Buying/building a new PC using AMD processor

[Phaedrus]

Dell and HP cases vary considerably in terms of airflow, depending on what era they're from and what size you get. Some have great cooling, others are toasters. The bigger problem is proprietary form factors; Dell and HP are fond of BTX motherboards, which are ONLY used by Dell and HP and companies making replacement parts for them. BTX motherboards often cost 2-3x what their retail ATX counterparts do. Both Dell and HP have a variety of power supply form factors, none of which are inter-compatible, and some will accept an ATX PSU, but will have a tab limiting its length to 140mm or 150mm. Dell even at one point had a proprietary electrical standard, similar to but different from ATX12V, with a 20-pin connector that would fit into an ATX motherboard; and promptly fry both the board and PSU with a dead short due to different pinouts. Fortunately that was done away with over a decade ago.


Modern retail computer chassis generally have excellent airflow. And there have been many advances over the last decade. A full ATX case can often move enough air to keep >1500W of components within their operating specs just with stock fans. In any case, more and more users are switching to all-in-one water cooling solutions, which have a sealed water loop with everything already assembled, which minimizes chances of leakage and makes installation simple.

http://www.coolermaster.com/case/mini-itx-elite-series/elite110/
^ Fits an mITX motherboard, the higher-end of which can support Intel i7 processors and 16GB+ of RAM. Has space for a 120mm radiator for your CPU, can fit a full-size ATX PSU up to 175mm long (though 150mm or less with modular cables is best) and can easily support an Nvidia GTX770 graphics card and keep it cool.

Costs less than a hundred bucks.

[Simon]

Yes I remember the time that dell decided to reward people who sort reasonably priced spares with a fry up, sort of thing that should be made illegal.........

[Simon]

well parts arrived, All put together and windows installed. Seems to perform quite well. As predicted a bandwidth test on the RAM gives very poor results and exactly as i predicted around 50% efficient (53 to be exact), I used to get near 100% with SDRAM, 80% with DDR, 60% with DDRII and now 50% with DDRIII, the drop has not been as drastic this time but seems to support my idea that the only way to truly increase speed is to increase speed and/or use multichannel.

I'm not over the moon about the motherboard, I am rather dissapointed with Gigabyte, the connectors are of a poorer quality plastic than my current one, I'd say the board is thinner and mose at a risk of being broken, updating the bios seemed to work but on rebooting having changed the bios settings back to Advanced SATA mode so that the machine could boot again and setting the memory from the default 1333MHz to the actual 1866MHz of both ram and motherboard it failed to boot and would not boot until I reset the bios, the only way of getting the RAM back to the correct speed was to do it with the motherboard performance tweaker software, although this setting seems to have stuck in the bios so I'm assuming that the new bios is not setting the latencies correctly. Very poor form.

The prcessor seems to not be too noisy on the fan with stock heat sink I'd say it will be pretty quiet and power efficient unless i thrash it, even with 2 -3 cores under permanent load the noise is reasonable.

[Simon]

I ran Solid Edge 3DCAD on my new machine, knocks the socks off my i7 computer at work so yea take your intel cores and go shove them someplace again flipping my model around the screen uses 100% of one core but because I'm on 4.2 GHz versus I forget what but something like 2.5GHz it really does follow my 3D mouse around unlike on my work computer where it is like trying to pull a truck around the screen.

Unlike my work computer with that shitty i7 that is supposed to be great at multitasking I can fully load the processor AND graphics card with grid computing tasks and it makes no difference to performance with solid edge whereas at work i have to leave at least one of 8 cores free in order for solid edge to usable in any way.

Again I'm getting no problems with running the screens in 3D CAD even if the graphics is fully loaded in direct compute work so my work wasted their £1000 on a quadro 4000 nVidia card because it's a cad station. for half the price of that graphics card I have bought an entire machine that knocks the socks off the work one.

the Hard drive seems to peform nicely now that it has worked out what to put on the solid state bit. Of course not blistering performance but it works good for the money.

From what I can tell the intel socket heat sink mechanism still sucks, the heatsink I bought actually came with a seating that needs screwing into an intel board so that there are proper screw points for the heat sink wherease the AMd socket is already more rugged. On my old intel machine I had to dump those shitty plastic lugs and screw my heatsink down through the board before putting it into the case.

Overall performance is not blisteringly faster than my old machine but it is overall nicer to use probably down to the hybrid drive and it shines when it really gets loaded.

[Monkeh]

I ran Solid Edge 3DCAD on my new machine, knocks the socks off my i7 computer at work so yea take your intel cores and go shove them someplace again flipping my model around the screen uses 100% of one core but because I'm on 4.2 GHz versus I forget what but something like 2.5GHz it really does follow my 3D mouse around unlike on my work computer where it is like trying to pull a truck around the screen.

How many people must tell you how many times that the clock speed is irrelevant, you are not comparing like-for-like? Also, confirmation bias.

From what I can tell the intel socket heat sink mechanism still sucks, the heatsink I bought actually came with a seating that needs screwing into an intel board so that there are proper screw points for the heat sink wherease the AMd socket is already more rugged. On my old intel machine I had to dump those shitty plastic lugs and screw my heatsink down through the board before putting it into the case.

The AMD system sucks too, any serious heatsink disposes of their shitty plastic brackets (which, unlike Intel pushpins, break off) automatically.

[Simon]

Well for the heaviest load I am putting on it it is faster. My hardest use of it is solid edge, and its faster for that than the i7, I guess the i7 is faster for other things, maybe those that really use the processors to it's full. The problem with solid edge is that it is such poor quality programming that expecting it to use any modern processor features is a bit of a stretch of the imagination so brute speed is the only way to make that particular program work. also as I've found the AMD is multitasking better than the i7 with boinc and solid edge, boinc in on idle priority yet still if i have all 8 cores at work running boinc stuff it grinds to a halt on solid edge and becomes unusable I have to manually free up 1-2 cores, yes the AMD does not mind having all 4 cores running 5 boinc tasks (because a GPU task still needs some processor) and flying my model around the screen no problem where as at work under the same conditions the machine stutters

Problem with my old intel machine is that you have to take the motherboard out to get the heatsink off because the large silent heat sink on that was supposed to mounted to the same holder as the intel one and the pins where already knackered by then so I had to take the whole thing off and do it myself with screws and nuts. my new heat sink has a REPLACEMENT seating, if you have intel you have to unscrew their heat sink holder and screw in the one suppled with the heat sink whereas for AMD it goes straight on the original heat sink bracket.

[Monkeh]

if you have intel you have to unscrew their heat sink holder and screw in the one suppled with the heat sink

No, you don't, they don't have brackets. There are simply holes in the board.

whereas for AMD it goes straight on the original heat sink bracket.

And a few years and a house move down the line, your heatsink falls off.

[Simon]

if you have intel you have to unscrew their heat sink holder and screw in the one suppled with the heat sink

No, you don't, they don't have brackets. There are simply holes in the board.

whereas for AMD it goes straight on the original heat sink bracket.

And a few years and a house move down the line, your heatsink falls off.

Yes the intel simply has holes in the board so because that is no good the heat sink comes with a seating very similar to the one that already comes with AMD that you have to put in to bring it up to a similar standard of mechanical strength.

the AMD seat is solid plastic bracing that is screwed to the board and the 3rd party heatsink goes right on instead of having to add bits to the board to bring it up to spec to take the weight of the larger heat sink.

[Monkeh]

Yes the intel simply has holes in the board so because that is no good the heat sink comes with a seating very similar to the one that already comes with AMD that you have to put in to bring it up to a similar standard of mechanical strength.

That is very good: They are standardised and have specific clearance, allowing you to design a bracket to suit your heatsink.

the AMD seat is solid plastic bracing that is screwed to the board and the 3rd party heatsink goes right on instead of having to add bits to the board to bring it up to spec to take the weight of the larger heat sink.

Plastic breaks. Why am I repeating myself?

[Fsck]

the AMD seat is solid plastic bracing that is screwed to the board and the 3rd party heatsink goes right on instead of having to add bits to the board to bring it up to spec to take the weight of the larger heat sink.

Plastic breaks. Why am I repeating myself?

exactly. all (that I've seen) reasonably heavy heatsinks are bolted directly to the board. I'm talking the >750g range.
even many of the 500-750g heatsinks are bolted to the board directly.

[Simon]

This is not that heavy just taller, nothing the seating can't handle. the supplied seating for intel boards looked very much like the one already on the AMD board so the heatsink manufacturer is obviously happy with the AMD solution.