"Rate my Rig" thread

[TheFeniX]

For storage, I'll be transplanting a 240GB Intel SSD and a 3TB HDD from my current rig. Additionally, I'll be ordering a second 3TB HDD with the rig. Will the PSU be sufficient to power the listed components, as well as the aforementioned 2 HDDs and 1 SSD, along with a liquid cooling system and a blu-ray burner?

I can't think of a single GPU setup that would require more than 600Ws unless you were piling on HDDs or something to that effect. When in doubt, there are multiple Wattage calculators on the Internet.

I want to be able to play Total War: Rome 2 (and hopefully, the upcoming Total War: Attila) at max settings, while maintaining 30+FPS. I do not plan to game above 1080p on this rig, which is why I have chosen the GTX 970 over the R9 290 and the GTX 980. The seemingly absurd amount of HDD storage is for other, unrelated purposes.

On a related note, I also have a 970 (MSI) that is currently running FFXIV at 4K and maintaining 60FPS through disabling a few things like Ambient Occulsion, rending of hidden objects, and some of the shadows. Game still looks and runs great even if I now have to deal with some pop-in around the draw distance (which is pretty low for FFXIV anyways). I did, however, have to overclock the core by ~200Mhz, but I have had no issues with heat or performance.

[HeavensThunderHammer]

If you want to compare to steam users, here's a good link:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I was surprised that my 6 year old 3.0 dual core really isn't too shabby compared to what other people are using. Same goes for using a radeon 7750 graphics card.

[The Infidel]

Ohhh sweet hardware.

I had an old Core2Duo E8500 with 8 gigs of DDR2 memory and a GTX 260, that I managed to swap for a AMD 5970 last autuum. I badly needed an upgrade, but had other things to spend my money on. Memory was a bit corrupt, but I could still use it. Then, my SSD broke down and took a LOT of things I didn't have any backup of with it. That's a real shame, as I had decided to wait for Skylake and upgrade then.

Then I found someone selling slightly used MB/RAM/CPU/w/cooler and a nice SSD for a nice price. When I had just assembled my rig, a friend said I had inspired him to buy a new graphics card used, so I got his old for a very nice price, and behold: My new rig (with some older elements):

Fractal Design XL
Cooler Master V850 PSU
Intel i7 4790K w/Thermaltake Archon.
Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK (Black Edition)
32Gb DDR3 RAM (1866Mhz Kingston HyperX)
Gigabyte nVidia GTX 680
2x1000Gb og 1x3000Gb HDD
Samsung 840 EVO (system)

Monitors: 2x Samsung 27", one HD and one 2560x1440.

I have 2x140mm Fractal Design + 1x120mm Noctua fans to draw air in from the front,
1x180mm Fractal Design + 1x120mm unknown (maybe Pabst) sucking hot air out from the back.
CPU fan is TR TY-140. There are 3 fans on the graphics card, but not sure of the size. PSU has its own intake and exit at the bottom of the case.

I have a bricked OCZ Vector that I've given up hope of getting my data from, so I will try to get a new one under warranty.

I bought a 4TB external drive for backup and have also started to have a backup at Jotta cloud. I don't want to lose any more data.

It was fun to try 3dmark01. Almost 100 000 score.

One question: What is best: To blow air trough the CPU cooler, or let it suck the air trough, as it does now? The 120mm fan at the rear of my case is now just a few centimeters away from the CPU fan. I'm not sure if my memory modules will hinder me from trying to have the fan in front of the cooler, but I might try it. At idle, my CPU reports lower temperature than the mobo, but when I tried y-cruncher calculating PI at all cores, CPU went up to 75c. I guess it is within limits, but I just don't like it.

[TheFeniX]

I came to the realization that with the baby on the way, it's either get my computer into the condition I want it in for the next 5 years or get pissed as it craters out. The i7 I've got (4790) is 4.0Ghz on the clock. That combined with 16GBs of RAM should be more than enough hardware for the near future. The problem was a single GTX970 really can't handle 4K, nor can any single card solution. Maybe a Titan, but a single Titan is more than 2 970s. My original Mainboard also will not support multiple PCE-16x slots. So, I dug around newegg, found some good parts. Then decided to check Fry's since I needed a new monitor and some other stuff for the office. I found everything I wanted/needed at Frys and to be honest, the markup wasn't bad at all (the MSI 970 was $10 more at Fry's than on Newegg). Other parts were about the same. They have become very price competitive on PC parts. Don't know about anything else.

My new build is as follows:
ASUS Z-97 Deluxe
Intel i7 4790K
16GBs RAM
2 MSI GTX970
1 120GB SSD for the OS
1 240GB SSD for games I want to run fast
1 1TB HDD for games I don't care about (and porn).

The install went incredibly well. No bad parts, no failures to boot (except me thinking A2 was an error code when it turns out my test monitor was set to HDMI rather than DVI, so I got no video). Windows 8 just picked up the new Mainboard and I was setting up SLI in no time. But... I had to build the damn thing first. I don't remember the model case I bought, I do know it's fucking huge though and has easy support for SSD (2.5") trays. You can click on the pictures for a bigger version.

First thing was pulling the back case fan off to make room for my liquid-cooler. They had a good price, like $50, and the recommended fan cooler was about the same. So I went with water.

I maybe should have put the board in first, but that water block is heavy and I really didn't want to flailing around waiting to smack the shit out of my new board.


i7 came out. Whoever did the grease job was amateur hour. From what I could read, the old pea sized dot still works, but you can get a bit better coverage by using a bit more. So, I had about double pea sized and everything went on ok.

Finding the right angle to install the block at was annoying. I remember when even high-end boards were just yellow/green circuit boards.


Old card and RAM went in with little issue. New card, same thing. Was going to put it down near the PSU (a new 1000W), but I decided against it (EDIT: Pretty sure that's the other 16x/8x slot. Swear I read the manual, whatever, check when I get home). Still don't if I should have mounted the PSU the way I did, but the fan's an intake. The case has a vent on the bottom, but these new bottom mounted PSU case weird me out. I might actually need to get another 1-2 fans for more inward airflow, since the CPU fans blow out. But I wanted to get this thing up and running first, worry about airflow later after I've checked temps under load.

FFXIV: Went from (at max everything 4K) 25FPS to 85FPS. Something about transparent lighting in that game craters my FPS. I don't know why, but it's the only thing disabled. I need to benchmark a few other games, but Jovial was on so we decided to rob banks in Payday2. I'm in about $2200 for the build now, that includes the old board, case, and PSU I don't know what to do with. Not cheap, but I think since I've gone back to PC this should keep me going for more than a few years. If push came to shove, I could even drop down to 2K. I'm considering benchmarking a few games at 1080p and 2K. I know my rig out of the box would do 90FPS at 2K. Or around there.

Oh well, it was fun and painless (except on the wallet), which is rare for a PC build. Guess hardware's come a long way since I poked at it with a magnetized screwdriver.

[The Infidel]

Sweet rig, Fenix.
A little protip: If you have SATA-ports from both Intel and Marvell on your mobo, try to not use those by Marvell. I had an SSD on Marvell controller and it would not get past about 350Mb/s using Atto SSD Benchmark. Shifted to Intel and it went up to past 500Mb/s.

Well, I found out if push or pull is best for the CPU-fan.

I had this setup (pull):
back fan < cpu-fan < cooler < intake fan.

My new setup (push):
back fan < cooler < cpu-fan < intake fan

I stressed the cpu using y-cruncher to calculate PI on all cores.
It used to be between 75-81 celsius. Now, it maxed out on 64 degrees and with normal idling, cpu is about 22 degrees and cpu fan is at lazily 600 rpm (max is 1200).

[TheFeniX]

Sweet rig, Fenix.

Thanks.

A little protip: If you have SATA-ports from both Intel and Marvell on your mobo, try to not use those by Marvell. I had an SSD on Marvell controller and it would not get past about 350Mb/s using Atto SSD Benchmark. Shifted to Intel and it went up to past 500Mb/s.

From what I've read, this board only has Intel SATA and ASMedia, which is some technology that's supposed to break the 6GB/s cap (and doesn't actually seem to). I've got my drives in the Intel SATA setup, but there is support for SATA Express. I need to do some more research and fiddling. However, in every game I play where multiple people load into a single area (dungeons in FFXIV and Payday 2 mission, for just two examples), I beat everyone in by multiple seconds. Even faster loads on some of the new (and huge) maps in Payday, such as the casino, which precaches a lot in the planning phase. My crew has to wait while I'm already buying assets. It's why I always host, I hate waiting on their slow load times. Based on this, I've assumed I'm about capped out on whatever speed I could possibly get. Wouldn't hurt to dig more though.

I really should just benchmark the damn thing.

Well, I found out if push or pull is best for the CPU-fan.

Right now, I've got too much going out, but my airflow is good. There's two extra spots for fans on the case. So, I'm thinking about just popping to intakes on there and calling it a day.

[Zaune]

I now have most of a somewhat-acceptable gaming rig assembled. Picked up a used Acer tower with a Core i5 650 and 4GB of DDR3 in it, already got a Geforce 480GTX knocking around, and a 600W power supply and another 4GB of RAM are on order. I'm not getting photorealistic nosehair rendering at 1080p out of this thing, but the most graphically intensive game I'm likely to be playing regularly is Kerbal Space Program so it'll do.

Is it worth dropping another fifty pounds on an SSD for this setup?

[TheFeniX]

I now have most of a somewhat-acceptable gaming rig assembled. Picked up a used Acer tower with a Core i5 650 and 4GB of DDR3 in it, already got a Geforce 480GTX knocking around, and a 600W power supply and another 4GB of RAM are on order. I'm not getting photorealistic nosehair rendering at 1080p out of this thing, but the most graphically intensive game I'm likely to be playing regularly is Kerbal Space Program so it'll do.

Your CPU is a bit older, but it has the clock-speed and the 480 is still a damn good card. I see no reason why that rig couldn't last you more than a few years if, like you said, you don't need ultra graphics settings. That said, it is an Acer. If you've got a semi-modern Quad-Core and 8GBs of RAM, your PC just isn't likely to reach end-of-life. They can't bloat OSs and programs up anymore and newer versions of Windows are faster on equivalent hardware. And Video cards are replaceable.

Is it worth dropping another fifty pounds on an SSD for this setup?

I say yes, depending on the SSD. But even the cheap POS ones are still much faster than a HDD. Reliability is their issue. Just from an OS stand-point, everything runs that much faster. Windows performance never seems to suffer for me even with 100% utilization on the SSD. Contrast to a 7200spin where the entire OS just crawls until the OS finally settles down. If you can install your games to an SSD, even better. Certain games load almost instantly, whereas I don't even want to know what Fallout 4 load times would be on an HDD when they are already in the 5-10 second range on an SSD.

[Zaune]

I say yes, depending on the SSD. But even the cheap POS ones are still much faster than a HDD. Reliability is their issue. Just from an OS stand-point, everything runs that much faster. Windows performance never seems to suffer for me even with 100% utilization on the SSD. Contrast to a 7200spin where the entire OS just crawls until the OS finally settles down. If you can install your games to an SSD, even better. Certain games load almost instantly, whereas I don't even want to know what Fallout 4 load times would be on an HDD when they are already in the 5-10 second range on an SSD.

I'm not really concerned with Windows performance at this juncture, but that's good to know.

[TheFeniX]

Well, poor windows performance generally leads to poor performance for whatever is running on top of it. If all you can spring for is a 120GB drive, then you probably would be better off just slapping it in there and putting some games on it. Since 50 pounds buys you a little more than Murrica bucks, you may be looking at a 240GB+ drive. In that case, depending on what programs you run and where you care to install them, you could fit Windows, your programs, and the few games you want to run on that drive. Then, as SSD prices bottom out, get another and move your games to it.

Obviously, if you don't feel like fucking with a Windows install, then ignore this. To quit ranting and just answer your original question: just using an SSD for games, you will see a marked improvement on any load times and data streaming. Just make sure to enable AHCI, if not already enabled. You may have to make some registry edits before-hand if you're on W7 though. Windows 8+ doesn't care.

[Zaune]

Heh. What I meant was that I plan on going Linux-only. That does commit me to a 250+GB hard drive, because Linux is a bit less flexible about where you can install stuff, but I can live with that. I'll add an SSD to my Christmas list, I think.

[The Infidel]

Heh. What I meant was that I plan on going Linux-only. That does commit me to a 250+GB hard drive, because Linux is a bit less flexible about where you can install stuff, but I can live with that. I'll add an SSD to my Christmas list, I think.

My old rig was set up with 2x500GB HDD in RAID0 to improve performance, but was still not too fast. When I threw out the RAID and installed an SSD, my computer was like a new one. WAY more responsive and faster, since the rest of the computer didn't have to wait for the HDD. An upgrade from HDD to SSD is simply the best investment you can do to your computer.

Have system and programs on the SSD and your porn movie collection and other stuff that demands a lot of space on a HDD.

If you've read my rants and complaints, you know that my former SSD died suddenly (as in the span of 2 seconds), and I lost a LOT of stuff I didn't want to lose, so besides getting a decent SSD, i urge you to have backup of all your important stuff and take regular backups. I've learnt my lession the hard way. I currently have a 4TB external HDD as in-house backup and use Jottacloud for continuous cloud backup and keeping archives of stuff that doesn't change too often. They are a Norwegian cloud service with unlimited backup for 7.5 euros pr. month. I currently have about 4TB there and a friend has 8TB, but you need a decent broadband connection. (Try the free one and see if the speed is OK.)

[Zaune]

My old rig was set up with 2x500GB HDD in RAID0 to improve performance, but was still not too fast. When I threw out the RAID and installed an SSD, my computer was like a new one. WAY more responsive and faster, since the rest of the computer didn't have to wait for the HDD. An upgrade from HDD to SSD is simply the best investment you can do to your computer.

Have system and programs on the SSD and your porn movie collection and other stuff that demands a lot of space on a HDD.

If you've read my rants and complaints, you know that my former SSD died suddenly (as in the span of 2 seconds), and I lost a LOT of stuff I didn't want to lose, so besides getting a decent SSD, i urge you to have backup of all your important stuff and take regular backups.

That's the plan. I've got two 1TB hard drives, one SATA and one in a USB enclosure, as well as a free Dropbox account. If and when the promised broadband connection for the building arrives I'll look into expanding my cloud backups as well.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Nice rig, Fenix- the inside of your PC looks much tidier than mine, given you have a similar number & positioning of fans as me. Though looking at the back of my rig I've noticed the rear case fan isn't turning despite the LED illumination still working- time for me to poke around and work out why

EDIT: Luckily all it took was for me to emulate Iron Man and reach in and push to kickstart it

[Starglider]

I am thinking about building a new workstation this summer. I have been working with 64-core servers so much recently that I am kind of pining for a quad-socket home machine; I have always been a dual-socket fan (yes I write highly threaded code) but a mere 16 cores is just not exciting me any more The Broadwell EP lineup recently leaked, it looks like the Xeon E5-4689 V4 would be a good fit in quad-socket configuration. I'm thinking similar to the Puget quad-socket workstation but watercooled. It's true that this would only be 48 CPU cores and the E5 v4s will go up to nearly twice that number (88 in quad config), but the base clock speed hit from 3.1 down to 2.2 is pretty punnishing. Then again, depends on the boost clock; max boost on the 22 core chips is 3.6 GHz, which makes sense as it is a 25W higher TDP than the 12 core chips. With watercooling thermal constraints are a non-issue so it's purely TDP, and I'm not using AVX on the CPU side (anything that vectorisable would be on GPU anyway). I admitt 88 cores on a single node is kind of tempting. 32GB DDR4 sticks are kinda mostly affordable now, so 1TB system memory is viable (only 2100 MHz but 16 channel so the aggregate bandwidth is goood). 64GB sticks are still in the 'only if money is no object' category and take a major latency hit.

Annoyingly I haven't found a quad E5 board that offers 4 PCIe x16 slots. Nearly all the E7 boards do, but E7s are just pointlessly more expensive for a workstation (and eight socket is not a great idea regardless of cost at the moment for fabric latency reasons). The best you get with quad E5s from Supermicro etc is 2 PCIe x16 and 9 PCIe x8. I ask you, how many people actually need nine half-speed slots vs the number of people who could use another 2 full-speed slots? Still, I'd probably put quad teslas in there anyway, it's not like I'm usually limited on PCIe bandwidth. Maybe the situation will be remedied by the product refresh for the v4 generation. Storage, probably eight or so half-terabyte SSDs in RAID 0+1. I'm really shying away from RAID 5 these days due to rebuild time and some controller issues I've had, and RAID6 is significant latency and still kinda excessively complicated for workstation use.

The wild card is AMD Zen coming late this year, which does actually stand a chance of retaking the high-end performance lead, certainly on cost/performance for multi-socket systems. I guess I can upgrade my current machine to 512GB via swapping the 16 GB DIMM for 32s and wait a bit longer if that is looking really promising; the DIMMs wouldn't be reusable though since my current machines are DDR3. It is of course perenially annoying that consumer CPUs are already on Skylake and about to go to Kaby Lake while the high end stuff is still just making it onto Broadwell, but that kind of sluggishness is what you get when the competition (AMD) dropped the ball so thoroughly at the high end.

[The Infidel]

Will it blend?

I knew before I read your post that your system would make my 4790K look like a Z80. Nice rig. I've seen some storage consisting of a few m.2. intel 750(?) In raid having a lot of speed. What are you coding that needs that kind of hardware? Wonder what results y-cruncher can get on that kind of rig.

I wonder what Intels new memory can do.http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... video.html

[Starglider]

Will it blend?

Is that joke still going? It must be about 10 years now.

I knew before I read your post that your system would make my 4790K look like a Z80.

Not necessarily. Boost speed on the 4970K is 4.4 GHz, a GHz faster than any of the enterprise Xeons. Single threaded tasks may actually be faster on the 4970 than a top end Haswell-EX, if it's something bottlenecked on core instruction throughput that doesn't benefit from cache or memory bandwidth improvements. Certainly almost no games benefit from having more than four cores, and for high-end gaming you're better off with an overclocked single-socket machine than a multi-socket machine.

What are you coding that needs that kind of hardware?

Mostly prototyping machine learning and data mining algorithms. GPUs are generally faster but they're a bit of a pain to work with in the early prototyping phase.

I wonder what Intels new memory can do.

The Purley platform has a lot of nice stuff but it's 2.5 years out. I mean, Omnipath looks great in theory, but it'll probably be yet another proprietary Intel initiative that is so late and overpriced that it's not sufficiently better than commodity to be worth deploying. The final spec for 40GBase-T is out next month, and honestly unless you have an app that's genuinely very latency sensitive it's hard to resist the economics of just ganging lots of commodity ethernet lanes together. 100Gbase is already available on only-moderately-silly-CR4 for intra-rack interconnect, by the time Omnipath actually gets real availability we'll probably be close to 100GBase-T on Cat 8A.

[Starglider]

Ok, couldn't resist, too much core count lust since I respecced the algo cluster (at work) to quads. Picked up this state-of-the-2011-art 32-core server to tide me over. I'll fill it up with spare DIMMs and SSDs to a decent spec. The sad thing is, this nearly five year old machine is still faster (for well-threaded workloads; although I turned down the top-end 40 core version for the 10% clock speed bump) than the fastest dual-socket workstations you can currently build, and it should be about 60% faster than (each of) my current pair of 16-core 3.2GHz workstations. Ironically the exact thing several banks are about to strip out for the DL 560 G9s (which have double the rack density over the old 580s; HP has been way behind the curve on quad socket packaging for oh a decade or so), including ones that I work with. Anyway, that should suffice until the end of the year, when we see if AMD are finally going to bring some competition back to the low-to-mid range server space.

[The Infidel]

Oh, please, Starglider. I would love to see the results of y-cruncher on that rig. Calculate PI multi-threaded. It also eats a lot of memory. Just did a calculation of 2 500 000 000 decimals, and it took me about 5 minutes. (If you're running it from your user folder, remember to change that to not reveal your user/real name.)

Latest version for Linux/Windows can be found here:
http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/#Download

Results: Spoiler

Code: Select all

y-cruncher v0.6.9 Build 9462

Detecting Environment...

CPU Vendor:
    AMD         = No
    Intel       = Yes

OS Features:
  * 64-bit      = Yes
  * OS AVX      = Yes
  * OS AVX512   = No

Hardware Features:
    MMX         = Yes
  * x64         = Yes
  * ABM         = Yes
    RDRAND      = Yes
    BMI1        = Yes
  * BMI2        = Yes
    ADX         = No
    MPX         = No
    PREFETCHWT1 = No

SIMD: 128-bit
  * SSE         = Yes
  * SSE2        = Yes
  * SSE3        = Yes
  * SSSE3       = Yes
    SSE4a       = No
  * SSE4.1      = Yes
  * SSE4.2      = Yes
    AES-NI      = Yes
    SHA         = No

SIMD: 256-bit
  * AVX         = Yes
  * XOP         = No
  * FMA3        = Yes
  * FMA4        = No
  * AVX2        = Yes

SIMD: 512-bit
  * AVX512-F    = No
    AVX512-CD   = No
    AVX512-PF   = No
    AVX512-ER   = No
  * AVX512-VL   = No
  * AVX512-BW   = No
  * AVX512-DQ   = No
    AVX512-IFMA = No
    AVX512-VBMI = No


Auto-Selecting: x64 AVX2 ~ Airi

C:\CHANGE_HERE\y-cruncher v0.6.9.9462\Binaries\x64 AVX2 ~ Airi.exe


Launching y-cruncher...
================================================================


Checking processor/OS features...

Required Features:
    x64, ABM, BMI1, BMI2,
    SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2
    AVX, FMA3, AVX2



y-cruncher v0.6.9 Build 9462                ( http://www.numberworld.org )
Copyright 2008-2016 Alexander J. Yee      ( a-yee@u.northwestern.edu )

Distribute Freely - Please report any bugs.

Tuning:  Windows - x64 AVX2 ~ Airi


  0         Benchmark Pi  (all in ram)
  1         Component Stress Tester
  2         Run I/O Performance Analysis

  3         Custom Compute a Constant
                -   Compute other constants (e, Golden Ratio, etc...)
                -   Choose your own settings (use disk for large computations)

  4         BBP Digit Extractor for Pi
  5         Digit Viewer

  6         Advanced Options
  7         About


Enter your choice:
option: 0

Benchmark Pi:

Select a Benchmark Type:

  0     Single-Threaded
  1     Multi-Threaded

option: 1


Available Memory:   24.1 GiB

Option      Decimal Digits          Approx. Memory Needed

  1             25,000,000                 227 MiB
  2             50,000,000                 368 MiB
  3            100,000,000                 621 MiB
  4            250,000,000                1.29 GiB
  5            500,000,000                2.48 GiB
  6          1,000,000,000                4.86 GiB
  7          2,500,000,000                11.4 GiB
  8          5,000,000,000                23.1 GiB
  9         10,000,000,000                46.2 GiB
 10         25,000,000,000                 116 GiB
 11         50,000,000,000                 231 GiB
 12        100,000,000,000                 463 GiB
 13        250,000,000,000                1.16 TiB
 14        500,000,000,000                2.32 TiB
 15      1,000,000,000,000                4.72 TiB
 16      2,500,000,000,000                11.5 TiB

  0     I prefer SuperPi sizes... (1M, 2M, 4M...)

option: 7


Constant:   Pi
Algorithm:  Chudnovsky Formula

Decimal Digits:       2,500,000,000
Hexadecimal Digits:   Disabled

Thread Mode:    Windows Thread Pool  ->  ? / 8
Memory Mode:    Ram Only

Start Time: Sat Feb  6 19:01:15 2016

Reserving Working Memory...         11.3 GiB
Constructing Twiddle Tables...      77.1 MiB
Allocating I/O Buffers...           0 bytes

Begin Computation:

Summing Series...  176,284,177 terms
Time:    315.535 seconds  ( 0.088 hours )
Division...
Time:    12.054 seconds  ( 0.003 hours )
InvSqrt...
Time:    7.656 seconds  ( 0.002 hours )
Final Multiply...
Time:    5.233 seconds  ( 0.001 hours )

Pi:  340.485 seconds  ( 0.095 hours )

Base Converting:
Time:    21.803 seconds  ( 0.006 hours )

Writing Decimal Digits:   2,500,000,000  digits written

Verifying Base Conversion...
Time:    11.080 seconds  ( 0.003 hours )

Start Time: Sat Feb  6 19:01:15 2016
End Time:   Sat Feb  6 19:07:42 2016

Total Computation Time:             362.287 seconds  ( 0.101 hours )
Total Time (with output + verify):  386.647 seconds  ( 0.107 hours )

CPU Utilization:        722.93 %
Multi-core Efficiency:  90.3662 %

Last Digits:  Pi
0917027898 3554136437 7123165188 3528593128 0032489094  :  2,499,999,950
9228502005 4677489552 2459688725 5242233502 7255998083  :  2,500,000,000

Version:              0.6.9.9462 (Windows - x64 AVX2 ~ Airi)
Processor(s):         Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
Logical Cores:        8
Physical Memory:      33,996,427,264 (31.7 GiB)
CPU Base Frequency:   3,990,754,175 Hz

Result File: Validation - Pi - 2,500,000,000.txt

Benchmark Successful. The digits appear to be OK.

Press any key to continue . . 

.

[Starglider]

Oh, please, Starglider. I would love to see the results of y-cruncher on that rig.

Sure. Slight problem at the moment though, I had to put it in the far corner of the attic (it is chock full of computers and stuff at the moment) and I've run out of 10m ethernet patch cables. Until that arrives it is off the internet; servers don't come with wi-fi.



It's actually quite a nice machine though. A lot of these 4U Gen7s are being pulled and replaced with the 2U DL560 Gen9s because 4U is just ridiculously wasteful for a 4 socket 8 drive machine (unless you have a ton of expansion cards), But for home use it's ideal, because the 1Us and even 2Us have lots of ridiculously noisy whiny little fans. This machine has chunky fans that spin slower and is thus much quieter. Still too noisy for desktop use but it's fine in the attic. As it's an enterprise server everything is tool free and designed for maintainability, and it's not actually much bigger than a high-end (EATX) gaming desktop. I've stuck an old Quadro K2000 in there, it'll suffice since this particular machine isn't for GPGPU-based experiments.



It has 32 cores at 2.66 GHz, 96 MB of cache and 16 channels of DDR-1333, albeit at poor latency due to the memory extenders. The best dual socket desktop you can currently build (with 2015 CPUs) would be a dual Xeon Xeon E5-2699 v3 with 36 cores at 2.3 GHz, 90 MB of cache and 8 channels of DDR-2133. So this 2011 machine will be winning many of the concurrent benchmarks but costs less than just one of the CPUs for the new workstation (technically you could use E7-8895v3s for 18 cores at 2.5 GHz, but those things are even worse at $7000 each plus high-end motherboard). The latest 2S solutions will finally completely surpass the 2011 generation of 4S solutions when Broadlake-EP comes out later this year, implying that doubling performance currently takes four years in the enterprise server space.

[Starglider]

Unfortunately performance on that benchmark is pretty bad; only about 15% faster than your desktop (this is with hyperthreading disabled);

Code: Select all

Total Computation Time:             313.072 seconds  ( 0.087 hours )
Total Time (with output + verify):  345.703 seconds  ( 0.096 hours )

CPU Utilization:        2903.5 %
Multi-core Efficiency:  90.7344 %

Last Digits:  Pi
0917027898 3554136437 7123165188 3528593128 0032489094  :  2,499,999,950
9228502005 4677489552 2459688725 5242233502 7255998083  :  2,500,000,000

Version:              0.6.9.9462 (Linux - x64 SSE4.1 ~ Ushio)
Processor(s):         Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7- 8837 @ 2.67GHz
Logical Cores:        32
Physical Memory:      547,608,181,728 ( 510 GiB)
CPU Base Frequency:   2,663,688,448 Hz

Result File: Validation - Pi - 2,500,000,000.txt

Benchmark Successful. The digits appear to be OK.

Looking at the website, I suspect the problem is the NUMA characteristics. Y-Cruncher allocates all the memory on the master thread, and then spawns the worker threads. On the default linux memory manager with node interleaving off, this means all the CPUs are trying to access memory allocated on CPU0, leaving the other 12 memory channels idle. The server came with DDR3-1033 sticks installed, so if you have DDR-1600 in your desktop, the usable memory bandwidth for the benchmark will only be about 28% greater and is probably the limiting factor for performance. The fix would be to haveY-Cruncher allocate the memory from the worker threads rather than the master.

This is one of several things you have to be careful with when programming for multi-socket systems, particularly now that they're all NUMA. For typical server applications it isn't a problem, because there are lots of loose-coupled tasks all allocating their own resources e.g. lots of servlets running and doing their work in independent threads, for which the default scheduler and allocator can set sensible core and memory affinity. However for HPC applications with close-coupled concurrency careful thought is required about memory allocation and access patterns. For some algo trading simulation stuff I am running now, performance is indeed about 60% better than my dual-socket machines, but that's because they have a lot of relatively loosely coupled actor threads each able to benefit from node-local memory allocation.

[phongn]

Finally time to replace my old C2Q 9550-based machine.

Supermicro X11SAE-O
Xeon E3-1240 v5
Noctua NH-U14S heatsink
16GB ECC DDR4-2133 RAM (2x8)
EVGA GTX 970 4GB
Samsung 840 Pro 512GB (from old machine)
Corsair TX650 650W PSU (from old machine)
Fractal Design Define R5

The heatsink is massive overkill, but basically will guarantee quietness even during high loads. I like having ECC and non-bling motherboards, so Xeon it is. The case is nicely damped (and replaces a first-generation Antec P180).

[The Infidel]

@Starglider.
Hm, I see the thing with memory. I saw "90% efficient" and thought it was good.
I haven't really gone into pi-calculating algorithms since last millennium, but I seem to remember that you can't calculate it without having access to all the data. I might of course be gravely mistaken.

Here I thought that y-cruncher would absolutely rule on your computer, since the total processing power is a bit greater.

BTW: I have 1866 DDR3, not 1600. My specs are at the third post from the top on this page (38).

[The Vortex Empire]

Been running this rig for a while now, but hadn't posted it here.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($224.95 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($24.88 @ OutletPC)
Thermal Compound: Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver 3.5g Thermal Paste ($10.00)
Motherboard: MSI Z97-GAMING 5 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($144.89 @ OutletPC)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($49.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Crucial MX100 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($108.90 @ Amazon)
Storage: Crucial MX100 512GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($230.00)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr V Video Card ($339.99 @ B&H)
Case: Corsair 750D ATX Full Tower Case ($139.99 @ B&H)
Power Supply: Corsair 750W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($144.99 @ Amazon)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 OEM (64-bit) ($86.89 @ OutletPC)
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition (2-Pack) 62.7 CFM 120mm Fans ($27.89 @ OutletPC)
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series AF140 Red 66.4 CFM 140mm Fan ($15.99 @ Amazon)
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series AF140 Red 66.4 CFM 140mm Fan ($15.99 @ Amazon)
Monitor: Asus PA248Q 24.1" Monitor ($298.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Monitor: Asus VS24AH-P 24.0" Monitor ($218.98 @ NCIX US)
Monitor: Asus MG279Q 144Hz 27.0" Monitor ($579.99 @ B&H)
Keyboard: Ducky DK9087 Shine 3 TKL Red LED Backlit (Red Cherry MX) Wired Standard Keyboard ($120.00)
Mouse: SteelSeries Rival Wired Optical Mouse ($59.99 @ Best Buy)
Headphones: Sennheiser HD 598 Headphones ($146.24 @ Amazon)
External Storage: Hitachi HGST Touro Mobile 1TB External Hard Drive ($60.00)
Other: Corsair Commander Mini (Purchased For $59.99)
Total: $3306.51
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-02-15 20:09 EST-0500

Plan on grabbing whichever new flagship GPU is more powerful when they come out this summer/fall to upgrade.

[TheFeniX]

Not a bad setup at all. I had considered going 140+hz at 2K vs 4K but the desktop scaling with W8, then the improvement with W10 sealed it for 4K.

Plan on grabbing whichever new flagship GPU is more powerful when they come out this summer/fall to upgrade.

Urg, Fry's promo code could get me a 980ti for $600. Gigabyte though and I haven't used one of those since AGP was still a thing. Overclocked it's comparable with SLIed 970s and there's no bullshit to deal with concerning SLI. And I could always get another later. This would let me cough up one 970 to my buddy in Kentucky and dump the other off on my brother.

But man, I just poured money into this thing and there's this new little fart machine I have to watch on the baby monitor. Really, I'd just be doing it so Fallout 4 didn't make my SLI setup crater until they fix it. There's really nothing in the near future that interests me enough to utilize that horsepower and I really don't feel like blowing another $1200 on parts just to be like "fuck yer, because I can" which I did before a wife, house, kid, you know: all that annoying stuff that gets in the way of gaming.

But man.... would be one beast of a rig.