New rig processor quandry...

[Albuquerque]

Rig is used for gaming (of course!), 720P video encoding / transcoding, 12mpx raw-format photo editing and batch processing / conversion to PNG, watching movies on occasion and of course surfing the web.

I have already purchased a PCI-E raid card and a stack of SSD drives to populate it. I'll be buying at least one high end video card (although I'm waiting for NV to release Kepler before I make any decisions), 32Gb of ram, and likely a dedicated PCI-E audio card. I'll also be picking up a Dell U2711 monitor to view it all. I already have the case and PSU and home-build water loop.

So, for the processor, I'm thinking I have two obvious options:

#1: Sandy Bridge "E" 3930k on the X79 platform. 6-core, 12-thread, unlocked, quad-channel ram interface, and 40 PCI-E lanes. Most people can get more than 4.5Ghz out of these with any semblance of reasonable cooling, it has enough PCI-E lanes to not choke on the RAID and a high-powered video card or two, and quad channel ram is sexy!

#2. Ivy Bridge 3770k on the Z68 or perhaps Z77 platform. 4-core, 8-thread, unlocked, dual-channel ram interface and 16 PCI-E lanes. The limited number of PCI-E lanes is what concerns me here; a fat RAID card with a stack of SSD's has been known to break video card stability when the PCI-E bus gets REALLY busy.

Obviously #2 is going to be about $300 cheaper than #1, but I just shelled out a pretty decent stack of cash just for the RAID array. In the grand scheme of things, this will probably be less than a 10% difference of the entire cost of the box.

I also assume that #2 will probably overclock further and create less heat while doing it, so maybe the raw performance difference can be minimized. And perhaps the PCI-E 3.0 lanes that are on IVB will help alleviate the bus contention issues that some sites see with massive bus traffic causing the video cards to crash...

Thoughts?

[V3]

I say go with option one. If you want something cheaper the i7-3820 could be an option. I'm sure there will be a 22nm LGA2011 somewhere down the line to upgrade to.

[shiznit]

For gaming, you will see little if any benefit from the Sandy Bridge E. The money saved can buy a better GPU.

Ivy Bridge is PCI-E 3.0 so you can get away with only using 8 lanes on with a 3.0 card and the DMI bus from the south bridge has plenty of bandwith for I/O. As for your RAID plans, why do you want your SSDs on a hardware raid card?

[I.S.T.]

Given your photography and video editing work, option 1 is by far the best choice.

shiznit, you're assuming the card is PCI-E 3.0. I highly doubt it is, that's very new.

[shiznit]

Yea I missed the part where he already bought the card. I don't do much photo editing and I usually do something else while waiting for transcoding to finish so it's hard for me to see value in slightly faster times. As for photos, I have no idea how much horsepower editing takes but isn't that GPU accelerated now anyway?

[Bludd]

Based on the money you are already spending, go for option 1 if you can afford it. x264 is going to rock on 12 of those threads.

[shiznit]

On second thought, if you can afford it (and you already bought the SSD array), might as well go all out especially if you need more than 16GB ram.

[Albuquerque]

It might be useful if I could somehow 'limit' one of the PCI-E interfaces to only use 8x, but I'm not aware of an option for that. If I plug a 16-lane device into a 16-lane slot, it's gonna soak up all sixteen lanes. The RAID card is an 8-lane device, and that's where I get confused as to how the breakout really works. I've effectively oversubscribed the board at that point; maybe it goes into a default 8x / 8x mode by using them both? Actually, I believe that's how it truly works.

For gaming, it surely isn't going to matter for that many threads. The only reason SB-E is interesting is because of the excess of PCI-E lanes to allow for RAID and video card (or more than one card in the future.) And they seem to overclock nearly as well as their current SB smaller brothers...

[shiznit]

If the board has 2 PCI-E slots that share 16 lanes, as soon as you populate both, they switch to 8x/8x even if one of slots is only running a 4x card.

Server motherboards like the Supermicros I use for my ESXi and storage servers allow for more flexible setups (8x/8x/4x) and even route an extra slot or two through the DMI bus but consumer/gamer motherboards are generally 16x or 8x/8x.

If your gpu pci-e 3.0?

[Albuquerque]

Haven't decided on GPU yet. Given existing information, extra PCI-E bandwidth (ie, over 8 lanes of 2.0 interface) doesn't seem to matter much anyway.

[shiznit]

the Z77 chipset (Z68 too supposedly) for Ivy Bridge will do 8x/4x/4x. If you get a 3.0 gpu, 8x will be plenty, at least for a good while. 4x is fine for your raid card, even in 2.0. You will still have another 4x to spare, and if you don't need it, your raid card will get the full 8x.

[Albuquerque]

the Z77 chipset (Z68 too supposedly) for Ivy Bridge will do 8x/4x/4x. If you get a 3.0 gpu, 8x will be plenty, at least for a good while. 4x is fine for your raid card, even in 2.0. You will still have another 4x to spare, and if you don't need it, your raid card will get the full 8x.

There's no way four PCI-E lanes will be fine for the RAID card with six SATA3 SSD's attached to it. We're talking about speeds approaching 3Gbytes per second; four lanes will never do that.

I need eight lanes for the RAID without question, and eight lanes for the video card -- leaving me exactly none. PCI-E 3.0 might help for the video card, but insofar as I'm aware, there are no RAID cards with support for PCI-E 3.0 yet... And the one I just bought isn't using it, either.

[PixResearch]

Option 1 here. The 6 core sandy bridges are excellent if you have the workload for them. Transcoding and image editing can spread out across all the cores easily enough and 4.5GHz is no problem at all. 25% overclock with conventional cooling is easy to achieve if you can live with the fan noise. :)

What I can't quite work out is what the SSD raid is for. None of your listed use cases are disk bound... I can certainly see the benefit of having your OS and main apps on an SSD and better still 2 of them in raid 0 but 6 implies there's some other task that will benefit. It seems odd to spec those then consider spending less on a CPU.

I've built a couple of SSD raids now (for streaming uncompressed video at 120fps) and even expensive external raid controllers start becoming a significant bottleneck above 3-4 drives...

[shiznit]

4x 2.0 lanes is 2 GB/s, probably a little less than your 6 SSDs will peak at but still a huge amount, and even with 8x the processor on the controller itself may become a bottleneck before your SSDs do.

But the simple answer is, if you don't want to make any compromises, you have to go with Sandy-E.

[Raqia]

I'd wait for IVB overclocking reports before making a decision if I were you. However, either of those are ridiculous overkill for most purposes; I was tabbing between 6 3-D games, 1 GPU demo, and watching an HD movie simultaneously on my 2500k w/o trouble.

[hoho]

Trust me, once you start some hardcore photography you'll be capable of using up any processing power you have access to. E.g putting together a time lapse from 30k images with minimum amount of processing took around 40h on q6600. Sure, it's an old CPU but even the 6-core monster here will quite likely take several hours to do the same work :)

[Blazkowicz]

32GB ram will be cheaper with 4GB sticks than 8GB sticks, so the expensive 2011 mobo pays for itself. though I've just checked and the 8GB sticks seem to have got very affordable - their price has crashed without notice. duh :lol:

option 1 with maybe a 3820 is nice as you just build it right now rather than wait for two monthes. use whatever crappy GPU in the interim. we've known Intel, and no CPU will have its price lowered. ever.

[shiznit]

+1 for the 3820, great deal.

[Davros]

I was tabbing between 6 3-D games,

I pride myself at being good at games, but 6 at once seriously ???

[hoho]

Hey, I multiboxed 5 copies of WoW on a measily 6600GT and C2D with 2GB of RAM under Linux. Running 6 games in parallel doesn't really say all that much if you "forget" to mention what they are. Not to mention tabbing out of one basically means it won't be using up any GPU and often CPU power either. :)

[Raqia]

I pride myself at being good at games, but 6 at once seriously ???

Lol; it was actually a test suite for calibrating my HDTV as my monitor. IIRC, they included DOTA 2, Mass Effect 2, Renegade Ops, Dragon Age, Dolphin Emulator, and Need for Speed. Oh, I also had Chrome w/ 45 tabs open in addition to everything else I mentioned. I wasn't actually playing all of them, but I'm glad that I can; 16 GB of ram sure comes in handy.

[Albuquerque]

I had no direct need for the SSD RAID, other than I really wanted to ;) I love having a single, contiguous storage space for my OS, apps and working data. The whole "fast small partition, slow large partition" is mildly irritating to me, although it could be solved by junctions or other similar redirection tricks.

So yeah, consider the SSD array to be an e-penis extension ;) And yeah, the rig will get 32Gb of ram (in 4Gb sticks.) You can get eight 4Gb DDR3-1600Mhz DIMMs with 7-6-7-7 timings for $200-ish and that's pretty badass IMO.

Sounds like I'm gonna do the SB-E, and I'm considering just changing to a new waterblock to my existing CPU-only dual-120mm radiator loop.

[Blazkowicz]

btw if 10 gigabit ethernet reaches the magical point where it becomes mainstream.. you could drop another PCIe, 10 G-baseT card in the rig, and build a raid 5 or 6 or something monster file server or SAN with by then cheap and totally huge hard disks.

e-peen and e-balls!

[Grall]

Monster file server that would still get whupped badly by even a single SSD where performance actually counts; latency. :)

I'm gonna sit on my good ol' Nehalem at least until ivy bridge-E appears, and maybe even haswell. That's where the really exciting stuff will start to happen IMO (although processor tech is always a swiftly moving target of course so you're never going to get 100% satisfied as a silicon gearhead...)

[hoho]

Talking about SSD RAIDs, didn't putting them into one turn TRIM or is that problem solved now?

[PixResearch]

That's definitely a good enough reason for the SSDs :D
Sounds like it'll be a great system!

[Albuquerque]

Talking about SSD RAIDs, didn't putting them into one turn TRIM or is that problem solved now?

Technically yes, but most modern SSD's have their own garbage collection now for self cleaning. Consider that I'll be fairly over-provisioned anyway (I'm not gonna fill that thing full for a LONG time) and TRIM should be mostly meaningless.

[Raqia]

Looks like someone wrote an article for you: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-3820.html

[hoho]

Technically yes, but most modern SSD's have their own garbage collection now for self cleaning. Consider that I'll be fairly over-provisioned anyway (I'm not gonna fill that thing full for a LONG time) and TRIM should be mostly meaningless.I'm curious, how can a SSD know if a file gets deleted from it without OS using the TRIM command? Deleting a file is just changing a bit of data that happens to reside in file allocation table. On SSD-side it's no different than modifying any other piece of data on the disk.

[Albuquerque]

I only know what I've read from several reviews; wikipedia also mentions it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM):
Although tools to "reset" some drives to a fresh state were already available before the introduction of TRIM, they also delete all data on the drive, which makes them impractical to use for ongoing optimization.[4] More recent SSDs will often contain internal idle/background garbage collection mechanisms that work independently of TRIM; although this successfully maintains their performance even under operating systems that do not (yet) support TRIM, it has the associated drawbacks of increased write amplification and wear of the flash cells.[5]

[Albuquerque]

Looks like someone wrote an article for you: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-3820.html

Oh, and yeah I've seen that review. The Quad SB-E is pretty lame, all things considered. The 3930k isn't the gaming beast that the i7-2600k (or it's overpriced, binned brother 2700k) is, but it single-handedly force-chokes all global warning doom-sayers when processing video encoding jobs. :D Look at that bad bastard go!

I think the 3930k is where I'll go. And then when IVB-E comes out in a year or so, I'll swap the CPU and call it good.

I plugged the current RAID card into my x38 / overclocked Quad 9450 rig just to see what might be possible, and I've discovered that the PCI-E implementation on this board doesn't deal well with the throughput the RAID card can put through. I can put up some ATTO / CrystalMark / AS-SSD numbers if someone is interested, but these are NOT interesting.

Basically, the transition from one to two drives is roughly linear (as you'd expect), but it has a strong taper at the top end. Sure enough, I get basically no scaling with three drives, and I cannot even attempt benches with four drives as it completely locks the system. I'm pretty convinced that it's a PCI-E (chipset) issue, because benchmarks even on dual drives will make WDM crash during the high-queue depth 4K random tests. When using three drives, WDM will start flaking out during the transfer tests and pretty much stops responding entirely during 4K tests. On four drives, it just reboots the system about halfway through the first transfer test.

Ye ol' 4-year old X38 chipset just wasn't meant to deal with this kind of abuse ;)

[Davros]

Since your going nuts, why not get a 5.25inch ramdrive or several and raid them ;)

[Albuquerque]

Even those are too expensive IMO. With 32Gb of system ram and over a terabyte of SSD space in RAID0, I can't imagine needing iRam disks (or whatever they're called now.)

[Blazkowicz]

sure and there's software ramdisks anyhow.
you can even load whole, heavy games in ramdisk as I did when I had 32 MB memory (this was not very practical as you had to edit config.sys and reboot to change ramdisk size)

[Albuquerque]

I use ramdisk software right now on my laptop and desktop for managing temp files, page file, and browser cache. If I end up with a game where 2Gb+/sec worth of disk transfer is still a 'painful' bottleneck, then I'm not really sure what decade I will be living in...

[Blazkowicz]

high end enterprise stuff does that now, multi-tiered storage with memory, then flash, then hard disks, then tape backup eventually.
you can run a heavy database with thousands users, B3D forum and site would be very small change.

actually the power of your machine is so great it's mind-numbing, you can run a high traffic website, application server (windows TSE or linux ltsp) or any ridiculous things while encoding in the background and still playing games :razz:

[Mr Deap]

I've being using the 3930K for quite awhile with 32GB of RAMs(8X4GB) stable OC at 4.5GHz. It encode more than twice faster than my old 920 OC at 3.4GHz.

You can even play games & encode video at the same time without much hit on the performance on the game. It still encode faster than my old 920. It's a blast.

[Albuquerque]

See, now that's what I'm talking about :D

The 3930k has been out of stock at NewEgg and MicroCenter for the last two weeks. WTF!?!? I have pretty much everything else picked out and to buy, just need the damnable processor to be available!

[Grall]

Out of stock situations is a good excuse to save up more money, and buy a bigger/faster component... :lol:

[Albuquerque]

None of the benchmarks anywhere showed measurable benefit from the extra cache of the 3960X, so it probably isn't worth the additional $400. That's the only thing bigger than the 3930k, unless you want to go to a XEON platform -- which I don't :)

I found a place with six in stock (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00603QXPM?ie=UTF8&seller=A2PH2OQP9RIP9Q&sn=PC%20Deals) for a fee that wasn't absolutely outlandish. Also found a few more in stock at a few other e-tailers for a thousand or more dollars, but if I was going to spend a grand, I'd buy the "X". And I'm not. :D

The board and ram came in today: went with the Intel DX79SI and 8 x 4Gb of Mushkin 7-8-9-24 4Gb DDR3-1600mhz

[Albuquerque]

Woke up this morning to Intel BurnTest v2 maximum load setting having completed 10 passes without issue. Processor is doing 4.5Ghz / 1.25x strap with all threads/cores active, set to 1.300v and "mid" vdroop correction; 74*c under a Zalman CNPS 9900 Max with a single 120mm exhaust fan and the case-side 250mm intake fan. Lots of possibilities for better cooling in this case, but I'm ridiculously happy with this result and noise level.

Task today after work is to go beat up the eight sticks of ram. They're all running VERY relaxed settings for now, something like 9-9-9-27 at 1333Mhz. I'm pretty sure I can get 8-8-8-8 timing at 1600 or better.

Power draw from the wall with the processor at full whack was ~335W. Looks like I'm not going to have any problems with my existing powersupply.

[Blazkowicz]

damn these times I'm doing browsing only with firefox eating all of my 2GB memory.
I'm planning a great upgrade, get an asrock 970 extreme 3 mobo or something, and 8GB ddr3 while keeping the same athlon X2 but this time I can overclock it. (upgrade from AM2 to AM3)

btw you could probably have gone with a 990FX mobo, only an FX is quite less sexy unless you wanted a space heater.
it would have been funny to run an o/c AMD FX and GPGPU folding during the harsh cold wave (but it's gone)

[Albuquerque]

Ye ol' 990FX isn't much competition for the X79 except for the space-heater aspect ;)

[Grall]

Woke up this morning to Intel BurnTest v2 maximum load setting having completed 10 passes without issue.
Sweet. :D Grats on the new rig!

I'm pretty sure I can get 8-8-8-8 timing at 1600 or better.
It's weird with the timing on RAM sticks; I've got a set of 6 OCZ Platinum 2GB DIMMs that I bought years ago now and are specced at 7-7-7-24@1600, and I run them 7-7-7-20@1660 no issues. All sticks I see these days are higher timings, even for a relativley paltry 1600MHz...

Especially sticks made for low-voltage have worse timings, so there's some sort of physical correlation going on there.

Power draw from the wall with the processor at full whack was ~335W.
Whoah. That's pretty rough just for the CPU! :D I remember when PC processors first started getting heatsinks on them instead of just a bare (ceramic) chip carrier; PASSIVE ones initially. Then those dinky little 40mm fans that gummed up in a couple months' time, and from there things just grew and grew.

Crazy now that I'm thinking of it... Of course, performance has grown a LOT more than power useage, so it's not a very straight comparison really. :lol:

[Dr Evil]

Whoah. That's pretty rough just for the CPU!

It wasn't just for the CPU, but total system with CPU at full load. How would you measure just the CPU power usage from the wall?

[Albuquerque]

Yeah, keep in mind that IBT soaks up pretty much all available ram (when placed into "Maximum" stress mode) so it's pretty much maximum power draw excluding your video subsystem. I just played with that last night, and my 5850 overvolted and overclocked running some FurMark Xtreme Burn + the CPU doing IBT at max yielded a whopping 500W power draw at the wall!

The ram timings are limited by having all eight channels populated. If I pare it down to four sticks, I can hit 7-9-8-24 at 1T (the XMP profile for these Mushkin sticks) on their rated 1.65v. However, with all eight sticks in, I can't maintain 1T at any speed :( My current stable point is 8-9-8-22 at 2T running 1666Mhz while still maintaining the 1.65v on memory voltage and stock volts to the CPU IO (VCCIO) voltage.

Later tonight I'm gonna poke around with the IO voltage, looks like I have a lot of room to move before it starts becoming "too much." According to most tweak guides, that IO voltage is what normally holds the keys to allowing me to squeeze a bit more on the memory speed and timings.

[Grall]

It wasn't just for the CPU, but total system with CPU at full load.
You're mincing words. "The full system" (minus GPUs) is just a bunch of support systems for the CPU. Chipset, RAM and so on are all CPU sub-systems without which the CPU could not do its work.

It's easier to just shovel all this crap in under CPU power useage rather than write a small essay describing and defining exactly what I mean.

How would you measure just the CPU power usage from the wall?
I don't even think that's interesting. Actual CPU-only power use will vary (often quite a lot actually) from board to board even with the same CPU, as seen in Anandtech motherboard reviews for example, depending on VRM and board design and such factors.

IMO, it's the whole package that's interesting, how much the CPU (and related systems) draw as a cohesive, whole unit. "A CPU is not an island", to paraphrase a common saying. :razz:

[Grall]

However, with all eight sticks in, I can't maintain 1T at any speed :(
Hmm... I can run 1T on my rig with all 6 sticks on my now soon ancient Nehalem plug... I'm really pleased with that myself actually (although actual performance benefit may be nigh unmeasurable in normal use of course....) Is it common for SB-D chips to not manage 1T rate with 8 sticks, or is it as much a function of the mobo/BIOS as of the sticks themselves?

[Dr Evil]

You're mincing words. "The full system" (minus GPUs) is just a bunch of support systems for the CPU. Chipset, RAM and so on are all CPU sub-systems without which the CPU could not do its work.

It's easier to just shovel all this crap in under CPU power useage rather than write a small essay describing and defining exactly what I mean.


Well I'm quessing his other components used at least 100w in that scenario, so it's not insignificant amount. At stock 5850 alone already idles at 30W. Eight RAM sticks and six SSDs and what else does he have in there. The CPU don't need that much sub-systems :)

[Grall]

Right, the SSD RAID array... I forgot about that. :lol: Still, the vast majority of power should be consumed by either the CPU or devices directly related to the same.

[Albuquerque]

Well, to be quite fair though, the SSD's weren't under any load. At idle, they probably use less power all together than a single spinning disk would. The RAID card needs a few watts I'm sure, but it too probably isn't doing much during the CPU stress portion of the test. At full torture-test load under AS-SSD or something, I do wonder how much power they might be drawing. TBH, I bet it's the RAID card that sucks more power than the SSD's do -- I think they're all rated for like 3 or 4 watts at peak.

I'll have to keep an eye on the kill-a-watt when I start doing disk benches, just to see what the result is. Hmm...

As for the 1T? It was pretty common even on the Nehalem products; I've got two more super-geeks at my office with i7-920 and i7-965 rigs that swore off the full six-sticks of ram config because they couldn't keep 1T. I am more inline with what you said though; the performance delta is likely negligible to non-existent. It's not like the quad-channel bus is starving the CPU of bandwidth, really... ;)

I'll attempt to get some figures for the SSD array and post back with my findings, as now I'm curious...

[Albuquerque]

Got some starter benchmark numbers; ATTO saw at least two hits at the 2.5GB/sec mark and Anvil Storage bench saw a ~6,400 score. The rig is all at default speeds for these runs as I'm having problems maintaining my overclock on my existing power supply when the whole rig is under load. The replacement Kingwin Lazer Platinum 1KW unit (http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=271) is arriving tomorrow to solve that problem, and I'll be able to start tweaking a bit more and provide some pictures, better benches (hopefully), and power draw figures.

I had never heard of that particular power supply builder before, but it got phenomenal reviews from JonnyGuru (linked) whom I trust to make the proper assessment of PSU quality.

[Albuquerque]

For those who are curious, the six SSD's and raid card peak out at approximately 60W under full load while doing these benches (comparing idle power draw to maximum that I saw indicated.)

http://www.schulzjewelry.com/Beyond3D/SSDRaid/AS-SSD%20result.PNG
http://www.schulzjewelry.com/Beyond3D/SSDRaid/ATTO%20result.PNG
http://www.schulzjewelry.com/Beyond3D/SSDRaid/Anvil%20result.PNG