PC upgrade time: Does this seem like a good way to go?

[beavereater]

Currently:

Windows 7 64bit

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD5
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 560
8GB RAM
Pioneer BR-RW
2 x 1TB SATA drives
1 x 250GB SATA drive

Syncmaster 245bPlus Monitor (Horrible monitor...old)

And what I was thinking of getting:

Monitor: Dell U2713H (I do a lot of photo editing and this seemed like the best bang for buck)

Tower: CoolerMaster CM Storm Stryker Tower (My current tower is broken and doesn't have good circulation of air. It's cold in Japan, but I need to preparing for the heat and humidity that is coming)

SSD Drive: OCZ SSD OCZ Vertex4 2.5" 256GB Indilinx (Again, best bang for buck as priced in Japan, but I'm open to suggestions. I meant to get a SSD drive the last time but didn't)

CPU: Intel CPU Core i7 3770K 3.5GHz 8M LGA1155 Ivy Bridge BX80637I73770K (Making the switch to Intel, the first time I will ever actually be personally buying Intel.)

Motherboard: ASUSTek Intel Socket 1155 DDR3 ATX Motherboard P8Z77-V DELUXE (Since I'm getting a new CPU this seems like the 'it' board to get. Again, I'm open to suggestions here)

Graphics Card: GIGABYTE GeForce GTX660 PCI-E 2GB WINDFORCE2X GV-N660OC-2GD (I want the 670 or 680 but in trying to keep costs down a bit, I decided on the 660 overclocked. I'd imagine it would stomp all over my current card anyways. This is for video editing and gaming mostly)

PSU: Owltech 【80PLUS PLATINUM】 860W (I'm not sure what the difference between bronze, silver, gold and platinum are, I'm going to check today. This unit sells for about 220 USD. Overkill? Just right? Any better choices?)

The only other thing on my list is RAM. I still have the RAM in my current machine. I'm not sure if that can be moved into my newer machine and if I can just get more of the same RAM. I haven't checked prices but I'm sure I can get it cheap. The question is, how much will RAM improve my performance in video rendering and gaming. Would the extra money be worth putting it towards a better CPU or graphics card?)

All of the above comes to about 2000USD. I have my other HDD's, peripherals etc. So, if anyone has a better solution for an upgrade, I'm all ears!

[usually_quiet]

I haven't had a close look at everything on your list but it looks fairly impressive.

I like the white case. It is nice to see a case that isn't all black for a change. It seems well-designed, but I saw a few complaints from consumers who reviewed the chassis that the painted and plastic parts on the unit they received were different shades of white, in case you are fussy about that sort of thing.

[jman98]

I've had a Crucial 256 GB SSD that cost me over $500 when I bought it about 2 years ago and I still think it was one of the best decisions I ever made on computer hardware. I very strongly encourage you to get an SSD too now that prices have dropped.

MUST you buy Intel? If everybody did that, AMD would be dead. Seriously, do consider that AMD already has a hard enough time of it and if they lose people like you and me who only bought AMD in the past, they are doomed. Do you really want to live in an Intel only world? Or an Intel and low horsepower ARM world? I guess ARM would fill the void if AMD died, but it would be brutal for those of us who really want an alternative to Intel. Is there really no way to meet your needs via AMD?

I had a pretty negative experience trying to use ASUS motherboards 2 years ago and I switched to Gigabyte and never looked back. I think Asus may be OK for Intel CPUs, but man, their AMD CPU motherboards really could be a lot better.

I'm not a gamer, but my general experience is that the very best thing you can do if you want "faster" is to get the best CPU possible. Trying to fix a speed problem via a graphics card or RAM is a bit of a fool's errand in my opinion. It's maybe a bit like deciding to lose weight so that your fuel inefficient car will have less of you to carry and expecting to save money on fuel that way rather than buying a more fuel efficient car to begin with.

I don't know that you should really let gaming dictate you spending all that money for a new PC, but it's your life. Just consider that in a couple of more years the PC you buy now won't be good enough any more for some games. Do you REALLY want game manufacturers to dictate your life where you HAVE to buy a new PC every 2 years to keep up? That's not how I'd want to live, but it's your decision here. At what point will you finally have enough?

[Island_Dweller]

A CPU Cooler is essential. The stock coolers, while not bad, are not good enough if you stress the CPU hard enough with gaming, heavy photoshopping or video encoding. If you're going to spend $1000 on a Dell U2713H, you should take a look at the Eizo monitors, they might be worth it for photo editing.
And if you're getting an Asus motherboard, it might be maybe more prudent to choose a GTX 660 from Asus.

[beavereater]

@usually_quiet

I'm not fussy about the color (Although my wife will be). The main reason for the tower is the cooling, the second reason is the hot-swap deck for SSD drives. Something I think I'll use once I get my hands on a Black Magic Cinema Camera.


@jman98

I don't have to go Intel, I'm just cruising along the internet looking for what would be the crucial part for my Adobe products. It seems the CPU is what is most important. Staying AMD would be great if I could stay with the same motherboard...and thus just upgrade the RAM.

The graphics card is for gaming, and gaming is NOT my life but when I do game I want to NOT worry about the settings.

@Island_Dweller

What CPU cooler would you recommend? The Dell monitor is only 650USD here in Japan. The Eizo monitors start at about 900USD.

ETA: If I stayed with my current motherboard, what would be a great AMD CPU to get?

[Island_Dweller]

If you are willing to spend a little extra, get the Antec Kühler H2O 920 while it's still in stock. A review here. There are also a couple good ones from Cooler Master. Water cooled is obviously the way to go if you can afford it. Be sure to look at their dimensions and determine which will fit inside your Cooler Master Tower.

[hello_hello]

Could I point out the next generation of Intel CPUs are only about three months away? The current CPU prices may have dropped a little in anticipation (I haven't looked) but from the reading I've done recently it seems the 4770k will be at least 10% faster than the 3770k at the same clock speed and the graphics up to twice the speed.

I've been planning to upgrade this PC for quite a while but I've procrastinated for so long that a few more months won't make too much difference.

It probably doesn't matter, but the PSU is potentially a little bit of overkill. Here's what I've been running off a 650w Antec PSU for the last few years:

motherboard and quadcore CPU
4GB RAM
2x 8600GT video cards
2 x 500GB hard drives
2 x 320GB hard drives
1 x 2TB hard drive
3 x DVD burners
1 x Bluray burner
1 x PCI-e SATA card
1 x PCI-e USB3 card
1 x TV tuner/capture card

As a comparison, Nvidia recommend a minimum 350w power supply for the 8600GT, or a 450w PSU with two 8600GT cards running in SLI mode (I've been running mine as 2 separate cards). The recommended minimum PSU for a GTX 560 is also 450w.

And I don't know if you were planning on running any of the drives in RAID mode, but maybe have a look at this thread to read my ravings about never running a PC with single hard drives again. Especially when moving large files around a lot.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/354336-WD-Green-Drives-good-for-capture-or-not?p=22...=1#post2226775
As a quick comparison, I just copied a folder with 7.38GB worth of files from one RAID volume to another. Each of my RAID volumes consist of two older drives which are a bit slow by today's standards. I then copied the same folder to the fastest single hard drive I own, a 1TB WD Black drive. Each time I copied the folder of files to/from a small partition at the beginning of each drive, so I know the fastest part of the drives were being used each time.

Raid-0 to RAID-0: 55 seconds.
RAID-0 to WD Black: 1 minute, 40 seconds.

The benefits of RAID-0 is reduced when doing a lot of random reading and writing as they still have the same average access time as a single hard drive, but they're still faster. As a result I've never bothered with a SSD drive. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd probably only use one as the drive for installing Windows and programs, and as I only reboot the PC a couple of times per week and program opening isn't particularly slow, I'm not sure if the benefit is worth the cost. Maybe a SSD drive user can tell me what I'm missing out on.

[Constant Gardener]

I've been playing with a 3770K, a 7870 video card, several drives, and 16 GB DDR3; according to a Watts Up power meter, it rarely pulls 200 watts. Right now it is running eight instances of the World Grid project, using 110 watts. The 600 watt power supply is loafing.

A small Zalman CNPS8000B heat sink keeps it cool and quiet. It's more than adequate, but overclockers would want more.

[fritzi93]

The CPU you have now isn't all that shabby. Dunno about gaming, but well-multithreaded video encoding speeds are still quite respectable. May I ask why you want to replace it? Or are you just itching to build a new computer?

You could get an aftermarket cooler and overclock it. Relatively easy to do on that CPU, especially if it's a Black Edition.

Otherwise, I'd consider waiting for Intel's next gen, as suggested.

Good luck.

[usually_quiet]

ETA: If I stayed with my current motherboard, what would be a great AMD CPU to get?

If you updated the BIOS to version F10, you could stay with your current motherboard and upgrade to an AMD FX-8350 Piledriver CPU.

I am an AMD supporter as well, but I'll admit that the i7-3770K beats the FX-8350 in a lot of benchmark tests, runs cooler, and is more energy-efficient, if you are willing to pay for the privilege of owning one. The FX-8350 is a little better than an i7-3770K at some video encoding tasks and somewhat worse than an i7-3770K at others, according to the benchmarks I saw, but the FX-8350 is definitely less capable than Intel's i5-3570K or i7-3770K for gaming.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-amd-fx8350-fx8320-fx6300-and-fx4300-tested
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328.html

[yoda313]

The question is, how much will RAM improve my performance in video rendering and gaming.

It has been my understanding that ram won't improve video rendering UNLESS it is for CUDA enhanced encoding OR you are dealing with NLE video editors that eat up ram for doing fancy edits and the like.

Suffice it to say ram won't really impact the encoding itself unless like I said its cuda based.

What it will help with is multitasking while encoding if your into that sort of thing.

Gaming on the other hand I'm sure more ram never hurts but the quality of the video card is more important than top ram numbers (again the video card can be important for encoding via cuda again).

As for gaming - are you a tried and true pc gamer? If you are on the fence you might wait and check out the final specs for the ps4 and the next xbox once they are finalized and released. You may be tempted to move that direction. Just a thought.

[beavereater]

OK, so I got the CoolMaster Trooper Case (cheaper and basically the same) but I have a problem.

If you go here, you can see the setup for the fans and the fan controller.

http://forum.coolermaster.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=15339&p=112038&hilit=trooper#p112038

The NOOB problem Im facing is that I cant get the last connection to connect to the PSU. Ive got a male plug and every other plug is also male. Does this mean I should buy a male to female to 4 pin straight to PSU kind of plug or am I in need of something else? Could I get a connection that would connect direct to the sys-fan on the mono?

Help....

[beavereater]

This is it.

[deadrats]

just to throw some fuel to the fire, i did a similar upgrade not to long ago, going from a system powered by a X6 1045t to a 3770k and the i7 is easily twice as fast in video encoding as the X6, so all other things being equal i like the upgrade path you chose.

but...all other things are never equal, the motherboard you currently have is a pretty good board and as was already pointed out should support an FX8350; in your case you might be better off simply flashing your motherboards bios and upgrading to an FX8320, which can be had for as little as $140:

http://microcenter.com/product/401796/FX_8320_Black_Edition_35GHz_AM3_Boxed_Processor

this would give you performance probably 20% or so slower than going with an 3770k, but you end up saving a load of cash in the process, money you could put into a better video card for instance or a nicer monitor.

i don't know that i would spend lots of cash in march to build a new system when in june/july intel is set to release haswell, and i'm assuming by fall we should have amd's steamroller, which hopefully won't be a steaming back of rollers.

[usually_quiet]

OK, so I got the CoolMaster Trooper Case (cheaper and basically the same) but I have a problem.

If you go here, you can see the setup for the fans and the fan controller.

http://forum.coolermaster.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=15339&p=112038&hilit=trooper#p112038

The NOOB problem Im facing is that I cant get the last connection to connect to the PSU. Ive got a male plug and every other plug is also male. Does this mean I should buy a male to female to 4 pin straight to PSU kind of plug or am I in need of something else? Could I get a connection that would connect direct to the sys-fan on the mono?

Help....

If your PSU only has male molex connections then you would need a female to female molex cable, adapter/coupler to connect the fan controller to the PSU. I think using the fan controller is a better idea than using the system fan connection to control the fans. There are 5 fans to power, and I have only seen the system fan connection on the motherboard used to run one or two fans. I think there must be an upper limit, but I don't know what that is.

[hello_hello]

deadrats,
Any "molex" plugs coming from the PSU should be female and therefore would connect directly to the plug in your pic. They should look like the last plug shown in this picture:



I'm not sure I've ever seen a PSU which has male molex connectors. They'd potentially be dangerous, give it'd be easy to touch the pins while the PSU is active. It'd be a bit like having male plugs on each end of a mains power cord.

I think using the fan controller is a better idea than using the system fan connection to control the fans. There are 5 fans to power, and I have only seen the system fan connection on the motherboard used to run one or two fans. I think there must be an upper limit, but I don't know what that is.

Many motherboards have multiple fan headers.

[usually_quiet]

I think using the fan controller is a better idea than using the system fan connection to control the fans. There are 5 fans to power, and I have only seen the system fan connection on the motherboard used to run one or two fans. I think there must be an upper limit, but I don't know what that is.

Many motherboards have multiple fan headers.

I didn't look to see how many the OP's motherboard has, but I haven't seen a lot of ATX boards with three system fan headers. Most often there are two, which means one of them will be running 3 fans.

[hello_hello]

My MB has 2x system fan headers and 1 x NB fan header. I use the NB fan header for one of the rear fans myself simply because it's right next to the fan.
You might also find if a MB has more than one system fan header, they'll be different voltages. One of mine is 12v while the other is 5v, so if you want all the fans running at the same speed you'd need to run them off one header. In my case the NB fan header is also 12v.

My case in an "older" design. Instead of having one or two larger fans in the front it can take up to four 80mm fans and another pair at the rear. I've only got two installed in the front, but if I had four they'd all be running off the same fan header. Fans only use a couple of watts of power. My theory would be, if it's possible to exceed the load limit of a single fan header if only one was used to run every fan, it'd probably be mentioned in the MB's manual, but I don't think I've ever seen a "number of fans per header" limit mentioned.

Because no two fans would draw the same amount of current, it'd depend on the fans being used as to how many you could run off a single header before hitting any limit anyway. As voltage*amps=watts, a 0.16A, 12v fan would use 1.92w, whereas a 0.32A fan would use 3.84 watts, so you'd be able to connect two 0.16A fans for every 0.32A fan to the same header.
Looking at the three fans on this page for example, they use 0.64w, 1.19w and 2.73w (at 12v) respectively, so it varies quiet a bit from fan to fan. Even if you ran ten 2.73w fans off the same header, you'd still only be using 27.3 watts.

[usually_quiet]

Getting back to the OP's original question, which was "Could I get a connection that would connect direct to the sys-fan on the mobo?"

If the OP wants to connect the fans themselves to the motherboard's system fan headers, I guess that is doable. It appears the motherboards system fan headers have enough power to run 5 fans. There are one-to-two system fan header splitters available. They could probably be chained together to power the fans, if it is necessary to power more than two fans from one header. The connection diagram for the controller shows separate 2-pin power connectors for the LED lights on the fans. I'm not sure how to connect the LED lights on the fan. I never buy fans with LED lights.

..but if the OP wanted an adapter to connect the system fan header to the fan controller, I could not find anything that would electrically connect to the three molex pins that supply power to the controller. Female fan header to female molex adapters only electrically connect two pins on each side. Which makes sense, because other pins on a fan header aren't used for power.

I would probably want to use the fan controller regardless, since it is included with the case. I have only ever seen female molex connections on a PSU, and I don't know why the OP's PSU is different. Maybe the connections are both the right gender but the male connection to the fan controller has a manufacturing defect so it doesn't mate properly with the PSU's connectors.

[hello_hello]

..but if the OP wanted an adapter to connect the system fan header to the fan controller, I could not find anything that would electrically connect to the three molex pins that supply power to the controller. Female fan header to female molex adapters only electrically connect two pins on each side. Which makes sense, because other pins on a fan header aren't used for power.

I've got a bunch of adaptors which have a fan header connector with a single wire for monitoring fan speed, which then connects to a "male" fan header to which you can connect a fan, but as you said the "male" fan connector only has two wires running from it to the molex connector, as it only supplies power. But as you got me thinking about that, it caused me to remember this. The molex connectors on those fan adaptors are both male and female so you can piggyback them. I wonder if the OP's molex connector is the same but he hasn't noticed? I couldn't find a single picture to explain what I mean, so two will have to do. It does appear the OP's pic shows the wires coming off the back of the connector, so it didn't occur to me until now that maybe the picture is a little deceiving.

The OP's pic shows a molex connector which looks like this:



But maybe if he was to turn it around, it'd look like this??



The connector in the OP's pic doesn't look like it's got a thin end and a fat end so it probably isn't a piggyback plug, but I guess it can't hurt to ask.....

[beavereater]

OK...an update.

Basically, the case didn't come with all the wires necessary. I'm not sure if the connectors should have come with my motherboard or my PSU but I needed an adapter to make sure I got power running to my fan controller.

After looking at the Coolmaster site, I connected all the fans to the controller. Then, I was left with a 4 pin molex (Male) but had nothing to plug it into. With all my wires I was trying to figure out if I wired something wrong. Turns out I didn't.

I bought a Sata to 4 pin molex adapter so that the power cables for my SATA drives could be used to power the fan controller via the adapter. Worked out fine and now I have my machine up and running. The sweet sound of "power" running through.