$2500 Multimedia Demolisher - O

My apologies if Im posting this in the wrong place but Id din't see a systems thread and it didn't seem to fit under motherboards.

I have revised my build and am about to pull the trigger on it. will be used for Multimedia, gaming some video editing, many thanks to those who commented on my previous posts the information you provided was invaluable. Hoping this will be somewhat futureproof for the next year at least.

thoughts/ revisions welcomed

thanks


CPU - Intel i7 2600k - 299$ - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9115070&cm_re=i7_2600k-_-19-115-070-_-Product

GPU - EVGA GTX 580 in SLI - 1060.00 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130590

PSU - Antec TruePower Quattro TPQ-1000 1000W - 179.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371012

MOBO - ASUS P8P67 WS REVOLUTION LGA 1155 Intel P67 - 259.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131714

SSD - OCZ Vertex 3 - 249.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706

HDD - Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS 3TB - 214.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148736

RAM - G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB - 83.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231428

Cooler - Noctua NH-D14 120mm & 140mm SSO CPU Cooler - 99.99 - http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608018

Case - HAF X - 209.98 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119239

DiscDrive - ASUS 24X DVD Burner - Bulk 24X - 20.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135204

Monitor - Dell 24" Professional - 319.00 - http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...327&ACD=10549103-4176827-a4zjqflnvcl9#reviews

IMHO i couldnt build a better machine my self, unless of course we waited for IVY bridge CPU's

arcanise said:

IMHO i couldnt build a better machine my self, unless of course we waited for IVY bridge CPU's

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+1

Refreshing when someone does their homework

Should be a badass rig for quite some time

The *only* thing that I would do differently would be to use a pair of proven 1.5TB drives. Some of the 2+TB drives haven't been real reliable.

Switch the board to a Z68 board. I imagine you'll want to keep your NF200 which is why I'm guessing you chose the WS board. You'll have to throw a bit of extra coin at it. Gigabyte's Z68XUD7 or ASUS Maximus IV Z would be good choices. Video editing is a strong point of the igpu on the SB processors. You can transcode really fast on it.

Nothing beats being able to transcode 3 streams at once (1 igpu 1 per 580). Nice vid editing rig methinks.

Also, nothing wrong with the D14, but with time I have come to prefer Thermalright's coolers just for their general philosophy towards their design and you can't beat the moddable pressure screw.
Either way, a Silver Arrow or D14 are utter overkill unless you want to push your CPU right to the wall. Nothing wrong with them, but they are a hassle as far as accessing your RAM and such.

Might want to look at a TR Archon. I have a D14 but it is leftover from a 1366 build. 1155 CPUs produce less heat.

Need some clarification

first a BIG thank you to those who posted. The information really helps.

OCnoob Some questions:

Originally I was going to go with the M4E, I wanted Z68 as it is supposed to be top of the line etc. But I was dissuaded on several threads by people who claimed that it suffered from a performance loss with SLI and saw a reduction in gaming performance.

when I asked for clarification this is what I was told

"If you look at the z68 ud7, you'll notice it doesn't have vga ports because they are omitted from the board. Windows won't identify the Intel HD graphics and thus the Virtu won't start. The end result is you can't use quick sync. It's a failure in the design. Look at the z68 M4E, same silly business. The UD7 and M4E both share another lame trait, they both have 3 pcie slots smack next to each other in what I call stupid slot layout lol."

AND

"no quicksynce is a failure in design. the integrated HD graphics suck anyway, why would you want a Sli board to use integrated graphics that really aren't that much faster in encoding?"


I noticed you have the Board in your sig, what has been your experience with it?

Some Gigabyte boards are an exception on video ports. Asus, Asrock, and MSI z boards are excellent boards. And why throw away a feature on the 2500k and 2600k if you can utilize it.

It seems a lot of people think the only advantages to a Z board is the SSD caching that I don't even use on my Z68 (set it up and took it back down). I think the video,Virtulogix and native Intel 6g controller is way more important than anything else on this mobo.

tool_462 said:

+1

Refreshing when someone does their homework

Should be a badass rig for quite some time

The *only* thing that I would do differently would be to use a pair of proven 1.5TB drives. Some of the 2+TB drives haven't been real reliable.

Click to expand...

+1 for data drive change..

I went from a single sata drive, to 4 1tb drives in raid5 with a 3ware 9650 card.. Super fast read/write (compared to a single drive) with some degree of safety..

I mean, if you are going to go all out, might as well make all the storage fast!

Stunt - What would you suggest?

Stunt many thanks for that info, what z board would you suggest? and do you not notice any performance issues in regards to graphics. I don't think there are currently any except the G UD7 that offer x16x16 pci lanes. I was originally going with the asus m4e but was basically told it was an overpriced waste of money.

How much benefit do you get from the features you mentioned? and Im making a mistake going with p67 in your opinion?

LieutenantFrost said:

I noticed you have the Board in your sig, what has been your experience with it?

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Well the M4E is an awesome if ridiculously expensive board. All of ASUS boards for 1155 are extremely user friendly, though. Myself and someone else are having a bit of a performance issue with the platform "Games not smooth/Hardware forum" which you may want to check out.

I built on a Giggy Z68 UD4 and an Asus Z68V-Pro, and yes, Gigabyte's implementation of the igpu is very screwy and I could not get it to work properly as others have mentioned. ASUS implementation is fool proof and very straightforward and user friendly. The Asus bios are also very good and very friendly.
The practicality of the Z68 is something that comes down to individual needs. Are you going to play flight sim on 2 screens with a couple of GPUs while you transcode on igpu in the background? Do you need to use SSD cache for a big hard drive? Are you ok with sacrificing your VTT phases to your igpu? IMO Z68 lends itself more to someone who is doing a very heavy workload of visual computing and transcoding. And likes to play Starcraft when the boss is on lunch. It focuses on speeding up massive storage devices, as well as handling as many transcoding threads as possible. For an average gamer, or an average home user, Z68 may not be the optimal choice. I didn't really compare any benchmarks so I can't comment on Z68 being any slower. The '6 series intel chipset driver' INF is intercompatible between P67 and Z68 AFAIK, though.. so they are operating similarly.

There's also Bulldozer on the horizon, with it's all SATA 6gb connectivity (six ports on chipset) and very robust PCIE connectivity. Will it suck? Will it kill SB? Will it suffer from the fact that it's 8 cores on 900 some odd pins? Will the IMC still be weaker than Intel's IMC? Which it has been, significantly, for some time now? Only time will tell. If it does this to SB I will buy it. Don't spend this much money hastily, is all I have to say . One thing that is for certain is you get way more board for your $ with AMD, as always. A quick look at the layout and features of a Crosshair V versus a Maximus IV pretty much says it all. Save for the LCD poster, you get just about the same featureset for about $120-130 less. The (8130P?) enthusiast Zambezi (1st gen Bulldozer) MSRP is $320 which puts it on par with a 2600K for price.

How much is actually GPU accelerated and how important are those tasks?

You could drop a 580 and slab another 10 GB (6x 3 GB). The intel IGP would outperform the 580 is video encoding (something to deal with video anyways, really weird if you ask me). Grab the SR2 board and go 2 i7-950s?

Domino said:

How much is actually GPU accelerated and how important are those tasks?

You could drop a 580 and slab another 10 GB (6x 3 GB). The intel IGP would outperform the 580 is video encoding (something to deal with video anyways, really weird if you ask me). Grab the SR2 board and go 2 i7-950s?

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You can't put 950s in an SR2 as far as I know. It only takes Xeon.

Theocnoob said:

You can't put 950s in an SR2 as far as I know. It only takes Xeon.

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Right. Has to be a Xeon with dual-QPI as well, the E and X series.

Theocnoob said:

You can't put 950s in an SR2 as far as I know. It only takes Xeon.

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Could grab some E5504s and overclock them?

My only question is... why do you want that 24" Dell monitor?

better monitor?

Cojac92 said:

My only question is... why do you want that 24" Dell monitor?

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I need a monitor and that 24 inch looked good. Dell usually have good warranty coverage. If you can suggest a better alternative I'd love to hear it.

LieutenantFrost said:

If you can suggest a better alternative I'd love to hear it.

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I'm not going to say it's better... because I haven't used a "Professional" Dell monitor. Although, I think this might give it a run for it's money in at least image quality.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236117

They make a 24" of this monitor also...

Lieutenantfrost sounds like a photog. In the photog world the upper Dells are very respectable. I personally use NEC but the dells are very popular.

LieutenantFrost said:

I need a monitor and that 24 inch looked good. Dell usually have good warranty coverage. If you can suggest a better alternative I'd love to hear it.

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I can't suggest a good monitor but do stay away from the lower end apple IPS monitors. The colour accuracy is on par with sub $200 TFT LCDs.

Better monitor?

Here.Get three, or the video card power will be wasted.

Features:
+ No LED backlight*true blacks*
+ 1920x1080 Resolution
+ HDMI support, with internal speakers(they aren't great, but decent.)
+ Cheap as hell for what it is.

Hope it helps.

I use one of these and really love it. Couldnt tell you how accurate colors are for photography purposes but blacks are very good IMO.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001414&Tpk=px2370