New computer build

[Pycno]

With Fermi and 2Gb 5870 released the time has come to buy a new computer. I will be using it for five boxing, gaming on big screen and across three monitors with Eyefinity. Budget is around $4k

List of parts
http://www.komplett.no/k/shoplist.aspx?mode=receive&si=782228&su=83C17B4E-054C-415E-AA0E-76BEFDB7F49A


Im waiting for the ssd-drives to come in stock before I checkout, Im fairly happy with my setup but I might have overlooked or missed something and I appreciate comments and tips in particular regarding ram, IMO 6gb is probably enough now - and its easy to insert more sticks at a later date if required.
12gb kits are slower then (fast) 6gb kits, so Ill stick to the faster option if its viable.

PS: Im not aiming for good value or longevity, I just want something fast :)

[eternaldrk]

Looks good, though you may want to get the 5870 2GB if it's available. You wouldn't need the extra 1GB for WoW, but it would help with AA and other things in more demanding games. It should only be a little more than the 1GB card.

Tom's review of the 5870 2GB: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-5870-eyefinity6,2595.html

[Pycno]

Thats exactly what I was thinking regarding the 5870 and why I waited for the 2gb version, but as it turns out its just not something to go for. The extra gigabyte of ram doesnt do anything for performance in 3x1 eyefinity mode as 1gb ram is sufficient already, except for in very few games. Games in the future will require more vram but then the gpu itself will struggle anyway so I dont consider that.
The price on it is almost the same as a 5970, and thats not taking into consideration active display port adapter (I think I would need a total of 3 of them).

5890 would be really nice to have, but I dont know when its going to be released.

[Pycno]

Finally everything has come in stock, I made my order and hope I get the parts before the weekend. I went for the 5970 card instead, hopefully it will be stable in wow in single-gpu mode. The only thing I need now is an active DisplayPort adapter that is confirmed to work with eyefinity, let me know if you find one :)

[Eloxy]

Hmm the setup seems nice. Leave some feedback on how that processor runs will you? Might consider getting one myself if its worth it.

[Pycno]

One 45 minute national flight, delivery time: 1 week This is what I get for ordering the most expensive shipping method, it takes a full week to deliver. The cheapest method (ground) would have been here today, the train ride is only 7-8 hours. I want to sleep now and have the delivery guy wake me up in a week =p

[botboxer]

wouldn't mind pics after you have everything setup. always interested in how other boxers setup their systems. enjoy your nap btw

[Pycno]

Wuho! Finally received my computer =) This thing is amazing, performs way better then I thought it would.

The interesting stuff;
Dalaran CPU Usage (5boxing) - ~75% (stock speeds)
Dalaran Mem Usage (5boxing) - ~75% (4,5gb out of 6gb)
Loading times are near instant, ~1 sec on slaves and 2-3 seconds on main. Dalaran is almost as fast.
Everything has become way more smooth then it was before, no more stutters and fps-drops/spikes, no more invisible characters that has not finished loading yet etc. Dalaran has become like Goldshire, it doesnt even feel like the computer is working hard.

Shadow graphics were turned down two notches or so as fps was rather low with it on max.

Eloxy, I have no idea if it will be worth it for you, and since I have not tried a quad core I cant know if it worth it over a quadcore cpu. The performance is really good and this extreme intel gives much more value then the earlier ones (more bang for the bucks). I did a cinebench rendering test and it finished in almost half the time as a core i7-920 :)

[Sly]

Wuho! Finally received my computer =) This thing is amazing, performs way better then I thought it would.

The interesting stuff;
Dalaran CPU Usage (5boxing) - ~75% (stock speeds)
Dalaran Mem Usage (5boxing) - ~75% (4,5gb out of 6gb)
Loading times are near instant, ~1 sec on slaves and 2-3 seconds on main. Dalaran is almost as fast.
Everything has become way more smooth then it was before, no more stutters and fps-drops/spikes, no more invisible characters that has not finished loading yet etc. Dalaran has become like Goldshire, it doesnt even feel like the computer is working hard.

Shadow graphics were turned down two notches or so as fps was rather low with it on max.

Eloxy, I have no idea if it will be worth it for you, and since I have not tried a quad core I cant know if it worth it over a quadcore cpu. The performance is really good and this extreme intel gives much more value then the earlier ones (more bang for the bucks). I did a cinebench rendering test and it finished in almost half the time as a core i7-920 :)

Thanks for the feedback on your setup was great to get an insight into performance for the build you chose, as i am probably going for something similar.

although one question: you have the i7 980X six core? you say that its around twice as good as the i7 920 quad.. although the 980 is over 4 times the price.. yet you state that its much better value? or am i perceiving this wrong? i was intending getting the 920.. do you think it would struggle in dalaran quad boxing? or is it more dependant on the GPU?

Thanks again
Sly

[Owltoid]

Thanks for the feedback on your setup was great to get an insight into performance for the build you chose, as i am probably going for something similar.

although one question: you have the i7 980X six core? you say that its around twice as good as the i7 920 quad.. although the 980 is over 4 times the price.. yet you state that its much better value? or am i perceiving this wrong? i was intending getting the 920.. do you think it would struggle in dalaran quad boxing? or is it more dependant on the GPU?

Thanks again
Sly

A number of us have 920's for 5-boxing. I know I don't have any studder in Dalaran, or anywhere in the game really (except at the very end of some WG battles, which I'm convinced is server lag)

[Pycno]

Sly, The 980x gives much better value then earlier extreme branded cpu's but its still a complete waste for anyone wanting the most bang for their bucks. If this is a concern and you dont want to shell out on computers then dont buy one of these, when your computer becomes outdated you will not be able to afford an upgrade as you bought the extreme cpu =p

i7-920 will do just fine for five boxing but I would hold my breath and wait for the amd 6 core cpu. They could be worth waiting for and I think the prices on them will be about the same as the i7-920's

the 75% load thing in cities is with fps set at 60 on every toon (background and foreground), you can easily set the background fps to 30 or less and hardly notice the difference.

Ill see about adding pictures if I find the cable for my camera :)

[Pycno]

wouldn't mind pics after you have everything setup. always interested in how other boxers setup their systems. enjoy your nap btw

Pictures are up, and movie showing it actually working =P

Unboxing the hardware:
http://www.home.no/victork/pc/CIMG3662.jpg

Everything set up:
http://www.home.no/victork/pc/CIMG3678.jpg

Eyefinity 3x1 Landscape with bezel correction
http://www.home.no/victork/pc/CIMG3680.jpg


Few things to note:
- the motherboard supported the cpu out of the box (had bios 0703 installed)
- 6gb ram was enough for now, I will probably need to increase the amount for next expansion
- The graphics card did not fit in the case, I had to cut away some harddrive-holders to get space for the gfx.
- The Proluma Deluxe Triple LCD stand is awesome in all ways
- I should have gotten another gfx card as I can only use half of this cards resources for multiboxing and this creates a bottleneck I should have foreseen.

Youtube link to Eyefinity 3x1 Landscape test (one character):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksytbgxcPcM

Youtube link to vid showing the multibox setup, finally made after all the requests Ive gotten to do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7EzVy2F2q4

[Sajuuk]

Few things to note:
- the motherboard supported the cpu out of the box (had bios 0703 installed)
- 6gb ram was enough for now, I will probably need to increase the amount for next expansion
- The graphics card did not fit in the case, I had to cut away some harddrive-holders to get space for the gfx.
- The Proluma Deluxe Triple LCD stand is awesome in all ways
- I should have gotten another gfx card as I can only use half of this cards resources for multiboxing and this creates a bottleneck I should have foreseen.
I had no issues running five clients at eyefinity resolutions (with a 5850). Granted I did have to turn some settings (shadows obviously) down, but it ran like a champ with almost no issues.

Obligatory /point and /laugh at not having the GPU fit. :p Go get 12gb of RAM. I know with my old setup if I ran around dalaran enough I'd start going into my page file.

What monitors are you using/are you using an active DP adaptor? Did you have any issues with bezel compensation (I have some issues with my native DP monitors). Have you thought about running them in portrait mode?

[Noids]

980X definitely much better value than 965/975X was, 2 extra cores over what was basically a 920 with an unlocked muliplier.

Awesome looking setup mate and glad to see you are getting the performance you want from it.

I am quite disappointed in the way my setup performs to be honest. I have an overclocked 920 (3.6GHz) with a GTX295, 12GB ram and Raid 0 intel ssds. I run 5 clients on my single 2560x1600 monitor and in Dal my main hardly ever gets above 25-30fps. This is with all graphics maximised but shadows on the most basic setting. I added the optimisation settings Kate mentioned recently without seeing any real change in performance. I use ISBoxer and have all instances set to use 8 cores... Any ideas?

[Pycno]

Try disabling hyper threading and assign only 4 physical cores, some users report increased performance from doing this, and also remove the HDR patch if you downloaded and installed that.

Best solution is to just forget about Dalaran and accept the fact that all computers struggle there.

[Sajuuk]

I am quite disappointed in the way my setup performs to be honest. I have an overclocked 920 (3.6GHz) with a GTX295, 12GB ram and Raid 0 intel ssds. I run 5 clients on my single 2560x1600 monitor and in Dal my main hardly ever gets above 25-30fps. This is with all graphics maximised but shadows on the most basic setting. I added the optimisation settings Kate mentioned recently without seeing any real change in performance. I use ISBoxer and have all instances set to use 8 cores... Any ideas?

Split up graphics rendering between your GPU cores, they're there to be used!

Try disabling hyper threading and assign only 4 physical cores, some users report increased performance from doing this, and also remove the HDR patch if you downloaded and installed that.

Best solution is to just forget about Dalaran and accept the fact that all computers struggle there.

And what, gimp himself? He has six physical/twelve logical cores, man! I've done dalaran just fine with a 920 and a 9800GX2.

[Ualaa]

I get slightly better FPS, using all four physical cores on each warcraft client.
And not using the logical cores at all.

It wasn't really a huge difference, maybe an extra 5 FPS on average.

[Pycno]

I installed more ram and are running 12gigs at 7-8-7-20 1600mhz with xmp enabled and I havent run into any problems yet and it looks like the board supports it. Should have plenty of ram for Cataclysm now :)

Edit: Actually its unstable atm, will need to do some troubleshooting before I know if its compatible or not.

[Pycno]

From the looks of it I think my ram was actually overheating, it looks stable now compared to crashing within <1min earlier at much lower loads. The crash could be just a screen freeze, a reset or a never ending spam of "preparing to dump memory" messages on a blue screen. The ram-chips felt very warm to touch.

I opened up the pc case, set every fan in the computer to its max setting and aimed a room fan at the case as well to see if reduced temperature would help.

And it did, I logged in to Dalaran, hearthed to Grizzly Hills and ported back to Dalaran. Ram usage went up to 9,3gig ram. Ram usage is high as I am stresstesting and turned all gfx settings but shadows to max. But now Im wondering if 12gigs will be enough for Cataclysm lol..

This has been stable for 15 minutes now, looks like I just need to find a more practical way of keeping the chips cooler.
Ill try and test the ram at higher speeds also (running 1066mhz 9-9-9-24 now).

Update: Tested with faster settings and the same stress test as earlier, seems stable with the fastest xmp-profile (6x2gb sticks at 1600mhz 7-7-7-20). Im fairly sure my problem was caused by insufficient cooling, now I just need to find a more practical and permanent solution to cool the ram sticks and I will be ready for Cataclysm :D

http://www.home.no/victork/performance.jpg

[Pycno]

Stable at 1066mhz 8-8-8-24 timings with 6 sticks without drastic cooling measures. Ill run some benchmarks and see if there is a significant performance drop and try and get it stable at 1333mhz.

Most boards can support most ram when using only 2-3 slots but they are very picky when it comes to occupying all of the slots. Next time I buy something Ill get ram from the QVL :)

[Pycno]

I cant understand what has happened but the ram I upgraded with is now working perfectly fine now at 6x2gb 1600mhz with timings at 8-8-8-24 (slightly below rated).
No instability, its really weird that it is working now as I have not changed anything within the conputer and I tried every kind of bios setting earlier.

The problems I had before has changed my view on buying ram. I used to think one could match almost any ram and just run them together at the speed of the slowest stick I now believe its safer to just buy kits to be certain - sometimes different ram sticks will not work as well together.

Anyway, I currently have three monitors connected to a 5970 gpu. Due to limitations of this card I can only use half of its resources for wow, would it be possible for me to install an additional card (radeon 5850 or 5770) for use with innerspace multi gpu rendering (not crossfire in games)?

Is there any issues or downsides to 5 box with main running on one gpu and the slaves rendering from another? Slower window switching?

[Pycno]

I can answer some of my own questions now :P

I installed an additional 5850 and it surpasses all my expectations, worked perfectly. I already had ati drivers installed so I just inserted the card and booted up and was good to go.

With this new card installed I can:

- use my big screen without replugging any cables
- have all four displays enabled simultaneously
- run my main toon in WoW at almost the highest graphic settings (nerf shadow detail)
- let the 5850 render four WoW windows with slave toons
- let the 5970 render just my main toon
- render all five windows at the same resolution (1920x1200) for pixel perfect mouse broadcasting
- run slave toons with much higher background fps
- run slave toons with much higher graphic settings (used to be everything at absolute minimums)

- With Trifire enabled I am also able to play Dragon Age: Origins in Eyefinity, previously I didnt do this as I had to disable Frame Buffer Effects to get playable framerates and the game is unplayable without them

- Possible performance gains in other games
- Disable CrossfireX for whenever I want troublefree compability mode

GPU usage on my main is now around 45-50% with every setting maxed out except for shadows which is one notch below max. With shadows at max gpu usage rices to 95% right away and fps remains at 60 but will drop occasionally.

GPU usage on slaves is around 40% so I have plenty to go on for Cataclysm also.
Also overclocked the cpu to 4 Ghz and that cant hurt either.

This has been a huge upgrade and I feel like I have a brand new computer =)