Best, fastest PC I can build now

[Cain]

Suggestions??

CPU/MB/RAM/HD?video card??

[BadHabitz]

I'm sure others will have opinions, but all I can say is...

[Donziboy2]

I7 2600k or an I5 2500k for cpu 1155pin, the 2011pin cpu's dont have a huge advantage over the 2500/2600k, they only show any real difference with multi threading since they have more cores.
8-16 gb ram, its really cheap.
SSD for OS 90-120gb
Hdd could suck since they are all overpriced atm, they have pretty much doubled......

GPU... 580 or 6970

Do you have a price range?

[Cain]

yes, two to three thousand....

Much more concerned about CPU power/strength. I'm doing a lot of HD video work, muxing mixing, etc. and will also use this PC to stream and decode video around the house, likely at the same time it is being used for gaming etc.

[Griemak]

i7-3960X - $1,049
ASUS Sabertooth X79 LGA 2011 - $339.99
Quad Channel memory kit from favorite manufacturer - $250+ depending on capacity
remaining budget on an SSD, a HDD (for data), PSU, and ATI and/or Nvidia goodness - $1,500+

Video/Audio encoding/transcoding:
The Sandy Bridge CPU's have an integrated GPU with hardware accelerated encoding/decoding, available if using a "z" or "x" (instead of "p" or "h") chipset. Ex: P67 can not use this feature, while Z67 can, even if an integrated video card is handling the display. A few x79 mobo's were benchmarked recently:

Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding : Ultimate X79? Five $320+ LGA 2011 Motherboards, Reviewed


That's the fastest, but hardly the best performance per $. An i5-2500K with dual channel memory kit and Z67 top-end motherboard will cost less than the i7-3960X alone and will handle h.264 for the foreseeable future. "h.265" or HEVC is the next codec and is still a few years away. That will free up the $2K budget for tri/quad SLI/Crossfire of the most recently released GPU's and the electrical sub-station in the case to power it

How much performance does a $1k processor over a $200 one provide?
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/288?vs=443

[Cain]

that 3960X is a Sandy Bridge -E processor and as I recall does NOT have integrated video capabilities, correct??

[Griemak]

Correct, it has 6 cores running at higher clock rates instead and tons of PCIx and bus bandwidth.

Steaming/decoding and even muxing of something like a few cable QAM-256 MPEG2 feeds can be handled easily on the i5. AVS forums has quite a few reports of feeds to multiple XBox extenders and attached displays running smoothly with a Ceton 6-tuner PCIx card. More than that might be problematic as encoding (instead of transcoding) is usually a full-on all-or-nothing endeavor, reducing other tasks. 12 threads (3960x) over 4 (2500k) may be greatly important?

[DougBob]

I'm sure others will have opinions, but all I can say is...

Agreed, BH hit the nail on the head. I hate to say this because I'm an AMD man myself, but I'm also a realist. Intel has the power ever since they busted AMD floating processor hold on them.

Go with an extreme edition CPU looks like the best one out is the i7-3960x 6 cores @ 3.3GHz

It's going to be pricey, but it's 15MB of cache on this baby

Intel Processor Comparison

[Donziboy2]

Cain since you want the 6 core Intels get the I7-3930K

Its nearly identical to the 3960X but $400 less.
Get a nice watercooler and bump it to 4.5ghz

[NateTheBrewer]

that 3960X is a Sandy Bridge -E processor and as I recall does NOT have integrated video capabilities, correct??

I know that the media applications I use have trouble running DXVA (which is the Windows version of GPU video acceleration) on the integrated graphics on Sandy Bridge processors.

You get WAY more processing power out of a discrete graphics card (or 2) then you would need, compared to the integrated graphic solution on the CPU die - also, not sure if your editing application work the same why, but all of my media stuff uses the card you are playing the video over to do the decoding... Which if you are using the PC for gaming, would be your discrete graphics card(s).


As for the choice between the big 2, aren't Nvidia cards supposedly slightly better at running BF3?

I have always been an Nvidia user so have not gotten an ATI card for home use in a while, so I can't really be unbiased there, but I can tell you that I am playing BF3 at 1920x1080 with every setting on max, including HBAO, on 2 GTX 570's in SLI. Getting roughly 50-80 FPS during full action... way higher when I am indoors, etc...

ALSO: The SSD is a great idea, you will be amazed at the difference in load times. One thing you should do is go with is 16 GB (or more if possible on the mobo) of RAM, and allot 4-8 GB of RAM to a virtual hard drive, and place your temp directories and swap file there. This will speed up your PC even more, and preserve your SSD's performace by not thrashing it with constant swapping of things into the memory. Here is a good article on it:

Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM? : Introduction

I was also surprised to find out that even graphics cards with massive amounts of memory often allocate a GB (or several) from the system RAM. They disabled this and saw issues with levels not loading fully in games... This is what mine is doing:

Display adapter type NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
Total available graphics memory 4095 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 1280 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 2815 MB

This is only one card, so in my SLI system, this means the graphics cards are allocating 5.6 GB of system RAM if they need it. This is why, if you can, you should get as much memory as your mobo can handle... You can find uses for excess later...

[Cain]

Cain since you want the 6 core Intels get the I7-3930K

Its nearly identical to the 3960X but $400 less.
Get a nice watercooler and bump it to 4.5ghz

My thoughts EXACTLY!