Trying a Quad-Core PC
I'm once again opening up to community scrutiny a rig my son and I are putting together. This system is mostly for my son who is getting a dollar-match discount from me if he Folds it. He is in college (computer/art emphasis), enjoys Oblivion/WoW. His current system (Gerad in my sig) has very little besides the case+opticals that can be reused for this endeavor. So it's basically a new build. All estimated costs are USD + S&H.
CPU: Intel Q6600 C2Q (est <$300)
HSF: Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler Review (est $50-60)
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P (est $150)
Mem: CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)(est $160)
PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-650HT ATX12V/EPS12V (est $160)
HD: WD Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA150 (est $180)
VID: X1950PRO 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 (est $160)
Current Total: <$1300
The hardware lid on this venture is $1500- so if you had an extra $200 you would … ?
Some rationales:
We don’t give a (insert here) about SLI / X-Fire- and on the P35s it looks like it saves us good $$$.
The discussion about the video card was pretty involved. I’ve suggested a “wait and see” approach anyhow- go with an adequate budget board until the DX10 fiasco and AMDATI/nVidia get ironed out with HOPEFULLY more power efficient GPUs.
Comments and ?s are invited- thanks : ) .
CPU: Intel Q6600 C2Q (est <$300)
HSF: Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler Review (est $50-60)
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P (est $150)
Mem: CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)(est $160)
PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-650HT ATX12V/EPS12V (est $160)
HD: WD Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA150 (est $180)
VID: X1950PRO 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 (est $160)
Current Total: <$1300
The hardware lid on this venture is $1500- so if you had an extra $200 you would … ?
Some rationales:
We don’t give a (insert here) about SLI / X-Fire- and on the P35s it looks like it saves us good $$$.
The discussion about the video card was pretty involved. I’ve suggested a “wait and see” approach anyhow- go with an adequate budget board until the DX10 fiasco and AMDATI/nVidia get ironed out with HOPEFULLY more power efficient GPUs.
Comments and ?s are invited- thanks : ) .
0
Comments
Because ... ?
Yes we are planning to overclock but didn't think the extra goodies were worth the $80. However, I wasn't aware of significant BIOS differences between the two and the DS3P got decent marks for OCing. What I mostly saw on the DQ6 were more heatsinks ... and I also know the Q6600 is more of a beast ... but the plan is to settle out at about 3GHz .... So I've waffled this one.
Again, thanks for the feedback
We’ve ordered the memory and hard drive- $334.13. (Thread will be updated as we go)
I think we’re also settling on the Gig DQ6 mobo- more for the fact that we are OCing a quad-core than anything else. What we’re not too sure of is if we’re going to have clearance problems with the HSF we’re looking at- but decided to take this step. Not too many people on line are doing this combo so there’s no real info. We’re hoping that a mod (if any) won’t be too severe.
The video card is the source of some discussion. I personally think it is a waste of $100 to go get the 8800GTS card. It has DX10- but there aren’t many titles we care about, many DX10 games have DX9 support, by the time they get it together with DX10 this board will likely be worthless anyhow and best of all- what do we care if we don’t run Vista anyhow? Power draw-wise, they are about the same. So it’s really a question of whether the DX9 performance increase is worth the $100+ extra bucks. Me- I say save the $100+ until they get things right- but he wants it now … sigh.
Thanks for the backup suggestions, especially since the drunken room-mate he has to deal with is me (he’s going to school locally right now). With all the video work I’m doing right now … that 1TB drive …?
I just hope, in your analysis of the 8800 v 1950 debate you've realized that the 8800 can be up to 50% faster. Who cares about vista? The 8800 is the fastest card in 2000, XP, Vista, 32bit, 64 bit.. For any API.. Anywhere.
Auto BIOS setting: 1.308Vidle, 1.289Vload
1.500V BIOS setting: 1.480Vidle, 1.447Vload
1.550V BIOS setting: 1.529Vidle, 1.495Vload
I guess the DQ6 is better in this regard due to the extra Vreg components. I just Vdroop modded this board with a 50k VR (see pic), and after lowering the resistance further, I got this:
Auto BIOS setting: 1.312Vidle, 1.307Vload
1.500V BIOS setting: 1.489Vidle, 1.483Vload
1.550V BIOS setting: 1.540Vidle, 1.533Vload
Which allows me to run 416x8=3.33GHz at 1.375V. You can probably pencil the resistor to get the same results. I believe the PCB is identical for the DQ6, DS4 and DS3P. FSB wise it seems to do 485ish, which isn't too bad for quad, but above 416 the strap seems to change, and I get lower RAM performance, so I might as well stick to 416. Anyway...great board for the price
I get 8800+ in 3DMark06 and the GTS get between 10000 and 11000. So yes it is worth the $100 difference to me. I am an avid gamer. I like lots of AA and AF at high resolution with max everything. Give me visual quality or give me more budget room!
If I could talk my wife into it, I would have one now! That means it's worth around $400 for the performance difference to me. I can't play Lost Planet at 1600 x 1200 with any AA or AF. I had to drop to 1280 x 1024 with some AF. I get less than 30 fps in some places.
So help me if Crysis calls my computer a medium - low I'm upgrading! That's the computer equivalent of it's a good size....
You just missed me by a few hours, Isevald- or I might have gone with the DS3P. Still, like you say, I’m getting a steady board that should be able to go a distance if my son wants to push this CPU to the edge. Those Voltages look familiar to an ASUS board I have that seems to idle 0.02V or more below setting. Yikes- those droops are pretty significant- they do say the Q6XXXs are beasts. I’ll look for it. BTW- nice OCing! You on air?
Yet the thing that makes me cringe right now is the amount of heat this setup is going to put out which, BTW, has the following updates:
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P35-DQ6 , $229
VID: EVGA 320-P2-N815-AR , $285
I relented and let my son pick his video card and asked that it at least be a quiet card (his last one was getting a little noisy).
Our final bill should be $1410 with S&H, so I did both upgrades with $90 change and am looking at some backup options.
Despite that this system is kind of a mutt caught between technologies, it should be fun to tinker with. It may, however, be late October before we see how far it can go.
Thanks for the input, everyone
Oh, and be careful with the Vdimm setting. It seems to overvolt quite a bit. I'm using the +0.25V setting which in theory should give 1.8+0.25=2.05V, but in reality I get 2.17V:
+0.2Vdimm setting=2.12V
+0.25Vdimm setting=2.17V
And it probably continues as you go higher...
What I like about the DS3P and DS4 (in addition to the price) is that the PCB is identical to the high end DQ6 (with a few SMD components less, and some heatsinks removed on the DS3P). IMHO the heatsinks are mostly bling. On this DS3P with a Q6600 and a moderate 3.33GHz OC (1.375Vcore), the CPU Vreg area doesn’t get very hot at all (same goes for the SB). I have a digital thermometer taped to the back of the PCB (behind the Vreg), and running FAH SMP, the temp is ~20°C above ambient (add another 10°C for the 3.6GHz OC). SMD components of that type are usually rated for over 100°C, so I guess there are no worries there (unless you live in a desert
THere you'll see memtest speeds only, but it may give a pointer, not sure. I have tested with most of the ram we have, Promos, 3 different types of Micron, value stuff. It just..works. As you can see, i haven't touched the alphas either, but i know for a fact that asus have them pretty tight at auto. But there is a lot more to gain from tweaking the alphas. Now, i'm pretty starved as far as cpu goes as the highest clocker i have, an old E6600 does 3.4 or so so i can't give you guys a match with your newer steppings.
Lasse, can you test max fsb with your quad? We found out yesterday with a Q6600 that it's stable up to 460 and then goes haywire (same bug as every other cpu you can read about) but we did boot straight to 500 fsb and believe it or not, it was dead stable. For some reason, i asked the guy to check task manager and off course, 2 cores got disabled at exactly 465 fsb.
Curiously the first bench you got there is almost exactly what I got with a E6300 on the P5B deluxe running 575x7=4025MHz, RAM at 1150MHz 1:1 and 4-4-4-12. These P35 boards seems to run RAM with dividers a lot better than the 965.
Nice work, Mr. Swede
Lasse, command rate doesn't mean much at all on P35. Maybe 1%, if that. I wouldn't trade 1T for 100mhz if you know what i mean. I'm not sure Gigabyte have the option though. What parts can you change the voltage on the Gigabyte? FSB Termination voltage? CPU PLL voltage?
Here is a good article on how FSB works and why some cpu's have a low limit. YOu can mod just about any L775 boards, but the board is not for mackanz hands, more like Lasse work :P
http://www.thetechrepository.com/showthread.php?t=87
As far as i know, DFI is the only board that lets you adjust the different GTL reference voltages.
Interesting article, but I'm not sure if more FSB is that useful when the dividers works as good as this. It sure gives you more freedom to find a good CPU/RAM performance ratio though.
I really miss manual strap control, I can't even find an app that is capable of reporting the strap in use. I have found out that going from 416->417FSB does not change any of the timings reported in memset. Still I'm loosing close to 1800mb/s in the memtest bench. Everest stays pretty much the same for reads, writes and latency, but the copy bench drop by 500mb/s. Not as dramatic as in memtest. I'm gussing this is due to the 800->1066 strap change in action?
I have spent a couple of hours getting to know the RAM tweaking options on this board. The auto settings sure doesn't work as well as on the Asus (too loose), but decent performance can be had if you spend some time tweaking it. I'm going to try higher fsb later, as this is only at 416x8