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New PC for playing poker + PhD in computer vision, any feedback appreciated.

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oracle3001

New Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
I am looking to build a new PC, that will be used for playing online poker and programming work for a PhD in computer vision.

For those that don't know, on the poker front, it means a box that can work extremely quickly with multiple extremely large postgres db's (these db's are often many GB's in size and are being called upon constantly while playing online poker). It is absolutely crucial that I get as fast performance as possible.

On the PhD front, going to be lots of 3D, video / image processing, and using techniques such as particle filtering. I will definitely looking to utilise CUDA. Again, performance is extremely important, when running heavy math based programs created in Matlab and C++.

Am looking to modestly overclock the machine, mostly to maximum the performance for the above two tasks. I also might want my machine to be able to do a bit of gaming and finally that I am far enough ahead of the curve that the machine lasts the whole of my PhD i.e 3-4 years

In terms of budget, I am in the UK and was looking at spending about £1000 (so roughly $1500), but am a bit flexible for the right parts. Having had a quick look, I can get the parts selected below for around that price.

So far I have selected the following selection of parts:

CPU - Intel Core i7-3770K 3.50GHz
Motherboard - Asus P8Z77-V DELUXE
Memory - Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz
Cooler - Phanteks PH-TC14PE CPU Cooler
PSU - Corsair Professional Series Gold AX850
GPU - Nvidia GTX 660 or GTX 660 Ti

Existing components I intend to continue using,

Hard Drive - Crucial m4 128gb SSD & WD Caviar Black 2 TB
Case - Cooler Master Praetorian 730
CD / DVD - Generic

Would anybody make any suggestions for a different components (I definitely want that CPU and fairly set on the Asus board, but everything else is still a bit up in the air)?

I'm not really up to speed on the state of graphics cards these days. I definitely need an nvidia as I intend to use CUDA and can't justify a 690 beast at the moment. I know that the 660Ti is basically a cut down 670, where as the standard 660 runs off a different chip, but I don't really know much about the likely performance difference. As stated above I will be looking to shove a load of operations onto the GPU using CUDA.

In terms of RAM I am 100% LP will fit under the cooler, but obviously this comes at a price / performance hit, does anybody know if one can fit standard / tall profile RAM under it? And if so, what other options are good? G.Skill RipJawsX 16GB? Also, how much performance difference does 1866MHz vs 1600Mhz RAM make?

I am somewhat concerned if my case be big enough to house the new motherboard / CPU and what is a rather large CPU cooler? If it won't fit, any suggestions on a decent case.

And have I forgotten anything obviously from my list of components?
 
Any reason for the high end board? How good of a motherboard you need is directly related to how much you want to overclock, you can go with a board less than half that price and still get the same performance.

Are your calculations integer or floating point?
 
Well initially I thought I would just go with the standard or pro, but actually some of the "goodies" like superior sound card and wifi etc means I won't then need to buy the separate cards and thus it seemed to make the extra £40 for the deluxe board actually worthwhile.

I will definitely have another look.

In terms of calculations, they will be floating point, but that isn't really the issue. Stuff like particle filtering requires many many repetitions of a metric calculated as to estimate a situation using an underlying model, and it needs to be done fast.
 
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AMD CPUs actually quite handily beat Intel at integer calculations, but due to the way that the Bulldozer architecture is setup, it suffers with FP calcs, so Intel is the choice for you.

Onboard sound is onboard sound, the differences between the chips on the lower and boards and the higher end boards are barely anything. A low end ASUS Xonar card is going to be way better than any onboard. That being said, unless you have a quality sound setup, you'll never hear the difference. A cheaper board with a Wifi card is still going to be cheaper than a more expensive board with it built in.

The CPU Cooler and PSU are also pretty overkill, you can definitely save some money there and upgrade the GPU a step or two up.

Are you planning on ever going SLI?
 
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Thanks for the feedback.

The CPU is an absolute must. Just to give you an indication of the kind of work I am doing, my office setup is 49 XEON boxes, and secondly I don't want to be upgrading my box in the next 3-4 years.

Also, on the poker playing front, the DB software can be absolutely gruelling.

What cooler would you suggest rather than stock?

Does the Asus P8Z77 Pro have onboard wifi?

And any ideas on if the case is likely to be able to fit those parts...am looking to order the stuff in the next few days and the last thing I want to do if be ready to build and find I will be delayed by the need to get a new case.
 
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I never said to go to a less capable CPU, I just meant that if your calclations were integer, an octocore AMD Bulldozer would be faster. However, due to the way the architecture is setup, you can only load 4 cores with floating point calculations, so Intel wins there.

The vanilla P8Z77-V has onboard Wifi. I would just grab an ASRock Extreme4 and a Wifi card though.

More likely than not, you'll have to upgrade three or four years from now, regardless of how much money you spend now. Futureproofing almost just doesn't exist anymore, with how fast the market moves.

Are you planning on ever going SLI?
 
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