Recommendations to budget

[afpTeam]

Hi,

I'm looking for suggestions on building an above average machine dealing with a dedicated MS Windows application (running Win 7 Enterprise or Ultimate) using vector graphics in market trading systems. There is a possibility to run the Windows app in Linux / Wine if that makes any sense for the losses likely to be found emulating with Wine. I'm open to which version of Linux would be applicable for best results, but fairly familiar with Debian, not opposed to BSD flavors either.

I need to be able to support high compute cycles as much of what gets done is mathematical algos doing floating point, then further facing the application's relatively vanilla vector graphics demand that draws multiple price bars, indicators, histograms on charts and the like.

My concept is to consider a design that's equipped with a bios / chip set that makes overclocking feasible, in order to bring the system up "some" within reasonable limits of the discovered weakest link, to maximize throughput. Ram type / speed, CPU/core design, buss speeds and drive technology all being fair considerations, hopefully not to break the bank, but that I cannot state a fixed budget much beyond 1500.00 - 1700.00 USD, I'm sure will cause limitation if not even outright belly laughter. The oddball in the bunch might be a need to handle at least dual monitors and preferably 3 monitors, possibly as a single (3) headed graphics card.

Hopefully there's a few on the forums here that can say "Here's a reasonable and clever way to hit above average, covering most if not all of the concerns". I mean it would make no sense to jack up sub-systems, only to find pipelining or on-board cache supports or Math processing were ultimately huge bottlenecks. I'm simply not familiar with what is reasonably current, tested state of the art in specifying an entire machine that would give a reasonable balance of the description, within controlled cost.

Any suggestions or questions I could respond to further would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks as always,

Afp

 

[EarthDog]

This seems to scream for:

4790K
2x8GB DDR3 2133 CL9
GTX 960
A quality 500W PSU (say EVGA, Corsair RMi)
Case is your choice.

Are the monitors part of this budget? What about Windows? Peripherals?

 

[Dlaw]

This should do nicely for you, ends up being ~$1550. The case is a personal choice, so I put an expensive placeholder in (I'm kinda partial to the 750D, but that's me). Feel free to pick whatever case you like.

If you are proficient in Linux, then feel free to drop Win10. Just keep in mind that this is a brand new platform, so you may need to modify the Kernel and other key OS files yourself to get any distro to work.

Edit:

This seems to scream for:

4790K
2x8GB DDR3 2133 CL9
GTX 960
A quality 500W PSU (say EVGA, Corsair RMi)
Case is your choice.

Are the monitors part of this budget? What about Windows? Peripherals?

That would probably do fine, but I don't know how much of the GPU his software uses. And wouldn't it be better at his budget to go with Skylake, since it's almost out?

 

[EarthDog]

Its out... ish... in Europe.

As far as the Haswell reasoning, you hit it on the head with the Linux concerns.

 

[afpTeam]

This seems to scream for:


Are the monitors part of this budget? What about Windows? Peripherals?

The monitors I can handle, relatively generic, likely HDMI.

I have a copy of Win 7 I might move over until I could make Nix handle it. Don't really care for Win 8 or above, due to growing cloud integration and security concerns that attend what I do. MS will not certify back door exposures where open source takes a front seat with source exposed. Same reason I dropped Skype and went to Jitsi running our own relay server, etc. Not inviting any MS flames, just a matter of trying to keep policy on point for security.

 

[Dlaw]

The thing is, these new Z170 boards may very well have support only for Win8/8.1/10, and all of those are more optimized for modern hardware than 7.

 

[afpTeam]

I'm not a pro at this by any means, so hopefully I don't expose my ignorance, but ...

The Haswell only finds a modest 3% overall benefit over Ivey accordingly to Wiki with higher heat and wattage to deal with, before consideration I can't write drivers. If I can't find supports, I end up stuck in Windows pretty much and possibly even current Windows OS worse yet.

If anyone can suggest a monitoring tool that will test the GPU Core distribution potentials of the Metaquotes Mt4 trading client design, I would be pleased to make some efforts, lest maybe I can run some typical benchmarking util to give back some degree of intel? I only know it's a dog for graphics on VM's, it's written in C++ and frequently doesn't show very good load sharing across cores in my past experience on machines 4-5 years old. (ug).

 

[EarthDog]

Task manager shows core activity...

The thing is, these new Z170 boards may very well have support only for Win8/8.1/10, and all of those are more optimized for modern hardware than 7.

I tested in W7. The only quarky thing is the USB driver thing. In my MSI Z170 board I had to enable a feature in the bios that allowed USB to work in windows (until you install a driver)... that included installing W7... but natively USB worked with 8/8.1/10.

 

[afpTeam]

The thing is, these new Z170 boards may very well have support only for Win8/8.1/10, and all of those are more optimized for modern hardware than 7.

Ditto, MS optimizations. Still, when handling other's money for a living, I have to keep security within reach at least, so I may end up self limiting on that aspect alone. Even then, how best to make gains within that limitation if so?

 

[afpTeam]

By the way, thank you both for the indications, this IS exactly what I was hoping for was others experience in current or recent methods addressing the limitations I'm facing. The replies are very much appreciated and hitting on point.

Incidentally, Taskmgr is the only place I've viewed core distribution so far as is. Not sure if it's possible to build a VM that might simulate a more modern architecture reliably, but that might add some insight into an OS perspective on performance possibly. Typically the drivers need to be implemented in Dom 0 of a VM hypervisor to do that, but might offer some limited view unless others know more specifically or have other tricks in identifying hardware / application analysis. I'm afraid the application is likely still 64 bit emulated even possibly.

 

[Dlaw]

I'm not a pro at this by any means, so hopefully I don't expose my ignorance, but ...

The Haswell only finds a modest 3% overall benefit over Ivey accordingly to Wiki with higher heat and wattage to deal with, before consideration I can't write drivers. If I can't find supports, I end up stuck in Windows pretty much and possibly even current Windows OS worse yet.

If anyone can suggest a monitoring tool that will test the GPU Core distribution potentials of the Metaquotes Mt4 trading client design, I would be pleased to make some efforts, lest maybe I can run some typical benchmarking util to give back some degree of intel? I only know it's a dog for graphics on VM's, it's written in C++ and frequently doesn't show very good load sharing across cores in my past experience on machines 4-5 years old. (ug).

We're talking about Haswell and Skylake, not Ivy. Ivy would end up costing more for less performance at this point, as it's 3 (4?) generations old now. On top, the Haswell refresh (4690K and 4790K) are more powerful, and thus provide a larger gap in performance compared to Ivy.

Here's the problem: In 5 years, Windows 7 will no longer be supported, and mainstream support has already ended. There are no more Service Pack updates (not that we've had a lot of them), hardware manufacturers no longer need to provide drivers, and general support is at a minimum. Windows 7 is already 6 years old. If you're using your system for actual work, running an unsupported OS is more insecure than Windows 10, in my opinion.

 

[afpTeam]

We're talking about Haswell and Skylake, not Ivy. Ivy would end up costing more for less performance at this point, as it's 3 (4?) generations old now. On top, the Haswell refresh (4690K and 4790K) are more powerful, and thus provide a larger gap in performance compared to Ivy.

Here's the problem: In 5 years, Windows 7 will no longer be supported, and mainstream support has already ended. There are no more Service Pack updates (not that we've had a lot of them), hardware manufacturers no longer need to provide drivers, and general support is at a minimum. Windows 7 is already 6 years old. If you're using your system for actual work, running an unsupported OS is more insecure than Windows 10, in my opinion.

Skylake understood, sorry for the oversight, thanks. I know it sounds backwards intelligent but I have a better sense of maintaining a well hardened workable Nix solution at slightly older compatibility. Working from certifiable source is at least defensible relative to answering why I would expose an OS with known exposures in back door and highest affinity to attract intrusion. I do understand the sense behind "supported OS" but I have better access to security provisions with Nix as well as the notion of corporate integrity issues and government agenda. Sorry if that sounds paranoid but in my industry, (currency trading) we have many examples to draw on unfortunately.

So is it viable to turn up prior art still relatively supported within a budget like this at all, or am I facing over the top cost to create an isolation network and real time IDS to handle W10, and up? Maybe I need to change my thinking to account the benefits of progress. I'm getting a quick lesson here, for sure as I would have overlooked some of this right off the jump, thank you. The later approach would apply to multiple systems in house I suppose, regarding secured networking versus OS. Not like I have to browse from a dedicated machine.

 

[Dlaw]

Skylake understood, sorry for the oversight, thanks. I know it sounds backwards intelligent but I have a better sense of maintaining a well hardened workable Nix solution at slightly older compatibility. Working from certifiable source is at least defensible relative to answering why I would expose an OS with known exposures in back door and highest affinity to attract intrusion. I do understand the sense behind "supported OS" but I have better access to security provisions with Nix as well as the notion of corporate integrity issues and government agenda. Sorry if that sounds paranoid but in my industry, (currency trading) we have many examples to draw on unfortunately.

So is it viable to turn up prior art still relatively supported within a budget like this at all, or am I facing over the top cost to create an isolation network and real time IDS to handle W10, and up? Maybe I need to change my thinking to account the benefits of progress. I'm getting a quick lesson here, for sure as I would have overlooked some of this right off the jump, thank you. The later approach would apply to multiple systems in house I suppose, regarding secured networking versus OS. Not like I have to browse from a dedicated machine.

I'm not saying that an open source OS isn't a viable option, as it is certainly the most secure of any OS option. If that is the route you are considering, there's nothing wrong with that, and Z97 with the 4790K is the best option from that standpoint unless you are proficient enough to build the Kernel headers and such yourself. I can understand your hesitation to Win10, but a Linux based workstation is going to be a lot more involved to setup. If that's fine with you, and your customers, it'll do fine for you.

The nice thing about open source OSs, is that there really isn't an end in support if you're proficient in the OS. You can manually install new Kernels, headers, compilers, etc. from source if and when the developers move on to another version, making the installation last as long as you want. The downside is you will likely need to use your free time to research current security issues, and apply and test the fixes.

 

[afpTeam]

I'm not saying that an open source OS isn't a viable option, [...] The downside is you will likely need to use your free time to research current security issues, and apply and test the fixes.

No, I agree Win 10+ is making more sense. It's going to be more time and cost effective to focus on IDS/Isolation so the machine can do the best job it's able to do. You guys are the more experienced and first impressions are sometimes the best suggestions, coming out of your own recent experience, just getting me to think through it.

Given that, where does it leave this, sourcing Mobo, processor(s), drive spec? Not sure I'm a big fan of Nvidia unless it's well tested in compatibility and heat management which seems well accepted here, yes? This is mostly about supporting a stuffy vector graphics app, so the 960 has a top rate cost / performance mark and fairly crisp performance if the vector graphics spec shows well supported on processor/ buss / chip set. Seems I can do dual monitors using an adapter on single 960 and toss in a junker card for third accessory text monitor, etc. I've been more ATI oriented in the past, but I'm not stuck on ATI.

Are we talking single processor quad core then?
Suggested MOBO / provider ?

How to round it down to a parts list that makes sense and does that leave us reasonable clock-able on the most of it within reason?

Where would we land on Hard Drive versus Solid State? At even 8 Gig RAM for budget there's minimal required caching on the drive requirement as the application is fairly sound on RAM / Caching AFAICS. Unless the rig requires minimal 16 Gig RAM.

Thanks more.

 

[EarthDog]

Not sure I'm a big fan of Nvidia unless it's well tested in compatibility and heat management which seems well accepted here, yes?

Modern NVIDIA GPUs use less power than their comparable performing AMD counterparts. As far as vector performance, unless I am misunderstanding the software, we are simply talking dynamic graphs, yes? CPU crunches data, GPU puts data on the screen. That is nothing.

Quad with hyperthreading, so 8 threads, yes.

Any 'unlocked' processor will easily overclock so we are set there so long as we use a Z97 motherboard (assuming we are going with 4790K).

Solid State for the OS and applications for sure. 256GB should be plenty.

 

[afpTeam]

Modern NVIDIA GPUs use less power than their comparable performing AMD counterparts. As far as vector performance, unless I am misunderstanding the software, we are simply talking dynamic graphs, yes? CPU crunches data, GPU puts data on the screen. That is nothing.

In localized development, we see highly accelerated market playback demand as part of development testing of algos, etc. This is where poorly handled vector graphics, (especially if handled at all by the CPU and not GPU), becomes a deficit hurling thousands of graphical vectors per second to the screen. In optimized infrastructure if that continues to be an issue it's likely application bound and less we can do about that but turn up the processor.

Quad with hyperthreading, so 8 threads, yes.

So,... roaring floating point algo's you feel are well supported for any hyperthreading collisions or conflicts cache bottlenecks? I'm a bit out of current context old school, but seems I recall some things about older hyperthreading being a bit touchy for instruction contention and bottlenecking, possibly on older pipelining maybe. That's likely before the days of integrated Math processor in the CPU, (dating myself badly here I'm afraid). This assumes again optimized OS / chipsets might partly free a core-bound application into distributed cores I guess, whereby contention could be questionable otherwise. Possibly that can't be known without actual runtime testing the application I suppose.

Ditto "Any 'unlocked' processor will easily overclock so we are set there so long as we use a Z97 motherboard (assuming we are going with 4790K)".
Ditto "Solid State", thanks. Backup to online HD, given.

Are we talking Air Cooled or water?
(I can end up in a 76-78 degree F ambient during summer months if the A/C stumbles in the office).

Likely I would end up turning up the base clock? or just processor multiplier?

Is the Z97 MOBO playing nice with 4790K clocked? I saw some suggestions the Z87 could be a bit finicky.
I assume you wouldn't recommend Z97 if not satisfactory to your experience, but no harm in asking if you've seen issues.

Does the current BIOS suggested give us sufficient support for multiple device / mode clocking?
I hope that question isn't redundant, but I'm not sure what to expect in trying to elevate performance.
----------------------------------------

Closing in on bottom line to get done... So, if this is the cat's meow, are the Mobo, chipset, processor and bios single sourced or preferred suggestions?

 

[Dlaw]

Let's go with this:

Asrock Z97 Extreme6: $160

Most powerful and feature-rich board in it's price range. Easily the most recommended, and plenty to take the 4790K to it's highest ambient clocks.

Hyper 212 EVO: $35

Good enough to run the CPU at max turbo under any load, and some can get even more out of their 4790K under this cooler.

Good RAM: $93

16GB of 2133MHz RAM for a great price.

GTX 960: ~$210

There are tons of variations of this card. I recommend getting the 4GB version, but there are also 2GB ones. They're all kinds of size and cooling options, shop around if you like.

Seasonic 550w PSU: $84

You should never skimp on PSU quality.

Samsung 850 EVO: $110

Great for the OS and programs. You can grab just about any normal HDD from WD or Seagate for mass storage. 1TB drives are normally around $50, and the price/GB ratio generally gets better with larger drives.

Grab any case that you like that will fit the motherboard, and Windows if that's what you'll use, and it will do you just fine.

Now, for your questions:

I would go with air cooling on a work machine. The reason is water cooling, be it AIO or custom, is risky. If you happen to spring a leak, it can take the whole system with it, data and all. The 212 EVO should be plenty.

You don't normally want to mess with the base clock. It's tied into everything else, and can cause all kinds of stability issues. Multiplier overclocking is much easier, and only affects the CPU frequency.

Z97 is the native platform for the 4790K. It's the one you'll want to use.

The tweaking options given to you by the EXT6 are crazy in depth. You can spend hours just messing with the CPU options, and then there are the memory, iGPU and about 300 other things to tweak.

 

[afpTeam]

Wow! (In simplest terms) I came looking for budget recommendations and leave with a parts list, references and experienced background behind it. I count myself "fortunate". Overclockers again proves to be the gold standard in performance tuning, excellent members and all around fantastic resource for keeping us dinosaurs from lapsing into an ice age.


Thanks Earthdog, alternate suggestions.
Thanks Dlaw, putting up with dumb questions, dovetail to parts list.

I went here, to find the processor at NewEgg, Haswell version, i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Quad-Core 4.0GHz, shown in stock, unless you have alternate suggestion for a different version, I didn't see any others. Recommendation for aftermarket cooler, dead on, the stock cooler not sufficient.

The rest of the accessories for basic needs are well covered by the Mobo, toss in a burner, the wireless goodies, jack in the monitors and then comes the nuances of getting devices and license recognition past Windows 10.

I think, this is hopefully the last questions, at least until I smell the "new" burning off the fresh components...

For one, most of what's in the list doesn't leave Linux verboten, which is nice to see; might be worth a try for an alternate later on, if / when time provides and more third party Nix users gravitate that direction.

It looks like Windows 10 will be a retail stand alone purchase ~ 200.00 USD, I'll leave the existing Win7 alone on the current machine. Realizing the OS will need to integrate with BIOS for final key alignment, confirmation etc...

... am I looking at a fairly vanilla process to install Win 10, or is this likely to be an uphill battle to put 10 on a custom rig and get it properly integrated and happy?

I suppose support in the end will end up being MS, but where would you recommend I purchase the OS? Straight from MS or retail vendor?

Last, any "Gotchas" come to mind on avoiding issues to get the retail OS settled in?

We talked some above about USB for example, possibly having to be sputtered in with a Win 7 approach. I know we can't foresee every aspect of "new custom" out of the box, but any other suggestions about OS integration are certainly worth me paying attention to. I did not elect to test Win 8 with as much evolution as it appeared was coming. I've always lagged on OS upgrades by a year in the past just to avoid early public debugging flurries and hung back further on Win 7, so this is the first time I'll be addressing a new OS retail install to a custom build, leaves me a bit apprehensive to the days of old sitting on hold with Redmond telling me to get out my credit card if I want help. Fortunately the only time I faced that, I proved was their bug to pay for, not mine.

=======================

Thanks again Dlaw, for such a quick trip to "Do this" and especially the effort to link up the references. I would have been weeks getting down to this point and likely would not have ended up with nearly the right choices you put up here. Your time and effort to help have been simply invaluable and give confidence to tipping the performance up a few clicks, solving an issue of slow development here for literally years, back to when clocking was still a black art of for how far it went to let the smoke out. LOL Words cannot express how much I appreciate the help.

I started out hacking machine code for Motrolla 6809s in Tandy color computers when a 300 baud modem was the only resource to get you to an Internet that had barely a few text based malls and PubMed online, while doing pkzip maintenance on a tape drive Unix machine during the day to pay the billz. Years of dedicated application and industrial computers filled in until a decade ago coding in the financial markets became a hopeful retirement plan. The return here to evolving technology in hardware has been a total blast, so you can imagine just how much help you've really been in a few short postings. My last brush with performance was a 60 lb, 3 Mobo Beowulf running Asus L1N64-SLI WS boards with (6) quad core Athlon 64 FX processors, (12) 120G hard drives, pulling a full 22 amps on start up. Clocking that rig was a threat more than once to burn down the Lexan case I built to house it, (data center made me wrap it in steel, before they'd permit it in a cabinet, LOL). Today, it's a simple parts list to run circles around that boat anchor and again, Overclockers gets me there, "Thank you!".

 

[Tech Tweaker]

A few small questions to the poster of the thread.

1. Do you know if you happen to have a Micro Center nearby your geographic location? It's just a thought because you can usually save a bit on the CPU by going to them. If I recall correctly their price on the i7 4790K the last time I checked was $279.99 USD, whereas most other places are $339.99.

2. Since this is going into a business-based computer environment (based upon type of usage you mentioned), do you know if the software you'd be using supports being run on Windows 10? I ask because I know a lot of software companies don't tend to release updates or patches right away to support new OS's that come on the market. From a personal standpoint, I'd wait at least six months before trying Windows 10, because there will almost certainly be bugs within the first few months. And time you spend fighting to solve bugs in the OS or software is time that might lose you money if your system is down for repairs (either physical repairs of the hardware or repairs of the digital software kind). Or do you know if your software has support for Windows 8.1?

 

[afpTeam]

A few small questions to the poster of the thread.

1. Do you know if you happen to have a Micro Center nearby your geographic location? It's just a thought because you can usually save a bit on the CPU by going to them. If I recall correctly their price on the i7 4790K the last time I checked was $279.99 USD, whereas most other places are $339.99.

2. Since this is going into a business-based computer environment (based upon type of usage you mentioned), do you know if the software you'd be using supports being run on Windows 10? I ask because I know a lot of software companies don't tend to release updates or patches right away to support new OS's that come on the market. From a personal standpoint, I'd wait at least six months before trying Windows 10, because there will almost certainly be bugs within the first few months. And time you spend fighting to solve bugs in the OS or software is time that might lose you money if your system is down for repairs (either physical repairs of the hardware or repairs of the digital software kind). Or do you know if your software has support for Windows 8.1?

I'm seeing Win 10 offered at 200.00 USD, not sure why, but I may have first confused your question. Either way 'yes' Micro Center is within reach.

Micro Center... (good call, 25 miles away)
Microsoft Corporation
38 Fulton Street West, Suite 311
Grand Rapids, MI 49503

As for the application viability with Win 10, yes I'm seeing others running the application on Win 10 without issues. That said they may not be compiling code as I am which will be harder to confirm, but this app JUST went through an overhaul 10 months ago I'm sure the CPP boys would have made some forward accounting of, so fairly safe it will work. The app is totally MS-centric by nature as is.

Thanks for the heads up.