New PC Build: now UPDATED with overclocking performance
Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 4:35 pm
Hi everyone,
Recently I decided to build a whole new PC from scratch to use as the core of my station. I had three goals:
a) It has to be very, very fast, as my old PC is no slouch
b) It has to be very quiet
c) It has to cost less than $1500.
To the first point, my old PC is pretty good: a Dell Precision T5500 workstation upgraded to 36GB of RAM, 250GB SSD and dual w5590 Xeon processors which provide a total of 8 hyperthreaded cores (16 threads) at 3.33GHz. The video system is an older Radeon R7 260X, not a gaming card, but more than adequate to run my triple monitor setup.
In the speed/cost department it was going to be hard to keep under budget if I wanted to stay with a lot of cores. I decided to go with an i7-7700K. That pretty much represents a knee in the processor performance curve, and with a CPUMark rating in excess of 12,000 it was twice as fast as a single w5590, so it puts me in the same ballpark as my old dual Xeon machine. Less cores, to be sure, but a much more modern CPU architecture that is amenable to overclocking.
The motherboard was a tough decision. The MSI boards look like they have a more capable BIOS, but were more expensive than the EVGA boards. Both were good for potential overclocking. I went with the less expensive EVGA Z270FTW. It has dual GiGE, lots of USB 3.x and a whole host of other nice features. This is one area I'm not sure I made the right decision, but I'll never know unless I buy an MSI motherboard!
I had wanted to upgrade to a 500GB SSD, and a 1TB hard drive for ancillary storage. However, when I saw that the EVGA motherboard had M.2 support, I knew I had to blow some money on a blazingly fast M.2 SSD. Alas, budget-wise that brought me back down to a 250GB SSD, and I threw in an old Seagate 500GB SATA drive I already had for ancillary storage. The M.2 SSD that I used is the very fast Samsung EVO 960.
The RAM I was able to get used from a friend. Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200MHz, 16GB total. If I had had to buy the RAM, I would have cheaped out on the M.2 SSD and also the RAM, probably going with something slower, so that was a lucky find. The EVGA board does support up to 3600MHz RAM, BTW.
To keep things quiet, and to support future overclocking efforts, I wanted liquid cooling for the CPU. I found a refurbished Corsair H115i cooler at Newegg for short money, so that was an easy decision.
For video I again wanted something that would run 3 Displayport monitors, be reasonably fast but not necessarily an all out gaming machine, and be liquid cooled so that it would be nearly silent. I also wanted to get back to having an Nvidia chipset so that I could support CUDA processing in the future. I found a used EVGA 1070 Hybrid on eBay and snapped that right up. It's a pretty fast machine, but a real gamer would be sneering at it and asking why I hadn't got a 1080!
For the power supply I splurged again and bought a near top of the line, EVGA Supernova 850, fully modular power supply. As it turns out, I probably shouldn't have spent that money, as I ultimately went over my cost target by about $100 with a few odds and ends I did not budget for. But it is a really great supply. At 850W it'll loaf along and almost never spin its fan, and it came with every cable I needed.
The case is pretty amazing. I've never had a modern PC case before. I chose the Corsair 600Q because it is generally considered one of the quietest cases on the planet, and it would easily accept all of the liquid cooling provisions. It was a little more expensive than a non-acoustically insulated case. The Phanteks cases are nice and a little less expensive, albeit not as quiet.
Where I went over budget is that I needed a slew of little things: a real serial port card, a USB 3.0 header, an internal USB hub (from NZXT) so I could control the CPU cooler (it is USB controlled), and of course a Win10Pro license. I got all that for about $100 total, and that pushed me almost exactly to $1600.
Performance has been good so far:
- Passmark score of almost 7000. With overclocking I should be higher. That's a fast machine!
- VAC audio is, finally, almost drop-out free. It does take some fussing with the settings. I could not achieve this on my old computer.
- The computer is, overall, much faster. It boots in only a few seconds. Every program launches twice as fast. Video is much smoother.
- It is nearly silent. My average CPU load is around 30% with everything running (PowerSDR, Pro Tools, OBS streaming, Chrome, etc.). The fans stay around 30% and CPU temp's stay in the 35C range. I could probably turn the fans down further. I can control all of this and customize fan curves from the desktop using the Corsair Link and EVGA Precision applications.
The only slight surprise is my CPU loading has not gone down compared to the dual Xeons. As I wrote above, perhaps not a surprise, since the CPUmark of the 7700 is twice that of a single Xeon.
The one disappointment is that the higher performing NIC on the motherboard, the "Killer" NIC, will not work with PowerSDR and the radio. This is a real mystery and one I intend to further investigate. For now I'm using the Intel NIC.
I have included some photos below.
73!
Scott
Out with the old and in with the new, and the new is HUGE!
Lots of space in these new cases!
Putting it all to work (Photo taken during last week's digital net.)
Recently I decided to build a whole new PC from scratch to use as the core of my station. I had three goals:
a) It has to be very, very fast, as my old PC is no slouch
b) It has to be very quiet
c) It has to cost less than $1500.
To the first point, my old PC is pretty good: a Dell Precision T5500 workstation upgraded to 36GB of RAM, 250GB SSD and dual w5590 Xeon processors which provide a total of 8 hyperthreaded cores (16 threads) at 3.33GHz. The video system is an older Radeon R7 260X, not a gaming card, but more than adequate to run my triple monitor setup.
In the speed/cost department it was going to be hard to keep under budget if I wanted to stay with a lot of cores. I decided to go with an i7-7700K. That pretty much represents a knee in the processor performance curve, and with a CPUMark rating in excess of 12,000 it was twice as fast as a single w5590, so it puts me in the same ballpark as my old dual Xeon machine. Less cores, to be sure, but a much more modern CPU architecture that is amenable to overclocking.
The motherboard was a tough decision. The MSI boards look like they have a more capable BIOS, but were more expensive than the EVGA boards. Both were good for potential overclocking. I went with the less expensive EVGA Z270FTW. It has dual GiGE, lots of USB 3.x and a whole host of other nice features. This is one area I'm not sure I made the right decision, but I'll never know unless I buy an MSI motherboard!
I had wanted to upgrade to a 500GB SSD, and a 1TB hard drive for ancillary storage. However, when I saw that the EVGA motherboard had M.2 support, I knew I had to blow some money on a blazingly fast M.2 SSD. Alas, budget-wise that brought me back down to a 250GB SSD, and I threw in an old Seagate 500GB SATA drive I already had for ancillary storage. The M.2 SSD that I used is the very fast Samsung EVO 960.
The RAM I was able to get used from a friend. Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200MHz, 16GB total. If I had had to buy the RAM, I would have cheaped out on the M.2 SSD and also the RAM, probably going with something slower, so that was a lucky find. The EVGA board does support up to 3600MHz RAM, BTW.
To keep things quiet, and to support future overclocking efforts, I wanted liquid cooling for the CPU. I found a refurbished Corsair H115i cooler at Newegg for short money, so that was an easy decision.
For video I again wanted something that would run 3 Displayport monitors, be reasonably fast but not necessarily an all out gaming machine, and be liquid cooled so that it would be nearly silent. I also wanted to get back to having an Nvidia chipset so that I could support CUDA processing in the future. I found a used EVGA 1070 Hybrid on eBay and snapped that right up. It's a pretty fast machine, but a real gamer would be sneering at it and asking why I hadn't got a 1080!
For the power supply I splurged again and bought a near top of the line, EVGA Supernova 850, fully modular power supply. As it turns out, I probably shouldn't have spent that money, as I ultimately went over my cost target by about $100 with a few odds and ends I did not budget for. But it is a really great supply. At 850W it'll loaf along and almost never spin its fan, and it came with every cable I needed.
The case is pretty amazing. I've never had a modern PC case before. I chose the Corsair 600Q because it is generally considered one of the quietest cases on the planet, and it would easily accept all of the liquid cooling provisions. It was a little more expensive than a non-acoustically insulated case. The Phanteks cases are nice and a little less expensive, albeit not as quiet.
Where I went over budget is that I needed a slew of little things: a real serial port card, a USB 3.0 header, an internal USB hub (from NZXT) so I could control the CPU cooler (it is USB controlled), and of course a Win10Pro license. I got all that for about $100 total, and that pushed me almost exactly to $1600.
Performance has been good so far:
- Passmark score of almost 7000. With overclocking I should be higher. That's a fast machine!
- VAC audio is, finally, almost drop-out free. It does take some fussing with the settings. I could not achieve this on my old computer.
- The computer is, overall, much faster. It boots in only a few seconds. Every program launches twice as fast. Video is much smoother.
- It is nearly silent. My average CPU load is around 30% with everything running (PowerSDR, Pro Tools, OBS streaming, Chrome, etc.). The fans stay around 30% and CPU temp's stay in the 35C range. I could probably turn the fans down further. I can control all of this and customize fan curves from the desktop using the Corsair Link and EVGA Precision applications.
The only slight surprise is my CPU loading has not gone down compared to the dual Xeons. As I wrote above, perhaps not a surprise, since the CPUmark of the 7700 is twice that of a single Xeon.
The one disappointment is that the higher performing NIC on the motherboard, the "Killer" NIC, will not work with PowerSDR and the radio. This is a real mystery and one I intend to further investigate. For now I'm using the Intel NIC.
I have included some photos below.
73!
Scott
Out with the old and in with the new, and the new is HUGE!
Lots of space in these new cases!
Putting it all to work (Photo taken during last week's digital net.)