My PC is Dead - Long Live the PC · 2:05am Jun 17th, 2016
So, my old PC has, after over 6 years of service, finally died. Or at least, I'm 90% certain that it has; I'm pretty sure that the power supply unit on it has burned out, judging by the fact that it won't power on anymore and the little white light on it had been turning on. Apparently, it was trying to warn me it was on its last legs, but I didn't listen.
I could order a new PSU for it and try and resurrect it, but at six plus years of age (the computer was assembled in the Winter of 2009) I think I might want to consider getting something entirely new instead of beating on the same old dead horse.
Problem is, I haven't been looking for computer stuff in a long time, so I'm not on the up and up on what sort of hardware is best these days. I've heard AMD has sort of gone down the drain and it is all Intel, all the time now, but I'm not quite sure what I should be buying.
The goal is to be able to play games on it, as well as run programs like Photoshop. So if anyone has any advice/has assembled a new computer recently, I'm all ears. I'm probably going to spend the evening trying to do some research on what I want to do, but any advice on GPUs/CPUs/motherboards/RAM/PSUs/cases/anything else I'm forgetting because I haven't done this since 2009, that would be nice.
Also, if anyone has a SSD HD, I'm curious what your experience with it has been - I have a 1 TB HDD and a 3 TB HDD, but I've been debating getting a SSD HD for my next computer to boot the box from because I've heard that it lets you boot up Windows extremely quickly, and I'm always annoyed by long startup sequences.
Another question: I've obviously still got my old hard drive from my old computer. If I just plug that into a new computer, will it be able to recognize the new computer okay and boot up? If so, I could save myself some time on installation and stuff, and maybe figure out how to migrate the OS over to a SSD HD later (if that's a thing I end up wanting to do).
EDIT:
This is the build I put together via PC Part Picker:
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/4oi8g9/build_help_1070_gamingphotoshop_pc/
As noted in the thread, I don't really know if the SSD or Motherboard is an appropriate choice. I also know little to nothing about overclocking stuff; what sort of fan/cooling system should I use if I choose to go that route?
I know the 1070s are sold out everywhere, so that won't be arriving for a while. Is there any particular difference between the brands for those?
I also have little idea about what is the best case to use. Does it really even matter?
I rebuilt my machine recently, check out my blog.
I have 16gb of DDR3 ram I could sell you for cheap. It's unopened. Only reason I have it is because I was lazy and didn't return it to Amazon.
SSD's are amazing, it's the best switch you can make.
Other than that, back when I played WoW one of the main fansites did semi regular computer build posts that I always found pretty useful. Gives a good range of power versus price.
Yes, you will not regret this at all.
It would be quite unlikely to simply boot up after you swap literally every piece of hardware. You will need to do some re-installing depending on the program.
Don't say SSD HD, unless you mean these HD with a small SSD disk that are usually called SSHD.
If you meant a normal Solid State Drive (SSD), then hell yes. If you've got the budget, getting a 512+GB SSD would be amazing as you could use it even for games/Photoshop files. But no matter what, throw at least a 128GB for your system.
As for migrating your SO, it may be possible but not sure if a good idea. I'd recommend migrating only your data.
1. I have two Samsung SSDs in my PC right now. So far, rock solid, very fast, and tons of storage. I have an old WD 7200rpm HDD in there as well, but it really doesn't do much anymore. Flash storage is definitely the way to go now.
1A. If you can only swing for one SSD and one "regular" drive, you have a choice to make. Make the SSD your boot/program drive and programs/OS will load very fast. Or, make the SSD storage only and have file access speed instead of boot/load speed.
2. If the old HDD was storage only (no OS), then it should recognize fairly easily and mesh with the new system. If it did have the OS on it though, I highly highly recommend backing up what you need and formatting it before swapping hardware. <<that goes double if you're swapping motherboard or RAM, as the Os will be looking for specific hardware signatures that won't be there anymore.
3. Lots more I can add or recommend, if you like. Drop me a PM and a approx. budget, and I'll be happy to help with potential build options.
AMD is on the upswing, but you'd want to wait until they release their new architecture later this year.
4027648 This, and use https://pcpartpicker.com/ to build the computer. Let's you assemble all the parts virtually before you buy any of them, warns you about parts that don't work with each other, and even gives you price comparisons from all stores that stock said part. I still get weekly emails from partpicker about sales on computer parts.
My general policy when building a PC is to aim for the price break point... that spot right before the price shoots upward. Gets you a PC that will last you a long time, where all you might wish to upgrade is the video card once or twice.
As for SSD, I'd suggest getting one. Most of the kinks have been worked out of them. Get one big enough for the OS and possibly to keep some of your more commonly run programs on. Though speed-wise, if your old machine was running XP or Windows 7, that your new one will most likely have Windows 10 alone will get you a much faster bootup time. You'll quickly come to hate Windows 7 machines due to that slowness
And if you're worried about privacy with Windows 10, you may wish to spring for the professional version. Costs more, but cuts down on the data-mining.
For some things, it'll work fine. For others though, you can run into issues. You'll be lacking registry entries, for example, plus if you wind up swapping OSs, that could also lead to path differences, making it unable to find things. Since the program wasn't installed, you won't find it in add/remove programs, in case you want to get rid of it in the future. Many programs save info to a user specific folder as well, rather than to where you installed the program, so you'll need to copy that over if you want to keep your settings, saves, and so on. If your old machine was 32-bit, that will obviously cause issues.
But beyond that, if you set the BIOS up right, it ought to mostly work. Though you will have a hard drive that is getting a bit long in the tooth...
Email my fiance at jazzepi@gmail.com. He has lots of experience assembling high-end PC computers.
(I could give you advice here but it'd be faster and better for you to contact him. And SSD are awesome, you should def have one as your main drive.)
It all depends upon how much you are willing to spend.
You are kind of at a bad time with regard to the video card as the 1080s are pretty much impossible to get, the 1070s are not out yet, but is cheaper and faster than the last gens 980ti. AMDs new 380 is ALMOST out but isn't out yet. So if you wait a couple of weeks you have all sorts of extra options than you have now.
Like everyone else here, I echo the SSD. Have that as your main drive. 128gb is quite inexpensive now, and I would honestly shoot for 256gb (what I have) as a minimum. Have your OS, main programs, etc on that for fast load times.
Your existing drives are pretty much secondary storage at this point. You won't be able to boot a new machine without an OS reinstall. The OS will look for motherboard chipsets that aren't there any more and not load properly if at all. The drives are still fully accessible from either a working install on your new machine or on any other working computer, so you should be able to pull over data no issue, but you're looking at an OS reinstall and a reinstall of all programs. Use windows? If you haven't upgraded to 10, might want to consider it on the new machine. Either way, once the new main drive is up and working, decide what you want to do with the others. You could have the 1TB be a program drive if you game a lot or have a lot of large programs and the 3TB be media storage or such. Up to you.
The rest of the specs really come down to what you want to do with the unit. General surfing and horsewords don't require a lot of power. Gaming will require more. Check out what others have said here. For more extensive guides and reviews, I've always been partial to anandtech.com and they have a number of pc builds for different budgets.
If you're mostly looking for games, your GPU is going to be more important than your CPU. Seriously, something mid-range is likely good enough for most titles, with a powerful GPU backing it up. I dunno what Photoshop uses for rendering, but I'd guess CPU... however, unless you're doing heavy video-editing or something, you probably don't need a super high-end processor there, either. I don't really have any strong feelings about AMD/Intel. However, AMD can be a better choice for budget builders - although they've lost something of the edge they held there, from what I know. Upgrade paths is a secondary consideration, I guess, but I don't know much about that. They have started including a pretty nice air-cooler with their CPU's, though, which is nice.
GPU is also affected by how big of a screen your running. 1080p? Two? Four? 4k? But both AMD and Nvidia recently advanced their architectures and announced new GPU's that look pretty good. They're trying to capitalize on the VR stuff that's starting to go down. Check out AMD's Radeon RX 480, and Nvidia's GTX 1080/70 if you've got some money to drop. I don't think the AMD one is out quite yet, but it should be soon? AMD is usually the better choice here for bang for your buck, and the RX 480 looks... pretty good, honestly.
On SSD's; they're absolutely better in every way than HDD's, except storage space and cost - although they're very near to achieving parity in some places, I think? They'll load everything faster, too, not just Windows, so if you've got a big program (like photoshop) that you've installed on one, it'll start faster. And yeah, they absolutely do load windows very quickly, especially with a UEFI mobo.
In everything but weird edge cases, you should be able to simply plug your old HDD's into your new mobo and it it would work fine. (They're probably all SATA and NTFS...) However, you couldn't simply boot, for two reasons; one might be Windows licensing and stuff, which I know very little about, but the other one is drivers; the hassle of un-installing and re-installing drivers to make all your new devices work right is probably not worth it, and unlikely to ever quite work right anyways. I'd suggest planning on a re-install, but google things about activating/de-activating windows to make sure you're good on that front, too. They've loosened up a lot on this, with Win10, but I don't know the specifics.
If you get an SSD and still have your windows install disks, you might consider doing a fresh install on the SSD, and just plugging your old drives in as secondary devices. Then you can organize/clean up your data afterwards. This is what I've done, and it works pretty well.
As for RAM; most mid to high range mobo's have a 'verified vendor' list of sticks that are certified to absolutely work with that mobo, if your really worried about compatibility. Otherwise, just get a handful of DDR3 sticks (edit: unless you get a fancy new mobo that can take DDR4. Apparently that's starting to be a thing?) from a good vendor, and you should be fine. Maybe pull them out of your old box. If you're really interested in squeezing the last drops of performance out of your ram, you need to learn about timings, bandwidth, and overclocking, but... that's a bit of an advanced topic? And probably not important unless you're getting an enthusiast mobo anyways... I guess it depends on how big you're buying and how desperate you are to squeeze performance out of stuff.
Oh... I probably should have started with this, but if your old mobo is an AM3+ board, you might be able to re-use that, if you were happy with its performance. AMD has newer CPU's that fit that socket, I believe.
Edit edit: If it were me, I'd start piecing out the computer, and once you have some idea buy the new PSU first, so you can slot it into your old machine and then take a bit more time on assembling your parts and what. No need to rush things.
Really need a budget to work with before recommendations can get specific. There's not a whole lot of variance in what constitutes smart spending on a PC, but there do exist areas where you can splurge a bit and gain quantifiable benefits.
Correct. AMD hasn't been seriously competitive in high end CPUs since 2008 or so. The latest Intel chipset is the Skylake series, and it's pretty easy to overclock the i5 6600k to 4.4Ghz or so. The corresponding i7 6700k provides marginally better performance for disproportionately more money, depending on how much you have to spend.
The better boot times are nice, but SSDs are absolutely fantastic for OS performance in general. The lack of any moving parts means that they can hit any random bit of data your computer needs in a minute fraction of the seek time of an HDD, which speeds up and smooths out the system's performance across the board. Get one to serve as a dedicated drive for your OS and applications. You will not regret it. You will not look back. You will wonder how you ever lived without one, if they are black magic, and how quickly the prices on black magic are dropping so you can get another, bigger one.
As far as the old drive goes, bite the bullet on doing a fresh install and copy over whatever data you want to keep from it. Six years of accumulated cruft isn't something you want to migrate, even aside from the OS activation issues other people have mentioned. Never mind that a six year old HDD just isn't going to be long for this world to begin with.
The 1070 will be a great buy on a GPU if you can manage to find one at MSRP.
So, since I've been computer shopping lately, I recommend starting by getting this bad boy...
...Except it went out of stock again in the week while I wasn't looking. Damn.
That said, if you can find it, they were going for 160 for a while there, it's what they call a "barebones" PC, and that gets you a motherboard, power supply, and an absolutely bitching case, plus a really advanced soundcard. After that you need the RAM, HDD, Processor, and Graphics card.
(As note, if you decide to go for the M8, it does have a small form factor, which means laptop drives and RAM, but having been shopping around lately, that's not really an issue pricewise.)
So, general advice: Get an i5. An i7 is basically future tech and only provides negligible returns for most consumer software, especially games, and AMDs basically need to have double the cores and sometimes half again the hertz to match an i5s performance. i5s generally run about 200~ bucks, and if you can get a similar deal on a barebones like the M8, that means you'd only need to drop about 460 for the barebone kit, a really good processor, 16 GB ram, and a TB HDD, and that is almost everything you need... except the graphics card.
Which is where you run into a problem, because as far as I can tell, you really want an Nvidia card, and those are expensive.
But the new 10X0 line is really nice.
But expensive.
But really nice.
...
Oh, sorry, drooling on myself there.
Basically, if you want a good, top of the line graphics card, your going to want to shell out a couple hundred bucks, and if you want a really nice one, it's going to be 400 or more, and consider that a steal, because before the 1070/80 rolled out the Titan X cards were a grand a pop. Still, if you shop around you can find GTX 970s for about 250-280, but you have to look for them. Google Shopping is your friend in this endeavor.
On the other hand, if you got a 1080, you'd basically not need another graphics card until the thing melted from use. Consider it an investment.
As for your OS, my traditional recommendation is "wipe it and install Ubuntu," but I don't think that's quite your speed. I will say this; if you have Win 7, I recommend a clean install as Windows's code base tends to decay over time as a billion versions of direct X, .net, and visual studio start to pile up on each other. I then recommend very carefully updating it after researching how to avoid installing Windows corporate branded nagware, malware, and spyware. That Windows 10 nagbot is a pain in the ass, and there's been a few episodes of serious consequence due to the aggressive Windows 10 push.
On the other hand if you have Windows 10 or anything older than 7 you basically don't have to worry.
Anyway, that's the "New Computer Market" as far as my research is concerned. Good luck, and happy hunting.
I strongly recommend you check out both the buildapc subreddit, and The PC part picker site. They are probably the best resources right now for getting builds, and assembling a great PC as cheaply as possible.
PC Part Picker is pretty good, I used that for my last build although at the time it was missing the CPU I wanted.
Anyhoo-
1. 100% go SSD. I finally did my first SSD last October and SWEET CELESTIA its amazing. I can do a total system reboot and have everything re-launched and running in under a minute. Like, 60 seconds from hitting 'restart' to having everything launched and logged in again. Samsung is generally a great pick for manufacturer and my go-to now.
2. Intel, far and away Intel. Intel is kicking AMDs ass, hard, and I dont know how AMD is staying in business because the gap is so huge. Also, Intel is not stupid so if your processor overheats because say you mounted your heatsink badly it will automatically underclock itself. An AMD processor will instead cook itself, promptly break, and probably take something with it.
3. As far as GPUs go, I think Nvidia and AMD remain competitive-ish there; either can work.
4. Do not buy two video cards to link them. Just buy one bigger, better card that will kick ass for 3 years and if you really want to upgrade later, replace it then.
5. Get at least 16 gigs of Ram. Plan for the future; ideally be able to expand to 32 eventually.
Really, you can make a fairly high-end gaming rig for around 1k-1400 depending how much you want to splurge. Mine was about 1400 but 1000 of that was my processor, video card, and 1 TB SSD - I wanted to spend more up front so I could not need to upgrade at all for 4-5 years.
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What model of SSD did you get? I found a 1 TB one for $200, but some folks noted it had a relatively small cache (only about 15 GB): I'm not sure how much of a concern that is. 500 GB is okay, but 1 TB is the size of my old hard drive, which would be nice (though I wouldn't really need to store like, video files and stuff on it; that could go on a bigger data drive).
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That PC Part Picker website is a dream. Why didn't they have that the last time I had to build a PC?
Anyway, I actually ended up getting some parts together and went to the buildaPC subreddit. I also updated the OP with a link to said build.
Thanks for the advice you two.
And thanks to everyone for their feedback and offers of help!
The SSD is totally going to be a thing. I just need to figure out which one.
As for the 1070, I'm probably going to order one, but they're out of stock absolutely everywhere so it is likely to be several weeks before I'll get one. Probably means I'll just put it together and suffer through using *shudder* integrated graphics.
Though seriously, anything is better than this laptop. It can barely browse the web these days.
Spend the few extra bucks for a really good case. Not only will you regret not buying a cool looking case later on after the build, but different cases also allow for better expandibility and upgrade options for later in the future. More fans, More PSI slots, better circulation...
Also, you can always just take out and change your graphic cards and hard drives really easy, but after all your stuff is mounted inside, its going to be a real pain after you've changed your mind.
I built a PC around christmas. Check out Passmark to look at performance per price and stuff like that (warning: I have heard they're biased towards Intel CPU's because of the tests they use to measure performance. I wanted an Intel anyway, so it really didn't matter to me).
I looked at your build, and I think 32 GB ram is overkill - 16 should be enough (besides, it's easy to buy more if you need it).
SSD is definitely the way to go: boot times are amazing, and they're silent. I haven't even got my spare HDD in my computer anymore, since it's so noticeable when it spins up.
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This one
A bit pricier perhaps, but hey, likely more reliable
You could go for this one type of set up https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8k7Rbb74gro
Though I have no ideas about how much it costs.
Excellent specs on that build.
I have that PSU and HSF in the box I built last year, and they both work very well. The HSF is huge but quiet, and keeps the i7-4790k cool under load. Just make sure you have room in the case for it, assuming you go with that.
FWIW, I have just a 250G SSD as a boot drive (only half full) and 2 standard 2TB HDDs for storage and Steam games. Boot time and general operation are awesome.
My strategy would be to buy a new PSU right away, from a high quality brand (I like Seasonic, personally) and with enough wattage to cover the needs of your future machine. Use that to quickly get your old computer up and running so you can continue whatever work you need it for, take a backup of anything you want to keep, and wind it down as a production system.
I'm very much a hardware enthusiast type of person, so I know I'd end up taking a few days or so to weight out exactly what processor I'd want given the various factors of the size of the manufacturing process, number of cores, cache, etc., and what motherboard chipset I want. That's just me, I guess. A lot of people want to move more quickly because it's not as important to them to be finicky as it is to just have it work.
I don't have any specific advice on RAM other than just pay attention to the timings and make sure they're right for your board and what you'll demand from them, and get a reputable brand and a set of sticks of a specific item number that has a very high proportion of good reviews and no warning flags like people complaining of failures or incompatibility at the specified timings. It's worth spending what it takes to get quality RAM, because cheap RAM that turns out to be flaky can be a huge frustration.
I'll echo what everyone is saying about SSDs - get one. I've been using them for a while and I'm never going back to magnetic hard drives. That said, not all SSDs are equal, and there are a number of options - such as, you can opt for an SSD that uses the usual SATA interface (the vast majority of people do this), or you can get one integrated onto a card with a RAID controller that plugs directly into a PCIe slot. Even going with the standard uncomplicated single drive on a SATA port route, there's a lot of different controllers, memory chips, and manufacturers of SSDs out there, so it takes some research to find the right one and meet the balance of performance for the price you want to pay.
Get an SSD, at least 32G, put your OS and applications on it, as already said by others. This will speed up Windows, because Windows is stupid and keeps swapping the OS out onto the hard drive no matter what you try to stop it from doing that unless you delete your swap file entirely, in which case it will just crash and wreak havoc on your files if you run out of RAM.
If Linux, yes. If Windows, not a chance. It has lots of code to prevent it from doing that, because they don't want people to copy someone else's hard drive and thus get a free copy of Windows.
Most consumer motherboards take only 16G RAM. Consider looking for one that will take 32G RAM, because you're a smart person and may want to do some data mining or other computation-intensive stuff. I have 16G and run out of RAM all the time. This is mostly due to Chrome and today's bloated websites. Each Chrome tab is a separate process, ranging from 15K to 1G. Many websites take hundreds of megabytes just to keep a tab open on them now. That's crazy, man. I don't know how they do, but they do. Also, any time I run a Perl script, it will expand by about 100M of RAM per hour until it hits 2G and then crashes, because Perl's garbage collection is crappy and its VM can't go over 2G. I run a lot of Perl scripts.
You can get the most CPU per dollar by buying a used server on ebay. Make sure it has all the RAM installed already. You can get a nice 64G 16-processor server pretty cheap, but it will run hot and make a lot of noise. For some reason, servers are never designed to run cool, even though the cost of cooling them is a major operating expense for server rooms. Note servers use only error-correcting RAM, and consumer motherboards use only non-error-correcting RAM. If you run programs that use more than about 100G of data and can't tolerate a single error, you need ECC server RAM, because the RAM error rate is high enough that your program will often crash due to a memory error.
You get the most processor per dollar from a CUDA GPU, but you'll usually have to write the code yourself. Those things are amazingly powerful if you do, though.
I think the 2 main decisions you need to decide are:
- Do you need mongo RAM and error-correcting RAM? (In which case you need a server.)
- Do you care how noisy the computer is? If you do, you need to NOT get a server, and carefully choose your case and CPU so that you can use mostly passive cooling. I find it hard to write with a noisy computer.
I had a nephew who had 8 fans on his computer. It sounded like a jet taking off when I turned it on. He'd installed Speedfan, and was trying to keep all the components under 70 degrees--and he'd set Speedfan to Fahrenheit.
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I don't know what kind of fans you're using, but I have a full set and the loudest thing in my build right now is a shitty HDD.
All I did was configure (in the BIOS) all the fans to run at minimum speed unless temperatures went beyond 50C. Now I have an overkill watercooler so I can run Prime95 for days without going over 52C or so, but even if you're using something reasonable, you should be fine unless you try some crazy overclocks.
Oh yeah, and by the way, do get a 1TB SSD. With today's prices there's no reason to go lower (unless you're genuinely really tight on budget). Or as an alternative, get a ~250GB PCIe one - they're even faster but also a ton more expensive.
(If you're curious, I a 1.2TB PCIe SSD costs like $1600. Literally no reason to spend money on something like that right now.)
EDIT: So you're already getting a 1TB SSD, you can ignore what I said then. Though I'm not sure about the brand - generally Samsung is king of te SSD market right now. That doesn't mean what you found is bad, just that I'd advise making sure it's not.
Oh, and DO NOT get the founder's edition of the 1070. It's literally overpriced for no reason than just because - I'm serious. Unless, of course, you really like nVidia and want to give them money out of generosity.
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As far as I can tell, Founder's Edition is the only edition that exists right now; the GeForce website itself lists the 1070 as having a MSRP of $449.99, which is the price of the Founder's Edition card.
That said, I think I'm going to hold off on ordering a video card until the end of the month; there's a competing card coming out which allegedly is going to launch for a price of $280, but independent benchmarkers aren't releasing their benchmarks until its release date. I can run a computer off of integrated graphics until then if need be.
This is my CPU cooler: the Ninja Scythe.
images10.newegg.com/productimage/35-185-173-02.jpg
It was hell to install, and I don't use the fan because it's too noisy, but with this heatsink and good airflow design, I don't need a CPU fan, and I can keep my case fans on low.
4029474 You have a very noisy HD if it's noisier than a good fan on low speed. The lowest-noise fans money can buy are much noisier than ordinary hard drives now, provided you installed them with vibration dampers & haven't got resonance (or Seagates). I buy Western Digital Blacks and set them to turn off after about 20 minutes, since I have 4 of them.
4029588 Basically, the Founder's is there for those who want it ASAP; the vendor cards are coming out later but are going to be cheaper. There's nothing special about the Founder's Edition to justify the price other than the fact that it's available earlier.
And don't get me wrong, as a business decision I don't think it's bad, but that doesn't mean that you need to pay extra.
As for competing cards, basically they're generally worse in quality. Their drivers are notably much less optimised, and in general the cards are less reliable. If you just occasionally play a few games, it might be fine, but if you're looking for anything serious, I'd strongly recommend nVidia.
EVGA in my experience is just an all-around high-quality, reliable brand; Asus is good too. In the end it doesn't make too much difference - you could go with an MSI or a Gigabyte card too. Once they all come out best thing to do would be compare reviews to see who has the best cooler (the main thing that changes between vendors) and the best bang-for-your-buck factory OC.
EDIT: Also these days integrated graphics are more than enough for absolutely anything which isn't gaming, and can even run older games on modest settings reasonably well. So unless you're itching to jump into the Witcher 3 in 2k res on Ultra asap, integrated graphics will tide you over just fine for a month or two.
BTW I find it very odd that you're building a new system around a quad-core 4GHz CPU, and when I built my computer in 2008, I built it around a quad-core 4GHz AMD CPU, which runs at 65W instead of 90W and which I paid about half as much for. What happened to Moore's law?
Specs say it's a 14nm CPU... with such an improvement, why aren't the specs better?
4029624 Core count and clock rates have stagnated for a while now, performance increases are more complicated than just "Slap on more of it and/or make it faster!". Moore's law is still going, but we are reaching the limit of it.
And yes, Skylake is 14nm, is that surprising? It's been around since like last year or something. (I don't really keep up with CPUs so I may be wrong.)
And yeah I got a 2TB HDD for some backups and shit, and it's pretty shitty. When it decides to shut up, my PC basically emits a low hum - I can hear my scroll wheel over it, and I have no problem leaving it on overnight if I need to.
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Moore's law has continued on transistor density, which is what it was related to, though it has actually slowed down to once every two years now. It is unclear if they're going to be able to push beyond 5 nm gates. 1 nm gates are thought to be the absolute physical limit based on restrictions from electron tunnelling. We're likely to see minimum-sized gates by 2030 or so, barring any exceptional slowdown, and possibly well before then.
Computer clockspeeds have barely changed since the early 2000s due to heat dissipation issues. IIRC there was a point in the late 1990s when they calculated that by now, at the past rate of CPU clock-cycle improvements, the surface of chips would be approximately equal to the surface of the Sun in temperature. They "solved" this problem by stopping the increase in clock speeds. Most new computers run slower than yours in terms of clock speed. This one, when finished, will be running at probably 4.6 GHz. Chips have better power efficiency in terms of computations per second, but there's still a limit on how how we can allow them to get.
It is possible to get more cores on a chip - one of my friends has a six core laptop - but their price has never really come down. A 6-core i7-6800k (which would be the next upgrade from this) costs $120 more for those two extra cores - and has a lower base clockspeed (3.4 Ghz).
The 8-core i7-6900k costs $1100.
My personal guess is that a big part of this is simply the fact that most people don't need extremely powerful CPUs or 6+ cores. 4 cores without hyperthreading or 2 cores with hyperthreading seems to meet a lot of people's needs. 6 hyperthreaded cores are still useful to a large enough group of people for their price to be reasonable.
It appears that no one buys 8-core chips except extreme enthusiasts or people willing to spend large amounts of money on CPUs. Without a large demand, or maybe just figuring they can rip people off, they just charge extreme amounts for them.
Or maybe they're just really hard to make. There's a huge difference between the 6-core and 8-core prices; maybe too many of the 8-core chips end up with bad cores and have to be rejected due to their process.
I checked out your build, and it looks pretty solid to me, although definitely a bit more spendy than I'd pick. But I'm a miser who's never owned a 'new' PC. :P
On SSD's, it's been a while since I looked at them... but I think you might want to do a bit more research there. If you're serious about more speed, consider taking a size hit and moving to a PCIe interface. (Fast, big, or cheap; pick two.) Something like the Samsung 950 pro has easily five times the performance of that OCZ drive, albeit at a fourth of the capacity. If you went with the AMD GPU instead of the Nvidia, you could drop some of that money into a larger drive with better performance, too. Your mobo should support M.2 PCIe 4x, but be sure to do your research if you go with a M.2 drive. Not all M.2 is PCIe, and not all PCIe is 4x. Here's a primer on M.2
As for overclocking, you probably don't need to worry about it. I think most people who go into that seriously use water cooling...? But you can totally overclock on air cooling, and the air cooler you've picked is a pretty good one - from what I understand, considered one of the best cheap coolers, and the expensive ones aren't much better - but I'm no expert, so don't take my word here too seriously. Still, I'd say you've bought more than enough CPU, and I seriously doubt you'll be pushing the limits on that anytime soon with casual use. So if you're overclocking just for fun, you'll be fine. I overclock on air cooling.
Oh, be sure you get some decent thermal paste before you start your build, if you don't have some already. It's not expensive, and it's worth getting right the first time. It can make a difference in cooling.
Your mobo seems fine, compatibility wise. One thing to note, though, it only has crossfire support, and not SLI. Since you've picked an Nvidia GPU, if you're planning on doubling up in the future, you wouldn't be able to do that with your current card/mobo. Well, your PSU might not support it as-is either (although the new GPU's are supposed to be much less power hungry) but still. Depending on your intent to upgrade, that might cause problems. However, If you went with the RX 480, you could double them up and not be spending ridiculously more than you would on one 1070, if I remember the prices correctly. The one potential snag there is your PSU, and, well, whether or not AMD will have massive supply issues at launch. Which is hard to guess at. Although Nvidia apparently has massive supply issues right now, so...
Oh, I have an EVGA PSU too. I was impressed by their ten-year warranty, and I really liked the overall feel of the thing. So good pick there.
The other consideration with the mobo is what sort of enthusiast features it allows. If you're serious about overclocking, this is what you'll need to read up on. Since I've never used that mobo, I really can't say what that'll be like. However, for basic usage, it shouldn't give you any problems.
On the RAM, if your honestly worried about compatibility, download the mobo's user manual (which should be online) and check the approved vendor list thing. Just to note, most RAM that's not on that list should work, if it has correct timing/voltage/etc, but the ones on that list are tested by the manufacturer. On RAM, timing is another thing that affects performance alongside clock speed, but it's listed much less often and rather trickier to understand. In general, though, RAM with smaller timing numbers will be faster than RAM with bigger timing numbers that's clocked at the same speed.
On the case, I'm not sure what the advantages and disadvantages to that one are. However, people do do case reviews, and it might be worth checking out some of those before you commit too hard. I mean, they're not rocket science; most of the time what you buy with a more expensive case is more convenience, more ports and stuff, better airflow or more flashing lights. It's usually quite possible to build a computer without any of those, so the one you've got should work just fine, since the size seems to match the mobo.
Hope this is useful!
Edit: Oh, and if you're waiting on a GPU, you might consider pulling the one out of your old box and throwing it into your new one instead of using integrated graphics. You'll have to go through the hassle of uninstalling/re-installing when the new card arrives, but you'd at least have parity until then.
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Yeah, I might end up pulling out the surfboard from my old box and tossing it in. It is old but lol why not, right? That gives me a bit more breathing room to wait to see how the $280 card matches up with the $440 card for rendering armpit hair on football players :V
4029960 K-kinky...
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Higher core count chips are naturally more expensive to produce, and even after several years of improvements, software performance rarely scales with more than four threads. There's little practical or economic incentive to offer more, especially in the consumer level market. Architectural improvements are also harder to come by nowadays; the easy performance gains to be had from design innovations within the current computing paradigm are all long behind us now, to the dismay of CPU engineers everywhere.
It also doesn't help that Intel dedicates a good deal of the CPU's die to integrated graphics, and is more focused on power efficiency than raw performance gains. AMD isn't in any sort of shape to provide them with real competition, either.
In short it's a stagnant market due to inviolable laws of physics and economic pressures.
Which isn't to say that the 2016 Intel chip won't crush the 2008 AMD chip, because it absolutely will. But that's down to several years of incremental progress compounding on one another as opposed to any single great leap from a process shrink.
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Doing a quick look back, a 2008 era AMD Phenom 9950 has a CPU Mark of 3052, with a single-thread rating of 891. The 2016 era Intel Core i7-6700k has a CPU mark of 10996 and its single threaded mark is 2329.
So in 8 years, performance has, perhaps, gone up 3.6x for the processor as a whole, and marginally less than 3x per individual thread. The rate from 2004 to 2012 for single-threaded processing was about 4.6x. By comparison, 1996 to 2004 saw about a 28x increase.
So the rate of improvement has fallen off dramatically, and is continuing to fall.
This is probably why I had a 6 year old computer this year and was struggling to play new video games with a decent framerate, while back in the 1990s, a 6 year old computer was practically an antique.
GPUs, conversely, appear to be getting better at a faster rate than CPUs; apparently, the best card from last year cost $1000 and is now about as good as the $380 card this year, released only 15 months later, with the more expensive card being about 28% more powerful and $400 less. That suggests a considerable level of year-to-year improvement.
BTW, this makes it tough to make any hardware changes, but...
I think you'd need a system to cool the mineral oil, like a fountain, otherwise the whole tank might overheat.
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I can just imagine, after we've maxed out hardware improvements, someone deciding that the only way for their supercomputer to be more super is immersing the whole thing in mineral oil and pumping it through various radiators to cool it.
And then it will leak and it will be the Boston Molasses Flood all over again.
EDIT: After looking something up out of curiosity, apparently the fastest overclock ever according to this page is under 9 Ghz. That's with liquid nitrogen cooling. Apparently going from 4 to 8 Ghz is a Herculean task.
4030782 4 to 8? I usually hear about people going from 4 to maybe 4.5.
Supercomputers have been immersed in stuff like that since at least the Cray 2. It has a fountain to cool the coolant which is also decorative. They have a more expensive coolant. I forget what it's called.
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GPUs have an advantage over CPUs in that they're laser focused on sheer FLOPS throughput, which is aimed at computing tasks that are infinitely parallelizable and scales more or less linearly with transistor counts.
Their rate of progress has slowed down a fair bit too in recent years, but a long overdue node shrink like what the 1000 series got (28nm -> 16nm on new FinFET transistors) still makes for an abnormally large jump, between the higher density and higher clock rates* that smaller, better transistors bring. Future generations on the 16nm process are unlikely to blow away the prior generation quite so convincingly.
*Which reminds me, if you do settle on a 1070, you really really want an aftermarket card with better cooling, as the reference models apparently throttle like crazy. Intel at least had the right idea with Skylake and just stopped shipping their reference cooler to save people from themselves.
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That's what I was saying; going from 4 to 4.5 is a lot apparently. Going from 4 to 8 is basically impossible outside of completely insane systems no one would use in the real world. That may indicate why no one has sped up clock speeds significantly.
I hadn't really understood that apparently power consumption rises exponentially as clock-speeds go up, either, though I guess it makes sense in retrospect.
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Actually, AMD decided to focus on increasing core count even further a few years back. Because most CPU applications are hard to parallelise (and if they're not, you can usually compute them on the GPU for massive performance gains), and use one or two cores at most... AMD was basically left in the dirt due to their piss-poor single-core performance.
Intel had the right idea, and focused on better cores rather than more cores. Since this let Intel dominate the market, you now see most consumer CPUs have 2-4 cores.
(Of course servers are different and easily use more cores. But that's another matter - and anyway single-core performance is sttill important, so a Xeon with 8 cores is still better than whatever cheap 8-core AMD produces.)
Yet another advice-comment:
Mudpony is right on the money with the "aim for the price sweet-spot" approach. You can spend as much money as you want on your machine, and it'll still be overtaken by middle-of-the-road machines in about 2 years. If you enjoy being ahead of the curve for its own sake, go for it, but if your goal is utility, I wouldn't bother with anything beyond that.
Regarding system requirements, the things you'll most want to upgrade down the road will be RAM and graphics card. Your specced system has more than enough RAM to be future-resistant, so that's a non-issue. Expect to buy a new graphics card about half way through the lifespan of this system.
The CPU and motherboard aren't nearly as critical for performance, so they're not worth fretting over.
Long story short, don't sweat the hardware decisions that much.
Regarding SSD vs HDD, Windows will run a bit faster with it, and more importantly won't slow down with age as much as it otherwise would. The reason for this is that Windows always checks a zillion and one files when doing anything (configuration files, drivers, resource files, etc), and on a hard drive you'll be waiting for the platter to spin to the right position for each one (they won't all be cached already). A solid-state drive has zero seek time.
The downside is that a solid state drive a) has a poor write throughput and b) has limited endurance. It's flash memory; whenever it commits a changed block, it has to carefully burn that into flash. Flash memory can only be burned 10,000-100,000 times (depending on which of the manufacturer specs you trust). This is enough for your OS's use, especially since "block rotation" and "wear-levelling" will move often-changed blocks around to spread out the damage, but for a data partition it may not be such a good idea. If you're working on large data files that will frequently be revised, a conventional hard drive might be more reliable (it depends on what exactly you do, and on the specific SSD and HDD being compared).
Price is also a consideration. OS and applications will likely fit on a relatively small drive. Data might or might not (depending on your requirements). Terabyte-scale SSDs exist but are much more expensive than terabyte HDDs.
Regarding overclocking: Don't. It can easily make your system less stable/reliable. There are people who do it for fun, and I can respect that, but unless you have that as a goal for its own sake, it's not worth having your machine decide to freeze/crash when the stars misalign. The performance gains from overclocking are marginal.
Regarding swapping in your old hard drive: Make sure you have all of the OS registration information handy. Whenever Windows detects a substantial enough change to the hardware, it thinks it might have been pirated via drive-imaging, and needs activation all over again. In one memorable occasion many years back, I ended up having to call Microsoft support for this; most of the time you shouldn't have to (I'd decommissioned an old machine and used the same license on an entirely new machine). Just have the keys handy and you should be okay.
Good luck!
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While I've read about the SSD issue before, people who have spent way too much time trying to break SSDs seem to indicate that the odds of me actually having a problem are pretty low.
But yeah, I've been digging out all the old discs and licensing stuff and stuff.