But to specifically answer your question, this would be what I would build for $3000 today not counting monitor(s), data drive(s), mouse, keyboard, OS, controller(s), etc:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($348.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler ($88.64 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Asus Z170-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($153.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($149.45 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($709.99 @ Micro Center)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($709.99 @ Micro Center)
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro ATX Full Tower Case ($99.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 1000G2 1000W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($169.99 @ NCIX US)
Other: Occulus Rift ($599.99)
Total: $3101.01
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-04-03 15:27 EDT-0400
It's $100 over budget, but if you're determined to spend $3000, might as well spend $3100.
Also, if you don't want to do water cooling, this is an extremely good air cooler.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835608045
It's also ing enormous, and you'd want to buy low profile RAM with it. It will easily fit into an Enthoo Pro, and is the quietest high end cooler out there (quieter than watercoolers even). Noctua fans are extremely high quality (and extremely expensive) and their heatsinks are really easy to mount.
Looks good, but having only a 1080 x 1200 screen per eye is a disappointment to me. Such small physical size screens as use could easily be made a better resolution.
$3k isn't an absolute limit. Just a general ballpark of what I expect to pay before increasing price bears little gain in performance. Looks good, but why would I want the 6700K and 1151? Why not something like the i7-5930K with the 2011-3? Better memory channeling with the 2011, six vs. four physical cores... Sure, it ~ $250 more for the processor, but isn't that extra cost justifiable? I may as well stick with my motherboard and go to the K version CPU and one video card. I don't think I would see much improvement except for using the DDR4 memory.
I was looking at it from a strictly gaming perspective. Because the hyperthreaded quadcore i7s have been showing real improvements over the non-hyperthreaded i5s in the last couple of years in gaming, I figured the six cores would end up beating the quadcores in gaming when I was recommending the i7-5820k to RandomGuy for highend gaming. There are a couple of sites I have seen these i7s winning in benchmarks (GameGPU.ru showed a lot of benefit to the 2011-3 cpus, but they only do tests at stock speeds). But Digital Foundry is the site I trust most since they publish the FCAT data for individual frames and select good areas to benchmark, and they showed the IPC improvements in the Skylake i7-6700k have slightly overcome the core count deficiency vs the Haswell-E i7-5820k and i7-5960x.
I have been a fan of i7 class CPUs for the hyperthreading and extra cores because most big release PC games are really designed with consoles in mind, and since the consoles use very low clocked low power octacores (well technically, dual quadcores). So I envisioned parallelization as the only way newer games would run well on those consoles. Sony and Microsoft have kind of thrown a wrench into that idea though in the last week, as it appears like the PS4k might have a stronger cpu(s) and Microsoft is saying they'll upgrade the hardware too in their XBox One. So if we're looking at cpus with stronger IPC in these systems, there is probably going to be a lot less pressure on developers to parallelize their games as well.
Still, you'll notice Crysis 3 performs a little better with the extra cores. That game was written with really high performance processors like the i7-3930k and so on in mind, and it scales well to the extra cores. Star Citizen is another game written straight for the highest performing PCs and it might really benefit from that kind of high end cpu too. But it's a guess and right now the 6700k is the best performing gaming cpu on the market.
But I agree, keeping your 4790 and adding a GTX 980 Ti would be a great option. Not for 4k though, if you want to play graphically intense games you're going to have to turn settings down pretty significantly to get a smooth 60 fps at that resolution. A single GTX 980 Ti is more for 1440p at 60 fps with the details turned way up.
Maybe I'm thinking beyond you guys. I was looking at things like the AVAGO MR9361-8i drive controller, and using a couple SAS drives, and an SSD. What ever I build, I will likely use the 2011-3 socket. I'm also willing to pay over $200/8GB memory to get to 20ns latency or less.
Maybe I shouldn't ask for opinions, if that's all you have?
You never said what you were looking for other than expensive. I only offered gaming recommendations.
True, but as you have seen, I really don't do much gaming.
I like a spiffy HD and memory!
there isn't much of a performance gain for gaming past about $1,600, is there? Isn't that where it becomes exceptionally more expensive for a little more performance.
I want a true General Purpose computer. Not just specifics applications.
Just dinking around a bit, I'm looking at things around these specs:
$461.42 MSI X99S Gaming 7 ATX
$214.00 Seagate 6TB ST6000DM001
$322.57 Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512GB NVMe
$699.99 EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti VR EDITION
$602.00 Intel Core i7-5930K
$630.99 Corsair Dominator Platinum 64GB DDR4 3333
This was a quick Amazon pricing, and is $2,930.97 without the case and PS. The same motherboard with the non-gaming tag is about $100 less. If I chose to, I could add another graphics card and another 64 GB easily.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 04-03-2016 at 06:51 PM.
I'm not talking SLI... from what I read a GTX 980 is right about the saturation point of a 8x lane, and a 980Ti will likely be over. The idea I had was to just run one card per 4k monitor, not on a SLI setup. 4k is a ton of data to move around. The trick part with lanes though is that it's hard sometimes to even pull off 16x/16x, since some lanes are prewired on the mobo to the SATA and USB3. Sometimes you can only max out at 16x/8x
Not sure what you want me to tell you here. I apologize if I gave bad advice before. Memory speeds that are actually noticeable with framerate basically apply to the latest gen Intel stuff (skylake). Prior to that, getting a 1666Mhz or 1800Mhz stick didn't really change much of anything performance wise. But if you're getting a Skylake-gen CPU and Mobo, yes, do get the fastest DDR4 memory you can get (as bum did in his build).
As a guy that has run hardware raids for plenty servers, be careful with those. You don't want to get locked in with a manufacturer and when the RAID card dies, you can't access the drives because they're on a vendor-specific format. Also, with the newer CPUs having the SATA controllers built in, it's debatable you really want a hardware raid solution. The hit on the CPU is fairly negligible unless you're crunching major numbers.
Look, if you're looking to max out drive speeds, setup a RAID-0 with SSDs... The question really is how many times are you going to need to move 1GB/sec... if the answer is many times, then it's probably worth it. If not, then might aswell blow that money on hoes, tbh
Higher speed DDR3 memory can make a difference in Haswell too. I get a pretty nice bump to minimum framerates by replacing a DDR3-1600 kit with a DDR3-2400 kit. It's almost 10% in GTA V and more than 15% in Fallout 4 for me in the problem areas that dragged my framerate to its lowest, I mean these framerate differences were easily reproducible for me in both games as they happened in very specific spots. I was pretty shocked to see the difference in Digital Foundry's tests and it motivated me to buy a Z97 board and the fastest RAM with good price to performance to try to make up a bit for running a locked 3.6 GHz Haswell quadcore (Xeon E3-1231v3). (I chose DDR3-2400 since it cost almost the same as DDR3-1600 but DDR3-2666 was way more expensive than DDR3-2400)
And as I said before, it made a pretty big difference. It doesn't do anything for games like Shadow of Mordor or Far Cry 4 that are straight gpu bound by my GTX 970, but GTA V can hit the cpu hard in areas and Fallout 4 hits the cpu hard everywhere. I'm kind of disappointed none of the tech sites uncovered this until after I had already bought an H81 board and a locked processor though, otherwise I would have probably bought Z97 from the start and a i5-4690k or i7-4790k (I built my system a little after Devils Canyon came out).
But it does nothing for my average framerates, since I'm mostly gpu bound in GTA V and since Fallout 4 runs with automatic vsync to 60 fps. But having much smaller dips in framerate at the worst cpu bound areas of those two games is pretty noticeable to me.
I was looking at those for speed. I don't think that card requires any specific drive, but maybe it does. I'll probably just go with the standard SATA 3.2.
Interesting, I haven't seen any PCIE scaling tests of a single 980 Ti. Here is the source for the 980 testing I was referring to (I think it was done before the an X and 980 Ti were released):
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/...press_Scaling/
Ooops...
That motherboard only allows one SATA Express HD, or the SSD. Not both... A quick search shows no available SATA express drives yet. 16 GB/sec... rather than 6...
I get annoyed from any perception of lag. I hate the hesitation from implementing something to when it starts, and finishes. Any amount i can reduce this affect, is a good thing for me.
u can get a 1tb ssd samsung for 320 or less if you look around more...trust me, they are dropping like flies
Those are pretty recent games though, but good tip. I actually ran my first DX12 game (Ashes of the Singularity) last night and I do get a 10fps bump on DX12 vs DX11 on my 960. It's not a lot, but interesting nonetheless.
10 fps is a lot imo. I might actually have to buy Windows this time since it's offering something useful.
It's not the drive types. The big drama with hardware raids is that every controller stores the configuration of the raid in different places. It's all proprietary stuff. Some on the disks, some on the controller itself. Some controllers have built in batteries because they cache and a power loss can be big trouble. Also, if the card itself dies, rebuilding the array on a new controller can be tough depending on the controller. We used to use Adaptec for SCSI stuff, but that's obsolete at this point. Loved 3Ware for SATA, but they got bought out and as usual suck now. Like I said, now Intel embeds the SATA controllers on the CPU, what's called a soft-raid is not bad at all.
Yes, but is it as fast as that one?
That one has a passmark rating of 13,400
http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hd...+NVMe&id=10841
I'm not super familiar with the Windows rendering engine at this point. I thought with Aero they moved quite a bit to be GPU bound, but they have this XPS format that AFAIK, it's like their proprietary PDF, and not sure if that's what they use for scalable graphics internally. With 4k, you're bound to have a ton of streaming going on. Lots of drawing commands for non-texture stuff, and then streams for videos and textures of web pages, etc. The framebuffer itself for the 4k res is massive, about 256MB IIRC (3840x2160x4). At 60fps, raw, that's 16GB/sec... Obviously, you don't do raw, that's why you have a GPU, but we're still talking massive data movement. IIRC, x16 PCIE 3.0 is 'theoretical' 32GB/sec... but they never reach that. You can see how x8 is borderline too.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote