Buying/building a new PC using AMD processor

[nctnico]

Perhaps but it wasn't the first time such an issue has occured.

[Simon]

Well back in the days of single cores AMD were pretty good and much more efficient than intel, they used less power and got more done and were easier to overclock, but yes that was over a decade ago.

most of the realistic "benchmarks" for RAM are processing large amounts of data from hard drives so really pointless, I don't know what the best CPU speed to ram speed ratio is, my understanding of DDR is that it works great when you just happen to find the data you want in the same pair, set of four or set of eight? (DDR3) memory banks so the higher we go in DDR the more we end up with theoretical but not realistic speed increase, but then I've not been able to compare - yet, in an ideal world we'd have very very fast SDRAM but that is not financially viable.

[rolycat]

It was probably an issue with the AMD Athlon64 chips then. Athlon64, and especially Athlon64x2, had some issues. The chips were actually fantastic, they beat out the competing Intel Pentium 4s by quite a large margin. But AMD's 64-bit architecture was not fully compatible with Intel's x86-64 architecture, so when Windows got updates to support x86-64, it broke a lot of AMD x64 systems. This was resolved, and is no longer an issue as both are standardized on x86-64.

I think you have this backwards.

When AMD introduced their Opteron and Athlon 64 chips the Pentium 4 was solely a 32-bit processor.

AMD originated the 64-bit version of Intel's x86 instruction set and Intel were forced to copy it when it became obvious that their incompatible Itanium 64-bit processor was a failure as a mass-market architecture.

[Simon]

that is what I thought, AMD surprised the world when it poped out the Athlon FX-64 bit as 64 bit did not exist them on the mass market, in response intel released the emergency edition.....err sorry meant extreme edition of the pentium 4 32 bit at 3+ GHz and with so called dual cores that actually gave another 50% performance because it was not true dual core just what they do now on the i7's which is to feed the two main sections of each core separately.

[grumpydoc]

Interesting thread. Given that it includes two discussion points that can sharply divide people in the PC world (AMD vs Intel, home build vs bought) I'm surprised it has all been so polite

It's a bit too long to quote individual items but one or two things spring to mind.

AMD Vs Intel
You can't - as has been pointed out - compare raw CPU speeds unless you are talking about the same CPU family.

Intel has the faster CPUs, AMD has better integrated GPUs, AMD is arguably better value in terms of bang-per-buck.

On the graphics front neither Intel nor AMD builtin graphics are up to more than light gaming duties anyway so I'm not sure it makes much of a difference to most users - for instance I think SImon would probably be fine with either for his uses.

There is an article comparing the performance of integrated GPU's here - I'll just pull one of the graphs to show but most look similar (except the Cloud Gate benchmark which shows the Intel i5-4430 as the faster)



Note that both are trounced by either the Radeon HD7750 or GeForce GT640 both of which are considered only entry level cards. OK, to an extent this is because below this there's no point, given the current capabilities of integrated GPUs, buying anything slower. However both are only $80 graphics cards.

Integrated GPUs can usually drive multiple monitors these days but you might need to use different connectors to achieve this (eg DVI+HDMI or DVI+VGA). Any modern graphics card will do multiple monitors as well so you probably don't need a separate graphics card at all.

RAM bottlenecks
These days with 4, 8 or even 12 cores even fast DRAM is actually even further behind the CPU speed than it was back with Simon's 900MHz Duron with its 200MHz FSB - but what has become much better is the amount of cache memory in CPUs and how that cache is handled so RAM speeds have relatively minor impact on overall system performance.

The latest Haswell chips specify DDR3-1600MHz and don't seem to benefit from higher than 2133MHz - it hurts overclocking if that's the game you're into to push the RAM faster than this.

Home build vs bought
I always build my own PCs - I'm just about to put a new MB and i7-4770K in my video editing machine. I rarely recommend others do though.

The bottom line is that if you're not at the performance end of the market it isn't cheaper and it's definitely not more convenient. Simon said he spent £360 - if he said exactly what he bought I missed it but I'm sort-of assuming that he recycled the case, HDD, optical drive and PSU at least.

For comparison look at this pc from ebuyer. No affiliation except that I've bought a few bits from them in the past and they've all arrived OK. £370 for a complete system with a copy of windows 7. The same price gets you a system with an AMD A10-5700 3.4GHz processor and 12G of RAM.

OK so DIY? Well, looking at the cheapest sources I can find the CPU costs £137 (ebay not cheapest I found BTW), RAM £55, M/B £60, disk £60, DVD writer £16, case+PSU £26.

While that is 16 quid cheaper we haven't added an OS - if you need Windows that's another 70 quid for the OEM copy (which, strictly you aren't supposed to use for your own builds). PLUS there's a year's warranty so if it goes wrong there's half a chance you can just send it back to be fixed rather than have a set of different suppliers blame each other (or more likely you) for the problem.

[edit] Oh, and it looks like you get a keyboard and mouse with the system FWIW.

Simon might like to comment on how the AMD system compares with what he bought.

There are lots of reasons for DIY but price is not a good one. I tend to do it because I can pick exactly the components I want and because I find it more interesting but it isn't generally cheaper.

17" monitors
Hmmm, Simon really do yourself a favour and get a decent monitor. You'll probably find the perceived desire for twin monitors will sort itself out if you get a modern 24" or even better 28" monitor. I find 16:10 better than 16:9 and the 28" ones are at 2560 x 1440 these days which gives you clarity and loads of screen real estate.

All contemporary processors use instruction pipelining to increase performance and the creation of Hyperthreading to increase pipeline depth even more through the logical CPU core is a very clever idea. It increases the use of already existing silicon to productive effect. Making 4 cores look like 8 has been shown to improve throughput. I can't help but think changing to a CAD program that has been designed to exploit the strengths of multi core processors would be worth considering.

Hyperthreading doesn't increase the pipeline depth - it uses the fact that modern CPUs have multiple execution units per core and some of these will be idle so to increase utilisation a "virtual core" is created. The original HT improved performance by 20-25% and I think the current generation gets more benefit.

The i5 is a four-core with no HT though - only the i7 (and i3) have hyperthreading.

[nctnico]

Om my i7 (950 IIRC) single core versus hyperthreading is about 1.25 versus 1 per CPU for CPU intensive tasks.

[mariush]

Home build vs bought
The bottom line is that if you're not at the performance end of the market it isn't cheaper and it's definitely not more convenient. Simon said he spent £360 - if he said exactly what he bought I missed it but I'm sort-of assuming that he recycled the case, HDD, optical drive and PSU at least.

For comparison look at this pc from ebuyer. No affiliation except that I've bought a few bits from them in the past and they've all arrived OK. £370 for a complete system with a copy of windows 7. The same price gets you a system with an AMD A10-5700 3.4GHz processor and 12G of RAM.

OK so DIY? Well, looking at the cheapest sources I can find the CPU costs £137 (ebay not cheapest I found BTW), RAM £55, M/B £60, disk £60, DVD writer £16, case+PSU £26.

While that is 16 quid cheaper we haven't added an OS - if you need Windows that's another 70 quid for the OEM copy (which, strictly you aren't supposed to use for your own builds). PLUS there's a year's warranty so if it goes wrong there's half a chance you can just send it back to be fixed rather than have a set of different suppliers blame each other (or more likely you) for the problem.

That £370 system is worse than a custom built computer because:

* comes in a £20 case with a 250w power supply that in reality will be so shitty it will barely be able to do 200w without active or passive pfc, 70% efficiency etc.  While the system barely uses 100 watts due to having everything onboard, try putting a better video card and the power supply will most likely blow up.

* the motherboard is a £30 H61 chipset based motherboard, the h61 chipset is severely cut down in functionality (no overclocking, no sata 3 for ssd drives, no usb 3.0)

* the hard drive is probably one of those toshiba / ibm / hitachi deskstar (deathstar) that's sold cheap because they want to clear the stocks. Not reliable.

* comes with 8 GB of memory but obviously "bottom of the barrel" memory sticks, 2 x 4 gb, 1333 mhz etc

* the whole system has only 1 year warranty while if you buy separately you get lifetime warranty for memory, 2-3years for hdd, 2-3 years for motherboard, 5y+ for cpu etc

So think about it. Yes, companies don't pay £70 or whatever they pay for Windows, they probably pay 20-30 pounds or even less for each OEM install. But even so, think how cheap everything has to be so that they'd afford hiring someone to assemble the system and still have a profit. The savings are in the shitty parts used.

Here, i even took the liberty to use the same ebuyer to make a system with the same specs from ebuyer parts. I even used a case with a 500w power supply (yeah, right, it's a 200w firecracker) :



325 pounds ... now take out the percents ebuyer added to each part, as you buy the parts from distributors not retail, then add 20-30 pounds for Windows and then you still have around 50 pounds profit.

[Simon]

The parts I bought are below from ebuyer.

503900 £97.49 AMD FX-4350 Socket AM3+ 4.2GHz 12MB Total Cache Retail Boxed Processor

546762 £59.10 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P Socket AM3+ 7.1 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard

415112 £32.50 Asus HD 5450 2GB GDDR3 VGA DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics Card

312042 £71.99 Crucial 8GB DDR3 1866Mhz Ballistix Tactical Memory

480300 £56.10 Seagate 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD)

255692 £20.51 CIT 500W GOLD 12cm Fan PSU

579036 £19.98 blu ray drive

Yes that PC is using all old speced parts, no USB 3.0 no PCI express 2.0 it would last me a year or two.

As for monitors I want resolution not size. It is far easier to put two separate programs onto 2 monitors than it is to set them up into one. I am dyslexic and reading Times new Roman font is difficult so I use comic Sans serif but this does not really look very good unless it's on a HD monitor like my laptop that is 17 inches and has a resolution of 1600 pixels.

Yes the ratio of RAM speed to CPU bus speed for 133 MHz to 900 MHz of a poorly efficient processor is a much higher ratio than we currently have. Cache memory can compensate so for but try this for size, what about when I have a 3-D CAD assembly that is hundreds of megabytes and needs to be rotated around the screen 3-D CAD software wants to recalculate each and every piece of the model therefore it needs to do those calculations on the RAM not the cache memory. Even my fast works Station struggles with large assemblies and it has been made pretty obvious to me that the graphics card is doing very little and it is all processor and system memory doing the work.

I'm not into fast graphics but I was hoping the built-in graphics processor with the main processor would help some applications that support GPU processing even if it is just boinc.

[mariush]

Oh Simon, if you can, please return that power supply and order something else. If you're still within the 10 days from order, legally you can return them no questions asked.

That's a really lousy power supply that really is nowhere near capable of doing 500w, maybe not even 300w, and you risk getting your system damaged if it blows up after a few months.

Here's something that would be fine and just a bit more expensive:

from not so great but still way better than that cit psu, to better psu

http://www.ebuyer.com/520267-be-quiet-pure-power-l8-350w-bn221
http://www.ebuyer.com/278493-antec-vp-350w-psu-0-761345-06431-6
http://www.ebuyer.com/520268-be-quiet-pure-power-l8-400w-bn222
http://www.ebuyer.com/429886-corsair-cx-series-cx430m-atx-power-supply-cp-9020058-uk

The motherboard is excellent. 

The CPU... i wish you would have chosen FX-6300, it's the sweetspot when it comes to price/performance at £82.49 right now : 

http://www.ebuyer.com/409191-amd-fx-6300-3-5ghz-socket-am3-14mb-cache-retail-boxed-processor-fd6300wmhkbox

Maybe you can still return your fx-4350 cpu in those 10 days.

Otherwise, the 5450 is not much faster than an onboard video card, so it's only good for 2d and hd video playback, it can't do games. But it can drive 2 monitors with no problems at all.

I'm not into fast graphics but I was hoping the built-in graphics processor with the main processor would help some applications that support GPU processing even if it is just boinc.

The FX-4350 DOES NOT have a built-in graphics processor and even if it did, you would have had to pair it with a motherboard that has the video output connectors (vga/hdmi/dvi) - the motherboard you chose doesn't.  So you only have that Radeon 5450 video card but again, that card can drive those two monitors you have (or at least I hope you chose a model with 2 outputs)

[Monkeh]

480300 £56.10 Seagate 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD)

Mmm, beta testers who pay for the privilege.

255692 £20.51 CIT 500W GOLD 12cm Fan PSU

Where's the projectile vomit emoticon again?

Otherwise, as mariush says, pretty much fine. I'd choose the Corsair PSU.

[grumpydoc]

That £370 system is worse than a custom built computer because:

Apart from the fact that I'm pretty sure the PSU was 350W nothing you say is wrong BUT I didn't say it was better than a DIY PC, I said it was cheaper.

Now, if I were building a system I wouldn't buy a £20 case, nor consider going anywhere near the PSU that you might get in such a case, nor buy a £30 motherboard - nor any of the components that are in that pre-built system except possibly the CPU.

But - can I put together a system of the same spec, with a copy of Windows, for the same price? The answer is no. Even if I can get the price close by choosing the same (i.e low) quality components you can't quite match the price of the bundle. In fact ebuyer go as low as £149 for a PC (although that's without OS). That's without factoring in the time to assemble it, install Windows etc which is not inconsiderable.

Possibly if you factor out the cost of the OS and run Linux only - then you can win.

And warranty for components - Seagate have cut down to 1 year on the low end stuff haven't they? MSI do give three years on motherboards in the UK so you're right there but for £30 it's almost more hassle to get them to do a warranty replacement than to buy a new board.

By all means build your own computer - the big advantage is that you can choose better than bargain basement stuff and you almost certainly will have a better computer but you probably won't have a cheaper computer.

Now for most people the £370 pre-bulit system will be fine. They want WIndows, not Linux, and to surf the 'net, and do a few emails and edit the odd document (probably with M$ Works).

Chances are that it will also do what Simon wants perfectly as well.

Note that I'm not saying don't build your own PC - I just don't think it's a worth it for most people most of the time, and if you do just don't kid yourself that you're saving much (or any) money doing so.

[Simon]

Well I spent the same on my system but for the case......... which is an old one i have. I don't see all this fuss over cases. Air needs to get in and it needs to get out, the basic design has not changed in years and power consumption is going down.

As i say no test has demonstrated yet what single core software thinks of these wonderful CPU's, basically that is potentially a slightly better CPU on old hardware for the same price.

I could try swapping that PSU but I doubt the system will use more than 200W

As for the hard drive seems pretty good value for money but I didn't check the prices of purely mechanical drives.

My processor will have room for over clocking that 3.5 GHz 6 core (what will i do with the other 45 cores ?) is already being stretched to 4.1 GHz.

[Monkeh]

Well I spent the same on my system but for the case......... which is an old one i have. I don't see all this fuss over cases. Air needs to get in and it needs to get out, the basic design has not changed in years and power consumption is going down.

Build a few systems with nice cases. You'll begin to understand, especially if you want a really quiet system.

I could try swapping that PSU but I doubt the system will use more than 200W

It doesn't matter if it uses 2W or 2000W, that PSU is a complete pile of garbage.

As for the hard drive seems pretty good value for money but I didn't check the prices of purely mechanical drives.

Seagate drives, in my experience, are total turds. And their hybrid drives are shocking. The early models were so unreliable they were going through beta firmware releases weekly. Couldn't pay me to use one.

[grumpydoc]

Yes that PC is using all old speced parts, no USB 3.0 no PCI express 2.0 it would last me a year or two.

OK, fair point about USB 3 (remind me why you wanted/needed this) but it has an x16 and x1 PCIe slot free.

As for monitors I want resolution not size. It is far easier to put two separate programs onto 2 monitors than it is to set them up into one. I am dyslexic and reading Times new Roman font is difficult so I use comic Sans serif but this does not really look very good unless it's on a HD monitor like my laptop that is 17 inches and has a resolution of 1600 pixels.

Each to their own I suppose.

Yes the ratio of RAM speed to CPU bus speed for 133 MHz to 900 MHz of a poorly efficient processor is a much higher ratio than we currently have. Cache memory can compensate so for but try this for size, what about when I have a 3-D CAD assembly that is hundreds of megabytes and needs to be rotated around the screen 3-D CAD software wants to recalculate each and every piece of the model therefore it needs to do those calculations on the RAM not the cache memory. Even my fast works Station struggles with large assemblies and it has been made pretty obvious to me that the graphics card is doing very little and it is all processor and system memory doing the work.

I'm not into fast graphics but I was hoping the built-in graphics processor with the main processor would help some applications that support GPU processing even if it is just boinc.

Programs need to be written specifically to take advantage of the GPU - I don't know how many CAD systems actually do that but likely only to be high end ones.

Cache is still important in your example because at any one time the CPU will probably be accessing some areas a LOT so they should be in cache. Of course to get the best performance the software does need to be written to be cache friendly, take advantage of modern CPU instruction sets (especially the SIMD and vector stuff in modern CPUs) so there's a lot software engineers can get right (or wrong) here.

[mariush]

As i say no test has demonstrated yet what single core software thinks of these wonderful CPU's, basically that is potentially a slightly better CPU on old hardware for the same price.

I could try swapping that PSU but I doubt the system will use more than 200W

My processor will have room for over clocking that 3.5 GHz 6 core (what will i do with the other 45 cores ?) is already being stretched to 4.1 GHz.

Your system will not even use 200 watts, it will barely hit 100-120 watts but that's not the issue. The issue is that power supply is based on a very old design (half bridge, pentium 3 generation) that has a very lousy efficiency so it will be hot even at 100w power consumption and will be paired with a crappy, noisy fan that will often run at high speed to keep the power supply cool.
It will also have crap secondary capacitors and substandard filtering (no pi filtering on output) which may die soon due to internal heat.
Those power supplies I linked to are actually based on newer designs, at least 80-85% efficient at 100-200 watts, they can do the advertised wattage with no problems and they have better fans that you won't hear from across the room.

The FX-4350 is a 4 core, 4.2 Ghz base frequency cpu, boosts to 4.3 Ghz. Basically the numbers already tell you the cpu is overclocked from factory close to its maximum. Also note the specs on ebuyer are wrong, the CPU only has 8 MB level 3 cache and 4 MB level 2 cache, not 12 MB.

The FX-6300 is a 6 core, 3.5 Ghz base frequency, boosts to 4.1 Ghz if needed. It has the same 8 MB level 3 cache but has 6 MB level 2 cache ( 1 MB per core duh). 
 
So when you run applications on just a couple of cores, the fx-6300 will auto overclock itself to 4.1 ghz, basically just 100-200 Mhz less than FX-4350. In single thread applications, these two processors are basically the same.  But in applications that use multiple cores, you gain with the FX-6300.
 
Also, FX-6300 only has a 95w TDP in contrast with the FX-4350 which has a 125w TDP. The FX-6300 will be more power efficient and will not heat up that much.

Again, i really recommend you return that power supply, it's not safe and just not a good investment. And the FX-4350 is a good buy, but I'd still recommend changing it to a FX-6300.

[Simon]

Yea i guess i should return the supply, i'll order another one and get the CIT returned as soon as it turns up.

[Monkeh]

Yea i guess i should return the supply, i'll order another one and get the CIT returned as soon as it turns up.

I'll repeat my recommendation of the Corsair unit.

[dr.diesel]

Corsair unit.

Anything made by Seasonic.

[Monkeh]

Corsair unit.

Anything made by Seasonic.

This one is made by CWT.

[djsb]

Corsair have a lifetime warranty on their supplies. I use a HX650W in my current machine. This replaced a HX620W that just stopped working due to supply inrush damage. It was replaced no questions asked. Need I say more.

David.



PS Turns out the warranty is 7 years on the HX650W, so effectively the lifetime of a machine.

[Monkeh]

Corsair have a lifetime warranty on their supplies. I use a HX650W in my current machine. This replaced a HX620W that just stopped working due to supply inrush damage. It was replaced no questions asked. Need I say more.

David.

Only 3 years on the CX series.

[Simon]

depending on the price of an item it can be covered for up to 6 years under CE marking.

[nctnico]

Well I spent the same on my system but for the case......... which is an old one i have. I don't see all this fuss over cases. Air needs to get in and it needs to get out, the basic design has not changed in years and power consumption is going down.

One of the reasons to buy an HP or Dell is to get a case with decent airflow along the CPU, chipset and hard drive. The standard ATX case is about the worst you can get in terms of proper airflow. Hence you'll need noisier fans to reach the same amount of cooling or just kill the hard drive within a year.

[NiHaoMike]

One of the reasons to buy an HP or Dell is to get a case with decent airflow along the CPU, chipset and hard drive. The standard ATX case is about the worst you can get in terms of proper airflow. Hence you'll need noisier fans to reach the same amount of cooling or just kill the hard drive within a year.

Modern ATX cases are very good with airflow and an older case can be "upgraded" with a drill and jigsaw.

[Simon]

The heatsink will be firing heat from the processor to the back directly at one exhaust fan, the PSU above it is also taking air out, cool air comes in at the front from the bottom and moves through the case, the hard drive is in the coolest part of the case, what is the problem ?