Intel has finally released the new generation of CPUs, for the first time in years there is a significant improvement and for the first time in much longer years Intel truly does beat AMD in performance.
Instead of working from a specific budged I chose to work the performance lane trying to save as much cash as I could while building the powerful and silent system. From the get go I have accepted the fact it wont be the absolute fastest computer on the market yet but a very reasonable compromise.
The facts I had to consider:
- Unlike their Pentium 4 counterparts Core 2 Duo runs significantly cooler, partly because of the 65nm technology, partly because it does much more per cycle and partly because just like woodcrest it has a capability of shutting down parts of CPU without going into suspend mode and no performance hit.
- Memory speed and latency is something majority of people loose sights of. Memory is important – it doesn’t matter how fast your CPU is if you cant deliver it the data to process (See my future DELL comments)
- Hard drives, in today’s world drive size is approaching the insane numbers yet drive reliability goes down what seems faster then drive size going up. What good is a very good hard drive when it is dead and all hundreds of gigabytes of data is nothing but a useless pile of clicking and clunking metal.
- Modern hardware components consume more and more power, inefficiency combined with power results in heat, heat results in larger cooling systems and those produce astronomical amount of noise. I do IT R&D for a living, I don’t want to come home to listen to more hum then I absolutely have to.
I think I have solved majority of challenges and got a well price-performance balanced system that should be sufficient to handle what I need it to which is development, video encoding, office work and (of course) games.
I decided to try to get the most out of the system by overclocking, especially with how easy the Conroe CPUs go along with the idea (low power consumption and loose multiplier)
Here is the final choice for the hardware, with brief reasoning:
e6600 CPU
There are two types to choose from Alendale (e6300 and e6400) and Conroe (e6600, e6700, e6800). The difference is die size and level 2 cache along with some $190 difference. Alendale has 2 MB cache, whereas Conroe has 4 MB. Might not seem as much but it helps in areas where I need it to, namely compile and video encoding. I thought that additional performance in those areas for the next few years won’t hurt me.
GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard
This was a tough selection as there is ASUS board that seems to perform very well as well. Having personal bad experience with ASUS, I chose to go with gigabyte. That on its own was a pain.
first and foremost – whoever numbers the chipsets ought to be shot – 965P chipset is NEWER the 975. If someone figures out rhyme or reason behind it – drop me a note…
There is another component that needs to be taken into account – ICH, or input output chipset, some boards are shipping with ICH7, others do ICH8 (see some on the hard drive notes)
Gigabyte has 3 different models for 965 chipset, DS3, DS4 and DQ6, from what I have gathered, the original board was DQ6, which then was simplified to produce DS3 which was later enhanced to produce DS4… makes sense?
I settled in DQ6 because of only 1 reason – ICH8 that comes with RAID5 drive support
Corsair Twin2x2048-8500C5
Without trying to go into religious wars I chose to go along with the manufacturer which is well known and stands behind its product; I have dealt with them before and when I had issues (configuration or RMA) I have never had any bad experience with them.
Besides manufacturer, I had to choose the right memory for the purpose. I knew I was going to overclock the system and getting saving on components that can drastically affect system stability is less the intelligent.
8500C5 memory is a high frequency, high latency memory guaranteed to run at 5-5-5-15 timing at 1066 Mhz. The memory pair has also been physically tested at corsair and was guaranteed to work (that’s one of the reasons I like them they don’t sell you memory rated to run together, they sell you the one that actually does do it)
For anyone who experimented and understands memory, - 8500C5 is using the same 667 Mhz micron chips as vast majority of the manufacturers; Consequently the, only the best chips actually make it to the end user, a drop in chip quality (manufacturing imperfections) will result in it not being able to run as fast as a ‘better’ chip given the constant voltage.
I thought for a bit about gong after some good PC-6400 memory (same 667 MHz chip clocked to 800) capable of gong to 1066 but decided against doing so as gong high usually means using more voltage to compensate for imperfections which means voided warranties and potential headache with RMA department. Overall, Motherboard and Memory is not something you want to save money on if you want a stable, high performing system.
MSI 7900 GT 256/HD was the video card of choice.
I don’t like ATI, in fact I can’t stand the company and their entire offering. They have high performance video cards with a piss poor driver support. Newer crossfire motherboards have a number of issues with “officially supported crossfire functionality” (ex: crossfire functionality sometimes randomly is disabled after boot). And if anyone has tried to get Linux running on ATI properly – good luck. I did it and it is not something I’d like to repeat…
NVIDIA on the other hand is a decent product, in fact the only one that’s left – hence not much of a choice.
The 7900 series card based purely on price, 7900 vs. 7800 differ a lot,- significant power reduction through a slightly upgraded GPU design and 90 nanometer technology (instead of 110 nm). However looking in 7900 series overall, the situation becomes apparent:
Nvidia ships reference design at 450Mhz GPU clock rate. Then you get every manufacturer producing a “better” card, simply by overclocking it and charging more money. Thank you, I can do that myself for free (with software from Nvidia and detailed instructions on how to overclock ) – they do warn you not to call them on the subject though.
The other thought train was that I don’t play Doom3 or Unreal – but mostly MMORPG games with occasional strategy like Civilizations and Empire Earth etc… I don’t need to have 512 Mb of memory; hence my savings of $120+ just for memory alone that’s in addition to $40 rebate.
The case – this is where I went a bit crazy:
Antec P180B case with Phantom 500 Silent power supply along with Acustipack v2 sound insulation.
I want it to be a silent system and thus splurged on case with sound dampening sidewalls and additional sound insulation material.
Putting it all together:
After quite a lot of reading, experimenting and system crashes, I have arrived to the following:
Bus speed : 350 Mhz
CPU Multiplier : x9
Effective CPU rate: 3.15 Ghz (that’s from stock speed of 2.4 Ghz)
Memory Divisor : 2:3 (which means for every clock of the motherboard memory does 1.5
That results in (350 / 2) * 3 = 525 Mhz frequency, multiply that by 2 to accommodate for marketing of DD2 and you arrive to 1050 Mhz (below upper rated spec)
Some on the internet were able to get that memory to run at 4-4-4-12 at 1066 – remember the numbers are deceptive it is CPU clocks that are written down and if you more of them per unit of time, the physical latency of the memory wont change.
Voltage : 1.4 volts to the CPU (from rated 1.325); give it anything less and it starts getting math errors.
Memory – 2.15 volts (1.8 + 0.35 overvolt), rated to run at 2.2v by the manufacturer.
PCIe BUS locked at 100 Mhz
Just a few notes – since most of the manufacturers use 667 Mhz chips, they have to supply more voltage for the memory to be stable at higher clock rate that means that there is virtually nobody that has high performing chips running at 1.8 volts at 400 Mhz (DDR2-800 or PC6400 – same thing). The motherboard manufactures continue to put 1.8 standard on the motherboards and then complain in their “health management systems” about too much voltage to the memory… for Christ’s sake – could we get some normality here? I called gigabyte and had to listen to a lecture from a guy with extremely heavy accent about how bad it is to run memory at 2.2 volts – I won the argument as he stated that I might burn the memory and I replied that Corsair warrantees it for life @2.2v. Right after I called corsair and validated it; all in all, I find the entire situation distasteful
Even if you do run system as “designed” without overclocking, you still need to raise memory voltage to 2.2 volts if you use corsair 8500c5 memory – because that’s what corsair tells you to have in order for the system to be stable. Go lower and you are risking instability – go higher and they wont warrantee it. Other manufactures are a bit lower 2.0v, 2.1v for DDR2-800 at 400x2 speed. Bump it higher and some of them go as high as 2.5 volts per module
The other gripe I have with gigabyte is that while they do good hardware, their software quality is even on a lower level then ATI’s. Aside from the fact that every application they have is just ugly half of them don’t work. Easy tune 5 distributed with the motherboard wont work because … “developers are working on a newer version…”, WTF – then why did you send me the software with a $250 board? And that type of situation is like an energizer bunny – going and going. The only good part is that you don’t need any of gigaybyte’s software – hence once you get through the insanity it is done with.
Gripes aside - similarly performing DELL system comes with .... 667 Mhz memory and $3200 price tag (+tax) - oops, my hardware with all "sound dampening eccentricities" cost me $1700 (with shipping) . I have benchmarked the two and thus far mine runs about 15% faster for 50% of the price
I will be updated the article with benchmark data and detailed price sheet if anyone is curious.