The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Make sure you get a setup to handle 500W thermal (and be ready to use 1.5V on the CPU - at 32nm, that's a pretty scary voltage). 500W is typically the domain of phasechange or liquid nitrogen, but it can be done on water with top-end gear. Also make sure your PSU and board voltage regs are to it, even with your GTX260 at idle, your system is going to be pulling over 500W out of the PSU. All this to get a 34% overclock. Meanwhile, the cheaper Core i5-2500K with a 52% overclock is completely non-plussed, drawing a measly 200W. You can do that on air, easily.

 

Wow, you've almost sold me on an intel :S I will be weighing options come february.

 

I'm not trying to force everyone off their AMD CPUs to buy Intels, but I am certainly throwing caution to those who will buy FX series chips, either for having 8 cores, or for being AMD's latest and greatest. It may be a cheap CPU, but it's cheap for a reason. Stock, it's the cheapest way to get that level of multi-threaded performance, but you have to be using a program that supports 8 threads almost perfectly to see the benefit.
Once you add overclocking to the picture, the Bulldozers stack up very poorly - especially when you consider motherboard and cooling infrastructure that can withstand that sort of power usage. The cheap CPU no longer seems so cheap.

The best case for using an FX series is probably x264 video encoding. Take a look at this quick extrapolation:

Multi-threaded video encode (x264 HD Pass 2)
X6 1100T @ 4.2ghz: 40fps @ 370W
i5 2500K @ 5Ghz: 43fps @ 200W
FX-8150 @ 4.8Ghz: 48fps @ 450W
i7 2600K @ 4.6ghz: 49fps @ 205W
i7 990X @ 4.6ghz: 64fps @ 300W

The $250 FX series CPU is outperforming the $220 Core i5 (which by the way is still the fastest gaming CPU to date) by 12%. Less than the difference in price.
Now consider that the i5 is using 200W versus the AMD's 450W, which is the difference between a 120mm tower cooler, and a $200 custom watercooling loop with a 360mm radiator and high pressure fans.
If we spend that money on a better CPU instead, we can afford the $315 i7 2600K, which can keep the same 200W footprint but achieve the same performance as the FX-8150, and in anything that doesn't use 8-threads, smack the FX-8150 around something silly.
The i7 990X is an incredibly expensive CPU and I would never recommend anyone to get one unless they had a colossal system budget, but just look at it - it's doing as much work as an 11-core FX-series CPU clocked to the max could, with only two thirds of the power usage of the 8-core chip. If Intel decide to cut the price of their hex core chips when the Ivy bridge chips come out, heaven help AMD, they have nothing in the pipeline other than a 10% refresh.


By the way, the stock power usage figures, for sake of comparison:
i7 920: 25fps @ 130W
i5 2500K: 29fps @ 70W
X6 1100T: 31fps @ 135W
FX-8150: 36fps @ 140W
i7 2600K: 36fps @ 85W
i7 990X: 48fps @ 160W

This of course does not consider chipset load differences, so bear that in mind!

 

Intel never even post speculative performance increases with their new products, all you ever hear is conjecture form the general public - you can't lie if you don't say anything!
Intel's RMA process needs to be tight - with how many CPUs they sell, any loopholes could cost them billions. Would you tell a manufacturer you were overclocking your CPU when it failed? Of course you wouldn't, that's just plain common sense. Never mind the fact that Intel CPUs almost never go wrong to start with. What's the failure rate, 0.16% last time I checked? Say what you like about Intel's marketing practices, they make A* quality hardware, and always have, even when they weren't any good for performance (i.e. Prescott/Smithfield/Presler). They may have ran slowly, but I don't remember hearing any of those failing. Credit where it's due AMD's CPUs are pretty reliable too as it happens, you don't see those go wrong often either.

 

LOL! A faulty CPU could cause some pretty weird issues. I imagine their quality control is even better than hard drives. It has to be

 

I've only seen one faulty CPU in my life - it was Shaff's

 

my Q9550.

best thing about it was on the return i was given an E0 stepping IICR. which you paid a premuim for from the US a few weeks prior. haha

didnt it caus a shut down on your P35 mobo aswell?

 

That is absolutely not true I've heard it right from the Sales team lips, personally! Not only that but I have seen it posted by Intel, not speculative from a 3rd party. Like I said I worked with the top teams from Intel, AMD, and NVidia so this is not hearsay!

Also I've seen plenty of faulty CPU's, mostly from Intel when they went to the pin-less processors, but also AMD, Cyrus, and Motorola. Of course I've built and test literally thousands of computers.

 

i remember finding my E1240 on the floor, my brother had dropped it a few months before, and it was covered in dust, on carpet. i removed the dust, banged it in a mobo and it worked perfectly, and clocked to 3.2 from 1.6. solid.

 

Links please? Personal contact doesn't count, and in any case, staff leaking information about a future product sounds very suspicious, unless they're telling you how much faster their CPUs are than AMDs (why are you even asking them?), in which case it's totally variable depending on the test, far more so than it ever is with GPUs.

You wish, it was a tiny P31! Board still works to this day, despite your CPU's best efforts to short it out...
I did pay a premium for my E0 stepping Q9550 (also still running right now btw), but it wasn't much of a premium, only about £20 extra I think. I was wary about buying a CPU off an ebay store in the US, but it's been great. That was the best chip I'd had up until that point, it overclocked really well, and unlike the other great overclocker I had (the E4300), it actually had some grunt at stock speeds as well. The i5 of course is another league altogether.

As far as I know, best overclocking consumer-grade chip of all time, the E2140. £600 Extreme edition performance from a £60 CPU. Amazing stuff. These were quite late in the day though, and the Q6600 had already started making major influences by then.

 

Please be serious, links to a personal conversation disusing new product lines and comparisons to others products. For one some the paper work I got was proprietary marked which meant I was not to disclose that information at the time, prior to release. Secondly digging up a link to appease you from something a few years back doesn't make sense.

Bottom line, what I'm telling you is true and if you don't like it too bad and I'm sorry you are ignorant of that. Believe it or not but your little snippet of links for truth doesn't change the facts.

 

Links to this, not the personal conversation for goodness sake.

Forgive me for being ignorant of something not one person has mentioned, or one article has stated in my 7 year, 40,000 post forum career.

Don't come on here and post something controversial like that and then get all grumpy when we don't take it as gospel...

 

Apparently you don't go to Intels site and read white papers and what not. Plus Intel has released speculative numbers to the press just like AMD and others.

Like I said before I'm not going to waste my time finding links to Intels lies just to appease you. Regardless of your 40,000 post career, mine goes much further than yours does and I don't need to use that to convince you of my experience either.

Also you don't mandate or dictate what I can or can't post either, you're not that big son!

Again it is your prerogative what you believe or don't, your loss. You are so biased by your Intel love that you can't see the sun through the trees, sad but true.

 

Sam seems more like a neutral party to me. Much like myself.

 

Because that's why I bought and advocated AMD exclusively prior to the Core 2's arrival is it? When AMD produce something truly competitive, I'd be happy to recommend it over Intel's equivalent CPUs for new builds. I was hoping Bulldozer would be that, but sadly it isn't the case. Let's not forget the Radeon family is as much a part of AMD as the CPUs, and I use and recommend those almost exclusively because in most ways they are better than the competition. There are a few situations where that's not true of course.

It's the same old story, if I don't say what you want to hear, I must be a fanboy for whichever company I'm supporting in this case. It would seem surprising that Intel would reference AMD's CPUs in their white papers (which I have read some of), rather than just comparisons to their own chips. Still, with Intel's development history, it's not so easy to go picking through years of their various different products just to verify the claim you can't be bothered to back up. So for now, I'm just going to stick with not believing it.

 

sam is neutral, he buys the best performance but for the right price.

 

I must admit though, there are companies I try to avoid, despite peoples praise. Philips for example. They're a thorn in my side LOL!

 

I'm typically an "A Minus" type of buyer. I'll take the product one row from the top. In rare cases I do buy the top end product if it's worth the outlay. For example my HD4870X2 Quad crossfire setup was the undisputed champion of late 2008, but it was only £540 to me, versus the £700+ it should have been, thanks to some lucky breaks on ebay. I have never bought an extreme edition CPU (considered it once, second hand mind), and I don't think that's likely to change in the future.
You never find best bang for buck at the high end of the market, it's always in the middle. If you want the best performance per dollar, it's almost always in the midrange. For CPUs, it's almost always an AMD too. Their pricing is undeniably competitive in the markets they fill. Fact is though, I want more than AMD can provide, and I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount extra for it. My i5 750 was £150, which is by no means a hefty amount to pay for a CPU (works out to be $200 pre-tax). Yet even to this day, almost 2 years after buying it, when it's overclocked it's better than any AMD can achieve. This is the sort of thing I'm referring to. AMD stuff is great value, but it just isn't that fast in the grand scheme of things, and Bulldozer has done nothing to change that.

Omega: I too have a brands blacklist. The only companies that have committed enough offenses to be on it are Asus, Epson and Daxon (Acer/Benq). I've used quite a few Philips products in the past, but I haven't really had that many issues. My MC-70 Hifi practically fell to bits, but that did take 8 years, so I'm not too frustrated about it.

 

I'm getting that way about epson! They're too thirsty for my likes LOL! I'm considering canon or HP next time.

 

I find HP ink tends to cost the most. Then I realised inkjet printers were crap and bought a 10 year old HP LaserJet off ebay for half the price of a set of cartridges for my Lexmark. It even came with a toner in it, so far it's done 1000+ pages without needing to change the toner, which doesn't cost any more than a pair of ink cartridges. It might be the size of a whole computer by itself, but it's a vast improvement on inkjets.
My anger with epson is the whole lasting 369 days before colossal failure.