[7eddy]

Hello.

I'm about to start my first new build - I'm going to base my build around the intel i7 2600k what would be the perfect setup to get the most out of my CPU?

I will be using my new 'beast' for multi-player game, record what happens. The VT will eventually be projected onto a cinema sized screen as part of an theatre project with live action happening in front of the screen.

So I need a setup that's stable and can handle gaming while recording in High def - beyond that I just want the most powerful machine I can make.

Cheers

Steve

[7eddy]

Looking at getting this motherboard...

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3761#ov

Is this the best I can get?

[Janus67]

What is your budget?

I would say the UD7 or any motherboard over $200 is overkill for 95% of users.

[RaV3N]

Do you plan on learning overclocking? If so I would stick with a P67 chipset

[7eddy]

My budget is about 900 in total. But if I have to save for another month/ or buy a piece at a time then I will.

I do plan on doing a little overclocking in the future... once I have this project out of the way I want to play about a bit.

For now, my primary concern is to get the best available without going for silly, silly money..

I did some reading about the h67 and the p67. read it here

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...2-tomshardware

@RaV3N - just to clarify - the motherboard I linked to is the P67 and the P67 is the best MB for the 2600k? Is that right?

[7eddy]

Sorry £900.00 - I'm in the UK

[bennoculus]

Definitely go with a P67 board if you're planning on overclocking in the future.

That board is very nice, indeed. But it is a tad overkill, as Janus already said. Go for a GA-P67-UD4. Cheaper, great performance, and all around an excellent board.

[7eddy]

A wee update on what I'm going for.

What I've picked out so far - I7 2600k
Then I'm going to go with the UD4 as suggested - it's half the price - then I'll use the money I save to buy more RAM.

For RAM these http://goo.gl/dtDkw look like the best or is it just marketing Hype? and would they work with this board?

Thanks for your help so far guys - it's been immense.

[chidesd]

I decided on the Z68 mother board for my i5 2500k build seems to be the best of both world (out of P67 and H67) Z68 for the use of ingegrated gfx form the cpu and overclocking of CPU and GPU.

[7eddy]

Just looked at the price of those RAM modules - they're a step too far I think.

But they are talking about triple channel memory and dual channel memory - what's the deal? Do I need triple channel memory to get the best from this processor?

Both the MB's linked to above only support dual channel memory - does this mean I won't get the best out of my machine?

[Janus67]

triple channel is not compatible with your board. You will either want a 2x2gb set (fine for the majority of users) or a 2x4gb set. Try to find ones that are rated for 1.5v and probably DDR3-1600 is the sweet spot for you.

That RAM is wayyyy overboard for your needs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231445

Would be plenty for what you are looking for (8gb DDR3 1600) just would need to find it at a UK retailer.

[Theocnoob]

-You can only afford a 2500K and it's all you need
-Get a Z68 board because you are recording HD game footage directly. That is very high data loads that need to be written quickly. You'll want a 20GB SSD to cache a 1-3TB HDD.
-Get a GTX460 or 560Ti graphics card depending on which you can afford
-Remember to budget in an OEM copy of Win7 64 if you don't have it already
-You need a bit of extra power for recording while playing smoothly. You'll want to overclock to 4.5-4.8 get a Coolermaster 212+ cpu cooler.

Overclocking these CPUs is stupidly easy. It's 5 mins. If you get some boards like the ASUS p8Z68V pro it'll do it for you automatically to 4.4 for 2600k 4.3 for 2500k

[Knufire]

2500K
Z68X-UD3H or Z68XP-UD3P
2x4GB DDR3-1600 CL9
1TB Spinpoint F3
60GB OCZ Agility 3
Cooler Master 690II
Hyper212+
Radeon HD 6950 (try to find a reference)

Fit in the budget?

[7eddy]

Done some reading into the z68 - it looks like the bomb! The SSD HDD mix is very sexy indeed... looks like I can use it to improve my write speed when I'm recording.

Cheers for the tip chidesd,Theocnoob, knufire... I would have been gutted if i'd found that out later!

@Janus 67 - you're right about the RAM I had picked out. Those modules look good but the page you posted says they are p67 compatible. Would I get the most out of them on a Z68 board?

[Janus67]

P67 and Z68 are virtually identical in that respect, (basically think of it as branded for sandy bridge)

[7eddy]

Update.

So I've pretty much taken you guys advice on the components for the system I'm going to build.

Did some research and everything came up trumps, nice work.

z68 with caching
8MB RAM
GTX 560ti
60GB OCZ Agility 3
Cooler Master 690II
Hyper212+
1TB Spinpoint F3

I only have one more question to do with the benefits of hyperthreading. From what I have read... Hyperthreading will help me edit and transcode video etc... but could also create problems when playing games and recording at the same time.

The i5 has hyperthreading disabled and the i7 has it enabled - the price difference doesn't bother me the only thing that matters is the quality off the video I produce because I'm planning to project it onto a cinema sized screen.

i5 or i7?

Cheers for your help so far!

[Janus67]

I haven't ever heard of HT causing problems I just know that not everything takes advantage of it.

[7eddy]

Here's the relevant extract from an article I read. Link below the text...

Does it actually help?

HyperThreading has some interesting performance characteristics as a result of its nature. HT will provide close to zero advantage if instruction decoding or execution is the limiting factor in performance. In the Nehalem architecture this is rarely the case. It performs ideally when there are a lot of cache misses or branch mispredictions since the execution unit would otherwise be idle waiting for these issues to be resolved.

Basically, certain applications will benefit more than others. Running a more parallel workload such as rendering or encoding video will see a nice benefit from HT since it’s likely both threads will be accessing the same data so they aren’t really competing for cache. Additionally the relatively small amount of local L2 cache in the i7 (256k) means there will be a decent amount of memory access giving the second thread time to execute. Also, it can result in a more responsive machine if not much is going on since threads will have very low execution time and it’s much faster for the CPU to switch the active register set than to grab another thread from RAM and load it into the registers.

Are there drawbacks?
As with most engineering decisions, there are drawbacks to HT. One of the more obvious one is that since HT keeps the execution unit fed more efficiently, it spends less time idle and can result in higher operating temperatures. More time idle would mean the CPU got a chance to cool down before the next execution burst and would result in a lower max temperature.
There are also programs that will either not see any benefit from HT or see decreased performance as well. Typically something that has performance limited by cache, instruction decode, the execution unit, or memory access will see little to negative improvement from HT (one of the reasons the i7 has so much memory bandwidth).

Running more than one multithreaded, computationally intensive task at a time can also be a situation where HT doesn’t help performance. If a processor core is running threads from different programs or that are operating on different data, all of the shared resources are effectively halved (data cache, branch prediction, instruction cache). This means branch mispredictions and cache misses become even more common, possibly to the point where both threads are stalled. Depending on the specific program this can mean either lower performance (compared to HT being disabled) or worse scaling than expected.

The last drawback is probably the most important one: The benefit of HT is inconsistent and dependent upon the specific operating environment and programs being run. Because of the way it works, code that is heavily optimized is likely to show less benefit as it would be designed to lower branch mispredictions and cache misses. The inconsistency of HT while multitasking won’t show up on benchmarks since they’re designed to only test a single task at a time.

Is it worth it?

This is a hard question to answer, and is heavily dependent on what you’re doing. If you do a lot of 3d rendering or video transcoding then it probably is since this is the workload HT is best suited for. If you find that you generally run multiple intensive tasks simultaneously (like playing a game while encoding a video or recompiling the Linux kernel in a VM) then HT could have a negative impact on overall performance (though not necessarily). One thing that is for sure is its impact is exaggerated in synthetic benchmarks, almost to the point where it becomes misleading.



http://www.overclock.net/blogs/darkc...explained.html

[hokiealumnus]

HT doesn't cause problems that I've ever heard of, at least not on semi-current CPUs. Back in the P4 days it may have, but not in recent memory. Whether it's worth it is up to what you do. Considering you do a lot of editing and trans-coding video, I'd say yes, it may well be a worthwhile investment.

HT temperature increase is a nonstarter with these Sandy Bridge CPUs. There may be a small temperature difference, but they run so much cooler than previous-gen CPUs anyway, it won't even be a point of concern.

Benchmarks in your case probably wouldn't be too awfully misleading because you will be, as they say it, doing one test at a time. Something tells me you won't be watching video, browsing the internet, encoding MP3's and editing video all at the same time. If you're editing video you're probably concentrating on it and it's likely the only trying task thrown to the CPU. I also daresay you will not lose any noticeable performance from simply using an i7 2600K at the same clock speed as an i7 2500K simply because the former has HT.

[7eddy]

@hokiealumnus

Cheers.

That's more or less what I was thinking... so that's great i7 it is then!

Sorted.