vickybat
I am the night...I am...
Those days are gone mate when single gpu's were considered de-facto for stability reasons. No such issues exists nowadays. Even the power envelope of two high end cards match that of a single highest end card which was impossible before. There's also no need to download game profiles manually as they are auto updated.
In reality there are non-existing cons for a multigpu setup. Evolution has set things just right.
Both power consumption and heat are in check like never before. This will only get better in future iterations increasing more and more enthusiasts to switch to value oriented multi-gpu setups to get maximum performance at similar prices of a highest end card.
In reality there are non-existing cons for a multigpu setup. Evolution has set things just right.
Both power consumption and heat are in check like never before. This will only get better in future iterations increasing more and more enthusiasts to switch to value oriented multi-gpu setups to get maximum performance at similar prices of a highest end card.
OP
gameranand
Living to Play
Ok here goes my suggestion:
This would be my choice of a sub- 130k ultimate gaming pc targeted for enthusiast students who can game at the highest ever settings along with programming as per their curriculum.
Type Name Price Processor i5 3570k 13.5k Motherboard Asus Maximus V Gene 16k Ram Gskill RipjawsX 8GB RAM F3-14900CL10S-8GBXL 2.9k Hard Drive WD 2 TB Desktop Internal Hard Drive Black Edition (WD2002FAEX) 10.5k GPU GIGABYTE GRAPHIC CARD GTX 660 TI 2GB DDR5 X 2 (SLI) 39.9K PSU Corsair HX850 10.5K Cabinet Cooler Master HAF 922 7.6k Cpu Cooler Noctua NH-D14 5k Keyboard Razer Lycosa 4k Mouse Razer Deathadder 2.3k UPS APC Back-UPS 1100VA (BR1100CI-IN) 5.1k Optical Drive ASUS DRW-24B3ST SATA 1.2k Headphones Razer Megaladon 9k Total 127.5k
Now i have striked off the 2600k/2700k/3770k based hyperthreaded cpu's coz they are overkill for a gaming cpu. Besides the 3570k is only non-hyperthreaded and lose out a little bit in multithreaded tasks like video encoding but its performance is still considered brilliant. Its an allrounded processor and also overclocks great. If op wants, he can still go for that 2600k.
Secondly, i have suggested an ROG board but with a m-atx form factor. This board has all the top-grade components and a two-way sli or crossfire is easily possible considering the well spaced out pci-e slots. The price is really sweet making it hard to ignore. If the form factor bugs you, then you can consider the maximus V board.
Since this is a gaming only rig ( keeping aside programming and other stuff as they are easily possible) i chose sli coz of the reasons described previously. Two gtx 660-ti's in sli delivers kickass performance beating any single gpu out there fair and square. The level of settings these cards allow is simply not possible in a single gpu. They even cover surround gaming easily delivering fluidic gameplay over a plethora of titles. It didn't receive a gold award from hardocp for nothing. It deserved every bit of it.
2xgtx 660-ti(sli) >> 7970/680 (This is as simplistic as it gets)
For a 130k rig, multigpu demands attention coz this is what its made for. Single gpu setups does not cut here coz it delivers relatively inferior image quality ( lower AA settings and other). Its totally hassle free as well.
Now coming to cpu cooler, since gameranand lives in a hot place , the nh-d14 fits the bill just fine. Its a terrific cooler and i don't have to say more about its cooling performance. A legendary cooler and is in a totally different league from a hyper212 plus/evo.
Cabinet is personal choice and i found haf 922 to be just fine for this rig considering the value in it. Besides if something flashy is required, then op should take a look at this:
COOLER MASTER CABINET CM STROM STRYKER
Finally, the headset is a beast. Razer megaladon offers 7.1 channel virtual surround and is more than ideal for gaming and movies.
This is strictly for gamers like gameraanand.
@ gameraanand
Buddy, i have given all the explanation required. Now its upto you to decide what you need. I have given links to most of the components so that it will be easier for you to order. For example motherboard and headset are available in flipkart and offer free shipping as well. The rest are from md computers. Contact cilus and he can help you out. Besides, cilus also has that razer megalaon headset. Ask him about its performance. This is the best that i could dig and they fit your requirements just fine. You can post whatever doubts you have. Now lets wait for cilus's config.
1. I guess I'll stick to 2600K for future proofing.
2. Yeah m-ATX form does bother me sometimes and I prefer an ATX board.
3. Don't know much about multi-GPU so can't comment on it but I'll take that into consideration and will buy which will be suggested by most.
4. I am not going to overclock very soon so investing in that costlier Cooler is not a good thing I guess. Like I said I can always upgrade it and the previous one in my current PC.
5. Is Lycosa a Mechanical KB ?? I would prefer a mechanical KB oriented at basically RPG gaming.
6. Somehow Razer mice don't give me that much comfort, don't know why I just feel comfortable with Logitech MX518 style design.
7. Would it be wise to invest that much on a Headphone ??
Go for it.
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
IMHO, Its better to prefer a single powerful GPU instead of 2 "good" GPUs
just dont ask me why
and I found a cool keyboard
Same feelings here though I can't find a logical reason for that.
sumonpathak
knocking on heavens door
double post....go with the config you selected
The Incinerator
Human Spambot
Look at this , it might help you decide better. Compare the 7970 single card with the 660Ti sli.
SLI And CrossFire, Compared : GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review: Nvidia's Trickle-Down Keplernomics
Which ever you think is optimal and frugal, go for it.
SLI And CrossFire, Compared : GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review: Nvidia's Trickle-Down Keplernomics
Which ever you think is optimal and frugal, go for it.
OP
gameranand
Living to Play
^^ But its before the AMD performance driver release. I guess benchmarks would differ a lot after that driver update.
sumonpathak
knocking on heavens door
OP
gameranand
Living to Play
But its very costly.
Also I already have Senneiher HD202 for music purpose. So I basically need a surround headphone only for gaming. Still I'll see if this one fits by budget.
At MD its available at 10K not at 7.8K at all.
Razer Megalodon
sumonpathak
knocking on heavens door
take Shinobi XL for cabby..looks better
Pre-Order | BitFenix Cases | Shinobi XL | Prodigy | Raider | Ghost | Outlaw SE
Pre-Order | BitFenix Cases | Shinobi XL | Prodigy | Raider | Ghost | Outlaw SE
OP
gameranand
Living to Play
^^ Some review links would be useful to me.
Never mind got it with a Google search. Reading now.
Not good for me. Read about 3-4 reviews but wasn't impressed that much. If I am paying 11K for a Cabinet then I would require real good performance which this cabinet is not providing. It is loosing to Trooper is almost all cases + I like the looks of Trooper.
Nothing at all. I already have numerous games lined up to play on this RIG. As for example, I would like to play Metro 2033, Crysis 2 (again for graphical glory), Dirt 3 (again), Just Cause 2, Skyrim, Witcher 2 and many others however I would get the softwares for testing because Bosses of the forum wants me to write a review and I can't disobey them.
Never mind got it with a Google search. Reading now.
Not good for me. Read about 3-4 reviews but wasn't impressed that much. If I am paying 11K for a Cabinet then I would require real good performance which this cabinet is not providing. It is loosing to Trooper is almost all cases + I like the looks of Trooper.
care to share what software (Games
Nothing at all. I already have numerous games lined up to play on this RIG. As for example, I would like to play Metro 2033, Crysis 2 (again for graphical glory), Dirt 3 (again), Just Cause 2, Skyrim, Witcher 2 and many others however I would get the softwares for testing because Bosses of the forum
wants me to write a review and I can't disobey them.
Cilus
laborare est orare
OK Anand, here is the 1st part of the analysis, covering CPU and Ram.
Processor:
For Processor, Intel 3770K is a strong contender, although similarly performing i7 2700K is available in less price. But in India, the price difference is only 2K and along with slightly higher IPC but full PCI-E 3.0 support, a feature missing in Sandybridge. Although none of highest cards of the current generation do have a noticeable effect on that, the 140K system is going to stay for some time and who can tell about the near future cards? In every year we're seeing new generations of cards from both Nvidia and AMD camps and I think 3770K is little future proof here. Regarding overclocking issues with Ivy Bridge, still 4.2 GHz, which a user going to use for long run most of the times, still not a problem with a standard cooler. Sadly AMD has no place here. Also there are certain games which use huge amount of pre defined static shaders to make the game look realistic, rather than creating it dynamically and COD series is an example of it. Those games require very less GPU power to deliver good image quality. Now these kind of games can take advantage of the huge band width of PCI-E 3.0 bus and in near future we might see some games. Current low utilization of PCI-E 3.0 bus bandwidth is not GPU's fault but we don't have games that requires that much of bandwidth. But the Computational performance can have great performance leap by using the extra memory bandwidth and how it is going to affect future gaming, I will discuss in GPU section
Another thing we should keep in mind, when game developers develop some games, they always concentrate on how the game run on the latest previous gen cards, not just the latest hardware. That's why we are not seeing games which requires huge memory bandwidth, but in near future, when AMD 8000 series and Nvidia 800 series will emerge, the game developers will definitely try to take advantage of PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth as both the then current and previous generation of cards support it.
And as per AMD, the life time of a card until its successor release, is actually 8 Months to 1 year. I guess Anand want to keep this system for more than that.
I have asked Sumon to provide information about the over clocking potential of 3770K and how stable and cool it will be at 4.2GHz speed. Waiting for his reply.
Motherboard:
I think this is covered in the discussion in the thread and not discussing here.
Ram
G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) PC RAM (F3-17000CL11D-8GBXL) @ 5.3K
LINK
Here most of the suggestions are for 1600 MHz but my recommendation will be a 2000 MHz+ ram, although the cost is almost 2K higher than the standard 1600 MHz Ram for 2X4GB module. Almost all the applications, specially the compute performance and Encryption related works and in some of the games, there are certain performance boost, although not much. But obviously, in future the price will be lower and OP will have the option to add another high speed Ram. Also there are chances for more optimized software to take the advantage of higher memory bandwidth.
Now here comes the most obvious question, what about the Latency? The Ram I've suggested is running @ CL11 whereas the standard 1600 MHz modules run @ CL9. A lot of people actually claims that Latency has a greater impact than speed. Now here comes my explanation: Clock Latency is not a fixed amount of delay for devices running @ different speed.
Consider two ancient Ram modules, R1 and R2, running at 20 Hz and 27 Hz with latency 9 and 11 respectively. the 27 Hz speed is derived by multiplying 20 with the ratio of (2133/1600) so that we can have the exact ratio of the original Rams we are discussing. So the 27 Hz ram is same amount faster than the 20 Hz as the 2133 MHz ram is faster than the 1600 MHz Ram.
Now
for R1: It can perform 20 transactions in 1 sec or it can generate 20 clock cycles in 1 sec. So for 1 clock cycle time required is 1/20 sec.
For R2: It can generates 27 clocks per second. So 1 clock cycle time is 1/27 sec.
Now R1 is a CL9 Ram, so time required for 9 Clock Cycle is 9X(1/20) = 9/20 sec = 0.45 sec
R2 is a CL11 Ram, so time required for 11 Clock Cycles is 11X(1/27) = 11/27 sec = 0.41 sec.
Surprised? Isn't is beautiful that actually the time needed for 11 clock cycle for the faster Ram is lesser than the time needed for 9 clock cycles of the slower Ram. So the effective latency of the 2133 MHz CL11 ram is same as the CL8 version of 1600 MHz Ram (8/1600 ~ 11/2133)
Moral of the story: The 2133 MHz CL11 Ram is faster than the 1600 MHz CL9 Ram in memory bandwidth and it also has better or tighter latency . So you will be benefited from both the aspect, Speed and Latency
Will cover the CPU cooler and Graphics Card in next iteration. The GPU part is going to be something, the most interested thing. Will cover, GP-GPU computing, FPS, Gaming performance and GP-GPU performance in Gaming.
Processor:
For Processor, Intel 3770K is a strong contender, although similarly performing i7 2700K is available in less price. But in India, the price difference is only 2K and along with slightly higher IPC but full PCI-E 3.0 support, a feature missing in Sandybridge. Although none of highest cards of the current generation do have a noticeable effect on that, the 140K system is going to stay for some time and who can tell about the near future cards? In every year we're seeing new generations of cards from both Nvidia and AMD camps and I think 3770K is little future proof here. Regarding overclocking issues with Ivy Bridge, still 4.2 GHz, which a user going to use for long run most of the times, still not a problem with a standard cooler. Sadly AMD has no place here. Also there are certain games which use huge amount of pre defined static shaders to make the game look realistic, rather than creating it dynamically and COD series is an example of it. Those games require very less GPU power to deliver good image quality. Now these kind of games can take advantage of the huge band width of PCI-E 3.0 bus and in near future we might see some games. Current low utilization of PCI-E 3.0 bus bandwidth is not GPU's fault but we don't have games that requires that much of bandwidth. But the Computational performance can have great performance leap by using the extra memory bandwidth and how it is going to affect future gaming, I will discuss in GPU section
Another thing we should keep in mind, when game developers develop some games, they always concentrate on how the game run on the latest previous gen cards, not just the latest hardware. That's why we are not seeing games which requires huge memory bandwidth, but in near future, when AMD 8000 series and Nvidia 800 series will emerge, the game developers will definitely try to take advantage of PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth as both the then current and previous generation of cards support it.
And as per AMD, the life time of a card until its successor release, is actually 8 Months to 1 year. I guess Anand want to keep this system for more than that.
I have asked Sumon to provide information about the over clocking potential of 3770K and how stable and cool it will be at 4.2GHz speed. Waiting for his reply.
Motherboard:
I think this is covered in the discussion in the thread and not discussing here.
Ram
G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) PC RAM (F3-17000CL11D-8GBXL) @ 5.3K
LINK
Here most of the suggestions are for 1600 MHz but my recommendation will be a 2000 MHz+ ram, although the cost is almost 2K higher than the standard 1600 MHz Ram for 2X4GB module. Almost all the applications, specially the compute performance and Encryption related works and in some of the games, there are certain performance boost, although not much. But obviously, in future the price will be lower and OP will have the option to add another high speed Ram. Also there are chances for more optimized software to take the advantage of higher memory bandwidth.
Now here comes the most obvious question, what about the Latency? The Ram I've suggested is running @ CL11 whereas the standard 1600 MHz modules run @ CL9. A lot of people actually claims that Latency has a greater impact than speed. Now here comes my explanation: Clock Latency is not a fixed amount of delay for devices running @ different speed.
Consider two ancient Ram modules, R1 and R2, running at 20 Hz and 27 Hz with latency 9 and 11 respectively. the 27 Hz speed is derived by multiplying 20 with the ratio of (2133/1600) so that we can have the exact ratio of the original Rams we are discussing. So the 27 Hz ram is same amount faster than the 20 Hz as the 2133 MHz ram is faster than the 1600 MHz Ram.
Now
for R1: It can perform 20 transactions in 1 sec or it can generate 20 clock cycles in 1 sec. So for 1 clock cycle time required is 1/20 sec.
For R2: It can generates 27 clocks per second. So 1 clock cycle time is 1/27 sec.
Now R1 is a CL9 Ram, so time required for 9 Clock Cycle is 9X(1/20) = 9/20 sec = 0.45 sec
R2 is a CL11 Ram, so time required for 11 Clock Cycles is 11X(1/27) = 11/27 sec = 0.41 sec.
Surprised? Isn't is beautiful that actually the time needed for 11 clock cycle for the faster Ram is lesser than the time needed for 9 clock cycles of the slower Ram. So the effective latency of the 2133 MHz CL11 ram is same as the CL8 version of 1600 MHz Ram (8/1600 ~ 11/2133)
Moral of the story: The 2133 MHz CL11 Ram is faster than the 1600 MHz CL9 Ram in memory bandwidth and it also has better or tighter latency . So you will be benefited from both the aspect, Speed and Latency
Will cover the CPU cooler and Graphics Card in next iteration. The GPU part is going to be something, the most interested thing. Will cover, GP-GPU computing, FPS, Gaming performance and GP-GPU performance in Gaming.
vickybat
I am the night...I am...
The links i gave before has been tested with 12.11 drivers (latest). Check them.
@ cilus
Excellent explanation about Ram timings buddy.
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sumonpathak
knocking on heavens door
those were made with 12.7..with 12.11 the perf has increased more.
OP
gameranand
Living to Play
OOOKKK. I will roger that. Thought like you said waiting for sumon input as he is the one who convinced me to get i7 2600K.
As for RAM, no problem I can afford that I guess, that would cost me about 1K more in Primeabgb if I am not wrong. Though I have to check for confirmation.
OK jusst checked
How is this one Cilus Corsair Vengeance Red 8GB PC3 17000 2133MHz
As for GPU and others please do. Your suggestions are very welcome to me.
As for RAM, no problem I can afford that I guess, that would cost me about 1K more in Primeabgb if I am not wrong. Though I have to check for confirmation.
OK jusst checked
How is this one Cilus Corsair Vengeance Red 8GB PC3 17000 2133MHz
As for GPU and others please do. Your suggestions are very welcome to me.
sumonpathak
knocking on heavens door
Stay away from vengeance series...not overclockable at all...the timings are stubborn as mule
Hokey...now coming to the overclocking part...
Both 3770k and 2600K are pretty impressive at stock;
the 2600K can do 4.2 Ghz @ around 1.25V depending on HOW good the chip and board is..
the 3770K can do it around 1.2V depending on the chip and board.Now that should make 3770K a winner...right?
well...the problem lies in the fact that Intel decided to cheapen out on the IHS part and they decided to cut back on the solder and fill it cheap thermal paste...there are too many delidding guide in the interwebs.
So at the end the problem comes when pushing the chip over 4.4Ghz.The ivy one tops heats up pretty fast so its not possible to run it 24/7 while the sandy can hold upto 5Ghz 24/7(again there are too many instances on the inter webz) so you can check.
So at the end of the day keeping aside the question of PCI 3.0..i would vote for the sandy..since heat is an issue which has plagued ivy from its conception err release (damn that came out wrong).
Hokey...now coming to the overclocking part...
Both 3770k and 2600K are pretty impressive at stock;
the 2600K can do 4.2 Ghz @ around 1.25V depending on HOW good the chip and board is..
the 3770K can do it around 1.2V depending on the chip and board.Now that should make 3770K a winner...right?
well...the problem lies in the fact that Intel decided to cheapen out on the IHS part and they decided to cut back on the solder and fill it cheap thermal paste...there are too many delidding guide in the interwebs.
So at the end the problem comes when pushing the chip over 4.4Ghz.The ivy one tops heats up pretty fast so its not possible to run it 24/7 while the sandy can hold upto 5Ghz 24/7(again there are too many instances on the inter webz) so you can check
.So at the end of the day keeping aside the question of PCI 3.0..i would vote for the sandy..since heat is an issue which has plagued ivy from its conception err release (damn that came out wrong
).
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OP
gameranand
Living to Play
OK thanks for that, and what about that 3770K which Cilus recommended ??
vickybat
I am the night...I am...
Check them yourself:
HARDOCP - Introduction - GALAXY GeForce GTX 660 Ti GC 3GB SLI Review
Go for the 3770k. You'll benefit with higher IPC and pci-e 3.0 controller in future.
Don't worry about overclocking because it will easily go past 4.2 ghz with that noctua cooler or even that hyper 212 evo.
You ain't gonna be setting any benchmark records but getting it purely coz of its compute performance.
Don't get too confused buddy. If you want the highest end cpu, go with 3770k.