Purchase now or wait?

loki_racer

loki_racer

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
134
First off, I'm here because I'm an AMD fanboy (and also a shareholder). So, now that we've got that out of the way and we can skip comparisons to Intel's products, let me ask some questions.

My current rig was built to be a massive data storage box + my work machine + my gaming machine. I used to have 8TB of storage in it, fans galore, all that jazz. I've moved all the "storage" requirements to another box and only use this one for work and gaming. I also used to have a computer closet for my computer, but since the move, it sits next to me for 14 hours a day and sounds like an Apache helicopter. I want to reduce the noise to unnoticeable levels.

I would like to move to a Mini-ITX case but have noticed that there are no 900 series AMD motherboards. All seem to be the 880G (I require 4 DIMMs supporting at least 16GB).

With Piledriver around the bend, will we be seeing updated motherboard chipsets on M-ITX boards? Is it worth waiting for updated M-ITX boards or are the 880G boards fine?

My shopping list so far:
  1. AMD FX-8150
  2. ASUS M5A88-M
  3. AMD 7970
  4. Silverstone SST
  5. Quietest PSU I can buy
  6. Quietest fans or Watercooling (thoughts?)
 
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loki_racer said:
I would like to move to a Mini-ITX case but have noticed that there are no 900 series AMD motherboards. All seem to be the 880G (I require 4 DIMMs supporting at least 16GB).
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If you're looking for 4 DIMMs, mITX is not for you as most mITX mobos only have two DIMM slots. In addition, of the three AM3 mITX mobos available from Newegg, two of those are Zotac mobos which are of fairly low quality. The one good AM3 mITX mobo, doesn't support your planned CPU and it uses SO-DIMM RAM.
loki_racer said:
With Piledriver around the bend, will we be seeing updated motherboard chipsets on M-ITX boards? Is it worth waiting for updated M-ITX boards or are the 880G boards fine?
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If you want to use mITX and the AMD FX CPUs, you're gonna have to wait and see if any motherboard manufacturer will release updated mITX mobos. Otherwise, if you want small, you're looking at mATX.

Now if you're asking about the 880G chipset for mATX mobos or even ATX mobos, they'll be fine unless you need SLI support or more bandwidth for HD 7970 Crossfire.
loki_racer said:
ASUS M5A88-M
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Hmmm, did you mean to say mATX earlier?
loki_racer said:
Silverstone SST
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Silverstone uses the SST as the beginning designation for lot of their parts. So SST alone doesn't tell us anything. So what Silverstone product are you trying to list there?
loki_racer said:
[*]Quietest PSU I can buy
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The Seasonic X-650 and X-750 are some of the quietest PSUS out there.

loki_racer said:
Quiestest fans or Watercooling (thoughts?)
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Avoid those self-contained water cooling kits like the Corsair Hydro series or the Antec Kuhler H20 series as the pumps for those kits tends to be a bit noisy. So I'd aim for a quiet air-cooling HSF setup or a high-end water cooling setup if you have the money for low-noise.
 
Not sure what can fit in that SST, since there are several different models with the SST designation, but your best bet would be something like the H50/60/70/80 with Gentle Typhoons. The 7970 is still going to be loud while gaming though, but will be quiet at idle.

Look at Asus's Z77 M-ITX board. They barely had enough room to squeeze two RAM slots in. You will not find any M-ITX boards with 4 RAM slots. What you have in your list is an M-ATX board, which is much larger than M-ITX. If it's necessary to have 16gb, then 2x8gb sticks in an ITX build are your only choice.

If you want ultra silent without regards to budget, the Seasonic and Kingwin fanless power supplies should do you well. Keeping it at stock, the Seasonic 460 watt should be fine. If overclocking, I would try to find the Kingwin 500 watt, but the 460 should be enough for mild overclocks.

As for fans... Gentle Typhoons are your best bet.
 
Sorry, I meant to put SST-SG08B for the case.

Ya, looks like I got Mini-ITX case and Micro-ATX motherboard on my wishlist. Guess I should sort that out.

So a Micro-ATX 880G motherboard will be fine for a FX CPU and 7970 non-crossfire?
 
If you're looking to cut down on noise and heat then I don't understand the choices. If you're going to get a mini-ITX or microATX then you'd be better off with a lower TDP chip. The 8150 makes a ton of heat and takes up a lot of power (particularly OC'd) so tossing it into a SFF case along with a 7970 isn't a bright move. Frankly, it's a recipe for disaster.

Secondly, I'm not even sure the 880G boards will support Piledriver. Though they carry the pins for AM3+ support it depends on the chipset as well as the BIOS and more likely then not you're not going to be able to fit a Vishera chip in there.

Why the small form factor mobo/case? If I were you I'd get a Corsair 550D and a proper 990FX Mobo like the Sabertooth. If you really want to get it into the smallest size possible then just be wary of the heat and noise and likely inability to upgrade that comes with it.
 
I would wait for FM2. Without a GPU-Northbridge on the mobo, mini-ITX is going to be a lot less crowded and more likely to become mainstream, with room for 4 DIMMs.
 
Agreed. if you want to go sff then you're better off going with an APU. Otherwise just find a smaller ATX compatible case that has good air flow.
 
I think that I would go the route of the Antec 300-ish case. Why so large? Well, unless you are going network attached or other remote storage, you probably will want at least 3 drives in the chassis:

1 for OS
2 that are 2-3 TB each, in RAID1 (mirrored) for reliability.

Personally, I would use low-power WD (5400 RPM) or Seagate (5600RPM) drives. the 3.5" drives have enough throughput for running movies/medai locally, as well as streaming. RAID 5 has too many failures that shouldn't ditch the array, but do not rebuild properly.

If speed and reliability are crucial, use a striped pair that is mirrored against another pair (RAID 10). Both options are available on newer full-service ASUS ATX boards.

As far as the 8150 goes, I would rather see you use an 8120, with 1 core per module disabled. The 990X Sabertooth can disable individual cores in the unlocking section.

Once you are down to a "true" 4 core that draws less power, you should be able to hit >4Ghz on just over/at stock voltage. Pushing the proc up, and turning CPU-NB up to about 2.7 Ghz will give you excellent results, with decent power and heat. Using a relatively cheap aftermarket heatsink and fan can keep noise down. The 300 has a top-mount fan that is quite large, and can run on low setting. In the case of my arctic freezer pro 2, I positioned the fan to blow it's air across the fins and out the top.

By the time you are ready to purchase, inexpensive HTPC 7xxx seris cards should be available that are passively cooled.

More case room means less localized heat. You should be able to hide the case somewhere out of sight.

Note: I also had to flip the back fan on the case to blow air in for the CPU cooler to yank across the fins.

Edit: Gaming rig. 7200 RPM drive, and whatever video suits you, but same otherwise.
 
the 7970/FX8150 is not small form factor friendly. I think llanos are ideal for small form factor...

My 7970 can put out a ton of heat under load, plus im assuming you will have lots of fitment issues in a small case. In a small case being shared with two heavy hitters fan speeds will have to be much higher to compensate.

I would go with an FX8120, then overclock it to 8150 speeds or beyond if you wish. The good news is that they can both be undervolted. My 7970 runs stable at 1000mhz with 1.043 V which reduces temps by about 20C and watts by about 70. Ive never tried undervolting the CPU because i typically like to overclock to highest stability with stock voltage.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys. First off, I seriously have zero interest in overclocking or stuffing a single HDD in this thing. I have 2 SSD's and am looking at ditching the green HDD that I have.

pelo said:
If you're looking to cut down on noise and heat then I don't understand the choices. If you're going to get a mini-ITX or microATX then you'd be better off with a lower TDP chip. The 8150 makes a ton of heat and takes up a lot of power (particularly OC'd) so tossing it into a SFF case along with a 7970 isn't a bright move. Frankly, it's a recipe for disaster.

Secondly, I'm not even sure the 880G boards will support Piledriver. Though they carry the pins for AM3+ support it depends on the chipset as well as the BIOS and more likely then not you're not going to be able to fit a Vishera chip in there.

Why the small form factor mobo/case? If I were you I'd get a Corsair 550D and a proper 990FX Mobo like the Sabertooth. If you really want to get it into the smallest size possible then just be wary of the heat and noise and likely inability to upgrade that comes with it.
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SFF because I'm tired of having a monster case in my office that does nothing.

reb00tin said:
I would wait for FM2. Without a GPU-Northbridge on the mobo, mini-ITX is going to be a lot less crowded and more likely to become mainstream, with room for 4 DIMMs.
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FM2 is an APU socket right? I'm not interested in APU for a number of reasons. The main being that Photoshop and Premiere, as they stand, utilize GPU acceleration. I generally have 800mb psds open and I have noticed a difference with GPU acceleration enabled.

Solomutt said:
If speed and reliability are crucial, use a striped pair that is mirrored against another pair (RAID 10). Both options are available on newer full-service ASUS ATX boards.
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I have a NAS with 9TB of storage. I have 2 SSD's and a 1TB WD green drive in my main rig. Didn't the speed improvements of a striped pair disappear with Sata II?

buttons said:
the 7970/FX8150 is not small form factor friendly. I think llanos are ideal for small form factor...

My 7970 can put out a ton of heat under load, plus im assuming you will have lots of fitment issues in a small case. In a small case being shared with two heavy hitters fan speeds will have to be much higher to compensate.
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Could they be watercooled effectively with a 240 rad in a single loop?

Well I have a lot to consider I guess. I am mainly looking for a smaller footprint, maybe even something I could mount to the side of my desk.

My main requirements are silence, then footprint.
 
If you're going for silent and small footprint then don't opt to go with the 8150, the 7970 and definitely don't place them on an mATX/mITX board.

AMD just doesn't have the performance-per-watt that Intel has at the moment and because of that it makes it very difficult to build a powerful yet small/silent AMD rig. Outside of the Llano I wouldn't put any AMD processor on an mATX/ITX board.

If you want to make it an AMD rig then my suggestion would be to wait. Trinity processors are being made and sent to OEMs as we speak. The official release date is supposedly May 15th and they look to pack quite a punch in comparison to the Llano, which would be your best bet at the moment. I'm not positive about socket compatibility but the A75 Hudson D3 chipset will live on in FM2 motherboards so that's a good sign of backwards compatibility, but again, not necessarily certain.

How much gaming power are you looking to pack? Is a 7970 and 8150 necessary? SFF and those 2 components will not mesh well together at all.
 
I would recommend waiting as well if you're set on AMD.

I'm not interested in APU for a number of reasons. The main being that Photoshop and Premiere, as they stand, utilize GPU acceleration. I generally have 800mb psds open and I have noticed a difference with GPU acceleration enabled.
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You can use discreet GPUs with the APU. You wouldn't have to use the onboard video for this.
 
pelo said:
If you're going for silent and small footprint then don't opt to go with the 8150, the 7970 and definitely don't place them on an mATX/mITX board.
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Ok, if sticking with AMD and SFF, what do you recommend that is not APU?

pelo said:
AMD just doesn't have the performance-per-watt that Intel has at the moment and because of that it makes it very difficult to build a powerful yet small/silent AMD
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No argument from me there. But as I said before, I'm a fanboy and I have to take the good with the bad.

pelo said:
How much gaming power are you looking to pack? Is a 7970 and 8150 necessary? SFF and those 2 components will not mesh well together at all.
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I don't do a whole lot of gaming. I dual/triple box EQ2 quite a bit. Photoshop needs a GPU as well.

I forgot to mention, I require triple monitor support. Not sure if APU's do that, but my 5850 runs three 2410 ultrasharps just run. Triple boxes EQ2 fine as well.


K1tty said:
You can use discreet GPUs with the APU. You wouldn't have to use the onboard video for this.
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I did not realize this. Ok, so waiting for Trinity might be the route to take.
 
Also the GPU in the APU's is a full fledged radeon 6300 series, it would actually probably run the gpu accel for photoshop and premiere.
 
extide said:
Also the GPU in the APU's is a full fledged radeon 6300 series, it would actually probably run the gpu accel for photoshop and premiere.
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It would but not as well as a discrete GPU.

Trinity performance estimates are pretty good if we go by the leaked screenshots and slides. ~30% increase in integer performance and a ~single digit % increase in FP when compared to equivalent Llanos at same TDP. That's really good if true, and especially the FP performance due to Trinity having only 2 FPUs compared to Llanos 4. Along with that there's the 50% boost in graphics performance.

I should clarify that May 15th is the announcement date but the launch date should be somewhere in Q2 this year. The desktop chips are being produced first so here's to hoping they get released first :p
 
Sweet, FM2 it is then. Any word if FM2 does triple video out? I know I could search, but I'm lazy.
 
I don't need Eyefinity, just multiple monitor support for three monitors. I don't use Eyefinity, makes me motion sick for some reason.
 
Well, Trinity has been demoed to support 3 monitors, and you will be able to crossfire it with certain graphics cards. Small form factors, low noise, and hot hardware do not exactly go well together.

A 240 radiator will probably not benefit you noise-wise. You'll need at least a 360 radiator or larger. You can always go with an external radiator setup.
 
tcclaviger said:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1038583853#post1038583853

consider that before FX purchase!
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That link means absolutely jack to me. I mentioned before I had zero interest in overclocking and that post has it overclocked by more than 1GHz. Why even bother posting a link to that?

You don't post photos of your rig. No video? All you did was post random screenshots that can be photoshopped in 5 seconds and a random photo of a Killawatt. Video or it didn't happen. You say stuff like "Onboard was DOA, like 30% of all Crosshair V boards lol". Really? 30%. Can we see some stats for that?

And before you blast me for being a fanboy, I already admitted to that, but that doesn't mean your post has any value.
 
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loki_racer said:
That link means absolutely jack to me. I mentioned before I had zero interest in overclocking and that post has it overclocked by more than 1GHz. Why even bother posting a link to that?

You don't post photos of your rig. No video? All you did was post random screenshots that can be photoshopped in 5 seconds and a random photo of a Killawatt. Video or it didn't happen. You say stuff like "Onboard was DOA, like 30% of all Crosshair V boards lol". Really? 30%. Can we see some stats for that?

And before you blast me for being a fanboy, I already admitted to that, but that doesn't mean your post has any value.
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For the DOA issue, go read newegg reviews and search around the ROG forum, since your not looking at a ROG board, it doesnt apply as the M5 has a different NIC on it. As a note, that M5 board is kind of a waste if your not planning on OCing at all, you can get away with a significantly cheaper board from another manufacturer. I would suggest though stay away from MSI, since they can't seem to wrap their minds around VRM thermal/overcurrent protection leading a WELL documented issue of their VRMs catching fire.

Just wanted to point out what an 8150 is actually like, when overclocked, and if you'd like, I can make a video so you can see it all rather than have to read for god sake.

Make no illusion, you will NOT be able to keep an 8150 suitably cool in a Mini-ITX format and have it be silent. Disagree, argue, whatever, but it wont happen sorry.

Not trying to talk you out of an AMD etc, I am 100% AMD fanboy, been one since 1998, still am. If I wasn't I would have spent the 500 bucks on a 2500k/Maximus Extreme -Z instead of a Crosshar V and 8150. I just wanted to post some actual data of a chip outside of a test bench scenario on some review site being paid to run the benches etc.

There really is no need to get all hostile about someone attempting to help you make a decision that is actually very simple....
 
Oh and if you really want a quiet system that games well and is responsive and AMD based find a 960T Zosma, it runs cooler than the normal Denab based Phenom II x4s, and can run at stock speeds at very low voltage, mine ran at 1.05 volts 3.3ghz 100% stable. Temps were around 1c over ambient idle, and 7c over ambient load lol.
 
I'm not hostile. Just pointing out that your post about an overclocked 8150 with easily spoofed data didn't really apply to me.

I'm aware the 8150 runs hot, that's why I can here to ask about cooling it in an SFF or other options.

Others have persuaded me to wait for FM2.
 
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