Can a PCIe slot go 'bad' if the video card blows up?

[Infinisearch]

Crashed last night, so I gave in and bought that machine today, posting from it now. Installing updates now since you can't update to 8.1 without them. Thanks for the advice/help. Also bought a USB 3.0 external enclosure to transfer data from the old HD.

I'm going to wait a while so I can test the system for stability but I plan on doing the following:

1.Get video card - any suggestions for the 100,150, and 200 dollar price points, if I go the 100 route I was seriously considering the R7 260x.
2.SSD - any suggestions on brand, size, or installation? (no windows media will need to clone)
3.I was going to wait unless a good reason pops up but I might just get another 8GB and 4 GB stick, so I have a total of 24GB in a dual channel config.
4.At the same store they have a refurb Creative Sound Blaster Recon 3D, but I guess if I get an AMD card with TrueAudio I won't need it.

Any other hardware or software suggestions?

Dont forget 2tb isnt enough for a gaming machine

If I don't upgrade the HD will I incur the wrath of the Gaming Gods and there most holy emissary on earth Davros?

Thanks again

 

[Grall]

SSD, Samsung EVO maybe? *shrug* SSDs these days are all quite fast, so fast that for normal single-user tasks there's no discernible real-life difference between them.

Don't bother with a soundcard - unless you've got special needs, a more than decent sound system and really fricken quiet case fans. You wouldn't be able to hear any improvements in sound with a PC whirring away in the background...

 

[Mize]

RE: SSDs, I have a couple EVOs and they're great. I also have a Plexstor that does great too.
Agree with Grall on soundcard. Unless you're an audiophile and use your computer for music, just go with on-board.

Interested in hearing how fast this is with integrated graphics compared to the old rig!

 

[homerdog]

3rded for the Samsung EVO. It is a great SSD at a great price.

As for GPUs, if $200 is your max budget you won't do any better than an R9 270X. That is so, so, so much faster than the IGP.

You can surely find a used HD7950 for <$200 on Ebay. This guy is only asking $155 straight up.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sapphire-Ra...013?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item3f34f0f035

Of course they will have been used 24/7 for coin mining but in theory they should be okay. That's what I would do.

 

[Davros]

For cloning ive just used Macrium Reflect Free Edition
it was quite good
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

re. soundcard if your playing games from the xp era an x-fi is recommended

 

[Infinisearch]

Just a quick update, so far so good fast and stable.

The good: wireless KB and mouse, a first for me.
The bad: The RAM is 11-11-11-28
The uncomfortable: The headphone, mic and some usb ports are strangely position on the top of the case facing the rear instead of forward.
The interesting: The RAM as GRALL pointed out is operating in dual channel mode with one 8 and a 4 stick. I have found out this is called intel "flex" memory.

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-011965.htm
http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/emea/eng/support/lcs/faq/technical/desktop/242787.htm
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/haswell-ddr3_2.html

Interested in hearing how fast this is with integrated graphics compared to the old rig!

The most demanding games I have in my possesion at the moment are GRAW2, Splinter Cell Double Agent, Rainbow Six Vegas, and either Far Cry or DeusEx IW. So if you're still interested I'll fire them up and tell you what I think, although the GT240 I had wasn't that bad it had a 128bit bus after all. I also ordered the Orange Box but that will take a few days to get here and I have a limited time to test because...

You can surely find a used HD7950 for <$200 on Ebay. This guy is only asking $155 straight up.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sapphire-Rad...item3f34f0f035

I ordered this video card from newegg, what do you think?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131562

A new 2gig 7850 for 130 and a 30 dollar rebate == 100 dollars. 256bit memory, mantle and hopefully DX12 support... and of course it only has one 6pin connector and a max TDP of 130 watts so I shouldn't have a problem with the 460W power supply that came with the system.

For cloning ive just used Macrium Reflect Free Edition

Thanks for that, I've been looking into various solutions. BTW if you're using Win8/8.1 did you run "optimize drives" to enable TRIM and disable various stuff for the SSD or did you do it manually somewhere else? If so where?

So I'm back to deciding what RAM and SSD to get. For the RAM newegg is having a sale on Crucial Ballistix Sport 9-9-9-24 1600 for 65(8gig), 43(4gig). SSD I was considering a 240GB Kingston SSDNow V300 or a 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus.

re. soundcard if your playing games from the xp era an x-fi is recommended

Do you know if the Recon3d would do in this case? I do have some older games I might decide to play at some point.

Thanks once again.

 

[Grall]

Just a quick update, so far so good fast and stable.

That's awesome.

The good: wireless KB and mouse, a first for me.

Suggest you keep spare batteries around...

The bad: The RAM is 11-11-11-28

@1600MHz? That's pretty pedestrian, although I doubt you'll really notice any difference in practice outside of benchmarking programs, TBH. Almost all PC RAM accesses are cached, making RAM timings more the domain of pedantic overclockers than something everyday users need to worry about. What might have more of an influence is if you use up enough RAM that your system switches over into single-channel memory mode, although with a pretty roomy 8GB of dual-channel memory you'd have to work hard to accomplish that, even if playing a game.

A new 2gig 7850 for 130 and a 30 dollar rebate == 100 dollars.

Dunno if you considered the Geforce GTX 750? Not sure how it compares performance-wise (it's about the same price bracket, but a more recent model, so the 7850 may have been downmarked, making it better price/performace; I haven't studied benchmarks for these cards... I tend to go for high-end stuff myself, because I'm a mad man.

So I'm back to deciding what RAM and SSD to get. For the RAM newegg is having a sale on Crucial Ballistix Sport 9-9-9-24 1600 for 65(8gig), 43(4gig).

I think that'd be money pretty well wasted, TBH. The performance benefit from the lower timing would be quite minimal, unless you plan on plugging in all sticks all at once because you need craploads of RAM for some reason... In that case, you should buy RAM that is of the same model/manufacturer as what you already got, for compatibility's sake.

SSD I was considering a 240GB Kingston SSDNow V300 or a 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus.

Most everything available on the market today should be decent enough for general use, especially if you stick to well-known brands only. You may want to check reviews how your preferred drive holds up in I/O consistency. Anandtech tests for this, maybe others too. A drive that is more consistent/offers lower latency will - in theory - feel more responsive. Although under general use conditions you probably won't notice anyway, and any difference will likely mostly be placebo. SSDs are damn fast on the whole regardless...

You might be best served just picking the (brand-name) SSD that gives best price/capacity that you can afford.

 

[Infinisearch]

Suggest you keep spare batteries around...

Thats the first thing I thought when I found out.

@1600MHz? That's pretty pedestrian, although I doubt you'll really notice any difference in practice outside of benchmarking programs, TBH. Almost all PC RAM accesses are cached, making RAM timings more the domain of pedantic overclockers than something everyday users need to worry about. What might have more of an influence is if you use up enough RAM that your system switches over into single-channel memory mode, although with a pretty roomy 8GB of dual-channel memory you'd have to work hard to accomplish that, even if playing a game.

Cache's only provide speed up for subsequent access's to the same line, some workloads are inherently streaming so the latency can make a difference. I'm going to start doing dev work again and one of the things I'll be working on is software rendering, though OOE and prefetching will mitigate higher latency I'm am curious and concerned about the effects of the latency. But you're right... its been so long since I've profiled any code I'm not really sure.

Dunno if you considered the Geforce GTX 750? Not sure how it compares performance-wise (it's about the same price bracket, but a more recent model, so the 7850 may have been downmarked, making it better price/performace; I haven't studied benchmarks for these cards... I tend to go for high-end stuff myself, because I'm a mad man.

Nothing wrong with being a madman. I think I looked into the 750ti and it was the same or worse perf but at $100 it'll be the first 256bit video card I could afford, and with mantle and dx12 coming out I get the feeling the 7850 will have longer legs and see perf boosts with the new api's... just a guess though.

I think that'd be money pretty well wasted, TBH. The performance benefit from the lower timing would be quite minimal, unless you plan on plugging in all sticks all at once because you need craploads of RAM for some reason... In that case, you should buy RAM that is of the same model/manufacturer as what you already got, for compatibility's sake.

The 9-9-9-24 RAM is cheaper than the 11-11-11-28 RAM currently and according to what I read in the links provided the system will use the timings of the slowest DIMM in the system. And yes I'll be plugging in all the sticks at once... as I said above I'll be developing again and between that and my unhealthy habit of keeping 20-70 browser tabs open at a time It'll help.

Most everything available on the market today should be decent enough for general use, especially if you stick to well-known brands only. You may want to check reviews how your preferred drive holds up in I/O consistency. Anandtech tests for this, maybe others too. A drive that is more consistent/offers lower latency will - in theory - feel more responsive. Although under general use conditions you probably won't notice anyway, and any difference will likely mostly be placebo. SSDs are damn fast on the whole regardless...

I have looked into SSD's a little... but what's I/O consistency?

You might be best served just picking the (brand-name) SSD that gives best price/capacity that you can afford.

That's what I planned on doing thanks for the advice though.

 

[Grall]

Cache's only provide speed up for subsequent access's to the same line

Well, yes and no. CPUs these days have hardware pre-fetchers to fill up caches with data before it is actually required by the CPU... Also, performance-sensitive software may be coded to actively pre-fetch in advance.

some workloads are inherently streaming so the latency can make a difference.

Yes, data (de)compression, transcoding, things like that. But the mere handful of cycles that differs between 9-9-9-24 and 11-11-11-28 sits on top of a stack of other latencies and stuff that won't change just because you switch RAM sticks, so it'll be a very small change, even in virtually uncachable streaming situations. Literally only a few percent.

...But do what you want to, you're a grown person I take it, with your own money. Far be it for me to try and decide what you should do! Just wanted to give some *ahem* cost-effective advice. Since you're probably not a mad man, like me. Five years ago I bought 6*2GB worth of 1600MHz sticks with 7-7-7-24 latencies that run at 1666MHz 7-7-7-20 1T... They don't make RAM like that aaany more... My current rig uses 4*4GB 2400MHz Corsair Dominator Platinums at 9-11-11-31 2T. They weren't terribly cheap summer last year, although there were boutique low-latency sticks available that were much more costly than that. Ugh!

I'm am curious and concerned about the effects of the latency.

There's some reviews out there, using Sandra's memory benchmark and such which is pretty thorough. That's probably an extreme of what you'll see, as all that benchmark does is stream memory as quickly as possible with no processing at all going on. A real-world situation would be running other instructions too, of course.

as I said above I'll be developing again and between that and my unhealthy habit of keeping 20-70 browser tabs open at a time It'll help.

Ok, well even when I was restricted to "only" 12GB, I hardly ever used more than 40% of that, even with loads of browser tabs, world of warcraft running windowed in the background and so on. Professional software might eat quite a bit of RAM though, I wouldn't know. So you choose what you're most comfortable with...

I have looked into SSD's a little... but what's I/O consistency?

Basically, the internal electronics of a SSD hides the way drive data is stored on the flash array from the operating system by means of mapping tables and whatnot, to help with wear leveling and such. Re-mapping data for writes, realtime garbage collection and other assorted under-the-hood work takes up some time for the drive controller, which can give variable response times when accessing the drive if drive firmware is not programmed carefully. A good drive ensures reasonably consistent I/O latency, whereas a drive where this is not a priority could see access times vary a lot over time. In theory at least, this could cause software doing I/O to stutter or the system to momentarily appear non-responsive.

In practice I'm unsure how big this issue really is, but it's worth taking a moment to check up on... The drive I bought, the Corsair Neutron GTX, was said to have very good consistency at the time when I bought it.

 

[Infinisearch]

Well, yes and no. CPUs these days have hardware pre-fetchers to fill up caches with data before it is actually required by the CPU... Also, performance-sensitive software may be coded to actively pre-fetch in advance.

I know... as I stated above both OOE and prefetching (hardware and IIRC instructions provided by SSE and its ilk on the x86 side of things) mitigate latency issues. The thing I'm interested in that I can't test out though... tightly coupled threading in a hyperthreaded/smt/amd "core pairing" core. If the threads could be enforced to run at the same time on the above coupled "cores" I was going to explore various software architectures that would exploit the shared cache. But I don't have the hardware, windows last I checked only has CPU affinity nothing to enforce parallel thread execution... I have to look into that again though.

Ok, well even when I was restricted to "only" 12GB, I hardly ever used more than 40% of that, even with loads of browser tabs, world of warcraft running windowed in the background and so on. Professional software might eat quite a bit of RAM though, I wouldn't know. So you choose what you're most comfortable with...

Were you running a 32 or 64bit OS and apps? With IE,Chrome, and Opera open with about 30-40 tabs between them I was getting about 6-7gigs in use, sometimes I have the above three open with firefox and other programs in the mix along with some pdf files and in the future dev tools open at the same time. Guess I'm just trying to solve a problem before it even becomes an Issue.

Basically, the internal electronics of a SSD hides the way drive data is stored on the flash array from the operating system by means of mapping tables and whatnot, to help with wear leveling and such. Re-mapping data for writes, realtime garbage collection and other assorted under-the-hood work takes up some time for the drive controller, which can give variable response times when accessing the drive if drive firmware is not programmed carefully. A good drive ensures reasonably consistent I/O latency, whereas a drive where this is not a priority could see access times vary a lot over time. In theory at least, this could cause software doing I/O to stutter or the system to momentarily appear non-responsive.

In practice I'm unsure how big this issue really is, but it's worth taking a moment to check up on... The drive I bought, the Corsair Neutron GTX, was said to have very good consistency at the time when I bought it.

Thanks for that I will indeed check up on it... although I knew about the housekeeping I didn't realize there might be "macro level" performance concerns.

 

[Grall]

I was going to explore various software architectures that would exploit the shared cache. But I don't have the hardware, windows last I checked only has CPU affinity nothing to enforce parallel thread execution...

Aren't there any free/open source realtime operating systems that might help you with such pursuits? Maybe Linux' sheduler is more flexible/powerful in this regard...?

Were you running a 32 or 64bit OS and apps?

64-bit OS obviously, and 64-bit IE for browsing. I'm too lazy to install/update more than one browser... I usually did not have as many as 30-40 complex pages open though, but for a period I did peruse tumblr a lot, for, eh, research purposes... Chrome on my macbook would not handle a lot of open tabs very well, especially not tumblr's perchant for endlessly scrolling pages of images that could become REALLY huge; the browser would slow down enormously, almost to the point of stopping responding completely.

Not sure if Chrome at that time was available in 64-bit version, but if it wasn't, I suppose it might have been hitting the harddrive pagefile pretty hard, I'm not sure because as we all know, macs lack a HDD LED... *facepalm*

Thanks for that I will indeed check up on it... although I knew about the housekeeping I didn't realize there might be "macro level" performance concerns.

Yeah well, here's the real kicker (as I may have pointed out, but perhaps not clearly enough); I'm not completely sure if there's ACTUALLY any macro level concerns or not. Probably not for most users, who simply don't write enough to their drive to make the garbage collection routines kick in very often. Most, if not all of the time, the drive could concievably rely on its spare blocks area to absorb writes, and then invisibly garbage collect in the background once disk activity settles down again to free up new spare blocks area... Most I/O latency issues occur during periods of heavy disk/write activity, so if you don't do much of that it might not be a factor, really...

Anyway, good luck in your research, and future purchases!

 

[homerdog]

CPUz shows my 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 sticks run at 1T. Is that possible on an i7-3770?

 

[Mize]

'grats on the new rig. Sounds very nice.

 

[Grall]

If CPUz says so then I'd be inclined to believe it. I've personally never seen it lie.

 

[homerdog]

Yep, I just checked the BIOS (UEFI?) and both sticks are indeed set to 1T. Don't even remember doing that.

Wonder if it's better to have 1600MHz with such low timings vs 2000+MHz with looser timings. I've seen comparison articles, but never any that test 1T at any speed.

Edit actually after googling it seems running at 1T is not so uncommon, and it can make a few % difference in games and stuff if you're not GPU bottlenecked.

 

[Grall]

1T is probably set by the onboard SPD eeprom if you didn't manually enable it. 1600MHz with low timings will only beat higher clockrate with higher timings if the absolute access time (in nanoseconds) is lower at 1600, and you're not benefitting from additional bandwidth.

Low access time 1600 is a very good middle ground so to speak though, from some tests I've read, especially if your RAM can do 1T, like yours. Don't have any links to hand out though... Too hard to remember such stuff off-hand.

 

[Infinisearch]

Aren't there any free/open source realtime operating systems that might help you with such pursuits? Maybe Linux' sheduler is more flexible/powerful in this regard...?
.....
Anyway, good luck in your research, and future purchases!

I was thinking of looking into the Linux Kernel, even to the point of doing a little kernel hacking to look into this but it'll be alot of work and I haven't really gotten around to doing the leg work yet much less seeing if I need to go that far.

Thanks for the goodwill.

 

[Infinisearch]

'grats on the new rig. Sounds very nice.

Thank you, both for the congrats and the advice... and as I said above if you're really interested in benchmarks from the above games (or kane and lynch... just remembered I had that) I'll fire them up and get back to you.

Oh and apparently things might not be as great as I said before, while 'conversing' with Grall earlier in the day a click type noise came from the computer randomly. Its happened 4 more times since then, I can't tell if its the burner or the HD. Just to be safe I'm going to run diagnostics from the HD manufacturer to see if there are any problems with the drive. It'll have to wait though because Steam is downloading updates for HL2 right now (my first experience with steam), why ohh why do I have to download 2.2gigs... I bought the hard copy to avoid that.

 

[Infinisearch]

CPUz shows my 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 sticks run at 1T. Is that possible on an i7-3770?

Do you mean the "command rate", cause if so I think thats pretty common... it's usually either 1T or 2T. IIRC it's the number of cycles between the chip select going active and the command being presented on the bus. I'll look it up and edit this post later.

 

[Davros]

Do you know if the Recon3d would do in this case? I do have some older games I might decide to play at some point.

I would stay away from the recon 3d it appears to be a step backwards from the x-fi (no harware eax, no dsp, no asio drivers) be aware there is 1 xfi that doesnt have a dsp (extreme audio)
extreme gamer is the cheapest dsp based xfi.