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Will this set up work? - yamatosoul - 06-06-2009 04:17 AM
I am totally new to this and I would like to ask for advice on my component selection. Can someone please review the set up below, and advise what you think?
1. Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115131
2. G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166
3. DFI BI P45-T2RS LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138118
4. Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319
5. HIS Hightech H467QT512P Radeon HD 4670
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161252
6. PLEXTOR 20X DVD Qflix Burner Black
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827249045
7. Rosewill RP550V2-D-SL 550W ATX12V v2.0 PSU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182030
8. LIAN LI PC-7BYCF Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112184
9. Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116488
I read everything on pcityourself and I think I followed all the steps in my selections. I apologize for such a newbie question, but I would greatly appreciate any input.
Thank you.
RE: Will this set up work? - Coder - 06-08-2009 12:00 AM
hey Yamatosoul !!
Great selection ..
But You can choos the intel core i7 Processor
or u can change the memory of 4 GB (2x2) to DDR3 the new one of (1x2GB)
actually i'm not sure if changing this parts Forced on U to change the motherborad series ..
now i well see this series of the motherboard to know if it can take this changes ..
RE: Will this set up work? - robthebloke - 06-08-2009 11:35 PM
The setup will work OK, but just a couple of points I'll make.
Get an Intel i7 920
It's going to cost a bit more, but having just built one for my housemate I honestly can't see the point in buying anything else. These are the bits we used:
Asus P6T SE
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131386
- I prefer ASUS to other makes, they have some fairly swanky bios options
Intel Core i7 920
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
- There are 2 versions of this CPU so beware! The older one is called the C0 stepping version. The newer one is the D0 stepping. So... Make sure you get the D0 stepping one!. Be sure to ask newegg which one you're getting before buying.
Fan + Cooler
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Titan-Fenrir-TTC-NK85TZ-120mm-PWM-17dBAplus-HDT-CPU-Cooler-(775-1366-K8-AM2-AM3)
closest thing i could find on newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835106131
- The CPU does come with it's own heatsink, but it's pretty lame. Here's a quick comparison shot: http://www.pcityourself.com/forum/attachment.php?aid=3 (stock cooler on the right). Larger heatsinks keep the fan noise down, and also keep the CPU very cool indeed (for reasons that will become apparent later).
6Gb DDR3 memory 1600Mhz
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211377
- Make sure you get 1600 Mhz.
There are some photos from the build here:
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/dgwaterman/NewPc#
It's worth noting the benchmarks in the very last photo. Hitting 4.2Ghz was pretty easy (which is why the fan and mem speed are so important!). Anyhow, even without overclocking it's damned fast. (But I'll talk about that more later...)
Get Windows 7
The next thing is vista 64bit. Windows 7 is coming out in October, so i don't think it's worth purchasing vista at the moment. You can however download the 64bit release candidate for windows 7 and use that instead: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
It's completely free to use until March 2010, when it will start shutting down every 2 hours until you buy a license of windows. So it doesn't avoid the cost of the license, but it does put it off for a bit to help you find that extra cash for an i7
There are a few problems worth noting before you go this route. First it's an RC, not a final version so there may be some minor problems you encounter along the way. The only problems we've seen so far are:
1. We couldn't get the ASUS motherboard drivers to install properly from the CD. We 'fixed' that problem by manually selecting every single device in the device manager, manually upgrading each driver, and told it to go search the DVD for drivers.
2. We couldn't get any software to work to let us slow the fans down in the case. (this is normally done with some asus software for the motherboard, which wouldn't install on windows 7). As a result, we had to spend a little bit extra to go and buy a basic fan controller. Something like this will do the job:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811999046
Both of those problems were fairly trivial to work around for the moment, and they are likely to be fixed when windows 7 is released in october.
Things to bear in mind when overclocking
The first rule is that caution is advisable! The most important thing is basically heat. The highest temperature for the i7's is 67.9 degrees, so don't let it go over that, ever!
The CPU voltage is the typical cause of heat problems, and the operating voltage for the 920 is 0.80V - 1.225V. The lower that number, the less heat it generates, the slower you can run your fans (noise), and the lower your electricity bill will be.
To overclock the CPU it's just a case of modifying the base clock for your computer (a.k.a. BCLCK). By default this is 133Mhz, and a CPU multiplier of 20 gives you 2.66Ghz (The i7's have a turbo mode that will put the multiplier up to 21 for 2.8Ghz). In theory you keep increasing the BCLCK until the system fails to boot, at which point you dial it down again. I say 'in theory' because in practice, this doesn't work that well.
When you modify the BCLCK, it also modifies the RAM speed. If the ram speed is somewhat non standard (i.e. anything other than 1600Mhz +/- 5Mhz) you'll find you get random crashes, some devices won't work etc. The trick is to find the BCLCK's that have multipliers for 1600Mhz ram speeds, which happen to be 133, 160, or 200.
The absolute highest you can reasonably expect is:
BCLCK 200, CPU multiplier 21, cpu voltage 1.225v, which gives 4.2Ghz at max temp of 58C with fan speed on high.
However at that speed, the fan noise is a bit on the loud side, and it'll put your electricity bill through the roof. In the end we settled for two modes:
eco: BCLCK 160, CPU multiplier 21, cpu voltage 1.01v, which gives 3.36Ghz at max temp of 54C with fan speed on low.
turbo: BCLCK 200, CPU multiplier 17, cpu voltage 1.03v, which gives 3.36Ghz at max temp of 56C with fan speed on low.
Both of those modes outperform the top of the range 3.33Ghz Core i7, and the voltages were low enough to be able to run the case and CPU fans at the absolute minimum (i.e. close to silent). We found that the voltage jumped *a lot* when we went above 3.4Ghz. At 4.2Ghz we needed the maximum voltage recommended for the CPU. If you see any reports of anyone running the CPU at 4.2Ghz +, they are either lying, or they are pumping dangerously high amounts of voltage through the CPU.
P.s. There's a 1TB Hitachi drive for the same price as the 640 WD hard drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145233
p.p.s. I only ever buy Hitachi drives these days, because they are the only make that has never failed on me....
p.p.p.s. As a comparison, my quad core PC @ 3.8Ghz seen here: http://www.pcityourself.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=11 is about 45% of the performance of the i920@3.36Ghz in all benchmarks we ran....
RE: Will this set up work? - Coder - 06-09-2009 12:32 AM
hey guys
what's UP robthebloke ..
it's the FUll options to have a great PC ..
but do U think it's windows 7 is ready to use? ..
I just read that the orginal ver is not available yet ..
maybe the demo ver is availabile now .. but is has lots of problems ..
RE: Will this set up work? - robthebloke - 06-09-2009 02:42 AM
(06-09-2009 12:32 AM)Coder Wrote: but do U think it's windows 7 is ready to use? ..
Doesn't seem any worse than vista 64bit tbh.
(06-09-2009 12:32 AM)Coder Wrote: I just read that the orginal ver is not available yet ..
It's gone through the beta stage, and is now in the final Release Candidate stage. It's not (yet) the final build, but really isn't far off.
(06-09-2009 12:32 AM)Coder Wrote: maybe the demo ver is availabile now .. but is has lots of problems ..
The beta had problems. The RC is out now. As i said above, we had some minor problems, but not with Windows 7 as such. Instead the problems are with Asus software. It seems that they do an annoying OS check in their installers. I'm guessing from code similar to this:
Code:
if( windowsVersion > Vista )
{
MessageBox( "Error, unsupported OS");
Quit();
}So they all fail to install (even though the vista drivers are compatible with Windows 7). You can manually install the drivers without any problems, so the only annoyance is that the Asus QFan software refuses to install. I really haven't seen a single thing wrong with it so far (that isn't a problem in XP64 or Vista64).
The real question is this, do you want to spend £88 on a vista license now (+upgrade cost in 6 months time), or would you rather wait 6 months and spend £88 on a Windows 7 license? Seems like a no brainer to me anyway.....
RE: Will this set up work? - yamatosoul - 06-09-2009 02:45 AM
Coder, thank you for your input.
robthebloke, your detailed response is greatly appreciated.
With both of you recommending Core i7, I am going to have to give it some serious consideration.
Thanks again!
robthebloke, I have a couple of questions regarding your response:
1) The Intel Core i7 920 on that Newegg link is for the C0 stepping version according to the manufacturer product link on the same page. Apparently, Newegg does not carry the D0 version at the moment. Can you please explain what the difference is between the two?
2) The pcityourself site only touches on the DDR3 memories and they do not make it sound like an absolute necessity. What advantage will I have over DDR2 if I were to get DDR3?
Thank you again for your help.
RE: Will this set up work? - robthebloke - 06-09-2009 08:00 PM
1) The D0 stepping is newer, and uses a *lot* less power. Since it uses less power, it generates less heat, and as a result makes it much easier to overclock
You can get a C0 to about 3.8Ghz, whereas the D0 should hit 4.6Ghz without exceeding the maximum CPU voltage (though running it over 4.0Ghz makes no sense). 2) It's the new memory standard to replace DDR2. The advantage is speed. Standard DDR2 is about 800Mhz, vs 1600Mhz for the DDR3 modules. DDR2 can run in dual channel (which effectively doubles the speed to 1600Mhz in a standard system). DDR3 can be run in triple channel which gives you an effective memory speed of 4800Mhz. (That's mainly why you see packs of 3xDDR3 memory). On the Core2 Quads it's actually fairly easy to hit the maximum memory throughput, at which point the CPU performance drops to the speed at which it can be fed data from memory. Since the i7 is effectively double the number of cores (using hyper-threading) and is a hell of a lot faster, it needs significantly faster memory...
Everything is slowly moving to DDR3, you can even buy Core2 motherboards with DDR3 support (though it apparently slows them down). The new core i5's should be out later this year which will replace the Core2 line completely - again with DDR3. (The i5 won't be as good as the i7 so no fear there, however they will be dropping the i7 920 and 940 to make the cheapest i7's about £400 or so).
RE: Will this set up work? - yamatosoul - 06-10-2009 01:50 AM
(06-09-2009 08:00 PM)robthebloke Wrote: 1) The D0 stepping is newer, and uses a *lot* less power. Since it uses less power, it generates less heat, and as a result makes it much easier to overclock
2) It's the new memory standard to replace DDR2. The advantage is speed. Standard DDR2 is about 800Mhz, vs 1600Mhz for the DDR3 modules. DDR2 can run in dual channel (which effectively doubles the speed to 1600Mhz in a standard system). DDR3 can be run in triple channel which gives you an effective memory speed of 4800Mhz. (That's mainly why you see packs of 3xDDR3 memory). On the Core2 Quads it's actually fairly easy to hit the maximum memory throughput, at which point the CPU performance drops to the speed at which it can be fed data from memory. Since the i7 is effectively double the number of cores (using hyper-threading) and is a hell of a lot faster, it needs significantly faster memory...
Everything is slowly moving to DDR3, you can even buy Core2 motherboards with DDR3 support (though it apparently slows them down). The new core i5's should be out later this year which will replace the Core2 line completely - again with DDR3. (The i5 won't be as good as the i7 so no fear there, however they will be dropping the i7 920 and 940 to make the cheapest i7's about £400 or so).
robthebloke, that was an awesome explanation! I'm glad I read up on this stuff because I was able to understand everything you wrote. Thank you very much!
RE: Will this set up work? - aram - 06-17-2009 02:51 AM
That was a great explenation rob, I think it's about time I updated some of the content on PCitYourslef.....fancy a job?
RE: Will this set up work? - MrPC - 07-31-2009 02:58 AM
(06-08-2009 11:35 PM)robthebloke Wrote: The setup will work OK, but just a couple of points I'll make.
Get an Intel i7 920
Intel Core i7 920
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
- There are 2 versions of this CPU so beware! The older one is called the C0 stepping version. The newer one is the D0 stepping. So... Make sure you get the D0 stepping one!. Be sure to ask newegg which one you're getting before buying.
How can I differentiate from the C0 or D0?
By the way, very helpful site I am loving it!
RE: Will this set up work? - robthebloke - 08-01-2009 03:09 AM
Some places will say which one it is - with others you may have to ask. It's worth a quick call to make sure imho. With any luck it should be D0, since that's been around for some time now.
RE: Will this set up work? - jenyroger - 06-11-2010 02:16 PM
Some set up will works if your PC can have such a software to install the software than only you can install your set up other wise you have to improve in some of your hard ware which can increases the space in your PC .