PC building and configs

[ZellSF]

Aren't you contradicting yourself by saying he shouldn't future proof while simultaneously talking about how you're still fine with 2011 high end equipment? Spending just a little more so you can wait one more year with upgrading next time is usually worth it.

[CkRtech]

I am saying that you shouldn't buy cutting edge thinking that all the extra money you spend now on core items (CPU, motherboard) is going to help that much down the line. The equipment that I bought in 2011 was not high end at the time, and it still meets my needs. Sometimes people equate buying the BEST at the time as money well spent. I am saying you can spend a lot less and still get something that will last.

It sounds like the OP is starting from scratch (for the most part) and wanting to edit video. Rather than dump money high on the expense/performance curve, you can pull back to mid-high end (rather than high end) and put the money saved toward other needs for the system.

[HydrogLox]

Western Digital Black 1 TB drives

Typically I stick with the Black line as well, however at this particular time there seems to be no point when you are looking specifically at a 1TB drive - performance wise the WD10EZEX Blue is in the same ballpark as the WD1003FZEX Black. The only benefit is a 5 year versus a 2 year warranty either of which is considered fulfilled if your drive fails after 6 months (i.e. the warranty is over and replacement may have no warranty or a short period like 30 or 90 days).

http://community.wd.com/t5/Desktop-Mobi ... d-p/658549

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1741- ... for-gaming

[CkRtech]

Yep. And sadly, you sometimes have to watch for bad batches of drives regardless of make or model.

[neorichieb1971]

Thanks for your input guys.

Yes, I am aware that the config that I am aiming for is probably excessive but I have a step son coming to live with me next week and he does game. He has never had hardware to run games in ultra modes and such and he is happy with PS3 at the moment, but perhaps he will indulge in gaming in the context of wanting an experience that is up there with modern gamers. However being the father figure of the house I don't want him gaming 24/7 so there will be restrictions.

What I really want is a system worthy of video editing faster than my current I3 laptop with 4GB of RAM. I did try using professional video editing software on it and it felt clunky and slow. In the end I just went back to moviemaker where I could get an end product out in less than 2 hours. Using the professional software (the one they use for Pulp fiction I can't remember the name of it) it took me 8 hours just trying to replicate what I was doing in moviemaker. I will upgrade the software when I have some hardware to match it.

The other reason to go hi spec is because I have a 1600mm desk, gaming keyboard and mouse, stand for 2 monitors and LED lights. If the system is sitting under the desk chugging away and being a dog I don't think it will suit its surroundings.

The problem for me is that I always aim for value for money. So I want a system that hits the best you can get at a £1000 budget. If spending £1500 gets you 10% more then I consider the £1000 config good value for money. I don't like throwing money around for the sake of it. But perhaps that's what I am doing.

I think the last couple of posts are probably correct. I am over spending and the performance will blow my current system away completely. I am happy if I get into that position. With 3 years of evolution, replacing a tower with a laptop, I would certainly like to think I'm going from a bi plane to a jet plane (so to speak).


edit- Talking of HDD's. It surprises me that you think I will run out. I have 3 external USB drives. The ebay link above, I changed the config to a 2TB HDD with a 250GB SDD. Thats more than all the space I currently have which is not 100% utilized. And these PC's are upgradablea after all. I can always add more later if necessary.

[CkRtech]

edit- Talking of HDD's. It surprises me that you think I will run out. I have 3 external USB drives. The ebay link above, I changed the config to a 2TB HDD with a 250GB SDD. Thats more than all the space I currently have which is not 100% utilized. And these PC's are upgradablea after all. I can always add more later if necessary.

The hard drive issue isn't a question about capacity - it is about meeting performance requirements for reading and writing while also having some redundancy for peace of mind.

[neorichieb1971]

So your saying my 500GB drive is a bottleneck of the system then?

I never thought I would be buying a system based around resilience.

[Ed Oscuro]

Not sure if you were giving general advice or talking about what we wrote earlier, but we're not recommending he's buying a better CPU cooler to get a more silent system, we're recommending he gets one that's adequate to cool a i7-4790k: the stock cooler isn't.

I know that - I'm pointing out that you can go in other directions than the Evo for cooling, one of which is building a semi-silent PC - but it doesn't make sense to get a quiet cooler if you aren't going to invest in quiet parts all around. That's a choice for richie to make. Of course, it does look like information saturation has taken over and we're basically just throwing around ideas at this point.

re: 2011 PCs - yep, I'm also still rocking essentially 2011 parts here and it gets 99% of things done. Only the graphics card (even older, at a 2010 model) is clearly obsolete for modern games, but it's been a long while since I thought about getting a top-of-the-line PC game anyway. Upgrading would fix that and video encoding as well, mostly. It wouldn't be production level speed, but I could encode the odd video now and then without real problems.

6GB/s SATA SSDs seem fine to me - Windows 10 boots in seconds (and I have to cold boot; I'm no able to sleep/hibernate the PC now due to some weirdness with S states on my particular motherboard that Asus never fixed; presumably new motherboards won't have such a problem here).

I'm a bit skeptical of future proofing as a philosophy for building PCs. Typically, components die and can't / shouldn't be easily replaced, leading to a cascade of forced upgrades - or the components just get too slow and you're again forced into a cascade of upgrades. The best strategy would instead be to get cost-effective but reliable components that support new technology (well - no bodge jobs like the early USB 3.0 support from non-Intel chipsets, ugh) that won't hurt too much to upgrade - and this is true for any application, from a lowly kitchen PC to a supercomputer complex, unless you are a hardcore gamer or some other kind of person who has a specific performance-at-all-costs end build in mind which you won't have to worry about upgrading (for such machines, usually all that would need to be replaced down the line are the graphics cards, and they remain a drop-in replacement for the foreseeable future).

Some random thoughts on "future proof" components:

- Hard drives: I've still got an early SATA drive from '05 which works. It's just too slow and small to waste a SATA port on. HDDs have been called a "mature technology" for a long time but new generations still do offer some speed increases - but generally I would think that buying a big reliable HDD and keeping it a long time is a good idea if you want cheap mass storage. Instead of speculating about platter counts and load cycles, one can always look at the BackBlaze lifespan data updates. Once you've bought and installed the drive, install a freeware tool like Defraggler which can show your own drive's SMART data (for a guess at your hard drive's health).

Of course, if you're not a digital hoarder, you don't need hard drives - but I wonder how you can be a photographer or videographer without a big hard drive! Every time I shoot my 7D on a busy day, that's up to 40GB more for the drive right away!

- Graphics: Unless you need very high framerates or graphical effects in new titles, it doesn't make much sense to me to spend big money on a huge graphics card. Even the GeForce 750 Ti seems like a reasonable deal to me. As a plus, buying a cooler and less power-hungry graphics card should help out with longevity of other parts (some power is supplied by the PSU, some from the motherboard).

- Other random buzzword things: I don't know if the rate at which the standards organizations spew out new interfaces and whatnot is more or less than it used to be, but the USB organization is out there trying to clear the air about its latest USB update and reversible cables, and the m2 thing just seems like it should be a standard to add to new motherboards, which I wouldn't worry about. There is always going to be some new thing coming down the pipe; you can't really help it.

I mentioned that my motherboard doesn't seem to recover from sleep or hibernation properly above. This is a well-known but mysterious issue with my old motherboard, made by Asus, and hasn't been fixed. I have to add that it's got semi-early USB 3.0 support, with some Intel chipset stuff, and some third-party stuff (earlier motherboards with USB 3.0 were even dodgier about support). Likewise, my old Radeon isn't being supported by AMD for DX12, even though it's truly capable of software support (and nVidia is updating drivers for its contemporary products to support it). These are issues that simply couldn't have been guessed at when I bought the parts. One hopes that buying stuff with support for new standards is a good idea, but sometimes the devil is in the details. I hope that the m2 SSD support is foolproof, at least.

[Ed Oscuro]

So your saying my 500GB drive is a bottleneck of the system then?

I never thought I would be buying a system based around resilience.

I don't think a 250GB drive would be a bottleneck, but it does depend on what you're going to use the drive for.

A better question would be what kind of storage system you have in mind for your photos and videos. Old fashioned hard drives are still the most cost-effective storage, and you'd probably want some other forms of backup as well.

[CkRtech]

So your saying my 500GB drive is a bottleneck of the system then?

I never thought I would be buying a system based around resilience.

Again - Capacity isn't really relevant so much as drive speed. I don't know what sort of video editing you are talking about. If you are cutting things out of an already compressed video file, stitching it back together, and exporting, then perhaps it isn't too big of a deal. But ultimately, you are having to read and write a lot of data.

If I gave you a project with that drew from several video files and had you load it and render output, a single, slow drive can cause a noticeable performance hit.

[HydrogLox]

I changed the config to a 2TB HDD with a 250GB SDD. Thats more than all the space I currently have which is not 100% utilized.

Ideally you have a source drive (raw video) and a render drive (output).

• This can improve performance because the same drive doesn't have to alternate between reading and writing.
• Theoretically this could also spread the wear and tear over both drives as neither of them has to work as hard provided the files read and the free space written to is sufficiently contiguous from the drive's point of view (so don't let them fill up).
• When I was looking into it recently based on user reviews I was left with the impression that it might not be a good idea to use consumer-grade drives > 1TB for high-traffic, intensive work. Of course data centers use much higher capacity drives but they typically use redundant RAID setups, so when one drive fails, a new one can be popped in without slowing anybody down. So in that environment hard-drives could be pretty much considered consumables.

So for a PC 2 x 1 TB could be better than 1 x 2 TB.

6GB/s SATA SSDs seem fine to me ... I'm a bit skeptical of future proofing as a philosophy for building PCs.

The comment about SSDs isn't about "future proofing" - it's about delaying obsolesce. You can't build a PC today that takes full advantage of SSD technology becoming available in 1 or 2 years but by the same token you shouldn't constrain a new PC that includes a SSD with yesteryear's SSD technology. PCIe SSD technology is current and if you can afford it go NVMe rather than AHCI. The March 2015 (i.e. current) MacBook Pro uses a PCIe SSD.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, I fully agree with that. I think the shorter version of my post is basically "there's not guarantee future proofing will work, but if you buy obsolete stuff, you've got a guarantee it's not going to hold up." My point was mainly that 2011 stuff has held up surprisingly well, despite the few pitfalls, so one shouldn't worry too much about upgrading equipment in just one or two years if it's working out fine (unless you're delaying hardware purchases to take advantage of lower prices in the future).

I am a bit surprised by the argument that a fast SSD setup is necessary for hobbyist video work and photography production - richie hasn't been super clear on how much this will be done or how quickly it must be done - but my guess was that if money is not so plentiful you can afford to just buy whatever, I'd rather not worry so much about caching times. 16GB or more of RAM is going to go a long way, I'd think, towards keeping enough of a video project in memory for simple edits, and since the SSDs are at most just a temporary storage space for finished projects, even 6GB/s is going to be only an occasional source of slowdown as you transfer a finished file. Then again, I haven't tried comparing my SSD's performance for projects like this, so I could be totally wrong on how frequently you'd experience bottlenecks or degraded performance with a 6GB/s SSD. But I don't know how the CPU / GPU recommendations are fitting in here, either. I'd certainly wonder if the suggestion is that $100 more for a GPU won't go further than $100 more on SSDs.

A m2 boot SSD does seem like the way to go, no question, totally agreed!

My usage case is generally photography, where mass storage is more important than bandwidth between storage and RAM (and the boot SSD seems to serve well enough for caching). I could get faster throughput and faster file processing using SSDs more, but it wouldn't help for general work on photographs which might range all across a multi-terabyte drive, so I'm tethered to that technology for now.

If I shot only JPEGs, it might be easier to go to SSD, though. But I don't, and so I have to pay more attention to cost/GB.

[HydrogLox]

since the SSDs are at most just a temporary storage space for finished projects.

"Ideally" you should keep only frequently read and "relatively rarely" updated content on an SSD - frequent re-writing on the memory "ages" SSDs quickly. That's why the OS is the prime candidate for going on the SSD, it changes relatively infrequently but any other application on the system has to go through OS code to get any work done - the fact that the system boots up faster is just a bonus; "ideally" the application code and the data that it is working on should fit into volatile memory.

Initially I was surprised to see the tiny virtual memory paging file that Samsung Magician configured in Windows on the SSD but it made sense once I thought about it; applications utilizing virtual memory would likely end up constantly re-writing the physical memory area the paging file would occupy, so that part of the SSD would be most at risk of degrading and to maximize the lifetime of the SSD as a whole the size of the paging file that resides on the SSD has to be minimized (or eliminated entirely).

[bobrocks95]

I know that - I'm pointing out that you can go in other directions than the Evo for cooling, one of which is building a semi-silent PC - but it doesn't make sense to get a quiet cooler if you aren't going to invest in quiet parts all around. That's a choice for richie to make. Of course, it does look like information saturation has taken over and we're basically just throwing around ideas at this point.

Sorry to derail for just a quick second- I built my PC about a year ago with a Noctua cooler (a brand I saw you mention earlier), one of the two fan tower models which they have plenty of . It runs very quietly, but I've noticed that it's a good bit louder now than it was when I first got it. Is this fairly typical for PC fans to wear down so quickly? I mean it's not annoyingly worn down, but it seems like a disappointing lifespan.

The only thing that stands out to me is that the fans on it are 3-pin instead of 4-pin PWM, and according to my BIOS the lowest speed they can hit is 50% of their max, which may account for the volume and why they seem to have worn down quickly.

[CkRtech]

Sorry to derail for just a quick second- I built my PC about a year ago with a Noctua cooler (a brand I saw you mention earlier), one of the two fan tower models which they have plenty of . It runs very quietly, but I've noticed that it's a good bit louder now than it was when I first got it. Is this fairly typical for PC fans to wear down so quickly? I mean it's not annoyingly worn down, but it seems like a disappointing lifespan.

Have you cleaned your system since you got it? Dust can certainly cause an imbalance. Vibration can also cause something to make more noise if it has shifted.

For my Noctua, I have removed the fans from the heatsinks, cleaned the heatsink and fan (compressed air), and reassembled.

[bobrocks95]

Have you cleaned your system since you got it? Dust can certainly cause an imbalance. Vibration can also cause something to make more noise if it has shifted.

For my Noctua, I have removed the fans from the heatsinks, cleaned the heatsink and fan (compressed air), and reassembled.

Meant to add I clean the case out every 3-4 months, but I haven't been that thorough with the heatsink before. I'll give it a shot next time I do, thanks!

[Ed Oscuro]

Bob, thanks for posting because it made me look into my own cooling situation again. I can still use most of what I wrote, but with better context now:

The main thing that comes to mind is your mention of the 3-pin adapter. Noctua offers "low noise" and "ultra low noise" adapters (or something like that) but the main thing to note is that these are for fixed voltage supply to your fan - and therefore fixed fan speeds. If the fan has become louder over time this isn't the issue, but in any case you will need to use the 4-pin adapter to get dynamic fan control for quieter operation during lower temperature periods, and for dynamic spin-up of the CPU fan as needed. This pinout mention suggests that 3-pin fan connectors can still report the fan speed, but it can't be controlled, and therefore the voltage adapters are necessary.

Most of the fan maintenance stories I've read suggest they need cleaning if they get dirty from dust. That doesn't sound like it's a major factor in your case, and my own PC got its first cleaning (via extremely noisy c. 1991 Toro leafblower), but I'm lucky in that my PC is in a quite cool place always, and there's not tons of dust buildup (just a slight dust moustache around the Noctua and Radeon GPU fans, and the slightest dusting throughout the case which was easily blasted away).

A lot of things could cause the noise level to be louder than you'd expect:

- Software load might be higher than when you first heard the fan. Firefox alone can cause a bit of warm air to come out the top of my case.
- BIOS configuration might not be correct for the fans - in my case, "ASUS Q-Control" is offered for the case fans, I believe, but the actual NZXT case I rather regret buying doesn't support it. The manual fan control there actually works decently enough, though.
- It's also possible that it's actually another fan. GPU fans can be quite noisy. In my system, the TDP ratings of the CPU and GPU are about the same (130W and 150W), and that's at best a mid-range power requirement on the GPU.

One thing to look at is the BIOS - in my motherboard's BIOS, there's settings (from memory) for "fan profiles" as well as alarms to sound if your fan speed dips below a certain threshhold, as well as fan speed reports. Look up the fan speed if it's reported there, and check out the fan speed rating for your CPU cooler if you can remember which it is.

Another thing to look at are the case fans. I looked up the case fan speed settings for my machine, and while it didn't help, it did reacquaint me with them. Interestingly, despite having four-pin control, nothing seems to be changing the fan speed noise coming from my computer. I can therefore state unequivocally that something is running a fan at a more or less constant speed. My guess is that the Noctua (DH-14?) is probably running at a pretty constant rate then, so it's back to the BIOS for me.

There is the possibility that something simply isn't working right between Windows and the motherboard here, but the fan was doing the same stuff under Windows 7. As usual, a slight amount of cool air is coming out of the case - all manual case fan controls are set just a bit above minimums, but some case fans don't seem to spin up very high no matter how many times I hit the +speed button on the case (I had to remind myself there's a special button that toggles control over all the fans - they went this way instead of a panel full of dials). I'll have to look at the ASUS site again to check that I don't need to install some crazy tray program to control fan speed with Q-Control on - I am almost positive that can't be true, but I'll look into it.

It might be the explanation though. Some old discussion of Q-Control, which is just one implementation of a dynamic fan, includes allegations of fan speeds sticking:
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threa ... on.138928/
And you can compare that to this, with one person noting that 3-pin fan header = 100% (naturally)
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2411365

[ZellSF]

SSD write cycle wear is stupid to worry about, in any normal use they will last forever.

Well, they (and HDDs too) won't. They'll die, just not from write cycle wear.

[tacoguy64]

Lots of good stuff brought up in this thread already but I am gonna just add my 2 cents.

It will be better if you go with a skylake cpu. Not a knock against Haswell but you generally want to go with the newer platforms. You will have to spend a bit more money on the motherboard and ram, but you will have the advantages of the latest tech.

Like others have mentioned, you don’t need that big of a power supply. Something in the 450w-600w range is more than enough. The gpu also seems a bit too much if you aren’t going to be doing any gaming on it. You could probably skimp on the GTX960 and get a GTX950 or even a GTX 750. You could even look at some of the lower tierd AMD cards and be fine for video editing. If you are thinking about doing any sort of gaming down the line, that 960GTX isn’t a bad choice.

[HydrogLox]

Things can seem to "last forever" if the risks are properly managed and most people think their usage pattern is normal even when it is not.

The Samsung Magician software can set a number of profiles ranging from "reliable" to "performance" - the "performance" profile warns that it can reduce the SSDs lifespan. See also:

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead
SSD endurance myths and legends

If you're a consumer you don't have to worry about the internals of endurance management - because most new SSDs are good enough (if they're used in the right applications environment).
Exceptions still do occur, however for users in the enterprise SSD market - where I still hear stories of users thinking it's perfectly normal and economic to replace burned out Intel SSDs every 6 to 12 months - instead of buying more reliable (but more expensive) SSDs - from companies like STEC.

So you don't have to worry if you're not "being stupid" - but that presupposes that everyone knows what "being stupid" with reference to SSDs is. On the flip-side I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that because of the competitive marketplace currently overall HDD reliability is in decline.

[ZellSF]

Uh, you posted two links supporting that regular users will never run into the write limits of SSDs.

So you don't have to worry if you're not "being stupid" - but that presupposes that everyone knows what "being stupid" with reference to SSDs is.

Judging by one of the links, being stupid is starting a torture test on your SSD and letting it run for 18 months. I feel confident claiming OP is not that stupid.

Expect minimum 5 years of 20 GB writes a day, 10 of 10 GB a day. In five years any SSD you buy today will already be severely outdated in 10 years then you might as well be using floppy disks.

Even if you write a lot of huge video files you'll still end up with an outdated disk before an outworn one.

Recommending people be careful about SSD writes just isn't a recommendation based in reality.

[neorichieb1971]

So, I've gone and bought the next piece to the puzzle. A U2414H Dell monitor.

I'm a bit confused. The white cover on the monitor states to run a utility to get the maximum resolution out of the monitor from the enclosed CD. So I googled that and it seems this monitor has issues with the display port and HDMI where it displays limited range RGB.

So what are all the steps I need to do using a GTX970. Bear in mind I don't have the computer yet lol.

To get the 0-255 range I am supposed to go into the NCP, go to display, change setting to custom, manual, change the timing to 59.9999fps and reboot my machine.

I assume no scaling issues will appear using nvidea? I think that was exclusive to AMD.


The supplied cable is a mini DP to DP. I believe the GTX970 uses DP so I've plugged the mini DP side into the monitor. What ever happened to PNP?

[Fudoh]

I'm running two of these with HDMI. Native resolution. Full range RGB without any trickery.

If yours default to limited range, there's a small tool which you can run to toggle between the two RGB ranges. Give this a try instead of fiddling with refresh rates. http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?p=83

[neorichieb1971]

Thanks Fudoh. Would you recommend HDMI over DP then? Its just that the GTX970 I am getting has DP's I believe. I suppose I can change it for one that has HDMI's instead.

What graphics card do you run?

[Xyga]

Some DELL monitors are famous for DP issues, this is one of them, you'll find tons of threads on various websites and communities, just google 'U2414H DP problem/issue' and see the wtf huge number of results.

So yeah having at least one HDMI out will probably save you trouble.

[BONKERS]

I dunno, EDID and HDMI can cause all kinds of headaches of their own.

I have to run an EDID override for one of my setups over HDMI with a PC.

But, most newer Nvidia cards have both HDMI,DVI and DP anyway these days.

DVI can easily be passively converted to HDMI. And it will be treated and recognized as HDMI .

[Xyga]

It's not a matter of general/common issues with every type of connectivity here, it's about known flaws with specific models from this manufacturer.
From what I've read the problem with some of those DELL models comse from wrong on-board EDID values on DP to begin, it's a firmware fuckup and we all know 'DELL quality' and how much they care.

[ZellSF]

I'm running two of these with HDMI. Native resolution. Full range RGB without any trickery.

If yours default to limited range, there's a small tool which you can run to toggle between the two RGB ranges. Give this a try instead of fiddling with refresh rates. http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?p=83

Not actually needed any longer, newer Nvidia drivers have an option for toggling between RGB ranges.

[Fudoh]

Not actually needed any longer, newer Nvidia drivers have an option for toggling between RGB ranges.

I haven't followed this in a while. But I think the driver option still has problems in applying the proper range when the EDID doesn't provide the option while the "hack" works all the times. Just what I read though and it's been some time.

[neorichieb1971]

I've seen the videos on how to adjust the NCP to a custom refresh of 59.9999fps which essentially makes it a non HDMI TV signal opening up the RGB full range. But that was made in early 2014 and its now late 2015 so I'm wondering if the issue has been resolved.

Like I said, my monitors came with a CD. The white cover on the front of the monitor has writing that states "Please load the drivers from the CD to gain full monitor capabilities". I'm guessing this has to do with the bug..

I've also noticed that most of the nay sayers are gamers where games over ride custom refresh rates.

My main issue here is to get the best from the monitor. I've read about washed out colours and so forth, but most reviews fail to mention this so either its now PNP or they have used jiggery pokery to overcome the issue.