"Rate my Rig" thread

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I read that Optane only really provides a performance boost to old-school HDDs, and only if they're the boot drive. Is that not the case? My boot drive is a SATA-SSD, which with the core upgrade already starts far faster than it used to- no need to stick an M.2 drive in there just yet.

I have a Raid-0 array comprised of a couple of velociraptors for my Steam library, if Optane would speed those up I could take the plunge as my board has two M.2 slots.

[The Infidel]

As I understand, Optane has lower sequential speed than m2 ssd, but higher iops and durability. This makes it perfect for a pure boot/scratch device or as cache for a slower medium. I don't think the difference is big enough to be felt for a normal PC.

You can get a 32gb optane cache quite cheap, but I think you need a z3xx chipset to make good use of it. Starglider knows more about this, I guess.

[Starglider]

I read that Optane only really provides a performance boost to old-school HDDs, and only if they're the boot drive. Is that not the case?

No, it has much better random read and write performance than Flash SSDs, and sequential speed only a bit slower than high-end SSDs (still better than low-end stuff). You may be thinking of 'Optane Cache' which was Intel's early attempt to get the tech into production by putting tiny amounts on the motherboard as a data cache for HDDs and slow SSDs. Compiles are definitely substantially faster than my previous workstation which had 4 x 2013 vintage SSDs in RAID 0 and 2 x 8 core Xeons. However I'm not sure if that's the Optane or the 32-core Threadripper.

I have a Raid-0 array comprised of a couple of velociraptors for my Steam library, if Optane would speed those up I could take the plunge as my board has two M.2 slots.

I didn't think anyone was still using Velociraptors, they topped out at 1TB each in the last ones made which were released in 2012. SSDs have closed the price gap enough that there isn't much point using (expensive, small) 10K RPM HDDs any more, and 15K RPM are nearly extinct. The only use case left for HDDs is for cheap mass (many TB per device) storage.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I read that Optane only really provides a performance boost to old-school HDDs, and only if they're the boot drive. Is that not the case?

No, it has much better random read and write performance than Flash SSDs, and sequential speed only a bit slower than high-end SSDs (still better than low-end stuff). You may be thinking of 'Optane Cache' which was Intel's early attempt to get the tech into production by putting tiny amounts on the motherboard as a data cache for HDDs and slow SSDs. Compiles are definitely substantially faster than my previous workstation which had 4 x 2013 vintage SSDs in RAID 0 and 2 x 8 core Xeons. However I'm not sure if that's the Optane or the 32-core Threadripper.

It was articles like this that gave the impression that HDDs would benefit far more than SSDs: Link.

The SSD that I have was high-end when I bought it nearly 2 years ago, a SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB; it was a great deal at £50 less than retail. It was only when I upgraded my motherboard that I saw the expected jump in performance.

I have a Raid-0 array comprised of a couple of velociraptors for my Steam library, if Optane would speed those up I could take the plunge as my board has two M.2 slots.

I didn't think anyone was still using Velociraptors, they topped out at 1TB each in the last ones made which were released in 2012. SSDs have closed the price gap enough that there isn't much point using (expensive, small) 10K RPM HDDs any more, and 15K RPM are nearly extinct. The only use case left for HDDs is for cheap mass (many TB per device) storage.

Yeah, they did- at one point I had two raptor arrays running. As WD were doubling capacity with each iteration, my first array comprised a pair of 300GBs, the second a pair of 600s. They never quite got to the 1,200 GB mark, which would have been the next logical step and my next array, but they never got that far. If there's a high capacity HDD that offers superior performance to those, I'd be very interested.

[Starglider]

I bought a second Radeon Vega Frontier Liquid from Ebay to keep my current one company. It was vaguely unsettling seeing only one GPU device in OpenCL. That BeQuiet case is now crammed full, barely fitted the second GPU cooler in there by suspending it between some hard drive cages with cable ties.

It was articles like this that gave the impression that HDDs would benefit far more than SSDs: Link.

The current 'Optane Memory' thing is an Intel revenue generator gimmick that is not worth bothering with; certainly no one in the enterprise space does. The sensible use for Optane is as a replacement for flash inside proper, stand-alone SSDs, which is the sort that I have.

If there's a high capacity HDD that offers superior performance to those, I'd be very interested.

Most contemporary 7.2K hard drives (4TB+) will outperform a Velociraptor, because transfer bandwidth scales with areal density. Which is to say that all other things being equal, a 2TB drive will have twice the sequential read/write rate of a 1TB drive, whereas a 10K RPM drive has only 40% better transfer than a 7.2K drive of the same capacity. Random R/W performance will probably still be better on the 10K drive due to rotational latency, but all the use cases that case about random access latency already moved to SSDs.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Most contemporary 7.2K hard drives (4TB+) will outperform a Velociraptor, because transfer bandwidth scales with areal density. Which is to say that all other things being equal, a 2TB drive will have twice the sequential read/write rate of a 1TB drive, whereas a 10K RPM drive has only 40% better transfer than a 7.2K drive of the same capacity. Random R/W performance will probably still be better on the 10K drive due to rotational latency, but all the use cases that case about random access latency already moved to SSDs.

Makes sense, though would I need to put a pair of such drives in a RAID-0 array like the Raptors to see a performance gain?

An article I found on techradar still names the WD raptors as the best for gaming despite them being discontinued years ago. Weirdly the URL says 2016 yet the date on the article says it's from 11 days ago.

[Starglider]

Makes sense, though would I need to put a pair of such drives in a RAID-0 array like the Raptors to see a performance gain?

A RAID-0 array on a decent controller increases sequential performance proportionally to the number of drives. It generally doesn't help with latency. So probably yes you would.

An article I found on techradar still names the WD raptors as the best for gaming despite them being discontinued years ago.

Sites without benchmarks are worthless for performance comparisons. Look at something like AnandTech instead, they have the random & sequential R/W speeds for a huge range of drives + workload-specific performance benchmarks.

[Ace Pace]

Fuck Fractal design. They made an amazing case, an amazing layout and a beautiful side window of "tempered glass".
Which is where the fuck you comes into it. I dropped it maybe 1cm and it just shattered the way no tempered glass should shatter.

So, advice for a mid sized case, that's cheap?
Must contain a full length GPU, ATX motherboard, and between 3-4 hard disk drives (2.5 and 3.5 inch mix)

[Dominus Atheos]

Someone explain to me about SSDs, backwards and forwards compatibility, and real world performance vs synthetic benchmarks please. Games are getting bigger and I need a 1tb ssd as the 500gb 850 evo that is also my boot drive isn't enough anymore, but everything's complicated and I don't have the patience to parse it all out.

I have an old z97 mobo (that I don't feel like replacing since apparently moore's law is dead for cpus and video cards) that supports SATA Express 10 Gbs... which apparently isn't a real thing that anybody came out with real products for. It also has an m2 slot that supports pcie2 x2... which they also don't make products for. I see lots of pcie3 x4 products though, some of which are "nvme" which is apparently better then not nvme.

The manufacturer's website for my motherboard says it's compatible with the samsung sm951 which is pcie3 x4 nvme... and also nearly fictional and not really widely released. The only thing that is a really real product that the website says my mobo supports is the samsung 950 pro x4 nvme... which they don't make anymore. Still, I assume that this means that everything should work with my mobo. And may work even better whenever I have to upgrade my system.

Or is all of this just marketing hype and nothing in the real wold is capable of bumping up against the limit of the much cheaper sata3?

[TheFeniX]

Dude, just go and buy a Samsung Evo 8XX 1TB SATA3 or something. They're like $150 now and backwards compatible. Unless you're doing some incredibly specialized tasks, the speed of the controller and interface for your drive is going to mean pretty much nothing. NOTE: "Gaming" is not that specialized task.

My 7200RPM HDD pulls like 130MB/s (on a sequential read, which is bullshit speed padding for most tasks). And you can still game on that, millions of people do. My Evo 850 pulls 500MB/s. Even if you don't pull those numbers, gaming isn't about straight thoughput. What it's (usually) about is pulling multiple small/medium sized files extremely quickly, which SSDs do on a level WAY outside that of HDDs due to the random access nature.

Pretty much all the newer SSD interface speed stuff is for epeen. It's like dealing with Quad channel RAM when all you do is game: trust me, it's never going to be your bottleneck.

Just go buy the cheapest SATA SSD from a quality manufacturer. I hear Crucial is good, but I stick with Samsung. You never know when you might replace it and maybe you've got another PC to put it in or want to convert it to an external drive. SATA's backwards compatibility is great for that. But even if you could get more speed on another interface, I doubt you're ever going to get NEAR 500MB/s playing a video game and SATA3 does that.

EDIT: I should maybe add, so I backed up some mods last night from one SSD to another. 20GBs transferred in about 25 second. If you honestly need more speed than that, then you're either rendering or video editing. And your CPU/software is likely to bottleneck you first either way.

[Dominus Atheos]

You're talking about frames-per-second, and you're right, ssd speeds have almost no effect on FPS.

What ssd speeds do affect is load times, and some of these have 2-3 times the synthetic benchmark numbers. But synthetic benchmarks are bullshit, and a lot more goes into loading a game level than the numbers hdtach will spit out.

But I finally found a real world comparison after literally years of curiosity and the answer is... not very much difference.

The Intel Optane SSD 900P Series was the winner in the game load test. The Intel Optane 900P 480GB PCIe NVMe SSD with 3D XPoint was found to be 36% faster than the Seagate Barracuda Pro 10TB SATA III hard drive and 20% faster than the Crucial BX200 series SATA III SSD.
Read more at https://www.legitreviews.com/game-load- ... 3AkyPsA.99

20% difference between the fastest ssd and the slowest. So cheapest (samsung) ssd it is!

[TheFeniX]

You're talking about frames-per-second, and you're right, ssd speeds have almost no effect on FPS.

You'd be surprised, an SSD isn't going to give you consistent FPS gains, but it might be the difference in poorly optimized games and/or ones trying to load way too much on the fly (SWTOR and Creation Engine Games). SWTOR seemed to dump and load UI assets on the fly, as well as character models, so depending on what you were doing you could see a few seconds of noticeable FPS drops as the engine choked. While large engagement have FPS number tank even with the best hardware and network latency was likely a huge factor (for the engine): my HDD was tapped out on reads near 100% of the time during said engagements. Which leads me to believe the game was consistently dropping character models in and out of memory.

I wonder just how much better the game would have ran had I an SSD at the time.

What ssd speeds do affect is load times, and some of these have 2-3 times the synthetic benchmark numbers. But synthetic benchmarks are bullshit, and a lot more goes into loading a game level than the numbers hdtach will spit out.

The days of 2-5 minutes load times on BF1942 maps is about done. Back then a good HDD Stripe could cut those load time under half. But predictive streaming of assets has come a long way from the the days of Half-Life 2's <loading........>.

I run most my games off an SSD stripe now (long story) and whereas I think I benchmarked something stupid like 850MB/s on random read/writes, I get maybe 1 second off something like an FFXIV dungeon load time. And even then, the SSD itself cut load times down way more than that. So, your benchmarks don't surprise me.

[Rogue 9]

I just bought a new computer this weekend. I'm going to double that RAM in fairly short order. Gets here on Friday.

[Marko Dash]

I've run into a hardware problem that's evaded all my solutions and attempts to fix.

Near the start of September i come home from work to find my PC off, as we had had a bad thunderstorm that day i just assumed the power had flickered and it shut down.

but when i start it back up it started and then shut back off around the bios splash screen, tried a different outlet, different cable, etc.

so i assumed the PSU got damaged. next day I bought a new PSU, wired everything back up, and same thing.

tried different RAM configurations to see if it might be a stick gone bad, no joy.

tried starting without the GPU, nope.

pulled the boot drive out and plugged it into an external dock on my backup PC, drive is fine.

then i thought it must be the motherboard, ordered a MB. when that got here i again wired everything up and, bupkis. if anything it's now worse because it now shuts off just a second or two after powering on.

the CPU was the only part left that i could think of that might have gone bad, but the price of a new one caused me to have to wait a while.

that finally got here yesterday, and you can guess by me even posting this that the CPU also doesn't appear to be the cause of the issue.

at this point there's almost no components left in it from August except the GPU (which I've eliminated as an issue), the RAM (same), and the hard drives (which have been checked on another PC).

I'm banging my head on the wall here trying to think of what else could be causing this and have sunk nearly 700 bucks into it with nothing to show for it except I've almost got enough parts to build a third PC.

[Mr Bean]

snip troubleshooting

Okay I have some questions about what was tested in combination with what but first up... have you tested it with another outlet/have you verified the outlet itself is good? I'm including the power strip/ups if you have one in the way.

Second what has been tested with what? Is there a new cpu sitting in a new motherboard with a new power supply or just swapping one part at a time.

Third the RAM, have you tried going down to 1 stick and verifying behavior continues?

[Marko Dash]

one part at a time over the course of the last two months, but new parts were left in. different outlet/power cable was the first thing i tried.

i didn't try going to one stick, but i did go down to two and tried each pair in each channel.

at this point it might turn out to be something stupid like the case power switch, but the button seems to power it on just fine (no stickyness, ect) and if it was a bad connection there i would think it would also be powering itself on.

[bilateralrope]

I'm looking to buy a new desktop soon, and I've narrowed my options to two prebuilts. Both identical except for the CPU and motherboard. Even the price is the same after the current discounts. One has an Intel I7 11700F, the other a Ryzen 7 3700X. Both come with Windows 11.

Benchmarks favor the 11700F. Is there anything else I should know before deciding ?

[Mr Bean]

Odd that they are selling a 3700x when the 5000 series have been out for over a year now.

Either way 3700x will win in power usage and some business tasks but loses in everything else. A nice 5600x or 5800x will beat a 11700f however..... Intel has already switched to Socket 1700 from FCLGA1200 on the I7 11700F and AMD have already said the 5000 series will be the last Socket AM4 so the whole thing is a wash.

I'd go with whichever one is cheaper unless you value power usage which might end up being oh 20$ a year in electricity at most. You get a tiny upgrade path with the AMD and 0 upgrade path with the Intel but both are at end of socket and both are pretty powerful.

So unless you care about the less power usage go with Intel.

[bilateralrope]

Odd that they are selling a 3700x when the 5000 series have been out for over a year now.

They are also selling more recent CPUs in systems with the same graphics card. But they come in machines that are significantly more expensive and/or come with RGB lighting all over the case which I'll find annoying.

Thanks for the help.

[LadyTevar]

More of a Rant.

I have cable/modem/phone through Shentel communications co.
I'm attempting to DL FFXIV's Endwalker update.
My DL speed is 0.50-0.65 MB/s.

[Xisiqomelir]

Board: 华南金 X99-T8
CPU: Xeon E5-2698v3
GPU: NVIDIA A4000
RAM: 128 GB ECC DDR3
Storage: ADATA XPG SX6000 512GB, Seagate Exos 16TB
Power: Seasonic Focus Plus 750W Gold

That's right we're going full meme!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=338EhbY8PZ4

Also successfully continuing to eschew DDR4 for the entirety of its lifespan.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well my new graphics card arrived, a very expensive but bottom-of-top-drawer GTX 3060* to replace my once-top-of-the-range-but-now-horribly-obsolete GTX-690. I went with the ASUS version of the card over MSI at the last minute because despite being slightly more expensive (and faster) there was one crucial difference- the ASUS has two HDMI sockets to the MSI's one. Which is important for me because being older models neither my TV nor my monitor have DisplayPort sockets, with the latter having the traditional DVI/VGA pairing and the TV having 3 HDMI sockets. Because I already have the necessary HDMI cables and HDMI-DVI adapters I didn't have to buy any extra cables so it actually works out cheaper this way.

Had some fun getting it into the case. While the length wasn't a problem since both cards have similar dimensions the new card was quite a bit taller meaning I couldn't manoeuvre it into the case initially, which I got around by moving the empty hard drive enclosure (one of 2 in the case) forward so I could get the card in. The enclosure doesn't quite go back far enough to line up with the screw holes with the new card in, but because the bay doesn't have any drives in it but does have a filtered fan intake I've left it where it is.

*Full name is ROG-STRIX-RTX3060-O12G-V2-GAMING to give it its due.

[Xisiqomelir]

Well my new graphics card arrived, a very expensive but bottom-of-top-drawer GTX 3060

How did you manage to get one?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well my new graphics card arrived, a very expensive but bottom-of-top-drawer GTX 3060

How did you manage to get one?

I got it from ebuyer, one of two retailers I've bought parts from in the past (the other being Overclockers). I'd been looking on and off for about 8 months for a card that offered the right balance of performance and price. Both companies definitely had more gaps than products in their GPU sections, with a lot of cards being labelled as "coming soon" with no prices listed. The majority of the cards they did have in stock were either the very cheap ones that nobody wanted or the very (4-figure) expensive ones that nobody could afford.

It wasn't the card I'd originally planned on getting but after reading about how the short (1 fan) cards just weren't as good and the mid-sized (2 fans) ones were 'meh' I went with the full length, 3-fan one as the upgrade I'd needed for years. The range of options wasn't great and I paid 50% more than I set out to but I'm happy with my choice Because there were no free delivery options I happily paid a few quid extra to get it next day (Friday) so I'd have it for the weekend. I could have paid another £5 to get it before noon but I wasn't bothered about the time, as it happens it came in the morning anyway.

It means I can now run Doom Eternal and Gears 5, the latter would load but would freeze as soon as I tried to load a map, Doom would not start at all. Other games would report issues because my old card had to rely on outdated drivers, now I can report that both titles run perfectly.

As a bonus, with the RGB lighting it looks pretty awesome as the case has a clear side panel and by coincidence, the motherboard is also from the ROG-STRIX range.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well I set out on my search to purchase a monitor worthy of the card currently running in my machine, which means at a bare minimum it has to be G-Sync capable, and it has to be 4K. Turns out that monitors that are both of those things are stupidly expensive even for a relatively modest 27'' model.