Grateful for your feedback on desktop spec

[brijon]

I intend to use this computer for video editing (inc. capture of analog Hi8 video), web design and gaming (mainly flight simulator). The areas I would welcome advice are:

• Are there any mother boards which offer more that 3 PCI expansion slots. Ideally I need 4: one for Pinnacle Video Capture Card, TV card, sound card and preferably one for USB 3 sockets(future proofing).

• Is there any real merit/noticeable difference in 16 Gb RAM cf to 8 GB RAM?

• Is there any advantage with Intel CPU compared to AMD CPUs for gaming or video editing?

• The key area I would wish to seek advice is the merit of a SSD + 1 x 1TB HDD compared to a SSD + possibly 2 x 1TB HDD. Am I correct in thinking if the SSD failed I cannot access the other drives? Given the small size of the SSD which programmes and files should be saved on the SSD

• Given my hearing is not good, what merit is there on installing a separate sound card?

The Spec is as follows:

Case
FRACTAL DESIGN R3 - BLACK PEARL CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i3-2120 Dual Core (3.30GHz, 3MB Cache) + HD Graphics
Motherboard
ASUS® P8Z68-V/GEN3: PCI-E 3.0 READY, SLI, CROSSFIREX
Memory (RAM)
16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB)
Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti - 2 DVI,HDMI,VGA - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 32MB Cache (7200rpm)
2nd Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 32MB Cache (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
12x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW (£42)
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply
600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£59)
Processor Cooling
SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE INTEL CPU COOLER (£19)
Sound Card
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Titanium (£59)
Network Facilities
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Floppy Disk Drive
EXTERNAL 1.44MB USB FLOPPY DISK DRIVE (£12)
TV Card
PCTV SYSTEMS DUAL TUNER TV CARD & WINDOWS MEDIA CENTRE REMOTE
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)

Many thanks in anticipation.

 

[dangro474]

Hi Brijon,

Short version:

- The motherboard has 5 PCI-E slots which should be fine, as well as 16 USB ports / connectors, 4 of which are USB 3.0.
- Performance wise dual Channel > Single Channel. The amount of RAM you need depends on your software and video filesizes, i would recommend 16gb as ram is currently cheap. I recommend 2x 8GB over 4x 4GB allowing an upgrade to 32GB (4x 8GB) infuture without having to replace DIMMS.
- Intel CPUs are superior at an equal price level. I would recommend the i5 2500 / i7 2600 for significantly more cores and threads which video encoding takes advantage of greatly.
- the number of HDDs depends on whether or not you want to RAID (see below), but i would recommend a small SSD primary + 1+TB storage. If you store personal files on the 1TB and the SSD dies your personal files are fine but you will not be able to access them until you replace your windows drive.
- Onboard sound should be fine. You can create equalizer profiles to ramp up the volume. however tghis distorts audio quality the higher you go. You can get a USB headset / PCI-E soundcard if you feel you need to later on.

The long version:

PCI-E SLOTS: The motherboard you have selected has a total of 5 PCI-E ports with varying speeds:

2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x16 or dual x8)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black)
2 x PCIe x1

Whether or not these are sufficient depends on the device you intend to use in them. I'm sure the TV tuner, Sound card and USB 3.0 adapter would perform optimally in a PCI-E 1x port, however the motherboard also has multiple USB expansion connections, allowing you to install brackets in any available back panel as long as the cable is of sufficient length. These are USB 2.0 ports however, but how likely are you to find a need for more than 16 USB ports, 4 of which are USB 3.0?

MEMORY: I'm not sure what you mean by "cf". Do you mean Dual Channel? Ultimately Dual Channel (two DIMMS of equal memory size, frequency and compatible timings running in tandem) outperforms single channel, however the level of performance increase depends ont he applicaitons. Games benefit only slightly from Dual Channel, whereas as far as i am aware video editing software benefits more. The necessity for 2x 8GB / 4x 4GB over 2x 4GB depends on the video editing software you use and the quality of the raw video files you intend to use.

I cannot advise you whether you will need more than 8GB, however RM is currently the cheapest its been in a while, so you may want to pick up 16GB just in case. Worst case scenario you wasted £40 in the short term only. I recommend 2x 8GB over 4x 4GB allowing an upgrade to 32GB (4x 8GB) infuture without having to replace DIMMS.

HARD DRIVES: SSD's are tricky. With a 2 / 3 drive setup i assume you will install all applications to the SSD and store all personal / project files on the second HDD. If this is the case, your performance in video editing MAY be bottlenecked by the 7.2 RPM drives, as you will need to read the files from them as they are written. I would recommend a multiple drive setup however, as recording to a secondary drive (if frapsing games etc) is considerably faster than recording to the drive the game is running from, as the drive perofrmance will bottleneck read times for the game you are playing. If you are editing videos from a camcorder etc and your specific application does read from the raw while encoding, again a multiple drive setup is recommended to avoid the drive speeds bottlenecking your encoding speed (read and write at the same time). this all does assume that you do not intend to RAID your HDDs.

If you decide to have 2x 1TB drives in RAID 0 or 2 Stripe and one drive dies, you have effectively lost all data across both drives. Having the two drives in Raid 1 Mirror will allow the second HDD to become a permanent on the fly backup of the other, however your effective storage space is that of just a single drive. If one of the drive fails, you have a perfect backup of it.

In any case if you operate the primary drive (SSD / platter whichever you choose) seperately and it dies, you will nto be able to boot into windows, however the personal files oyu have on your storage drives will be safe.

Whether you decide to pick up an SSD over a platter drive for your primary HDD is a question of necessity. If you are encoding relatively small files, you can do so to and from the SSD, which will probably outperform doing so from one normal HDD to another, however i cannot confirm that without knowing which applicaiton you use. Either way, for your particular setup a 120GB SSD looks good. If you decide to pick one up, i would personally store windows, your applications and games on the SSD and use the other HDDs for storage only.

AUDIO: The integrated Realtek audio is pretty decent and comes with an equalizer. If you have difficulty hearing, you can do what i do with Skyrim and create a profile with all values increased by 50%. If you find this to be insufficient, you can pick up a sound card at a later date.

Regarding the CPU; as you will be doing a lot of video editing i would highly recommend an i5 2500 / i7 2600 over the i3 depending on your budget, as the applications should make great use of the additional cores and threads unless they are extremely old.

Sorry for the wall of text.

 

[brijon]

Hi dangro474

Thank you for the comprehensive and helpful response.

- The advice on the 2 x 8GB RAM to allow future upgrade is well made and appreciated. [The "cf" is shorthand for "compared to"]

- Regarding the SSD primary drive: Is this for the operating system and all software application or just high CPU performance applications, eg. games applications, video/photo editing and webdesign applications (in my case Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Master Collection)? Thus the 'my documents' folder and 'my photos' folder, etc, and low CPU performance programmes go on a HDD. Are you suggesting video or photos files that I am working on should be saved to the SDD drive whilst being worked on?

- If I install the other applications like MS Office, low CPU power programmes, etc to the HDD will there not be a delay due to the operating systems not being on the same drive?

- Do RAID drives have to be the same size or can one be say 1TB and another 750GB? Can you RAID say 2 x 1TB HDD to 1 x 2TB HDD or a SSD to HDD. Can you I suspect I know the answer but it is worth asking.

- Does the Realtek audio on the mother board allow 5.1 speakers to fully work in sound surround? currently have a Soundblaster card that allows me to do this.

Again thank you for your response.

 

[Rakk]

- The advice on the 2 x 8GB RAM to allow future upgrade is well made and appreciated. [The "cf" is shorthand for "compared to"]

Do note however that due to the fact that the 8GB sticks still cost an arm and a leg, they are not offered by PCS at present (I think, I could be wrong)

 

[dangro474]

- The SSD won't help imptove the performance of your applications, it will however allow them to load associated components faster and MAY (stressing that as i have only novice experience with video editing software) improve rendering speeds if platter drives prove to be a bottleneck. I would recommend installing windows, games and software only to the SSD and keep all personal files on your storage drives.

- Loading other components that happen to be on the same drive as the OS should not increase load times whatsoever, as even if components related to the OS need to be loaded, they would not load in parallel anyhow.

- Raid drives do have to be the same size yes. I would personally recommend against using raid however. If you want to keep backups, i personally prefer a weekly / monthly manual copy over to an external hard drive. Although this is considerably worse than raid mirror due to the frequency of backups, it will prevent both drives becoming corrupt by a trojan / a user mistake on a work file, as it would be copied to the mirrored drive immediately.

- I'm actually struggling to confirm which setups your onboard sound will support, but as it has a ttoal of 6 audio jacks it certainly supports 5.1 surround sound at a bare minimum. Even my mid range asus 775 board back in 2007 supported 5.1

As Rakk mentioned above PCS do not supply 8GB sticks, but going with 2x4 or 4x4 ould be fine, i can't imagine you requiring more for a while.

 

[Music Guy123]

Firstly, what is your budget? I have put up a decent spec below that should be sufficient for you, it could well be out of your budget though! Tell me what you think! Here it is:

Case
COOLERMASTER HAF-X FULL TOWER GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7-2600 Quad Core (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache) + HD Graphics
Motherboard
ASUS® P8Z68-V LX: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, ATI®CrossFireX
Memory (RAM)
16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)
Graphics Card
1.25GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 570 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
120GB KINGSTON HYPERX SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
3rd Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
RAID
RAID 0 (STRIPED VOLUME - 2 x same size & model HDD / SSD) (£9)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
12x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW (£42)
Power Supply
CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE (£72)
Processor Cooling
SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE INTEL CPU COOLER (£19)
Fan Controller
NZXT Sentry 2 Fan Controller with upto 5 Fitted Case Fans
Sound Card
Asus Xonar DG 5.1 SoundCard & Headphone AMP *Award Winner* £20
Network Facilities
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Floppy Disk Drive
EXTERNAL 1.44MB USB FLOPPY DISK DRIVE (£12)
TV Card
PCTV SYSTEMS DUAL TUNER TV CARD & WINDOWS MEDIA CENTRE REMOTE
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 10 to 12 working days
Quantity
1

Price: £1,696.00 including VAT and delivery.

Configure Here: http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-sandy-bridge-pc/

 

[brijon552]

Hi dangro474

Again thank you. The idea of 1 x SSD and two HDD seems appealing. With PCS not selling 8MB, 4 x 4 looks as if it will be the cost effective solution.

Regards

 

[brijon]

Hi Music Guy123,

I have been playing around variations on various selections and I originally went for the Intel® Core™ i7-2600 as I have read several good reviews. The updated spec below reflects the inclusion of the Intel® Core™ i7-2600. What is the difference between the Intel® Core™ i7-2600 and the Intel® Core™ i7-2600K, besides £30.00?

Regarding the P8Z68-V LX, the reason I went for the ASUS® P8Z68-V/GEN3 was the additional expansion slots. If I have got this wrong, then I can save £50 by going for the P8Z68-V LX. LXV/GEN3ASUS® P8Z68-V LX

Is there a reason for the suggestion to change the RAM from 16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB) to 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)? Is there a reason to justify the extra £11.00?

I note that you have suggested going for the 1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm) rather than the 1TB SEAGATE Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 32MB Cache (7200rpm). Will the performance of the extra cache memory be significant? Again, the cost difference is an extra £72 for two WD HDD compared to two SEAGATE HDD.

I am torn between the 120GB KINGSTON HYPERX SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (up to 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW) with two Hard Disks. The additional cost is £160. The concern I have is, even if I save the ‘USERS’ folder to one of the hard drives, it will quickly fill. At the moment I have 250GB on my C Drive of which 140GB is my ‘USER’ folder. Thus this leaves two questions:
• Is it easy to swap the complete ‘USER’ folder across to a HDD?
• Does the SSD start to slow down once it starts reaching its capacity? Given I have 110GB of files in PROGRAM FILES, PROGRAM DATA and WINDOWS folders, a 120GB SDD may be insufficient.

Thus if I go with the SSD option and have to upgrade to capacity, this will further add to the cost.
I accept the CORSAIR 650W option if I go for 2 disk drives and a high end video card. As an aside mention is made via the help button against the PSU that a video card video card uses 200 watts!! Is this when the video card is processing a complex game of when having a word processing document open?
You include a NZXT Sentry 2 Fan Controller with up to 5 Fitted Case Fans; I had assumed with the video card having 2 of its own fans, there would be no need for further fans. Again I would welcome advice of the merits of fitting addition fans to a high end spec computer.

I am interested in why you suggest Asus Xonar DG 5.1 SoundCard? I have always gone for Creative Sound Blaster sound cards. Old dogs and new tricks?

The revised spec that I am considering is:

Case
FRACTAL DESIGN R3 - BLACK PEARL CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7-2600 Quad Core (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache) + HD Graphics
Motherboard
ASUS® P8Z68-V/GEN3: PCI-E 3.0 READY, SLI, CROSSFIREX
Memory (RAM)
16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB)
Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti - 2 DVI,HDMI,VGA - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 32MB Cache (7200rpm)
2nd Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 32MB Cache (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
12x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW (£42)
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply
CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE (£72)
Processor Cooling
SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE INTEL CPU COOLER (£19)
Sound Card
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Titanium (£59)
Network Facilities
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Floppy Disk Drive
EXTERNAL 1.44MB USB FLOPPY DISK DRIVE (£12)
TV Card
PCTV SYSTEMS DUAL TUNER TV CARD & WINDOWS MEDIA CENTRE REMOTE
REMOTE
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 10 to 12 working days
Quantity
1

Price: £1,388.00 including VAT and delivery.

Thank you for your contributions.

 

[Rakk]

I have been playing around variations on various selections and I originally went for the Intel® Core™ i7-2600 as I have read several good reviews. The updated spec below reflects the inclusion of the Intel® Core™ i7-2600. What is the difference between the Intel® Core™ i7-2600 and the Intel® Core™ i7-2600K, besides £30.00?

Is there a reason for the suggestion to change the RAM from 16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB) to 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)? Is there a reason to justify the extra £11.00?

The k variants of trh CPUs are unlocked for easy overclocking so are good to have if you're going to be doing some overclocking, if not then the non-k variant will be perfectly fine, and if not overclocking you'd see no difference between the 2600 and 2600k

Same pretty much applies for the memory, you will only see a difference between the Samsung 1333 and the Kingston 1600 if you are overclocking.

 

[brijon]

Hi Rakk,

Thanks, your advice is narrowing down the options.

The last jigsaw piece is the motherboard. I am considering the P8Z68-V/GEN3 as it is ‘PCIe 3 Ready’. However, ready for what. If I am not going to change the CPU, does this make any difference? At the moment I don’t have USB3 devices. The other option is the P8Z68-V LX. The price difference is £55.00 in favour of the P8Z68-V LX.

One of the key issues is the number of expansion slots. From each card’s specs, the expansions slots and USB sockets are shown as follows:

P8Z68-V/GEN3:

2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x16 or dual x8) *1
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black) *2
2 x PCIe x1
2 x PCI

ASMedia® USB 3.0 controller:
4 x USB 3.0 port(s) (2 at back panel, blue, 2 at mid-board)
Intel® Z68 chipset:
12 x USB 2.0 port(s) (6 at back panel, black+red, 6 at mid-board)

P8Z68-V LX:

1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (blue) *1
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black) *1
2 x PCIe 2.0 x1
3 x PCI

ASMedia® USB 3.0 controller:
2 x USB 3.0 port(s) (2 at back panel, blue)
Intel® Z68 chipset:
12 x USB 2.0 port(s) (4 at back panel, black, 8 at mid-board)

I am confused how many external PCI slots there are on each motherboard. The cards that I need to fit are:
• Sound Card
• Pinnacle Studio Video Capture Card
• TV Card

Can I assess the 2nd PCIe 3.0/2.0 on the P8Z68-V/GEN3 and fit one of the above cards? Or does this mean I cannot have the P8Z68-V/GEN3 motherboard as it looks as if it only has 2 x PCI slots? If this is the case, does the P8Z68-V LX have any disadvantages in terms of future proofing, speed, etc?

 

[tom_gr7]

hi Brijon,

I thought i'd offer a little help here.

here are links to the ASUS website for each motherboard.
p8z68 v /gen 3 here
p8z68-v lx here


the z68 gen 3 can fit two gpu's, but this doesn't matter in your case as you only have one gtx 560ti, it comes with 2 pci-e slots, (the little blue slots) But because of the 560 ti uses the pcie 2.0 x16 and covers/blocks one pci-e these slots, you can only use one pci-e slot above the gpu. Then it leaves two pci slots, free for devices. See the picture of the p8z68 gen 3

the z68 v lx can fit ONE 560ti, and has two pci -e slots, but minus one pci-e slot as the 560ti will cover/block a slot too. The has three PCI slots. The picture of the z68 v lx

So if your three devices you are adding are all PCI slot go for the p8z68-v lx.

hope this helps and was understandable.

tom