New PC Build
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| It's been a little over two years since I built my last PC, and it's starting to feel its age a little bit. I'd like to be able to capture gameplay footage from my game at 60FPS with FRAPS. I do some video editing, so that's a factor. My cutscene editor struggles a bit with real-time editing and displaying graphs for scene properties, so I guess that's mostly CPU bound. I don't play a lot of games on my workstation, but I'm inevitably going to play some, and I'd like to not worry about performance. My current machine only has a hard drive so I'm hankering for the performance increase of SSDs. Application load times for 3dsMax, Photoshop, FaceFX, etc can be significant. So far I've put together this list: Motherboard: Intel X79 (not sure which brand/model) PSU: 750W Gaming PSU. CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K Processor Memory: 4x8GB DDR3 @ 1600 Gfx: Nvidia GTX 780 3GB DDR5 (not sure which brand) HDD: 2 x 128GB Cherryville SSD. 1 x Seagate Barracuda 3TB HDD. Plus a nice big case with good airflow and plenty of room for another GTX 780 if the mood takes me. One thing that concerns me is that a lot of shops - even Microsoft resellers - seem to be refusing to sell their high end PCs with Windows 8. I'm obviously aware of a general lack of interest from consumers but I get the impression that there's more to it. Is there some kind of limitation with Windows 8 (perhaps memory use?) which makes it inadvisable to use Windows 8? I'm quite happy with W7 but would have liked a W8 machine just for testing purposes. |
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| I'm not aware of any Windows 8 limitation, other than the self-imposed RAM limits that MS seem to force upon us with the more affordable versions of Windows. That might be THE reason, actually. Average Joe doesn't want or need Windows Ultimate to do whatever it is he does in his bedroom all day. Your PC is quite similar to mine, only with a faster CPU and better graphics card; Asus motherboard, i5-2400 @ 3.1GHz, 4x8GB 2400 RAM (running at 1600 cos of the CPU), Nvidia GTX650 (only 1GB, though weirdly, Windows says it's 4GB - which I know for a fact it's not), 250GB Samsung EVO SSD. |
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| No inherent limitation -- I have a very similar set up 6-core i7 with hyperthreading, except my model runs at 3.4GHz) If you want windows 8, make sure to get the Professional or Ultimate version -- the home premium maxes out at 16GB. Same goes for Windows 7, FWIW. I think that the lack of windows 8 is more consumer back-lash than anything else. I noticed the same under our Dell account at the office -- If I go to the screens to customize a new PC, Windows 8 is available as an option on less than half the machines I see in there. A word of warning, though: it may be smarter to get a single 240GB SSD than dual 120GB -- last I looked, none of the SSD's support TRIM yet in RAID mode (I'm assuming that's why you wanted two?), and without TRIM the write performance goes downhill very fast the more you use the drive. Also be aware that SSD write performance goes down on drives that are mostly full compared with drives that have a bunch of free space left. Here's some background info on what TRIM does and why it's important: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM Actual failure rates of SSD are comparitively low compared to HDD's -- here's an interesting article about that: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html (Boils down to: SSD failure while still under warranty is around 1.5% per year, compared to HDD near 5%) |
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| Thanks guys. I didn't see why it would be an issue, but since it seemed prevalent, I thought there was something I was missing. I wasn't thinking of RAID for the SSDs. I just thought it would be faster and help me organize better to have applications on one drive and commonly used data (ie: my game projects) on another drive. Thanks for the info on TRIM. I wasn't aware of that at all; good reading. |
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| @Marc: Are you sure about the Win8 memory limits? Any sources that I can look up? Microsofts lists only different Windows 8 versions and their memory limits and says that the base version supports 128 gigs on x64 systems: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_8 There is also no word of a Home Premium version (except for Win7 & Vista) and I would assume that Microsoft would have mentioned it in this table, especially if it would be any different from the base entry. |
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| According to here, Windows 8 supports up to 128GB, while Pro and Enterprise support up to 512GB. |
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| The GTX680 is still floating about for now, even compared with the 7XX it provides more bang for your buck IMHO. |
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| I stand corrected -- sorry about that. It does stand for Win 7, though. |
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| The GTX680 is still floating about for now, even compared with the 7XX it provides more bang for your buck IMHO. When I looked at them the power/price ratio seemed just about the same. The 780 has around 90% of the power of the Titan and costs only just over half as much. The 780 has potential for upgrade by running two in SLI, but it might be trickier to do that with an older card. |
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