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BurritoJustice
Oct 9, 2012

The biggest thing I got from those benches is how much of a hideous bottleneck the AMD APUs are in every single game. In some tests it is the difference between 60fps and 40fps. And the A10-7850k costs more than an i5 :psyduck:

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KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


Cardboard Box A posted:

Battlefield 4 64 player MP is the most taxing game a computer can run, CPU-wise, but it is understandably hard to benchmark multiplayer.

Dwarf Fortress. :colbert:

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Planetside 2? But yeah, Dwarf Fortress.

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull
Isn't Dwarf Fortress single thread only though? Meaning the best CPU for it would be a 4790k.

SCheeseman
Apr 23, 2003

BobHoward posted:

Isn't Dwarf Fortress single thread only though? Meaning the best CPU for it would be a 4790k.

You could always get one of those Pentiums and overclock the living gently caress out of it. Works well for Dolphin and PCSX2, apparently.

The Last Poet
Oct 9, 2001
I'm looking to build a new PC soonish and for some reason i want one of the Samsung M.2 drives in it. I also want SLI. Would i need the 5830 or would the 5820 be sufficient (wrt pcie lanes) ?

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

The Last Poet posted:

I'm looking to build a new PC soonish and for some reason i want one of the Samsung M.2 drives in it. I also want SLI. Would i need the 5830 or would the 5820 be sufficient (wrt pcie lanes) ?
Why are you not getting a 4790K?

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

The Last Poet posted:

I'm looking to build a new PC soonish and for some reason i want one of the Samsung M.2 drives in it. I also want SLI. Would i need the 5830 or would the 5820 be sufficient (wrt pcie lanes) ?

There is no legitimate reason to be buying Haswell-E for typical home use or gaming. Get a 4790K if you want to be spendy, but even that is overkill for a gaming machine and you should probably just get a 4690K. Both have more than enough PCIe lanes for an M.2 Drive and a couple of graphics cards.

It's also extremely unlikely that you need SLI unless you have a 4k screen. You can get outstanding performance even at 2560x1440 with a single, top end graphics card like the 780ti. Getting multiple cheaper cards is almost never a good idea - tons of games don't support SLI properly, and half the time it will cause glitches or stuttering or all sorts of fuckups on new games before they get patched/new drivers come out.

BurritoJustice
Oct 9, 2012

To be fair, you can't actually use SLI alongside a M.2 3.0 4x SSD (like the Samsung is) on LGA1150 without a PLX chip. Honestly if you really had to do it, the cheapest option would be a 4690k/4790k alongside an ASRock Extreme9 (only motherboard I know of with both PCIE 3.0 4x M.2 and a PLX chip, also a good 200 dollars cheaper than other PLX boards). But you shouldn't.

Canned Sunshine
Nov 20, 2005

CAUTION: POST QUALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION



BurritoJustice posted:

To be fair, you can't actually use SLI alongside a M.2 3.0 4x SSD (like the Samsung is) on LGA1150 without a PLX chip. Honestly if you really had to do it, the cheapest option would be a 4690k/4790k alongside an ASRock Extreme9 (only motherboard I know of with both PCIE 3.0 4x M.2 and a PLX chip, also a good 200 dollars cheaper than other PLX boards). But you shouldn't.

And doesn't the PLX chip introduce quite a bit of latency also? So it might not actually be an option for some either.

The Last Poet
Oct 9, 2001

Alereon posted:

Why are you not getting a 4790K?

I don't think theres a good Z97 motherboard that supported bootable M.2 and SLI ?

edit: my understanding is what BurritoJustice said, theres only the ASRock board supports it.

The Lord Bude posted:

There is no legitimate reason to be buying Haswell-E for typical home use or gaming. Get a 4790K if you want to be spendy, but even that is overkill for a gaming machine and you should probably just get a 4690K. Both have more than enough PCIe lanes for an M.2 Drive and a couple of graphics cards.

It's also extremely unlikely that you need SLI unless you have a 4k screen. You can get outstanding performance even at 2560x1440 with a single, top end graphics card like the 780ti. Getting multiple cheaper cards is almost never a good idea - tons of games don't support SLI properly, and half the time it will cause glitches or stuttering or all sorts of fuckups on new games before they get patched/new drivers come out.

Given the option i'd rather buy a 4790K but without proper M.2 support i'd rather not.
My intent is to buy a 4k monitor as well.

I think the obvious question is 'why ?' and the best answer i can give is i _really_ want the M.2 functionality. A poor answer admittedly, and given it'll cost an extra 700 quid (550 with the 5820) i'm debating getting a 4790K and a Samsung 850.

thanks for the replies.

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

BurritoJustice posted:

To be fair, you can't actually use SLI alongside a M.2 3.0 4x SSD (like the Samsung is) on LGA1150 without a PLX chip. Honestly if you really had to do it, the cheapest option would be a 4690k/4790k alongside an ASRock Extreme9 (only motherboard I know of with both PCIE 3.0 4x M.2 and a PLX chip, also a good 200 dollars cheaper than other PLX boards). But you shouldn't.

The Samsung drive is PCIe 2.0 x4, not 3.0, and you can get an adapter for like $20 to plug it into a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot which is fairly common on just about every ATX sized board.

Even if you insisted on using the M.2 Slot, the two PCIe 3.0x16 slots would still run at x8 and x4, which I doubt would measurably impact performance of the cards unless maybe they were Titan Zs or something. 3.0x4 is still equivalent to 2.0x8, and people run SLI just fine on 2.0x8 without running into bandwidth issues. Here's some data on the subject:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/24.html

So it is perfectly possible, if you wanted to be a nutter, and use SLI and M.2; to do so without a PLX chip. And the Extreme 6 does in fact support booting from M.2. Any z97 board with M.2 support should - I know for a fact Asus has released a bios update to support it for 9 series boards.

Even using an Extreme9 - which at 236 dollars is only a tad more expensive than say a Maximus Gene, and much better featured - isn't an unreasonable purchase for someone looking to build a high end rig with money to burn.

Going for Haswell-E for a gaming machine is lunacy though, and honestly so is buying a samsung M.2 SSD vs just getting an 850 pro or something.

The Lord Bude fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Aug 31, 2014

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

The Last Poet posted:

I don't think theres a good Z97 motherboard that supported bootable M.2 and SLI ?

edit: my understanding is what BurritoJustice said, theres only the ASRock board supports it.


Given the option i'd rather buy a 4790K but without proper M.2 support i'd rather not.
My intent is to buy a 4k monitor as well.

I think the obvious question is 'why ?' and the best answer i can give is i _really_ want the M.2 functionality. A poor answer admittedly, and given it'll cost an extra 700 quid (550 with the 5820) i'm debating getting a 4790K and a Samsung 850.

thanks for the replies.

We are a fair way from getting what I would call acceptable 4k gaming performance, even with two graphics cards - it's probably a couple generations away at best, unless you intend to spend several thousand dollars on graphics cards.

Honestly I also don't think M.2 is worth it, compared to an 850 pro. I'm also not sure that it supports rapid mode, which gives a gigantic performance boost to regular Samsung SSDs.

The Lord Bude fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Aug 31, 2014

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

The Lord Bude posted:

We are a fair way from getting what I would call acceptable 4k gaming performance, even with two graphics cards

I don't know, 295X2 takes a good shot at single board gaming at 3840×2160.

So I definitely don't think it's several generations away. The next dual GPU board from AMD or NVIDIA will probably give us the goods, especially since the new consoles are so crap, I doubt we're going to see huge increases in asset quality.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Aug 31, 2014

BurritoJustice
Oct 9, 2012

The Lord Bude posted:

The Samsung drive is PCIe 2.0 x4, not 3.0, and you can get an adapter for like $20 to plug it into a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot which is fairly common on just about every ATX sized board.

Even if you insisted on using the M.2 Slot, the two PCIe 3.0x16 slots would still run at x8 and x4, which I doubt would measurably impact performance of the cards unless maybe they were Titan Zs or something. 3.0x4 is still equivalent to 2.0x8, and people run SLI just fine on 2.0x8 without running into bandwidth issues. Here's some data on the subject:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/24.html

So it is perfectly possible, if you wanted to be a nutter, and use SLI and M.2; to do so without a PLX chip. And the Extreme 6 does in fact support booting from M.2. Any z97 board with M.2 support should - I know for a fact Asus has released a bios update to support it for 9 series boards.

Even using an Extreme9 - which at 236 dollars is only a tad more expensive than say a Maximus Gene, and much better featured - isn't an unreasonable purchase for someone looking to build a high end rig with money to burn.

Going for Haswell-E for a gaming machine is lunacy though, and honestly so is buying a samsung M.2 SSD vs just getting an 850 pro or something.

A lot of this is wrong. The XP941 is 3.0, it just wasn't marketed as such because until ASRock did 3.0 M.2 it wasn't an option. See Anandtech's review of the Extreme6 specifically addressing this.

Also it isn't possible to sli using 3.0 4x, Titan Z's or otherwise, as Nvidia disables it under 8x.

You're right about A. The extreme9 being a huge amount of motherboard for the money, and B. normal SATA SDDs on a cheaper board make way more sense.

Pimpmust
Oct 1, 2008

KillHour posted:

Dwarf Fortress. :colbert:

That or any Paradox strategy game, the newer ones make use of multiple cores too I think. True CPU performance is measured in seconds per turn-tick 300 years into a game :colbert:

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

BurritoJustice posted:

A lot of this is wrong. The XP941 is 3.0, it just wasn't marketed as such because until ASRock did 3.0 M.2 it wasn't an option. See Anandtech's review of the Extreme6 specifically addressing this.

Also it isn't possible to sli using 3.0 4x, Titan Z's or otherwise, as Nvidia disables it under 8x.

You're right about A. The extreme9 being a huge amount of motherboard for the money, and B. normal SATA SDDs on a cheaper board make way more sense.

Crossfire would work though - I'm pretty sure AMD cards will do crossfire at x4. I hadn't realised Nvidia disabled it though.

That review is the first I've heard of the drive being 3.0 - every reference to the drive I could find had listed it as being 2.0

Guess I learn something every day.

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

HalloKitty posted:

I don't know, 295X2 takes a good shot at single board gaming at 3840×2160.

So I definitely don't think it's several generations away. The next dual GPU board from AMD or NVIDIA will probably give us the goods, especially since the new consoles are so crap, I doubt we're going to see huge increases in asset quality.

that does better than I thought - That Anandtech review is garbage, they don't test all the games at max settings, or list minimum fps. According to HardOCP minimum fps drops to the mid 20s though.

Still that's a ton of money to pay, and you'd still have to deal with crossfire shenanigans. I don't think 4k is worth doing until you can do it with a single gpu.

The Lord Bude fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Aug 31, 2014

LiquidRain
May 21, 2007

Watch the madness!

Why can't we get gaming at 4k yet? What's the technical bottleneck - fillrate? shading power? everything, since its' 4x the pixels?

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

LiquidRain posted:

Why can't we get gaming at 4k yet? What's the technical bottleneck - fillrate? shading power? everything, since its' 4x the pixels?

Well we can, you just have to spend a boatload of money on graphics cards.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

BurritoJustice posted:

A lot of this is wrong. The XP941 is 3.0, it just wasn't marketed as such because until ASRock did 3.0 M.2 it wasn't an option. See Anandtech's review of the Extreme6 specifically addressing this.
:siren:The Samsung XP941 is not PCI-Express 3.0:siren:

That review clearly states the drive is PCIe 2.0 x4. The point of that review was that most Z97 boards don't have four lanes available from the chipset, so if you want to dedicate four lanes to the M.2 slot, you need to use PCIe 3.0 lanes coming from the CPU.

More broadly, the Samsung XP941 is not a very good SSD for consumers compared to the options that are currently available. Remember that it doesn't support any of the important perfomance-enhancing features of upcoming consumer PCIe SSDs, and since it's an OEM-only product you lose support for all features provided by the Samsung software, most importantly RAPID Mode. For day-to-day usage RAPID Mode provides a very similar performance benefit to high-end PCIe SSDs, and you can get a Samsung 840 Evo 500GB for the price of a 256GB XP941 with money left over. If you don't think the 840 Evo is the drive for you for whatever reason, the 850 Pro still provides compelling benefits over the XP941 at a substantially lower price. More details are available in the SSD Megathread.

My point here is not that the XP941 sucks, but that it's not the straight upgrade over Samsung's consumer SATA SSDs that it might seem like at first glance. That straight upgrade will come with the next generation of drives. With the XP941 you're basically getting 8 channels of MLC on a bus that's twice as wide as SATA600. With a Samsung 840 Evo you're getting 8 channels of SLC (up to the size of the cache, 3-12GB) on a SATA600 bus, along with a memory caching and write combining layer that's designed to alleviate the bottlenecks from that bus. For most typical consumer workloads the Samsung 840 Evo actually works better, especially when you consider it's less than half the price so you can afford a much larger drive. It really is ridiculous how perfectly suited the Samsung 840 Evo is to desktop workloads.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Aug 31, 2014

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Alereon posted:

:siren:The Samsung XP941 is not PCI-Express 3.0:siren:

I thought I was right about that.

BurritoJustice
Oct 9, 2012

Alereon posted:

:siren:The Samsung XP941 is not PCI-Express 3.0:siren:

quote:

"one of the few native PCIe 3.0 x4 drives in OEM circulation, the Samsung XP941"

:confused:

To be clear, I'm not recommending the drive at all here, I just wish to be as factual as possible.


(I love your work in the SSD thread)

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

BurritoJustice posted:

:confused:

To be clear, I'm not recommending the drive at all here, I just wish to be as factual as possible.


(I love your work in the SSD thread)
I am 99% sure that's a typo, as the review of the drive itself (as do others) says the controller is PCIe 2.0 x4, nowhere else in that review is it mentioned that the drive (versus slot) supports >2GB/sec, and the drive's performance doesn't exceed 1350MB/sec.

So the upshot of all this (so I'm not just being pedantic and telling people they're wrong!) is that you can get full performance out of a Samsung XP941 on a Z97 board if that was a thing you wanted to do by using the PCI-E 2.0 x4 slot provided by the chipset and an adapter card. This is usually your third PCI-E x16 slot on SLI-capable motherboards.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Aug 31, 2014

BurritoJustice
Oct 9, 2012

A confusingly worded Anandtech review then, especially considering that later on they question the performance of the drive compared to the 3.0 4x theoretical maximum. (Also I'm sorry for correcting you on that Bude, my mistake).

I think the moral is the story is that there is a variety of crazy ways to strap PCI-E devices to a system, and its all fricking fascinating.

Thanks for clearing that up Alereon.

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

BurritoJustice posted:

A confusingly worded Anandtech review then, especially considering that later on they question the performance of the drive compared to the 3.0 4x theoretical maximum. (Also I'm sorry for correcting you on that Bude, my mistake).

I think the moral is the story is that there is a variety of crazy ways to strap PCI-E devices to a system, and its all fricking fascinating.

Thanks for clearing that up Alereon.

I think anandtech in general isn't what it used to be. I had reservations about that graphics card review posted a little while back - you can't review battlefield 4 at high settings, then review crysis 3 at medium settings and say 'oh look, it can do 60fps in both games!' nor is it fair to just look at average fps and not minimum.

And when they review AMD processors they beat around the bush, and gush over improvments over past CPUs, without saying the bleeding obvious of 'why the gently caress would you buy this!'.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Interestingly, Anand announced his retirement yesterday, Ryan Smith will now be running the site. I'm not sure I agree with criticisms of their GPU coverage, if you look at their recent reviews they include minimum framerate or framrate over time graphs for most games, and framerate variation graphs for some as well. I'm also not sure of the value of testing Crysis 3 beyond Medium quality at 4K, since you're basically just comparing how not-quite-playable it is on the two highest-end cards that would come the closest. I am a pretty big fan of Tech Report's GPU coverage for the nitty gritty of the kind of experience you can get though, the value of Anandtech's GPU articles is more about how the card actually works and performs rather than the experience in particular games.

Keep in mind also that AMD's APUs are usually pretty good values at launch, the problem comes when they don't evolve in time or when Intel aggressively improves the value of their products. AMD APUs were drat compelling in HTPCs before Intel introduced QuickSync to their Pentiums, and similarly prior to the Pentium Anniversary Edition you had to choose between a decent CPU or decent graphics, and AMD APUs gave you "good enough" for both. I think Anandtech's reviews of the FX series have been appropriately critical, only recommending them narrowly for heavily multi-threaded applications.

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Alereon posted:

Interestingly, Anand announced his retirement yesterday, Ryan Smith will now be running the site. I'm not sure I agree with criticisms of their GPU coverage, if you look at their recent reviews they include minimum framerate or framrate over time graphs for most games, and framerate variation graphs for some as well. I'm also not sure of the value of testing Crysis 3 beyond Medium quality at 4K, since you're basically just comparing how not-quite-playable it is on the two highest-end cards that would come the closest. I am a pretty big fan of Tech Report's GPU coverage for the nitty gritty of the kind of experience you can get though, the value of Anandtech's GPU articles is more about how the card actually works and performs rather than the experience in particular games.

Keep in mind also that AMD's APUs are usually pretty good values at launch, the problem comes when they don't evolve in time or when Intel aggressively improves the value of their products. AMD APUs were drat compelling in HTPCs before Intel introduced QuickSync to their Pentiums, and similarly prior to the Pentium Anniversary Edition you had to choose between a decent CPU or decent graphics, and AMD APUs gave you "good enough" for both. I think Anandtech's reviews of the FX series have been appropriately critical, only recommending them narrowly for heavily multi-threaded applications.

It seemed to me in the FX9590 review that they were trying to be as diplomatic as possible, and avoided bluntly saying this is a bad product, don't buy it. As for graphics cards, the fact that it isn't playable at max settings is an important piece of information. Like many of the people who would be reading a review of a 1500 dollar video card, I would never tolerate playing a game at less than max settings; so I want to know that the card can't do it.

I also really don't like their new method for testing cases.

The Lord Bude fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Aug 31, 2014

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Now for something more directly on-topic:

:siren:Does Haswell-E make sense for me?:siren:

The key benefits for Haswell-E are more cores, support for more PCI-Express 3.0 lanes in higher CPUs, and additional memory bandwidth, as well as support for more than 32GB of RAM (Haswell's memory controller is limited to 4 x 8GB DIMMs). Here are some example basic systems to compare:

High Haswell System:
ASUS ROG MAXIMUS VII HERO Z97 $206
G.Skill Ares DDR3-2133 16GB (2x8GB) $163
Core i7 4790K $340
Total: $709 for 8 x 4.0Ghz threads (4.4Ghz single-core), 16GB RAM, 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes

Max Haswell System:
ASUS Z97-WS $286
G.Skill Ares DDR3-2133 32GB (4x8GB) $326
Core i7 4790K $340
Total: $952 for 8 x 4.0Ghz threads (4.4Ghz single-core), 32GB RAM, 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes (16GB/sec shared)

Mini Haswell-E System:
Lower-end Asus board launching later this year ($300)
G.Skill RipJaws DDR4-2133 16GB (4x4GB) $260
Core i7 5820K $400
Total: $960 for 12 x 3.3Ghz threads (3.6Ghz single-core), 16GB RAM, 28 PCIe 3.0 lanes

Basic Haswell-E System:
Asus X99 Deluxe $399
G.Skill RipJaws DDR4-2133 32GB (4x8GB) $480
Core i7 5820K $400
Total: $1279 for 12 x 3.3Ghz threads (3.6Ghz single-core), 32GB RAM, 28 PCIe 3.0 lanes

Mid Haswell-E System:
Core i7 5930K $590
Asus X99 Deluxe $399
G.Skill RipJaws DDR4-2133 32GB (4x8GB) $480
Total: $1469 for 12 x 3.5Ghz threads (3.7Ghz single-core), 32GB RAM, 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes

High Haswell-E System:
Core i7 5960X $1050
Asus X99 Deluxe $399
G.Skill RipJaws DDR4-2133 32GB (4x8GB) $480
Total: $1929 for 16 x 3.0Ghz threads (3.5Ghz single-core), 32GB RAM, 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes

For most people reading this thread, particularly gamers, that first High Haswell system makes the most sense. It has high-clocked cores needed for good framerates without hitching, and 8 x 4Ghz threads is still a lot of multi-threaded CPU performance. If you really want more PCIe lanes, you can upgrade to a motherboard with a PLX switch chip, which multiplies the 16 lanes from the CPU into 32. They still share 16GB/sec of bandwidth, but each card is uncapped, and more than two-way SLI is allowed. You can also max the system out with 32GB of RAM if desired.

The Basic Haswell-E system only provides 24% more CPU performance best-case in heavily multi-threaded apps than the 4790K due to the lower clockspeed, so I don't see how it's worth the extra $570 over the High Haswell System, or even the $325 over the Max Haswell system with the same amount of RAM and more electrical PCIe lanes. This is the cheapest way to ridiculous CPU performance if you are overclocking, however, and that would benefit from the additional memory bandwidth.

The Mid Haswell-E system at least has a kind of value proposition, as it offers a full 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes and a 31% CPU performance boost over the 4790k, along with doubled memory bandwidth.

The Max Haswell-E system has a ridiculous price tag, but this is actually the system that makes the most sense in many ways. With a 50% CPU performance boost over the 4790K in heavily-threaded applications that scales to over 100% when overclocked, if you can use the cores nothing will come close.

Edit: Added a "Mini Haswell-E" system, which represents a lower-end build using the boards launching later this year. It makes a lot of sense compared to the Max Haswell system if you don't need more RAM, since DDR4 will be going down in price unlike DDR3, but you still give up a lot of per-thread performance and spend an extra $250 over the High Haswell system for 24% more multi-threaded CPU performance. Even overclocked it doesn't seem to make sense unless you really need the extra cores without needing RAM, which is odd.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Aug 31, 2014

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
--edit: ^^^ If you can forego a bunch of the options on the deluxe board and go with the X99-A instead and go for 16GB of RAM, you can get way cheaper for the basic Haswell-E. I'm currently at 748€ for a 5820K, 4x4GB of DDR4-2400 and that X99-A.

The Last Poet posted:

I think the obvious question is 'why ?' and the best answer i can give is i _really_ want the M.2 functionality. A poor answer admittedly, and given it'll cost an extra 700 quid (550 with the 5820) i'm debating getting a 4790K and a Samsung 850.
In regards to gaming, you could argue for the utility of a six core CPU via the necessity of game developers to get maximum performance out of the consoles, of which each allow access to six of their cores anyhow, by means of parallelism. While it's slightly naive, it's far from impossible. A good multithreaded game engine very likely might get more performance out of a lower clocked CPU with more cores eventually. Plus upcoming DirectX 12 will help with multithreading, too. (--edit: Of course, this is a gamble on whether the developer's going to maintain similar thread/job scheduling across all nextgen and PC platforms, or if there's going to restrictions to the PC builds and the assumption there's going to be four cores max.)

Then again, personally, I have other use cases for more than four cores. On top of gaming, there's also image and video editing, and virtualization.

Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Aug 31, 2014

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Combat Pretzel posted:

--edit: ^^^ If you can forego a bunch of the options on the deluxe board and go with the X99-A instead and go for 16GB of RAM, you can get way cheaper for the basic Haswell-E. I'm currently at 748€ for a 5820K, 4x4GB of DDR4-2400 and that X99-A.
Yeah cheaper boards are launching later this year, though the X99-Deluxe is Asus's mainstream LGA2011-3 board. I added a system like that to the list called "Mini Haswell-E", though it seems to occupy an even narrower window. I can fill 16GB of RAM pretty easily when exercising 8 threads so I feel like you need to go 32GB if you're bumping up to Haswell-E, though of course that depends on your workload. At least DDR4 is getting cheaper while DDR3 gets more expensive.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
While I have an itch, I'm waiting until December, because that coincides with a bonus I haven't even thought of planning away, so I might aswell pretend I never got one. Leaves me time to wait for DDR4 and the CPU prices to settle a little. If by then there's a 100€ shaven off the current price, I might consider bumping the RAM, since I was looking at an additional 16GB down the line, anyway.

I take it, beyond PCIe lanes and clock, there's no difference between the 5820K and the 5930K, right?

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Combat Pretzel posted:

--edit: ^^^ If you can forego a bunch of the options on the deluxe board and go with the X99-A instead and go for 16GB of RAM, you can get way cheaper for the basic Haswell-E. I'm currently at 748€ for a 5820K, 4x4GB of DDR4-2400 and that X99-A.

In regards to gaming, you could argue for the utility of a six core CPU via the necessity of game developers to get maximum performance out of the consoles, of which each allow access to six of their cores anyhow, by means of parallelism. While it's slightly naive, it's far from impossible. A good multithreaded game engine very likely might get more performance out of a lower clocked CPU with more cores eventually. Plus upcoming DirectX 12 will help with multithreading, too. (--edit: Of course, this is a gamble on whether the developer's going to maintain similar thread/job scheduling across all nextgen and PC platforms, or if there's going to restrictions to the PC builds and the assumption there's going to be four cores max.)

Then again, personally, I have other use cases for more than four cores. On top of gaming, there's also image and video editing, and virtualization.

You could also buy Asrock boards instead of paying more for Asus stuff with fewer features. Asrock X99 extreme 3 is $209; and there are a whole raft of asrock boards out at different price points above that.

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
To make it simple if you have to ask if Haswell-E is for you, it probably isn't.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Intel CPU and Platform Discussion: Everything is pretty fast now (except AMD)

:(

There's a lot of performance here but for gamers it's gonna get left on the table unless someone's upgrading from a very old platform and wants to go all-out, drat the cost. And that will of course (as such things go) be left behind by superior performers in the future, though for what it's worth I really don't see a future where multi-threading wanes in the least (no poo poo, right?) and even games are starting to genuinely take advantage of a bunch of threads instead of running a main one for ~everything important and a secondary one for physics or whatever.

It isn't the dumbest choice if you just do not want to gently caress with getting a new computer later on, it's forward looking, but it's still going to be more expense than it's worth if you're trying to future proof. Though I'd hope by now we're all in full agreement that there's no such thing as future proofing, anyway. I could at least see the system having long legs, Sandy Bridge style, but the niche for this stuff is prosumer, not general computer stuff & videogames.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

The Lord Bude posted:

You could also buy Asrock boards instead of paying more for Asus stuff with fewer features. Asrock X99 extreme 3 is $209; and there are a whole raft of asrock boards out at different price points above that.
Those cheap Asrock boards aren't any good, though. There are a few factors that go into whether a motherboard is good or not, not all of them are easy to measure or market, and features are the least important. Here's the basic order of importance of considerations for a motherboard:

1. Design, trace layout, and overall engineering
2. Component selection and quality
3. BIOS engineering and optimization
4. Features

Audio quality is the best, most easily measured example of #1. When you measure the audio output quality of a motherboard you're measuring how well the designer isolated the analog audio signals from the other traces and sources of interference on the board. Poor isolation causes audible hiss and noise in the background of audio that changes based on system activity, which can be very annoying. The audio section from the Asrock Z97 Extreme 6 upthread illustrates this well, all the boards with the same audio chip get similar dynamic range scores, but despite being a higher-end board the Asrock Z97 Extreme 6 has THD+N scores similar to mid-range mothebroards. Their less expensive boards would be further down that chart.

Even if you don't care about audio, those same factors apply to the signal traces you DO care about, particularly those between the RAM and the CPU. The quality of the signal between the RAM and CPU is the single greatest factor affecting system stability, and it's why RAM that works just fine may fail in a lower-quality board. It's hard to measure this directly, but memory overclocking results are a good indicator, and this is an area where Asus has excelled for a few generations.

Power delivery quality is a combination of the first and second factors. The number of VRM phases and the quality of the capacitors selected is a simple component choice issue, using thick enough traces to carry power from the top of the board to the PCI-Express slots is more layout and design. Cheap boards like that have extra power connectors near the PCI-Express slots so they can cheap out on those traces. Like all things this is a matter of degree, Gigabyte boards go so cheap you always have to have the extra power cable connected for stable operation, that may not be the case with only one or two cards on that Asrock board.

Some other component selection choices are things like the network adapter. Good boards use Intel, low-end boards use Realtek, garbage boards use KillerNIC chipsets. The audio chipset itself is pretty standard these days and doesn't make much difference.

BIOS quality comes down to three main factors, POST time, DPC latency, and power usage. POST time is how long it takes the system to start loading the operating system from the time you press the power button. Better motherboards initialize faster, though boards with more hardware take longer to initialize (though usually you can get this time back by disabling that hardware). DPC latency is how long (in microseconds) the system takes to respond to an interrupt, and depends on component selection, drivers, and BIOS optimizations. A board with poor DPC latency can feel noticeably laggy. Asrock has actually been pretty good compared to other brands on both POST time and DPC latency in recent generations, though these new boards remain to be tested. BIOS optimizations also play the biggest role in power consumption, though this isn't very relevant for desktop users.

Only now do we get to the features that manufacturers use to segment their products. There's some overlap here with component selection for things like VRM phases, as the number of phases is usually a selling feature for the board. Similarly, the presence of ports or controller chips is both a component and feature selection. I personally think the fan control that Asus offers on its boards is pretty drat compelling, and I like Asus's UEFI firmware, but these aren't really the actual reason to buy the boards. Then again Asrock does have a dehumidifier :v:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mQfFVT4tT8
(The theory is that the hot air in your case can hold more moisture than the cooler air outside, so if you shut your system down moisture could condense when the hot air cools. This runs the fans to blow the hot air out of the system before it cools. It can also run daily if your computer was turned off, to ventilate the system as the day cools down for the same reason. You decide whether this is crazy-talk!)

Alereon fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Aug 31, 2014

The Last Poet
Oct 9, 2001
Cheers for all the responses and extra info. I'm moving towards the 4790K system with an 850 Pro (assuming they ever come out in the UK) though the Mini Haswell-E System or my original plan aren't ruled out as yet. Now to see if Nvidia are announcing their 800/900 series cards soon.

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
Just remember to buy for what you need now, not what you want later.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

go3 posted:

Just remember to buy for what you need now, not what you want later.
The key is to look at total cost of ownership, and to be realistic about what you're getting when you spend extra money, as well as what you're losing when you don't. It seems pretty obvious that getting a Core i5 over a Core i3 will extend the useful life of the system by years since you're doubling the CPU performance, so spending an extra $50-$100 on that is a no-brainer. It might even be the case that jumping up to a Core i7 4790K for another $100 could make sense from a value perspective if it allows you to push off an upgrade for another cycle, though this is much more speculative. On the other hand, I don't see a way that going up to Haswell-E could make sense unless you really can use the cores for some application where your time really is money. In that kind of situation a dual-socket box with Haswell-EP might even start to make financial sense, when available.

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Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Alereon posted:

BIOS optimizations also play the biggest role in power consumption, though this isn't very relevant for desktop users.
What does the BIOS have to do with anything beyond initializing device parameters during POST? Once the NT kernel's booting, it is entirely out of the picture.

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