Panning For New Gaming Computer

[titaniclover]

My birthday is February 16th and yesterday my father pulled me aside an asked me the question I have waited for ever since Xmas morning. "What do you want for your birthday?"

Seeing that he gives in to whatever I say, I told him halfheartedly, a new gaming computer. His mouth opened and closed a few times and then finally said, "Well, that computer is getting old...talk to Dave (a friend of ours that used to work for HP) about picking out parts."

He has no idea that I have been searching for months on parts for a new computer. A talk with our friend yesterday, and recap this morning via IM has given me, what I think is, a dream computer. However as Trainz is one of my most used programs I would like some advice from you techy people on this new system.

I have decided with advise from my friend that we should not overclock anything and keep it all at stock speed.


CASE:
Cooler Master HAF 932
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119160


MOBO:
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131365


GPU:
2 - ATI Radeon HD5870*
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121346


CPU:
Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115212


RAM:
2 - Corsair 6GB DDR3-1600 (12GB total)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145253


PSU:
Thermaltake Tough Power 1200 Watt PSU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153054


SOUND:
HT Omega Striker 7.1
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829271001


OPTICAL DRIVES:***
Pioneer 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 8X
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827129051


LG 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD+R DL 24X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136177


HDD:
4 - Western Digital 1TB HDD**
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284


OS:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116718


*The 2 graphic cards will be in Crossfire.

**For the HDD, I was planning on having a 80GB-160GB SSD for the OS but my friend told me it wasn't the best idea, and maybe with the next system down the road (about 5 years he said) I could have all SSD's. So I decided just to put 4 1TB HDDs instead, just for money and reliability purposes. They will be in two, 2TB mirrored RAID settings.

***I am still looking for a good card reader, or is that not worth spending money on, anyone have any suggestions on the situation?


So what do you all think? I play a lot of FPS games, Crysis is one of my newer ones. Any suggestions before the final order list is made?

Cheers,
Adam

 

[johnwhelan]

State the requirements first, 30 fps running Trainz perhaps? Read through the forum and see what others are getting.

Comment one, I don't think you see any practical difference between an i7 920 and the i7 975 Extreme Edition other than $600.

Comment two, Trainz can access a maximum of 4 gigs of memory under a 64 bit operating system. Add in two more gigs for the operating system comes to six gigs. More than this and the memory is just sitting there emitting heat which is not good for the computer. There will be no visible difference between 6 gigs of memory and 12 gigs of memory so save cash and use 6 gigs.

Comment three if your birthday is in Feb think about holding off for a day or two before ordering a graphics card. nVidia should have a Directx 11 card out by then. Both Crossfire and SLI have not been confirmed as working with Trainz so I'd go for a single graphics card.

Comment four hard drives. I'd use the money saved onthe cpu to buy a solid state hard drive, probably Intel 80/160 gigs and put the operating system on it. Programs other than the operating system I'd put on other drives. Other drives, a single internal 2 terrabyte drive probably WD with a 5 year warranty. A USB drive, probably Samsung of 1.5 to 2 terra bytes in size for back up. The reason being hard drives have two bits to slow you down, track to track and spin. The large drives hold a lot of data on a single track and often a large slower spin drive will out perform a faster spin drive because it doesn't need to move the head as much from track to track. Have a look at diskeeper www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/home/diskeeper.aspx to maintain drive performance.

Raid only improves performance sometimes and in the case of Trainz when we dug in with perfmon disk activity was not that high so I don't think its critical. Given the MTBF of hard drives putting 4 one terrabyte drives in would just cost more and add heat.

You'll find that if you ask for the most expensive sometimes you'll get a refusal, but if you can justify your choice on price performance its more difficult to refuse.

Tomshardware.com look up the cpu and gpu, also look at their high end gaming machines. newegg.com look at the number of reviews as well as how favourable they are.

You want components that are fast but fairly mainstream, these days the software drivers are the most important bit to get right for high end performance. Once written they are cheap ie copy the file but the cost money to write. So volume components can often out perform low volume components simply because the cost can be spread over a larger number.

Cheerio John

 

[titaniclover]

State the requirements first, 30 fps running Trainz perhaps? Read through the forum and see what others are getting.

Comment one, I don't think you see any practical difference between an i7 920 and the i7 975 Extreme Edition other than $600.

Comment two, Trainz can access a maximum of 4 gigs of memory under a 64 bit operating system. Add in two more gigs for the operating system comes to six gigs. More than this and the memory is just sitting there emitting heat which is not good for the computer. There will be no visible difference between 6 gigs of memory and 12 gigs of memory so save cash and use 6 gigs.

Comment three if your birthday is in Feb think about holding off for a day or two before ordering a graphics card. nVidia should have a Directx 11 card out by then. Both Crossfire and SLI have not been confirmed as working with Trainz so I'd go for a single graphics card.

Comment four hard drives. I'd use the money saved onthe cpu to buy a solid state hard drive, probably Intel 80/160 gigs and put the operating system on it. Programs other than the operating system I'd put on other drives. Other drives, a single internal 2 terrabyte drive probably WD with a 5 year warranty. A USB drive, probably Samsung of 1.5 to 2 terra bytes in size for back up. The reason being hard drives have two bits to slow you down, track to track and spin. The large drives hold a lot of data on a single track and often a large slower spin drive will out perform a faster spin drive because it doesn't need to move the head as much from track to track. Have a look at diskeeper www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/home/diskeeper.aspx to maintain drive performance.

Raid only improves performance sometimes and in the case of Trainz when we dug in with perfmon disk activity was not that high so I don't think its critical. Given the MTBF of hard drives putting 4 one terrabyte drives in would just cost more and add heat.

You'll find that if you ask for the most expensive sometimes you'll get a refusal, but if you can justify your choice on price performance its more difficult to refuse.

Tomshardware.com look up the cpu and gpu, also look at their high end gaming machines. newegg.com look at the number of reviews as well as how favourable they are.

You want components that are fast but fairly mainstream, these days the software drivers are the most important bit to get right for high end performance. Once written they are cheap ie copy the file but the cost money to write. So volume components can often out perform low volume components simply because the cost can be spread over a larger number.

Cheerio John

Hi John,

I do not know the FPS at the time for Trainz, however 30 FPS does sound about right.

I do agree with you about the RAM, however I feel that I might as well put as much in it as I can, even if I only put in 8GB, then I still will have other memory on hand if I need it.

I have looked at Nvidia, and have decided to follow my instincts, and with what I have always trusted, and that is ATI. I have had a Nvidia card before and had problems with it along with it failing only 3 months after purchase due to the capacitor on it exploding. I have had 3 ATI cards now, all are reliable and I still have all of them. All work but I just updated them out of my system. As for Crossfire/SLI I am taking the risk, the benefits outweigh the risks in my opinion.

I have decided at having the four 1TB HDD, next build I make a few years from now I will use all SSD's. Here is how they will be set up:
HDD's are labeled A, B, D, E.
A and B will be seen as one by the operating system and will be called Drive C (RAID0). Drive D will be a mirror of Drive C (RAID1). Drive E will hold all my Trainz stuff and anything else I wish.

I have joined Toms Hardware and been looking at articles since I started my search. I also know how to use Newegg and have made my choices by Newegg as well. Specific products I Googled and look at review on other sites and looked on the products home site.

While I agree with you on the Core i7 920 and 975, my friend and I had an argument but as the geek on geek terms he won. I feel that the 920 might be the same just less but he feels that 975 is the next best thing. So I agree with him, for now. In terms of money, that is my dads problem, I did tell him that they are basically the same thing, just slightly different core clocks, so it is up to him more or less.

My father is more worried about the PSU, he wants me to have 2 PSU's!! One for the graphics and one for the rest of the machine. Is that really a good idea? I felt that the PSU I found was very good and will do the job very well.

Many thanks for the input. I want to make this the best gaming system possible. My goal, to make the compuetr so smart that the user is stupider than the machine so my quote below is false in my situation, which seems impossible as I type this right now. :hehe:

Cheers,
Adam

 

[SuperFudd]

I got a new Dell PC (see below) for Christmas. I am blown away by TS2009 compatable on it. Anything better is, well, better.

 

[meatloaf747]

Has your dad just won lotto ??? :hehe: Those spec's will keep you "fps" worry free for awhile !!!
Cheers, Mac...

 

[Gandalf0444]

Two PSU's? Never heard of such a thing. If you are really worried about power just get a 1200W one....

 

[jammydodger]

I wouldn't go with an i7 processor. Quad core means that so much of the power would be wasted. So many programs, including Trainz, only use 1 core. I would go for a 2 core instead. I have a 2x 3.00Ghz processor, which means more power can and therefore is being used. Quad cores really just 'shouldn't be' yet.

 

[whitepass]

jammydodger - Trainz TC3 and newer can use multi core.

titaniclover - you did not list your monitor size witch is the most impotent part in determining what video card/CPU you need.

 

[saintjimmy]

If you're worried about the power supply, then get a high wattage one (1000 watts + for 2 5870s). That Thermaltake 1200w is definitely enough to power the system you listed, and then some.

As for the Core i7, I would go for the 920 and then just overclock it to the speed of the 975. Heck, with the right cooler, you could probably go to 4 GHz! I know my AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition and Cooler Master GeminII cooler can take 4 GHz with ease, but I keep it to 3.6 GHz.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[jammydodger]

jammydodger - Trainz TC3 and newer can use multi core.

titaniclover - you did not list your monitor size witch is the most impotent part in determining what video card/CPU you need.

My TC3 does NOT use my second core. Maybe because it's the last core (I said I have 2 cores)... I dunno. It only uses one core anyway.
I didn't know about the multi core usage! I would just try to find the fastest 2 core processor you can get, to be honest. But yes, more programs are being developed to use more than 1 or 2 cores.

 

[johnwhelan]

Hi John,

I do not know the FPS at the time for Trainz, however 30 FPS does sound about right.

I do agree with you about the RAM, however I feel that I might as well put as much in it as I can, even if I only put in 8GB, then I still will have other memory on hand if I need it.

I have looked at Nvidia, and have decided to follow my instincts, and with what I have always trusted, and that is ATI. I have had a Nvidia card before and had problems with it along with it failing only 3 months after purchase due to the capacitor on it exploding. I have had 3 ATI cards now, all are reliable and I still have all of them. All work but I just updated them out of my system. As for Crossfire/SLI I am taking the risk, the benefits outweigh the risks in my opinion.

I have decided at having the four 1TB HDD, next build I make a few years from now I will use all SSD's. Here is how they will be set up:
HDD's are labeled A, B, D, E.
A and B will be seen as one by the operating system and will be called Drive C (RAID0). Drive D will be a mirror of Drive C (RAID1). Drive E will hold all my Trainz stuff and anything else I wish.

I have joined Toms Hardware and been looking at articles since I started my search. I also know how to use Newegg and have made my choices by Newegg as well. Specific products I Googled and look at review on other sites and looked on the products home site.

While I agree with you on the Core i7 920 and 975, my friend and I had an argument but as the geek on geek terms he won. I feel that the 920 might be the same just less but he feels that 975 is the next best thing. So I agree with him, for now. In terms of money, that is my dads problem, I did tell him that they are basically the same thing, just slightly different core clocks, so it is up to him more or less.

My father is more worried about the PSU, he wants me to have 2 PSU's!! One for the graphics and one for the rest of the machine. Is that really a good idea? I felt that the PSU I found was very good and will do the job very well.

Many thanks for the input. I want to make this the best gaming system possible. My goal, to make the compuetr so smart that the user is stupider than the machine so my quote below is false in my situation, which seems impossible as I type this right now. :hehe:

Cheers,
Adam

I was trying to identify the possible weak points so you know what to expect.

I've seen two power supplies used but only on high end servers and even then it was in case one failed. We had something like 1,200 servers and although the hardware guys thought they were a great idea no one could identify a server power supply failing on a server in the last three years. I did find out though that the rep for the servers that had the dual power supplies used to take the techies out for lunch occasionally. I'd go with one and your choice seems fine. Trying to put in two one for the graphics card and one for the motherboard will probably lead to electrical complications and I'd steer clear of it.

Memory I assume its triple channel so your choice would be 6 gigs or 12 gigs, 8 gigs only happens on dual channel. Triple channel technically is slightly better than dual channel whether you'd notice any difference is mute.

My guess is the box you've put together should run practically all layouts at 80 fps, it will allow you to model built up areas nicely and still stay above the 30 fps mark. Give me a bit of time and I can come up with a layout that will bring any machine to its knees by the way, you just use poorly created items and lots of them.

Crossfire is reputed to be more Trainz friendly than SLI, ATI cards tend to use 40 nm rather than 55 nm so they perform better and need less cooling. I run them.

920 /975, Intel makes more money on the 975 however they put a lot of cash into research and it does perform better. If I'm penny pinching this is where I would penny pinch.

Hard drives, how are you going to do the RAID? A separate RAID controller? or load up the cpu? If you go seperate RAID controller that will give you the best performance as you are off loading the cpu which is a good thing to do. However I think RAID 1 is the mirrored so that's where I'd put the operating system for reliability. The files in Trainz are small and typically you'll fit a number per track RAID 0 is much more suited to large files. Having to read two drives to bring in a 4k fine is quite a lot of head movement and overhead and will probably be slower than using the drives without RAID. Using a single small SSD for just the operating system will speed up the system and be very close to the reliability of a mirrored RAID drive. RAID adds complexity which reduces reliability, also there is a problem with drivers, Windows drivers are optimised for the high volume components, RAID controllers big market is for servers where reliability is king not performance, the available Windows drivers may give you a performance hit.

Don't neglect the UPS, make it brown out proof.

Otherwise sounds fine.

Cheerio John

 

[johnwhelan]

I assume you're going to be using TS2010 by the way.

Cheerio John

 

[titaniclover]

Yes John, TS2010 is the main program. I do have TRS2006 as well, but that won't be installed on this new computer.

My monitor size is 24 inch, with a 1920 x 1200 resolution. Which is my current setting. I might later upgrade to a new monitor but not at the moment with the major part of this build.

John again, As for RAM, 12GB is what I ordered so now that you tell me about the Triple channel I will put all of it in. Below is a quote of the email my friend sent me this afternoon when I questioned him about how the hard drives would be configured, I don't understand it at all.

As for the raid, it is part of the mother board nothing to do with the OS, so when the motherboard starts you hit F10 and it takes you into the motherboard raid software, from there you build your two raid sets, two drives each, in spanning mirror, which once finished with the hardware raid install, you load the OS, which will require F6 on OS load first time to enter the special drivers to find the hardware raid controller, which you need on floppy ready to load, then the OS sees the raid set as a single drive and the first mirror will be drive C and the second will be D, A and B are reserved from the old dos system for floppy drives, C is system, D is expansion, e-z are available and your first optical would be E the second would be F but can be renamed in the OS to anything leftover.

Many thanks for the help everyone. My dad gave the list to his boss at CSX and he will see if they can get a good deal on the parts. My dad will pay but everything will go through CSXT.

Cheers,
Adam

 

[johnwhelan]

See if you can read up about RAID on motherboards, in the operating sytem and RAID controllers.

Yes the Intel chip set does do RAID but it isn't Hot swappable, and it is not as easy to recover from should a drive die as the operating system level one or a separate RAID controller one.

Have a read here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adaptec-serial-controllers,1806.html

and here

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/UNIFIED-SERIAL-RAID-CONTROLLERS-PCI-EXPRESS,1665.html

If you notice both articles refer to servers as the prime target. My background is in computers, I spent my first ten years programming in assembler when computer costs were very high and we spent a lot of time learning about hardware so we could program it effectively. I once cut the sort time down on a major payroll by 25% which was very cost effective in those days. I've also spent 10 years messing around with big databases and SANs.

I don't think RAID is mainstream for game machines at the moment. If we look at Trainz in particular Windows has something called lazy write which means that Windows tells the program it has written something to the hard drive but in reality it has simply queued the write. Good RAID controllers do the same but you need a UPS on the system to make sure that all the writes are completed in case of a power outage. Basically you write the file out not as it is but as the head travels across the hard drive. This may mean an index is written before the bit of the file so it points nowhere until the file is completely written. The reason this works is that memory is measured in nanoseconds, disks in milliseconds. There are 10,000 nanoseconds in a millisecond so memory is always much faster than hard drives.

Windows will cache hard drives. When you tell it to read a file in it actually will read the entire track in and stores it in memory. When you read a track you get a rotational delay whilst the drive rotates under the head until its in the correct place. On a high performance drive this is a millisecond but typically with 12 gigs of memory what happens is Windows says give me the full track, takes an extra millisecond but if the file is not fragmented and you are using diskeeper professional, with a large platter size you suck in the entire file in one read instead of making perhaps forty separate reads each with their own overhead say 40 milliseconds in total. In Trainz you basically read in the layout and once the game is running you don't do that many more reads. This is where perfmon comes in its the Windows profiler to help you sort out where your program is using resources. Trainz is not disk intensive.

RAID 0 reads in faster because you are reading from more than one physical drive at a time, but only when you are pulling in big chunks of data. So on a database search where you want to read in big chunks of the database it makes sense, big volumes but when the files you are pulling in are small it doesn't make sense. The SATA interface is 3 gigs per second but the drives themselves can only feed around a gig per second if its coming off the physical drive and not the cache which is the case with random reads. By reading off two drives at the same time you get to 2 gigs per second. I think the PCI-e bus can be saturated by one hard drive which is why you put RAID controllers on the faster PCIs-e channels. Effectively for smaller files in Trainz there is very little advantage to RAID from a performance point of view. From a reliability point of view you aren't doing financial transactions so if a drive dies after five years so what, just reload the operating system and reload your backups. Even if you are running RAID 1, mirrored you still need to do backups, for example if you delete something by mistake it doesn't matter if its on RAID or a single disk you need a back up. When I used to be responsible for recovering backups for each hard drive that failed we found that we had about fifty cases of data being lost by finger problems. RAID does not protect you from finger problems, but Windows backup to a USB external hard drive does. Not only that but you can recover the backups onto a different machine fairly easily. Not always easy to do with a RAID drive.

I think RAID is adding complexity here and very little value. If you want to go this route see if you can work out the bandwidth available on the PCI-e bus and the raw data bandwidth on a disk drive and it isn't 3 gigs per second. The server guys used to boast about the 2 gigs per second they could serve up when I dug into it on the server we were using they were getting 130 kbs because of the bandwidths available on the server and the overhead the SAN was putting on.

Cheerio John