Starting to build my new rig, looking for opinions

[kitamesume]

going with 8350 wouldn't be a bad choice but its not good either, you're sacrificing single threaded performance for more power consumption and temperature generation.

the only reason as of moment to shy away from AMD counterparts is their performance/watts, as with their power consumption comes with heat generation. meaning AMD cards would run slightly hotter and slightly more power consuming than Nvidia's counterpart.

granted that the ITX build is still an option, these wouldn't be such a good scenario inside an ITX case, since an ITX build requires for low heat generation and as low as possible power consumption.

[Saras]

Are there even that many single threaded applications left that require the performance of an i5 nowadays?

Heat certainly might be a problem. But if he requires the threads and the budget isn't shifting, I'd say it's an excellent choice. And if we go with the set budget question, mainstream gaming level ITX boards don't really exist, you basically have the choice of going either office or extreme, and those don't come cheap.

[kureshii]

Are there even that many single threaded applications left that require the performance of an i5 nowadays?

Saras, don’t forget that *everything else* that isn’t multi-threaded is generally single-threaded (or performs like a single-threaded application). And that includes the large majority of software OP is likely to use. OS startup/wakeup/resume, installer archive decompression, file-scanning, etc are still largely single-threaded, and the i5 is the clear winner in that category

Besides, the FX-8350 demonstrates no significant advantage over the IVB i5 in lightly multithreaded applications either, where bottlenecks may lie elsewhere (e.g. memory/cache bandwidth). That means that even for multithreaded applications (Photoshop, archive compression/decompression, etc) the i5 stands toe-to-toe with the 8350 in quite a number of them.

The 8350 sees a significant advantage over the i5 only in heavily multithreaded workloads, e.g. rendering and encoding. If this is not going to constitute the large part of OP’s usage scenario (keep in mind that video-editing/CAD doesn’t mean you’re rendering final product all the time), he will be better off with the i5.

A quick look at Newegg tells me that all the 9-series AM3+ motherboards they stock are ATX. OP did mention he will probably stick to a mid ATX tower (I’m assuming this means ATX mid-tower) which doesn’t exclude ATX motherboards, but since he mentioned ITX builds I presume he doesn’t want to just throw out micro-ATX options either. Just another thing to keep in mind, in case he tries to shoehorn an FX-8350 into an AM3 motherboard *cough*

And if we go with the set budget question, mainstream gaming level ITX boards don't really exist, you basically have the choice of going either office or extreme

Not true. They exist at <=$100 already (H67/H77), and despite lacking OC options are quite "mainstream gaming"-capable.

[kitamesume]

Heat certainly might be a problem. But if he requires the threads and the budget isn't shifting, I'd say it's an excellent choice. And if we go with the set budget question, mainstream gaming level ITX boards don't really exist, you basically have the choice of going either office or extreme, and those don't come cheap.

"gaming" isn't necessarily a standard, how does a motherboard get a "gaming" category anyway, mostly any motherboard can be used as mainstream gaming component.

as for the budget, unless he wants to go into the extreme route, an i5-3330(the cheapest i5-ivy at the moment) paired with a GTX660(not the Ti), can fit in an ITX case and would provide 30+FPS @ 1080P high or max settings on all games thats currently available while staying affordable in a sense.

[Saras]

Heat certainly might be a problem. But if he requires the threads and the budget isn't shifting, I'd say it's an excellent choice. And if we go with the set budget question, mainstream gaming level ITX boards don't really exist, you basically have the choice of going either office or extreme, and those don't come cheap.

"gaming" isn't necessarily a standard, how does a motherboard get a "gaming" category anyway, mostly any motherboard can be used as mainstream gaming component.

as for the budget, unless he wants to go into the extreme route, an i5-3330(the cheapest i5-ivy at the moment) paired with a GTX660(not the Ti), can fit in an ITX case and would provide 30+FPS @ 1080P high or max settings on all games thats currently available while staying affordable in a sense.

Generally, I'd refer to mainstream gamer boards as those having convenient stable systems for voltage control and the like. You know, something you wouldn't think twice about overclocking. You know, a nice Z77 with some lovely extras.

By the sounds of it, he wasn't going for that much of a budget. I took the i5 vs i7 as 3570k or 3770k, also keeping in mind that he did mention a planned overclock.

Are there even that many single threaded applications left that require the performance of an i5 nowadays?

Saras, don’t forget that *everything else* that isn’t multi-threaded is generally single-threaded (or performs like a single-threaded application). And that includes the large majority of software OP is likely to use. OS startup/wakeup/resume, installer archive decompression, file-scanning, etc are still largely single-threaded, and the i5 is the clear winner in that category

Besides, the FX-8350 demonstrates no significant advantage over the IVB i5 in lightly multithreaded applications either, where bottlenecks may lie elsewhere (e.g. memory bandwidth). That means in quite a number of multithreaded applications (Photoshop, archive compression/decompression, etc) the i5 stands toe-to-toe with the 8350.

The 8350 sees a significant advantage over the i5 only in heavily multithreaded workloads, e.g. rendering and encoding. If this is not going to constitute the large part of OP’s usage scenario (keep in mind that video-editing/CAD doesn’t mean you’re rendering final product all the time), he will be better off with the i5.

A quick look at Newegg tells me that all the 9-series AM3+ motherboards they stock are ATX. OP did mention he will probably stick to a mid ATX tower (I’m assuming this means ATX mid-tower) which doesn’t exclude ATX motherboards, but since he mentioned ITX builds I presume he doesn’t want to just throw out micro-ATX options either. Just another thing to keep in mind, in case he tries to shoehorn an FX-8350 into an AM3 motherboard *cough*

Which is why I've given it as an alternative for the i7 if he wants to go on a budget. I'm quite aware that the i5 is better at the general stuff. Do note that I also said, that if he doesn't need the extra threads, he should stick with the i5.

And I'm also aware that the majority of the things you do on the PC is single threaded, what I was asking was how much of the stuff would actually benefit from the i5. Out of the stuff you mentioned, I'm not certain as I haven't actually checked, but all of that seems to be bottlenecked by the hard drive, not the CPU. Yes, there's single core programmes a plenty, but I can't think of a single one that's as demanding in its calculations, that you'd feel the difference between an i3, the FX8350 or an overclocked i7-3960X and I'm asking for examples there.

[kitamesume]

most, if not all, of the Z77 ITX can handle overclocks well enough, although none of them are cheap enough to fit in the budget category.
i'm quite interested in the[$149.99]ASRock Z77E-ITX simply because it has an ALC898 onboard sound, 8-pin 12V power, 2+2 SATAII&III, free wifi module, and the mosfets are heatsinked.
similar MATX or ATX motherboards containing the same features(excluding the free wifi module) does have identical price to this board.

well yeah, i did even recommend going with an i5-K, the build i had in mind.

(click to show/hide)

[$214.99]Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge
[$80.99]Noctua NH-D14 (lets just say it can fit)
[$149.99]ASRock Z77E-ITX
[$66.99]G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB(2x8GB)DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
[$229.99]EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-2662-KR GeForce GTX 660 2GB 192-bit
[$79.99]BitFenix Prodigy
[$67.99]SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W
[$149.99]SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD128BW 2.5" 128GB SATA III
---------------------------------------------
[total] - 1,040.92

(click to show/hide)

[$189.99]Intel Core i5-3350P Ivy Bridge
[$149.99]ASRock Z77E-ITX
[$39.99]Kingston HyperX Blu 8GB(2x4GB)DDR3 1600
[$229.99]EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-2662-KR GeForce GTX 660 2GB 192-bit
[$49.99]COOLER MASTER Elite 120 Advanced
[$59.99]SeaSonic S12II 430B 430W
[$149.99]SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD128BW 2.5" 128GB SATA III
---------------------------------------------
[total] - 869.93

(click to show/hide)

[$214.99]Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge
[$80.99]Noctua NH-D14
[$129.99]ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M (ALC898, thats my reason.)
[$66.99]G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB(2x8GB)DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
[$229.99]EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-2662-KR GeForce GTX 660 2GB 192-bit
[$39.99]NZXT Source 210 S210-002
[$67.99]SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W
[$149.99]SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD128BW 2.5" 128GB SATA III
---------------------------------------------
[total] - 940.92

as you can see, their price difference is small.

[GoGeTa006]

Im probably sticking to the i5 and the 660 Ti, as mentioned the Bulldozers have a very high power consumption (125W) compared to the intel competition. . .
and yes, kureshii is right, I am not going to be doing something that would require 8 threads. . .
and yes I MIGHT overclock a little, depends, as mentioned I want to avoid bottlenecking my computer:
so far (i havent made a wishlist but anyways)
Im looking at:
16 GB DDR3
SSD 128 or 120 whichever is on sale
i5 (Im still debating over Sandy/Ivy)
Nvidia 660 Ti, or if a higher model goes into sale < 300 then I'll probably take that.


but yeah, my biggest concern was the bottlenecking of the video card/ processor, but it seems that build works perfectly.

and TBH I dont think a CPU cooler is necessary in those builds kitamesume, they look good tho. . .If I overclock I dont think I would do it to a point where a stock cooler wouldnt handle the heat. (I have my Q6600 OC to 3.0 Ghz and still runs pretty good on stock cooler)

[kitamesume]

if you're looking into that kind of overclock range then an i5-3470 has an overclock headroom of 3.6Ghz plus 200mhz on 4cores or 400mhz on 1core by turbo boost, which ends up at 3.8Ghz and 4.0Ghz respectively.
when you're reaching over 4.0Ghz you'll end up getting too hot on the stock cooler(going over 65c on stressful load).

the GPU would be the bottleneck on games thats for sure, although a GTX660Ti would be plenty for current games to make them at least hit a stable 40-60FPS at high or max settings.

if you'd end up waiting till march-2013 or longer you might want to look into intel haswell, given that they promise a much much more power efficient processor which should indicate that they'll run much cooler, on top of having a slightly more performance per clockspeed.
the thing that interests me on haswell is their idle power consumption promising 20times less than that of ivy bridge, paired up with current GPU's idle of less than 10watts you'll be seeing quite a low standby power consumption.

[GoGeTa006]

if you're looking into that kind of overclock range then an i5-3470 has an overclock headroom of 3.6Ghz plus 200mhz on 4cores or 400mhz on 1core by turbo boost, which ends up at 3.8Ghz and 4.0Ghz respectively.
when you're reaching over 4.0Ghz you'll end up getting too hot on the stock cooler(going over 65c on stressful load).

the GPU would be the bottleneck on games thats for sure, although a GTX660Ti would be plenty for current games to make them at least hit a stable 40-60FPS at high or max settings.

if you'd end up waiting till march-2013 or longer you might want to look into intel haswell, given that they promise a much much more power efficient processor which should indicate that they'll run much cooler, on top of having a slightly more performance per clockspeed.
the thing that interests me on haswell is their idle power consumption promising 20times less than that of ivy bridge, paired up with current GPU's idle of less than 10watts you'll be seeing quite a low standby power consumption.

From what ive read, haswell wont have too much increase, I might wait till feb, they have good deals on presidents day weekend usually. . . As you said haswell will have a huge increase in power efficiency but thats not much of a concern. . . Plus their improvement in ivy ended up counterproductive since it got really hot when overclocked. . .

[kitamesume]

^no no, it is a good thing, a decrease in power consumption comes a decrease in heat generation, with this in mind you may attain a more broad overclocking headroom with just the stock heatsink. now do you get the cause?

its not only the efficiency that matters on haswell, the introduction of new instruction sets should be handy when programs starts implementing them.

if i remember correctly, there were some rumors floating a few months back that haswell will sport quadcores as entry processors (125$) while dualcores with HT would become the budget processsors (<100$), that would mean mainstream processors would be quadcores with HT (200$) and flagships being hexa cores (300$), also enthusiasts would have octa cores (5,00$-1,000$)

edit: now articles about haswell =D
Haswell at IDF 2012: 10W is the New 17W
Haswell: Up to 128MB On-Package Cache, ULV GPU Performance Estimates
Intel's Haswell: 20x Lower Platform Idle Power than Sandy Bridge, 2x GPU Performance of Ivy Bridge
IDF 2012: Haswell GT3 Running Skyrim

Intel Haswell Architecture Disclosure: Live Blog

edit: im all-ears on haswell's GT3, if it can overclock and how much would be the gain from doing so, if it reaches HD6670 levels then i'm in, thats a walking gaming-ultrabook there.

01:47PM - Haswell extends the turbo range a little bit

O.O

01:47PM - Finer grained voltage/frequency control

01:47PM - Haswell extends the turbo range a little bit

these two should put up quite nice stuffs on the non-K i5s.

the problem with ivy bridge getting hot way faster than sandy bridge was caused by two things, one was that they used a TIM instead of soldering the die, the other is the surface area of the die is much smaller which means the contact is much smaller for the heat to transfer.
none the less if you aren't going over 4.0Ghz none of these should be of concern, only going over 4.5Ghz does exhibit scary rise in temperatures, although people still manages to hit 5.0Ghz overclocks.

[Tatsujin]

One disadvantage of getting one of the K-series is that they don't have VT-d (which is used to game in Virtualbox, for example).

I am not too familiar but isnt virtual machine something that wouldnt apply here since all the processing is done in the local and not some host? (AFAIK Virtual machine is like cloud computing? like an emulated computer that does all the processing for you while you just get the results)
that article talks about linux and stuff (still reading), so Im assuming that user is running multiple instances, where I see how virtual machines might come in handy, but for my purposes I dont think I'll be doing that, here is a little more about what I plan on doing:

- Heavy gaming
- Photoshop/Flash/Adobe stuff enthusiast
- Sony Vegas/Adobe Premiere enthusiast
- Engineering CAD (Solidworks and ProE mostly) for school, and hopefully work sometime soon

---
and well offcourse all those basics, web surfing, torrenting, playing minesweeper. . .

Go with the i7. Get a nice big case with lots of airflow if you do and especially if you're going to overclock. Get a good PSU, too. I use the DF-85 (Newegg) case and it's one hell of a fucking case (expensive, too). There are other good cases out there, too. Two things to note about this - you don't get a lot of dust, barely any and the fans are very quiet. It's stylish and pretty looking.

Btw GoGeTa, Avoid AMD and save yourself the headache. Invest in performance and stability = Intel.

[kitamesume]

the problem with the i7 though is it's "125$ more than i5" price tag, it'll push the budget a little too out of hand for the sole reason of filling up the niche requirements where an i5 should be enough even if its slightly slower.
a GTX660Ti should be the minimum card for superb gaming and it starts at 200$ which already has the budget really pushed up.

if you manage to wait till march-april 2013 this is the sort of build you'd wanna go with

(click to show/hide)

[$200.99]Intel Core i5-nonK Haswell (3.5Ghz stock : 4.0Ghz turbo-ish) - or [ $250 i5-K haswell ]
[$150.99]whatever motherboard with pretty features
[$66.99]G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB(2x8GB)DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
[$250.99]Nvidia GTX 760 2GB DDR5 (rumors has it that it'll be on the same performance level of GTX 670)
[$39.99]NZXT Source 210 S210-002
[$67.99]SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W
[$149.99]256GB SSD SIII(rumors says it'll drop price by this much, evident enough since some of them are starting to touch $180)
---------------------------------------------
[total] - 927.93

edit: oh and i suggest you buy two SSDs, one solely for the OS and the other for programs and games, its to split the load so that the SSDs wouldn't queue the read/write operations.
i've heard of issues where the SSD becomes unresponsive during read/write operations.

[GoGeTa006]

the problem with the i7 though is it's "125$ more than i5" price tag, it'll push the budget a little too out of hand for the sole reason of filling up the niche requirements where an i5 should be enough even if its slightly slower.
a GTX660Ti should be the minimum card for superb gaming and it starts at 200$ which already has the budget really pushed up.

if you manage to wait till march-april 2013 this is the sort of build you'd wanna go with

(click to show/hide)

[$200.99]Intel Core i5-nonK Haswell (3.5Ghz stock : 4.0Ghz turbo-ish) - or [ $250 i5-K haswell ]
[$150.99]whatever motherboard with pretty features
[$66.99]G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB(2x8GB)DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
[$250.99]Nvidia GTX 760 2GB DDR5 (rumors has it that it'll be on the same performance level of GTX 670)
[$39.99]NZXT Source 210 S210-002
[$67.99]SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W
[$149.99]256GB SSD SIII(rumors says it'll drop price by this much, evident enough since some of them are starting to touch $180)
---------------------------------------------
[total] - 927.93

edit: oh and i suggest you buy two SSDs, one solely for the OS and the other for programs and games, its to split the load so that the SSDs wouldn't queue the read/write operations.
i've heard of issues where the SSD becomes unresponsive during read/write operations.

damn really?

AFAIK you only "load" once, I mean the OS loads into memory and the SSD isnt used to load any OS things anymore. . .and if you are loading a game. . .you arent "queuing" anything up if its just the game (the OS and any other programs should already be loaded).  . .right?

the Nvidia 7 series are gonna be that cheap for reals? source?

[kitamesume]

not all games are equally HDD extensive, but some games do access the HDD often, specially ones that loads maps, loads textures and saves files all the time(minecraft says hiiii).
as for the OS loading most of its components into the ram, yes its true, but not everything, it doesn't load components that aren't requested(you can imagine how would a 30+GB OS be entirely loaded when OS ram usage is 4GB and below depending on total ram capacity), but if the SSD is busy it'd queue the operation.
also, i haven't seen much reviews about read and write being done at the same time, the issues i've heard were that read speed plummets during writing.

i'm not sure if this issue is common and/or has already been fixed, but its a good thing to keep such in mind as precaution.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

When presented with realistic workloads, we see the worst of the SSDs producing very long IO times as well, as much as one half to one full second to complete individual random write and flush requests. This is abysmal for many workloads and can make the entire system feel choppy, unresponsive and sluggish.

i bumped the 2013 rumor thread for the GTX780 being 40-55% faster than GTX680 while maintaining the same price, it should then be quite obvious that the same thing could happen on the lower end if the rumors were true.

[kureshii]

if you manage to wait till march-april 2013 this is the sort of build you'd wanna go with

(click to show/hide)

[$200.99]Intel Core i5-nonK Haswell (3.5Ghz stock : 4.0Ghz turbo-ish) - or [ $250 i5-K haswell ]
[$150.99]whatever motherboard with pretty features
[$66.99]G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB(2x8GB)DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
[$250.99]Nvidia GTX 760 2GB DDR5 (rumors has it that it'll be on the same performance level of GTX 670)
[$39.99]NZXT Source 210 S210-002
[$67.99]SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W
[$149.99]256GB SSD SIII(rumors says it'll drop price by this much, evident enough since some of them are starting to touch $180)
---------------------------------------------
[total] - 927.93

Not march–april; Haswell is more likely to be out closer to June.

[kitamesume]

what it was moved? last time i heard from it it was like february-march for the K series while the non-Ks usually comes after a month or so.
quite a sad news, although it gives me more room to try and stack some cash before swapping out my current rig.

edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_%28microarchitecture%29

Intel is expected to release CPUs based on this microarchitecture around March to June 2013 according to leaked roadmaps.

it is around march, although i guess the part "to june" means similar to what happened with ivy bridge, i5-K i7-K plus a few non-K came out first, a month later is where the other non-Ks came out, then 5months later came the i3.

[vuzedome]

Oh come on, gogeta wants it by Christmas and what gogeta has in mind is decent enough.
If we wait for April and later come back the situation will repeat itself with some going to say that since this or that is coming in August so why not wait....... Yeah it's a cycle.

[buchno]

Oh come on, gogeta wants it by Christmas and what gogeta has in mind is decent enough.
If we wait for April and later come back the situation will repeat itself with some going to say that since this or that is coming in August so why not wait....... Yeah it's a cycle.

That's what I go by. Technology will always get better if you wait, so if you need something, just buy it now.

[kitamesume]

he did say he might get to sit it out until february for some more bucks and since march is just this close by and if by chance he gets postponed to it, why not?

[kureshii]

what it was moved? last time i heard from it it was like february-march for the K series while the non-Ks usually comes after a month or so.

Quite some time ago. Originally slated Q2 2013, which would be march–june, but later at IDF it was confirmed to be much closer to June; see Anandtech (my link), TPU articles.