to set up your drives?

using onboard raid on the mobo?

raid 6 or 10?

 

[TeeJayHoward]

i dont see a raid card in there... how do you plan to set up your drives?

using onboard raid on the mobo?

raid 6 or 10?

Software raid-5 through Windows, most likely. Might even just do a big ol' JBOD.

 

[Dangman]

Software raid-5 through Windows, most likely. Might even just do a big ol' JBOD.

I wouldn't recommend that course of action considering how slow and somewhat unreliable it can be. Just keep the disks separate if you are using Windows and no true hardware RAID card.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

I second what Danny said unless you don't really care about the data or performance.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

I wouldn't recommend that course of action considering how slow and somewhat unreliable it can be. Just keep the disks separate if you are using Windows and no true hardware RAID card.

I second what Danny said unless you don't really care about the data or performance.

Unfortunately, that would seriously impact my data backup plan, which currently utilizes rsync to duplicate the data. I guess I could try picking up a copy of Win8 and using storage pools, but... Blech. Any idea if VirtualBox/VMWare/etc. supports direct disk passthrough? I could just pass the drives to a Solaris VM and be done with it.

 

[Dangman]

Damn. I loved the Define, too... What is it about the Silverstones that make them superior thermally to the Fractal? Is it the motherboard orientation?

The motherboard orientation and the fact that both cases have 180mm fans. As a result, the Silverstones are actually quieter than the Fractal while providing better cooling.

The extra $40 isn't going to push me over a limit. Is the Gigabyte a superior board? If so, I'll swap that in. The color would certainly go better with the Gigabyte card you recommended below!

IMO, the Gigabyte is the better bang for the buck mobo. IMO, the eVGA isn't worth its cost.

Aah, thanks! Knew I was forgetting something. Does the 212+ Support 1155 as well?

Yes.

The 7970s/680s would be cheaper, and there's something sexy about a wall of GPUs occupying every available PCIe slot. I didn't realize that the VRAM limit was something modern games were actually hitting! Would you mind linking to a DP->MiniDP adapter? I've been unable to find one online anywhere.

Couldn't find one anywhere either. In any case, from looking through the questions section of that monitor, it appears that everyone is recommending just using a mini-DP to mini-DP cable.

Unfortunately, that would seriously impact my data backup plan, which currently utilizes rsync to duplicate the data. I guess I could try picking up a copy of Win8 and using storage pools, but... Blech. Any idea if VirtualBox/VMWare/etc. supports direct disk passthrough? I could just pass the drives to a Solaris VM and be done with it.

VMWare Workstation does support direct disk pass-through.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

IMO, the Gigabyte is the better bang for the buck mobo. IMO, the eVGA isn't worth its cost.

How does the ASUS Maximus V Gene motherboard compare to the Gigabyte? I can grab one of those and a i5-3570K for about $350, which is about $60 cheaper than the Gigabyte+3570K combo.

 

[Dangman]

How does the ASUS Maximus V Gene motherboard compare to the Gigabyte? I can grab one of those and a i5-3570K for about $350, which is about $60 cheaper than the Gigabyte+3570K combo.

It's a good mobo if you're only using a mATX case. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother with it considering that you're now planning on SLI or Crossfire. With an ATX mobo, there would be a single slot worth of space between the two GPUs which means a better chance of lower temperatures. With a mATX mobo, you don't have that space and therefore have a higher chance of higher temperatures.