New computer? Intel Core i7 4470K best option?

[Baldrick]

I'm thinking of replacing my 5 year old Intel Core i7 920 2.66, 16GB memory(DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz), 74GB SSD, ATI Radeon HD4800. It's my stationary computer for work, gaming and a few times as a htpc. It's incredible stable and complete silent.

Is the Intel Core i7 4770K the best buy right now? According to Passmark it's about twice as fast my old i7.

I would also like a new graphics card but I have no idea what to get.

And I need a new motherboard, new memory? and a bigger SSD would probably be good. I have a 1TB secondary HDD for storing other crap.

[Arnold_Layne]

The 4770K seems to be the sweet spot of i7's. Though I went with a 4820K I also upgraded from a i7 920 system. I went with the following:

Asus Sabertooth X79;
i7 4820K 3.7GHz;
Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO cpu cooler
32GB PNY 1866DDR3;
Asus GTX780-DC2OC-3GD5


For my boot drive I kept a OCZ Revodrive x2 100GB (25x4 raid 0) PCI-E SSD Card
For data I have 3.75 TB's of interal hard drives, a 2TB esata drive and a 4TB usb 3.0 drive
For video capture a Black Magic Intensity Pro PCI-E card
All this is installed a Coolermaster HAF-X full tower case.
The system has a total of 10 fans (2 on the MB, 2 on video card, one for CPU cooler, one in PSU, and four in the case) and it runs cool and quiet. CPU idles at 26C and under full load 51C (no overclock).


A_L

[smrpix]

Don't know if this is too helpful, but I tend to use the videoguys DIY recommendations as a starting point. (My own current build is a year and a half old and therefore hopelessly out of date.)

https://www.videoguys.com/Guide/C/DIY%2bSystems.aspx

[Baldrick]

My current shopping list

• Asus Z87-A
• Asus GeForce GTX760-DC2OC-2GD5 2GB
• Samsung 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256 256GB
• Intel Core i7 4770K 3,50GHz Socket 1150 Box

I don't do any video editing so I don't need any bigger hdds.

[jagabo]

If you live close to a Microcenter: http://www.microcenter.com/product/413248/Core_i7_4770K_35GHz_Socket_LGA_1150_Boxed_Processor

[Baldrick]

I haven't seen any Microcenters here in Sweden.... The chepeast store has it for $310 here (no sales tax).

[Arnold_Layne]

My current shopping list

• Asus Z87-A
• Asus GeForce GTX760-DC2OC-2GD5 2GB
• Samsung 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256 256GB
• Intel Core i7 4770K 3,50GHz Socket 1150 Box

I don't do any video editing so I don't need any bigger hdds.

Should be more than adequate for your needs. Be sure get a decent CPU cooler, as many intels are coming without a cooler stock these days. Also you may need to upgrade your power supply. I had to upgrade mine due to the video card needing more power and requiring a 6pin and an 8pin pci-e power connection.

[redwudz]

I'm a big fan of 120GB SSDs. I had problems with the smaller sizes. My present 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD seems about the perfect size. It stays at about 60% freespace. It's a good practice to keep a SSD not less than 50% free so the drive has room to move around the data to keep from burning out individual cells from overuse. I only use the SSD for boot and programs. I keep all other large temp files, etc., on my other drives.

If your new CPU produces a lot of heat and you like a very quiet PC, I would really consider water cooling. A setup like a Corsair H-50 or H-60 can cost about $60US and is completely quiet while giving excellent cooling performance. I went through a lot of good brands of CPU air coolers and I was never impressed with any of them.

Also, if the MB supports them, using PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) fans, both CPU and case, will allow the MB to regulate the fan speed and
the PC can be very quiet with light loads, but still respond quickly to CPU intensive tasks.

[deadrats]

I don't do any video editing so I don't need any bigger hdds.

you're kidding?!? the admin for a site dedicated to video editing doesn't do any video editing himself? that's too funny, LOL.

regardless, if you don't do any video editing or 3d rendering or use any apps that are well threaded then you should consider saving a few bucks and going with the 4670k, same thing as a 4770k only no HT and you can probably save about $50.

i don't see you mentioning ram anywhere but you should choose some ram based on timings and not clock speed, as a general rule of thumb you'll see better performance from tighter timings than faster ram speed.

i would skip a new video card at the moment. nvidia is going to be releasing the new geforce's in february or march of 2014 and it's been confirmed that these new cards will feature fully programmable "denver" ARM cores in addition to the standard cuda cores; obviously there won't be any software that leverages these cores at launch but such a card should have plenty of life as programmers start taking advantage of the hybrid nature of the card.

i would also skip the ssd. i know this is blasphemy in many circles but i would pick up a nice 250gb or 500gb 10k rpm hdd for the same price as a ssd. i bought an 128gb ssd and use it as my C drive and i have noticed that while it worked like gang busters when it was new and had nothing other than the OS installed, as the drive got filled up there was a definite slow down. i personally won't be picking up another ssd for a long time.

another option to consider, which may be more economical, is to see if your current motherboard will support one of the older intel hexa-core cpu's and then see if there's any local computer shows or maybe a place on the net where you can buy a system pull, basically a cpu pulled from a working system and sold in part to finance an upgrade.

sometimes you get lucky and you can get a really good deal on what was once a top of the line cpu.

[Baldrick]

Thanks. I might wait with the graphics card.


I have used an intel SSD for 5 years and I haven't noticed any slow down. And it's always filled up...

And no, I have never really done any video editing or much video conversion at all the last 10 years now.

[gonca]

If you don't do any video editing or serious gaming then consider going from a GTX760 to a 660 or even a 560

[sum_guy]

Baldrick, Just curious, if you aren't editing vid, what do you do that requires such high end hardware? gaming?

[Baldrick]

Baldrick, Just curious, if you aren't editing vid, what do you do that requires such high end hardware? gaming?

Less delay in everything I do....especially programming for android with 3636 emulators running and compiling. The graphics might be a bit overkill but it's fun to be able to try latest games.

My stationary computer also works as a video streaming server for two dvb-boxes. So my family can watch live sports everywhere.

And it's a very cheap upgrade compared when I had to buy macbook pro just to be able to code for ios.

And it's fun.

Okey?

[Baldrick]

If you don't do any video editing or serious gaming then consider going from a GTX760 to a 660 or even a 560

Thanks. I will get a Asus GeForce GTX660-DC2-2GD5 instead. Much cheaper and still good enough for gaming.

[gonca]

Baldrick, Just curious, if you aren't editing vid, what do you do that requires such high end hardware? gaming?

Less delay in everything I do....especially programming for android with 3636 emulators running and compiling. The graphics might be a bit overkill but it's fun to be able to try latest games.

My stationary computer also works as a video streaming server for two dvb-boxes. So my family can watch live sports everywhere.

And it's a very cheap upgrade compared when I had to buy macbook pro just to be able to code for ios.

And it's fun.

Okey?

You forgot the main reasons >> because you can -- because you want

[Baldrick]

I'm not sure if I want. I'm worried that I will build one that randomly crashes...

[gonca]

Random crashes occur because of hardware instability, i.e. unstable OC or flaky components, or buggy software.
Start the hardware at stock settings to test it and if any is questionable, RMA it.

[Chopmeister]

That's almost identical to the system I am about to acquire to replace my ancient Dual Core e6850 desktop. Only differences of note are:
- I'm going with 16GB of ram not 32GB
- I do video edit/re-encode - so I'm thinking of adding a 1TB WD Caviare Black (as a working drive) and a 3TB WD Green (for file storage), and
- I will run with a (slightly) different video card.

Did vaguely contemplate keeping the SSD as a boot/program drive and replacing the Black and Green drives with a RAID controller and 4x2TB WD Reds in RAID5. Don't think I will do that though.

[hello_hello]

I'm big on running drives in a RAID configuration, although I only use RAID-0. I think it's fine for general use in a PC. It mightn't offer any redundancy but hard drives are pretty reliable these days. This PC has two 320GB drives running as one RAID-0 volume and two 500GB drives running as another. They're around 6 years old and still working fine. My other PC was given an upgrade a little while ago (those drives were at least 5 years old before one of them started acting up). It has four 1TB drives running as two RAID-0 volumes. As long as you still backup important files to another location, a failed drive isn't any more devastating in a RAID-0 configuration than it would be for a single drive.

I've never run a SSD myself. I create a small partition on one of the RAID volumes and install Windows and programs on it. It's plenty fast enough for me. The time it takes for Windows to boot or for a program to open isn't all that important anyway, because I don't spend much time waiting for that sort of thing. The time it takes to work with large files and/or move them around matters more to me.

It's dependant on how full the drives are, but as an example, when muxing files with MKVMergeGUI, if a single drive takes two minutes to remux a particular file, a dual drive RAID-0 volume should do it in one minute. When there's two RAID-0 volumes and one of them contains the source file while the output is being written to the other, the same job would take about 30 seconds. Once I went RAID years ago, there was no way I could ever go back.