Tom's Hardware of Finland

[notbov]

today’s dumb project: breadbox continues the march towards its final form

after having put the thing together and having been inside it several times, while the current setup works, it’s far from ideal. for instance, I would like one (1) big 2.5" drive instead of two drives. I would like a GPU that both fits and isn’t inherently flawed in its reference design because the RAM on it can’t handle actually being run at the rated speed.

but, most importantly, I wanted a modular PSU so I could clean up the endless fucking clutter of wires inside. thankfully, Microcenter had Corsair SFX refurbished (it has to be safe, right) PSUs on some kind of crazy discount

time to zen out to the art of component replacement

here’s the old setup. it’s a bit cramped but careful use of cable ties has everything tied down, taking up the least amount of space possible and out of the way. what’s not immediately obvious from this picture is that all of the extra wires are blocking the holy hell out of the fan I set up to exhaust in the front.

the new, totally modular PSU (not that being modular mattered, I used all but one cable) and the old, fixed PSU that came out

the final turnout, after fighting with the SATA power cables (the drives are flush with surfaces and the cables didn’t like that) and a lot of moving shit around and about

it’s slightly cooler and a lot quieter (semi-fanless on the PSU) and whenever I go back in to do anything else, I won’t look on in despair that I’ll have to fight through bunches of bullshit

[SUPERSONNICK]

huh, just before clicking on this thread, i’ve finally received the ACK that the latest addition to my HTPC has been shipped, and i’ve been planning to do exactly this, open up this monster and finally fix cabling and do some more experiments with fans/rpm settings, since nowadays of course you can fine-tune the states/rpms during usage that fans offer.

i’m ready for this!

[SUPERSONNICK]

Well, before…

…
and afterwards…

… so, much to my surprise, this one worked pretty quickly, install drivers, reboot, update BIOS, reboot, done.

For a first test, i decided to use PrjCars2:
Turned everything on/max settings, used my benchmark test track (COTA, 32 cars, 2200, lightning storm with rain…) and - coil whining

Didn’t have time to play around with FPS limit or the C… something adaptive framerate tech that VEGA cards seem to have, but with fixed 60fps (come to think of it, there was a setting in PrjCars2 that said 1920x1080, 59fps…) i had some nice, audible feedback that the GPU is working well…

ah well, let’s see tomorrow when i can try some other game(s).

[notbov]

a quick observation of my system with the lid off: I overshot my power demands and am drawing so little power/stressing the PSU so little that even under GPU load, the fan in it isn’t spinning up

with that said, it was 10 bucks extra over the SF450 so

[sponkmonkey]

My ancient 6870 died today so I guess until I have the cash to build a new system in two or three months I can memorize this thread in its entirety

[SUPERSONNICK]

following up on that:
I brake-tested the GPU a bit by now, and had two instances where the picture went black, but could not reproduce it. So i installed the newest (bleeding edge omfg Xtreme G4mer Edition) drivers and used my PS4-setting for bench’ing purposes:

I saw the card drawing 249W for a moment, but was too slow to catch it.

What else... Yeah, i ___am___ glad i went for the 650W PSU now, because if the CPU will decide to stop idling around for some reason...

Ah, also decided to open the lid when checking the temps, since it was getting quite cozy in there…

[notbov]

I’m 100% sure if you ask anyone with a Vega what to do, they’ll tell you to undervolt as much as possible since AMD was too aggressive with their power settings

Also i want to live in the world where under 70 C is “getting toasty”

[Felix]

OK the rumours coming out of Nvidia right now are pretty bonkers, like they’ve managed to do a whole lot without a real shrink again

I’ll believe it when I see it but the stuff they’re quoting is like they’ve managed to get their efficiency up beyond 15w/tflop which is pretty wild, it’s like straight double all the competition

[Brooks]

So, my MonHun amusement has kicked me to actually upgrade my rig and I want the top whack i9 (7980xe?). Can anyone suggest a good X299 mobo? Want one with good fast DDR4 support, at least 1 M2 drive slot for when I eventually go for one of those, preferably no lightshow guff and solid reliability

I currently already have my Win10’d SSD, Corsair 850W PSU and the GTX1080 to haul over from the old show

Like, I have an eye on this thing: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20X299%20Gaming%20K6/index.asp

But

[SUPERSONNICK]

I’m 100% sure if you ask anyone with a Vega

there we have the problem, who is stupid enough to have a VEGA?
why would you wait for about a year to be able to buy a Vega now for the 499$$$ that were supposed to be the retail price last year, esp. when a lot of people bought a cheap nvidia card to ease them over into the next gen, and - what a coincidence, nvidia is about to demo their 11xx gen that will pretty much wipe the floor with AMD from the looks of it?

that’s me, yupp.

[disestablished]

Is there a use case for you to buy 16 cores? Or to go for the X platform?

Because in terms of gaming with Intel, less cores + higher clockspeed on all cores, is going to give you better performance.

And the X platform is very expensive.

The 79*** CPUs are skylake based. I would get something at least Kaby Lake based. If not Coffee Lake. A. For better clockspeed B. Newer cpu features and the fact that the 4k cutoff for Netflix etc, is Kaby Lake.

An 8 or 12 core CPU is going to be a much better balance for gaming and still offer plenty of threads for most anything else.

In terms of motherboards: I tend to like Gigabyte. Their RMA process actually works. So, they back their product. And they usually have most of the features I like, at each price level. They are effective at releasing bios updates. And their boards are generally pretty happy with most RAM.
Their one issue for me is that they still sometimes make boards with layout issues.

ASUS, despite being basically the industry standard, have put themselves into a weird corner where they don’t seem to be good about ho honoring replacements on most but their top end boards and videocards. I have seen way too many posts suggesting this.
However, Asus boards perform the best (though we are talking about small margins), overclock the best, are consistently among the best in terms of exposing features for granular control of various things. Don’t usually skimp on fan headers. Dont usually have layout issues. Are usually good about bios updates.
But, I have known them to be a bit more picky about ram choice.

MSI is a lot better than they used to be. They are competing in nearly all aspects. However, they still seem to have a higher frequency of stability issues. At least in their more economically priced boards. Their high end stuff seema good.

Asrock pretty much goes model to model. Some are fine. Some are junk. They do tend to expose bios features, like ASUS does. But They do also consistently have the thinnest PCBs, to squeeze a few bucks and undercut competitors. YMMV

A minute with newegg reviews, will reveal boards with widespread issues.

Tomshardware seems to actually put their mitts on more boards, than other sites. But, if they have actually reviewed your specific hardware: Hardocp and Techreport.com are my two faves. Their individual testiing methodologies are superior, IMO. Techreport is especially great for GPU and CPU data. And If [H] tells you a board is good, it’s good. It’s not just another article pushed out.

[Brooks]

Well multicore would be exceedingly handy for my more typical use of my rig, which is running shitloads of plugins in my DAW of choice. Looking at this, the big-ass i9 does seem to be the don

Intel's Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X CPUs reviewed

[disestablished]

And in that case: AMD is about to drop threadripper 2. Which gives you more of everything, for your money. More cores, more threads. More PCI-E lanes and board features. The only two ways Intel currently wins with Skylake X, is their IPC advantage and single core turbo.
I expect Intel’s next product to create a proper clockspeed advantage. But who knows when that’s out. They have actually had 4 core Kaby X for a year. But it’s unclear to me what core their next 16+ product will be based on and when it will release. Seems like they should have had it ready, by now.

[Brooks]

Thready 2 and an Aorus X399 Extreme then? Neither are immediately available, but I guess it couldn’t hurt to wait a bit since I’ve put this shit off for so long anyway

[Felix]

honestly just get a ryzen 2700

[notbov]

technically you can pick up any X399 board because AMD is making the TR4 socket forward compatible and the only hold up would be BIOS support from the board manufacturer and possibly cooling the VRM from the additional power draw if you went with the 2990WX and overclocked it

also DDR4 is expensive

[notbov]

ALSO: https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=131-SX-E295-KR

EVGA seems to be clearing out their mATX X299 board for 150 USD (note: I am baselessly assuming you are in North America)

[disestablished]

Unless you need that level of performance with digital instruments, threadripper looks like the value winner, at 1/4 the.money. And that’s 1.0.

Threadripper 2.0 offers better clocks, better cache and communication between cores (so IPC should be up a little). And if you want it, up to 32 cores. Still, for less money.

[disestablished]

The new threadripper reviews are out and it looks like the only improvement from the 1950X to the 2950X (both are 16c/32t parts), is 400-500 mhz extra headroom. Any power usage savings is eaten by the extra mhz.
There seems to be virtually no clock for clock IPC improvement. I expected a little bit.
But that will make used 1950x a real good value!

The new 32c/64t 2990wx is kind of its own beast. Latency is higher in full 32 core mode. But it’s a good value for budget workstation needs. Where that many threads trumps latency in appropriate workloads and even saves power, by doing work so much faster. Even though the chip draws more power in he general. Less time processing.can mean less power used.

You can also disable half the chip, for 16 cores and you get latency improvements which put it a little better than the 2950x in overall performance. Which I don’t full understand why. But clearly the 2950x must have slightly less bandwidth and/or higher latency.

AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX CPU reviewed

[H]ardOCP: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX & 2950X CPU Review

[Felix]

I’m still very, very, very skeptical that there is a consumer use case for that many x86 CPU cores. most workflows that are parallelized that effectively should be run on the GPU, and meanwhile x86 value and single-threaded performance both plummet so dramatically after ~8 cores that I honestly just don’t get it.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve more or less completely lost interest in x86 from the point of view of “exciting new developments in personal computing” because ARM and CUDA have been so much more interesting lately but I still don’t understand who is driving these product cycles. unless you’re running your own VPS datacentre (which is not at all cost competitive or sensible these days), why would you want this? all these benchmarks are synthetic nonsense and the $2000 chip only outperforms the $300 one on like half of them