Too bad you can’t overclock with an H61 board.
Indeed. I was gonna say…that K-series is overkill on an H6X board because it won’t let you change the multiplier anyway. Not sure if it lets you alter BCLK, but even if it does, you’re not going to blow any doors off with your overclock.
I agree with SenorBeef.
I have used both Nvidia and ATI cards in the past and I currently have a 5870 and have absolutely zero problems with it in any game I have played (and I tend to like bleeding edge games with graphics cranked to the highest or near-highest levels I can…everything looks great and never a problem).
Indeed in Witcher 2 I heard Nvidia people complaining about texture “pop-in” as a scene loaded. Not a big deal but a little annoying. My 5870 never had a problem with that (think I noticed it once).
Thanks, I forgot. Look for P67 in the name or description of the MB if you wish to oc. Should add $50 to $100 for a single PCI expressx16 slot and regular PCI slots. Or just go with ReticulatingSplines’ advice.
Thanks everyone for your feedback and support. My first task is buying a new TV this weekend, but on Monday I am going to start planning out my system build.
Newegg has a weekend sale going on a ASUS Sabertooth Motherboard with a full-sized heat sink covering the entire board!. I’ve never seen one of these before except in servers. If it weren’t for the stupid card set up (once again, the sole PCI slot will be blocked by my GPU’s fan), I might take a closer look at this one.
Not to hijack my own topic TOO much, but it also became clear during a presentation I was doing at work yesterday that I NEED a new laptop. It will be a secondary system, but I need a portable system which can run Adobe Illustrator CS5 (requires 2GB of RAM or it won’t even INSTALL) and ArcGIS Suite. My current laptop (which I’ve had since 2005 and even then I got it used) has 512 and some cheapo AMD processor…so that’s gonna be my next big purchase. I could probably get my company to buy one for me (aka buy one for themselves and let me use it), but I want a personal system which I can load full of warez and porn too. So who has the better mobile processors these days?
Right now I’m debating between the i5 and i7. I feel like it’ll be worthwhile to throw a little more money at the i7, but I’m not quite sure how the real world comparison is. If I do go for the i7, I guess it can’t hurt to spend an extra $15 to get an unlocked version, if I decide to OC down the line…
Only if you’re using dual video cards – I believe the primary video card slot is in the middle of the board.
I’m actually putting together a new system now, and am doing the research.
The i5 2500k is the chip to buy. It’s basically the same as the i7 2600k minus the hyperthreading. The hyperthreading can lead to substantial gains in a very limited set of applications - stuff that’s very paralellized and mathy like video encoding. But for every day applications or gaming you rarely use more than the four threads available for the four cores of the processor. At $220 vs $320, there’s no way the 2600k is $100 better.
Both chips are crazy good overclockers. You’ll hit 4.5 with very little effort (a $30 CM hyper212+ and a $5 tube of AS5 will get you there) from what I understand and 5.0 is a decent possibility.
The “k” part is extremely important - that’s what unlocks the multiplier. Everything on the sandy bridge is connected to a single clock, so you effectively can’t do bclock/fsb overclocking or your pci-e devices will fail. So all of the CPU overclocking is done from the multiplier. This actually makes it simpler with a single point of failure. And the K version is only like $12 more than the non-k version making it a no brainer. Actually, newegg has a promo code right now that takes the 2500k down to $205. 2500k, cm hyper212+, as5 - all together $240 - and you’ll get to 4.5ghz and beyond.
But he says he IS doing video encoding…
You’d have to check benchmarks of the video encoders you actually use to see if they properly take advantage of hyperthreading. Even then, it would be a downgrade in cost to performance - the performance increase might be optimistically 30% on average, but the price increase with it is almost 50%. Would probably be worth it to a dedicated video editor/encoder wanting a high end computer, but not something someone budget-minded should consider.
In any case, it’s going to encode videos at well faster than real time anyway, so unless you’re doing it professionally all day I doubt it’s going to make much of a difference.
Thanks again for your help everyone, but I decided to hold off on upgrading for the time being. Instead, I just bought this laptop. Not really a gaming or recompression machine, but I needed it to fit my work needs. Intel Core i3-370M 2.4GHz / 4GB DDR3 / 500GB Hard Drive / Blu-ray Reader / Intel HD Graphics / 802.11n … got it for $538 + tax (even the salesman at J&R thought it was a steal!). I may pull out the two 2GB RAM chips and replace them with two 4GB. Sucks I have to buy the entire 8GB if I want to upgrade.
Before I decide on the i5 vs i7, I want to see how well the i3 in my laptop handles video compression. I’m going to race it with my Athlon 64 X2 2.2ghz overnight tonight, by giving both computers the same task, and starting both at the same time with nothing else running.
Last night I ran the benchmark, x264 compressing the same m2ts file, both started at 00:47:52, with nothing else running on either computer. My desktop Athlon 64 X2 finished the task at 05:27:09 and my laptop i3 finished at 5:52:54, 25 minutes longer. When I woke up, my laptop was in sleep mode, so I wonder if that slowed it down? Since that task doesn’t rely on GPU power, my laptop SHOULD have won the race. This doesn’t give me much faith in the Intel i3 … maybe I am better off sticking with AMD?
Missed the edit.
I think I know why my desktop won the race. Two RAID-0 WD Raptor 10,000rpm harddrives vs a single 5400rpm harddrive. I took a closer look at the batch log, and where my laptop lost time was the extracting stages. For the reencoding stages (where the CPU comes into play) it did beat the desktop.
Just make sure you get enough power… new stuff draws a surprising amount of current.
In Nov 2008, I got an Athlon X4, Geforce 9800, etc… and a shiny new 500w power supply.
The fan on the video card crapped out and started making a hellacious racket, so I got a GTX 550 TI card… and a new 650w power supply so it would run right. Apparently the new cards take enough power to not work with the 500 w power supply of 3 years ago.
Laptop chips aren’t as fast as their desktop equivelants. I’d imagine the core i3 is probably faster than your x2, but not by as large a margin as the i3 desktop version would be. You also want to make sure that no sort of power saving mode is running on your laptop - you want it running at full blast when plugged in.
And bump - if it’s any good, a 500w supply would run those components fine. Is it some generic Sparkle $25 unit or something?
I wouldn’t bother, to be honest. I upgraded my desktop computer from 4 GB to 8 a while back and so far the only difference I’ve noticed is that it decompresses files a teensy bit faster. Then again, it was only €40 so it’s not a terrible investment or anything, but I expect laptop RAM is a good deal pricier.
A bit, but not by much. I ordered a laptop this week myself. It comes with 2x1 GB, so I ordered 2x2 GB SODIMMs alongside it. $22 each. I haven’t bought computer components in a while; RAM is startingly cheap right now.
Update. I just finished building my new desktop system. I decided to go all out and buy A-quality parts for it. It cost me about $900 for everything. And man, oh man, does this thing fly!
Intel i7-2600k @ 3.4 ghz (I think the bios is giving it a slight overclock - it changes every time I power it on)
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ CPU cooler (which was incredibly annoying to install)
ASUS P8-Z68 Deluxe motherboard — very nice board with all of the on-board expansion I needed (with one exception, see below), but the BIOS is screwy. It uses a mouse interface, except I have no control over the mouse - it’s like an uncalibrated joystick that keeps gliding to the corner
Nvidia 8800GT from my old system - I wanted to wait to upgrade the GPU, since I want to see how everything performs first. I might be fine with this card for now, since I don’t do a lot of high-end PC gaming. It played Civ 5 just fine.
16 GB DDR3-1600 RAM - again, the BIOS is overclocking it just a bit. 1648 right now.
Rosewill Parallel/Serial PCI card - got it off newegg for $12. Needed it for my HP Laserjet 4 printer which I’ve had for close to 2 decades. They do not make motherboards with on-board Parallel anymore.
Antec Earthwatts 650w PSU - A-list quality brand, and should be enough wattage for a new GPU when I get it. It’s dark green colored…seriously. BTW - my case had the mounting point for the PSU on the bottom. There’s a vent on the bottom of the case (and it has feet which raises it about an inch off the desk), was I correct in mounting the PSU with the fan facing the bottom?
Crucial SATA-III 64GB SSD HDD – for Windows 7 x64. Power on to desktop in under 20 seconds. The W7 logo doesn’t even have time to materialize before my desktop loads! If there’s ever any doubt if a SSD is worth the extra money – it IS. Get a 64GB drive and install Windows to it, and then use mechanical drives as secondary. I also have a couple of old fashioned HDDs from my old system in there.
LG Blu-Ray burner - recycled from my old system
Thermaltake V9 Blacx case with 2 HDD docking bays and huge top fan. With the expansion port that came with my motherboard, I have 4 USB-3 ports on the front.
Two 24" monitors recycled from my old system, both 1080p
You can mount the PSU in either direction with that sort of case, but I prefer mounting it with the intake fan up. It takes in hot air from your case and exhausts it (but not very hot air, being at the bottom, so this isn’t a big deal) but it’s also cleaner air - if you have some sort of filters on the air coming into your case vs picking up air off the floor, it might have more dust/hair/whatever.
The bios shouldn’t be overclocking your ram automatically. But it doesn’t matter, that’s an inconsequential amount, but I’d be curious to know why it’s doing that. The important thing is that it’s not touching the BCLOCK (which should be at 99.8-100mhz) to do so.
Anyway, you should get to overclocking that chip. With sandy bridge chips it’s extremely easy. With mine, all I did was set “4.6 ghz preset” and my motherboard took care of all the voltages and it’s 100% stable running at 4.6 ghz. Anything above this speed will take some more work with tweaking, but 4.6 ghz literally took me about 5 seconds, flipping one switch, saving, and rebooting.
The vent on the bottom has a filter, which can be pulled out and cleaned.
I haven’t done much messing around in the bios yet, aside from turning on hot cables for the two HDD drive bays. It’s really hard to make changes due to that mouse issue (and I tried using a different mouse, both are USB), so I need to investigate it.
This motherboard has two on/off switches called EPU and TPU, which are automatic overclocking systems. I left them off because I would rather fine tune the settings in the BIOS myself. This board (and even the Z68 chipset) is less than 2 months old so I’m not finding much for tutorials yet. But the CPU cooler I got is supposed to be able to get the 2600k up to the 5ghz range.
With the current settings, the CPU is running at about 45°C, with the motherboard at 38. What is the highest safe temp to run this CPU at?