Buying/building a new PC using AMD processor

[Simon]

After about six years of good service I think the time has come to upgrade my PC. My current core two Quad processor now seems a bit outdated and I am well behind on PCI express bus technology.

Unlike when I built my current PC they seem to be so many options in processor technology and on trying to buy the best value for money. I am aware that many AMD processors include graphics capability, can this be used by general programmes that support GPU processing? Or is it only for graphics output.

On the processor side I am aiming for the highest possible clock speed with at least two cores. I'll take more than two but I am quite certain that most of my applications will not use more than one so one for me and one for the operating system if there are more than two fine I run BOINC anyway, I'm only usually interested in built-in graphics processing if it will help in GPU processing tasks.

On the graphics side I'm looking for a video card with two HDMI outputs to run two monitors. I don't game but any GPU processing ability that will help other software would be nice.

I'm also after USB 3.0 ports these don't seem to have become widely popular and many motherboards don't include them.

On the RAM side I'd want 1.6 GHz bus capability.

And that is about it really, my main intensive tasks will probably be 3-D CAD and speech recognition which this computer is not very fast at despite having 2.4 GHz processors naturally yet another program that could benefit from multitasking processors does not use more than one core.

So what are the main technologies I'm after in processor capabilities for my needs?

What I'm trying to do is build a modest but future proof computer, this current machine has lasted six years and is still good I'm hoping to be as lucky again.

[Bored@Work]

Last time I got beaten to pulp here when I mentioned that I buy supermarket PCs. I am sick and tired of having to study for month to figure out what is en vouge, to waste countless hours to try to order "the best" items, and wasting more hours to assemble all the rubbish into some case. And all that for maybe a 10% performance edge over some off-the-shelf PC.

I can't care less about CPU's, socket types, chipset types, ram technology, PSUs and what not. I just don't care about that rubbish any more. No, supermarket PCs instead. I take one home if a new one is needed. The wife, kids, I, whoever the intended user is, plays with it to figure out if it is good enough. If good enough it stays. If not it goes back to the supermarket.

[Simon]

I'm starting to agree

[Jon86]

When I built mine and a friend's, I just threw together some good, fast, cheapish parts and ended up with a couple of £500 rigs that did what we wanted pretty well.
I don't really bother overthinking it, I just buy what I can afford and it turns out pretty well 
I think people spend way too much time on totally irrelevant things that won't impact your computer's performance in the slightest.
Just my two cents anyway

[dr.diesel]

What I'm trying to do is build a modest but future proof computer

If buy future proof you mean 4-6 months?  In general you can't buy high HP machines without spending quite a bit via the department store. 

Matching hardware is very easy these days, it's not what it used to be.  From what you spec'd i'd suggest an Intel i5 Haswell, Nvidia GPU, SSD boot drive with 8G of DDR3-1600 Ram.  I build about two dozen boxes a year, takes me about 5 minutes each to get the right guts.

If you decide to build, I'll gladly help you get the right stuff.

[GeoffS]

I've always gone with AMD CPU's for desktop/servers but couldn't give you a particular reason why. They've always done the job for me.

When I bought my last computer (some years ago), I went with an AMD 1090T which is a 6 core CPU, and 16GB of memory.
The reasoning behind this was that I was running  Linux with multiple VMware sessions to duplicate my work environment for testing.
For this use it worked well. Although I'm retired, I still have it as my main computer sitting under the desk in a ridiculously large server cabinet 

It's not so flash for CAD which would be better served with a single CPU, no real advantage in multiple cores.
(Of course there's no Linux based CAD package to speak of so not really an issue for me)

If I had to buy a new computer now, it would be from a department store or online from Dell.

[Simon]

the problem I'm having is that most off the shelf PC's have no USB3 no dual display outputs (I'm finding I might as well stick with VGA/DVI) and many still ship with pciexpress 1 slots, For what ebay has to offer I can get the bare parts cheaper

[GeoffS]

the problem I'm having is that most off the shelf PC's have no USB3 no dual display outputs (I'm finding I might as well stick with VGA/DVI) and many still ship with pciexpress 1 slots, For what ebay has to offer I can get the bare parts cheaper

Agreed, for a CAD system you need a much better graphics cards than most off the shelf systems provide.

[Fsck]

you really should build your own. it's almost always cheaper and of course, overclocking extends the viability of your machine over time.

I'm still running a 4.2GHz i7 920 from 2009, though I've upgraded to a 7970 gpu, overclocked to 1.15GHz.
for cad, shouldn't you throw a quadro or a firepro in it as well?

[dr.diesel]

for cad, shouldn't you throw a quadro or a firepro in it as well?

Probably not necessary unless your talking some really big layouts, or 4k displays etc.

[tszaboo]

for cad, shouldn't you throw a quadro or a firepro in it as well?

Probably not necessary unless your talking some really big layouts, or 4k displays etc.

This "professional graphics for CAD" thing really bothers me. Only small amount of application benefits from having them, 0 of this is electronics related. You can drive multiple displays with a moderate modern discrete GPU. The only benefit I ever see is 10 bit color resolution, which doesnt really bother me, since I see everything in ~16 colors, 4 of these are different  gray. And they do double precision computing for some reason.

For OP, I would just buy a recent Dell or Lenovo with whatever they've put in it.

[Fsck]

for cad, shouldn't you throw a quadro or a firepro in it as well?

Probably not necessary unless your talking some really big layouts, or 4k displays etc.

This "professional graphics for CAD" thing really bothers me. Only small amount of application benefits from having them, 0 of this is electronics related. You can drive multiple displays with a moderate modern discrete GPU. The only benefit I ever see is 10 bit color resolution, which doesnt really bother me, since I see everything in ~16 colors, 4 of these are different  gray. And they do double precision computing for some reason.

For OP, I would just buy a recent Dell or Lenovo with whatever they've put in it.

I was thinking opengl primatives

in regards to multi-display: hell, even with "old" cards, you could drive multiples. I've ran dual monitors off a nvidia 6600gt for a while, and 3 off of an amd 5850.
10 bit resolution is basically useless since it needs to be 10-bit end to end. the monitor and your application(s) [10-bit applications are rarer than finding another human while wandering aimlessly on the antarctic.]

double precision is incredibly useful if you're a scientist and the crippling of consumer cards forces you to run pro cards or compute-exclusive cards in gpu clusters.

[nctnico]

I strongly recommend to stick to Intel. I used to build/sell computers but I've never seen an AMD based machine survive in an office environment despite using top notch components (Asus motherboard, Kingston memory, etc). I've seen a lot of people getting 'burned' buying AMD based systems. If you need a PC to type a letter or play a game for an hour AMD is OK.

If you want something reliable get an HP or Dell workstation for office use. Maybe not the best performance for money but they do run stable even under high loads.

[Simon]

Well I've ordered all the bits, yes I'm building my own it is cheaper and much better performance.

I'm not sure why anyone would be against AMD, I've not had an AMD processor die on me just the crappy asus motherboard but it did get well used. My work use intel i7, what a load of crap ! we have low speed 4 core processors that are made to look like 8 cores and our cad software uses the grand sum of 1! gee i can run 7 cores on boinc and it makes no difference to the cad which is crap for large assemblies because it requires CPU power not GPU, I can run boinc or bitcoin mine on my GPU and it does not even make any difference to a massive model. Yes this shit CAD software is solid edge, performance it not in it's nature and we have PC's that only get 12.5% used.

So I'm getting a 4 core AMD 4.2 GHz with graphics, a graphics card, I'll keep my two monitors as I can't get 2 17" monitors with a resolution over 1440*900 (I was rather hoping to find HD ones but they only seem to exist over 20"). 8GB of ram a hybrid SSD drive at 500 GB and a decent gigabyte motherboard (I rather went off asus when they lied about a motherboard i bought rating it at 1066 FSB when that was OC mode and not specified as such, it was really 800 MHz and it was not until years later and many bios updates that it actually started to work at 1066 MHz matching the processor).

So I'm fairly happy, spent about £360, I could not get anything off the shelf for that with the same performance and off the shelf still meant installing windows myself and even if I got a PC with windows installed anything decent had 8 on it and anything with 7 was overpriced for the specs.

[nctnico]

Core I7 has turbo mode where one (or maybe 2) cores can be overclocked for single threaded applications. This needs the proper software drivers though.

[Simon]

I doubt our IT bunch bothered to sort that out and a 2.4GHz processor can only be overclocked so far it will never match a 4.2 GHz processor. Fact is the more cores the lower the speed, why on earth have 8 cores at 2.5 GHz when you can have 4 at 4.2 GHz, you will get more work out of them. I rarely use more than one core, so one for my application and one for the Pc to multitask with, that still leaves 2, why bother to have 6 going begging ?

[Phaedrus]

I strongly recommend to stick to Intel. I used to build/sell computers but I've never seen an AMD based machine survive in an office environment despite using top notch components (Asus motherboard, Kingston memory, etc). I've seen a lot of people getting 'burned' buying AMD based systems. If you need a PC to type a letter or play a game for an hour AMD is OK.

If you want something reliable get an HP or Dell workstation for office use. Maybe not the best performance for money but they do run stable even under high loads.

I like how the CPU being AMD made the systems fail. That makes lots of sense.

The actual reason you probably saw lots of failures with AMD systems is that you were using Asus motherboards... Asus has no good AMD motherboards under $100, or at least didn't until very recently. The entire Asus M4 series motherboards, which were sold for like 5 years, were garbage with crappy power regulation, poor soldering, and cheap caps.

If you'd gone with Gigabyte for AMD systems you'd have been better off.

[NiHaoMike]

Core I7 has turbo mode where one (or maybe 2) cores can be overclocked for single threaded applications. This needs the proper software drivers though.

The drivers have been in the kernel for a long time.

If you have really good cooling (as I do), you can even tweak the board to turbo all cores at the same time.

[Monkeh]

I doubt our IT bunch bothered to sort that out and a 2.4GHz processor can only be overclocked so far it will never match a 4.2 GHz processor.

You cannot directly compare clock speeds.

Fact is the more cores the lower the speed

No, more cores increases the heat.

why on earth have 8 cores at 2.5 GHz when you can have 4 at 4.2 GHz

Because you have 4 at 2.5GHz and they're actually faster single-threaded than the 4.2GHz AMDs?

[mariush]

Intel cores are faster than AMD cores, if a software is not designed to properly utilize all the cores then an Intel processor is better.

If however you work with software that uses cores well (x264 for video encoding for example) then the eight cores in a FX-8320 or FX-8350 or whatever new version AMD released.

Games and most common applications only use 2-3 cores, so it often makes sense to go with Intel processors because of the higher performance of those individual cores. BUT, keep in mind both Xbox One and PS4 are basically using AMD processors with 8 Jaguar cores (similar to the ones in FM2 socket processors) so it's quite possible future PC games will be more and more optimized for 4 cores or more.

There's really no difference in quality between Intel and AMD processors - what makes a platform more "unstable" or makes it feel worse is the other hardware the processor is combined with.  Of course you're going to have a problematic system if you combine it with the cheapest motherboard on the market.

Fact is, AMD made the processors pretty much backwards compatible so today it's even possible to combine a FX-8320 or FX-8350 with a very cheap motherboard that uses chipsets from 4-5 years ago, with VRM circuitry that's barely able to handle these new processors. But just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Can't do that with Intel, as they change sockets almost yearly... they went through 4 or 5 sockets in the last 2-3 years.

[djsb]

AMD's new Kaveri (A10-7850K et al) will be available from January 14th. I think I will be using this CPU for upgrading my current PC. Just have to look out for a compatible motherboard. I can spend a little more on a new graphics card and better RAM as well.
I think AMD deserves a bit of support as well.

David.


PS Looks like the Gigabyte G1.Sniper A88X motherboard should do the job nicely.£80 on Amazon.
    Or the Asrock FM2A88X Extreme6+
    Then again an FX-9590 CPU with a decent motherboard is probably the best.
    Or back to intel now an i7 4770k.

[echen1024]

I still prefer Intel though. In my experience, Intel processors have been faster for what I use them for, and, Intel is much more reliable. I tried an AMD system once, and it flamed out after around 4 months.

[Bloch]

On the RAM side I'd want 1.6 GHz bus capability.

I dont care about ram speed > all new PC are fast enough. But if you are using a 64bit windows 8GB are a must !

Then a "boot" SSD are a MUST

No crap software running in background thene a 2 dual core ok for none game pc

[Simon]

I doubt our IT bunch bothered to sort that out and a 2.4GHz processor can only be overclocked so far it will never match a 4.2 GHz processor.

You cannot directly compare clock speeds.

Fact is the more cores the lower the speed

No, more cores increases the heat.

why on earth have 8 cores at 2.5 GHz when you can have 4 at 4.2 GHz

Because you have 4 at 2.5GHz and they're actually faster single-threaded than the 4.2GHz AMDs?

no but I'll take a lower core count and faster core any day, sure more cores increases heat that is why the speed is lower, that will be why the more cores a processor has the slower it runs, no I have 4 cores at 2.4 GHz and only ever use one so why bother having 8 when I can have a faster processor with 4 cores so use 25% of my processor instead of 12.5%, fact most software simply does not multithread, even the CAD software i used for work that costs thousands of pounds is incapable of using more than 1 core which is pathetic, it's not even written to use the graphics cards very well, people run around buying multi core processors assuming that their software will simply use them all and they don't unless they are specifically written too but as most users are ignorant and don't know the difference no software developer bothers. I'd be happy with a dual core processor that runs as fast as possible, I'd get more meaningful performance increase.

[nctnico]

GHz isn't everything. There is a huge speed difference between an older and newer CPU from Intel running at the same frequency. I'd compare benchmarks very carefully.