Computer Builds

[Perdix]

I finished a computer build today and the thought struck me, we don't have a computer build thread here. I know I'm not the only, nor the nerdiest, nerd on this forum, so post up your computer builds!

Sorry for the blur.




Details:

EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 watt power supply
Z97 Extreme6 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-4790K Processor (OC'd to 4.5 GHz)
Radeon 7990 graphics card
4x8gb of 1600 MHz ram, purchased a long time ago.
10TB (4x4TB HDD) raid setup in raid 5 configuration
250gb SSD

[GnarlFox]

Nice build. I've got a much more moderate system that I built in 2013:

CORSAIR CX600M 600 watt power supply
ASROCK Z87 Extreme4 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-3750K Processor
EVGA GeForce 970 SSC
2x8gb of 1866 MHz RAM
4TB HDD + 2TB non-raid
128gb Sandisc SSD

No real point in pictures as I use the "as long as the wires keep to themselves" cable management system.

My only real regrets are that I went with a CORSAIR Carbide 200R case as I wish I had more than two front USB slots and I should have gone with 4x4gb for RAM. I just upgraded my graphics card to the 970 this past week from a 660 and I plan on it being my last upgrade before a new build in another couple years. I don't play games as much as I used to but I wanted to get it before GTA V and The Witcher 3 are released.

[Perdix]

Nice build. I've got a much more moderate system that I built in 2013:

CORSAIR CX600M 600 watt power supply
ASROCK Z87 Extreme4 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-3750K Processor
EVGA GeForce 970 SSC
2x8gb of 1866 MHz RAM
4TB HDD + 2TB non-raid
128gb Sandisc SSD

No real point in pictures as I use the "as long as the wires keep to themselves" cable management system.

My only real regrets are that I went with a CORSAIR Carbide 200R case as I wish I had more than two front USB slots and I should have gone with 4x4gb for RAM. I just upgraded my graphics card to the 970 this past week from a 660 and I plan on it being my last upgrade before a new build in another couple years.

Thanks! Nice build yourself! Have you played around with overclocking your 3750? Ive heard you can get those up to 4.4+ GHz or so with proper cooling.

[GnarlFox]

Thanks! Nice build yourself! Have you played around with overclocking your 3750? Ive heard you can get those up to 4.4+ GHz or so with proper cooling.

No I haven't, but I've heard good things. To be honest, I haven't seen much of a point in overclocking with my build. Now that I have the 970 though, I'm sure I'll start overclocking my CPU at some point. The numbers I've heard sound amazing (like the 4.4+) but I've never overclocked before and while I know I have decent cooling and probably more than I need without it being overclocked, I don't know what kind of cooling and fan settings I'd need to get somewhere probably in the 4.~ range. I will admit that I've never looked it up thoroughly. I know that my 970 could easily be overclocked as well, but I don't see much of a point in that right now as I'm only gaming at 1080p. That might make a difference in a year when overclocked (or higher voltage, both?) GDDR5 could help as it's only a 4gb card. The 3.5gb argument seemingly has little basis in single GPU setups and especially at 1080p.

Edit: BTW if anyone know so some good guides to overclocking, I'd be happy to read them.

[Limes]

I'm getting ready to upgrade again at the end of the month, I want to get into Radeon R9 hashcat cracking and maybe quad display panels, possibly an 8-way FX CPU. I've been an AMD fanboy since the 90s and I'm not really a gamer. My current system is actually tuned to be both fast and quiet, I cannot stand loud fans and drives etc.

Currently running
Phenom II six core black series @ 4.2GHz
Custom water cooling system
RAID 0 (striping) 256GB SSDs with a RAID 1 (mirroring) 3TB NAS for bulk storage
ATI 6800
16GB 2100MHz RAM
LCDS: Acer 27" + Asus 24"
1500VA UPS

I should really get dual in-line water pumps, for redundancy, since I'm not currently running a hardware monitor. Something like what I had running on my DFI Lanparty build from ~2006, though one of those pumps did eventually fail.
That old 2006 build:
Pic1
Pic2
Pic3

[Perdix]

No I haven't, but I've heard good things. To be honest, I haven't seen much of a point in overclocking with my build. Now that I have the 970 though, I'm sure I'll start overclocking my CPU at some point. The numbers I've heard sound amazing (like the 4.4+) but I've never overclocked before and while I know I have decent cooling and probably more than I need without it being overclocked, I don't know what kind of cooling and fan settings I'd need to get somewhere probably in the 4.~ range. I will admit that I've never looked it up thoroughly. I know that my 970 could easily be overclocked as well, but I don't see much of a point in that right now as I'm only gaming at 1080p. That might make a difference in a year when overclocked (or higher voltage, both?) GDDR5 could help as it's only a 4gb card. The 3.5gb argument seemingly has little basis in single GPU setups and especially at 1080p.

I wouldn't OC your 970, I've found over clocking graphics cards to drastically reduce lifespan. That CPU though, I would definitely experiment with it a bit. As far as cooling goes I just upgraded my fan.

I'm getting ready to upgrade again at the end of the month, I want to get into Radeon R9 hashcat cracking and maybe quad display panels, possibly an 8-way FX CPU. I've been an AMD fanboy since the 90s and I'm not really a gamer. My current system is actually tuned to be both fast and quiet, I cannot stand loud fans and drives etc.

Currently running
Phenom II six core black series @ 4.2GHz
Custom water cooling system
RAID 0 (striping) 256GB SSDs with a RAID 1 (mirroring) 3TB NAS for bulk storage
ATI 6800
16GB 2100MHz RAM
LCDS: Acer 27" + Asus 24"
1500VA UPS

I should really get dual in-line water pumps, for redundancy, since I'm not currently running a hardware monitor. Something like what I had running on my DFI Lanparty build from ~2006, though one of those pumps did eventually fail.
That old 2006 build:
Pic1
Pic2
Pic3

The specs for the 390x are insane... 8gb? Goddamn. Nice build!

Water pumps -- aren't you worried about the water fucking everything up? Can you substitute the water for a nonconductive fluid like oil?

[Limes]

The specs for the 390x are insane... 8gb? Goddamn. Nice build!

Water pumps -- aren't you worried about the water fucking everything up? Can you substitute the water for a nonconductive fluid like oil?

I'm not going crazy on the R9, just modest. I have access to a cracking lab based R9 Cluster which can get some 60 billion hashes computed on the fly per second (NTLM Session security protocol challenge responses) so I'll just be happy with something that is blowing away CPU speeds, which are really being bottle-necked by the X86 architecture.

Water leaks? naw, it's very low pressure. A bigger concern is the pump simply stopping on me. The CPU doesn't always thermal shutdown quickly enough if that happens. My BIOS is set at 70C (since my idle is about 28C and load is ~50C)
Typical approach is to allow the entire cooling system to run for a few days before installing it anyway. I'd say the biggest concern is also the seal on the water reservois, which many people are tempted to over tighten, which causes an issue.

I have Corsair H60 water coolers on two of my Kids' systems, who are running AMD A10s (integral Radeon R7 class)

2015 is the year I will phase out all platter based hard drives from systems other than the NAS, same thing for light bulbs in the house that are on at least once per day - going all LED

I'm up to 5 laptops now, with my main two work ones (known as "go to war" machines) being Intel i7 - they're fast CPUs, but I still like the bang for the buck of the AMDs.
I think my favorite performance upgrade this past several years has been the advent of SSDs. It used to be that you had to run a huge cache controller to get that kind of performance.
I might well go intel 730 RAID 0 soon and see if I can break the 1G per second barrier. I remember debating with some tool at INTPc once that was trying to say that HD speed had no bearing on a gamer PC.

[Perdix]

I'm not going crazy on the R9, just modest. I have access to a cracking lab based R9 Cluster which can get some 60 billion hashes computed on the fly per second (NTLM Session security protocol challenge responses) so I'll just be happy with something that is blowing away CPU speeds, which are really being bottle-necked by the X86 architecture.

Water leaks? naw, it's very low pressure. A bigger concern is the pump simply stopping on me. The CPU doesn't always thermal shutdown quickly enough if that happens. My BIOS is set at 70C (since my idle is about 28C and load is ~50C)
Typical approach is to allow the entire cooling system to run for a few days before installing it anyway. I'd say the biggest concern is also the seal on the water reservois, which many people are tempted to over tighten, which causes an issue.

I have Corsair H60 water coolers on two of my Kids' systems, who are running AMD A10s (integral Radeon R7 class)

2015 is the year I will phase out all platter based hard drives from systems other than the NAS, same thing for light bulbs in the house that are on at least once per day - going all LED

I'm up to 5 laptops now, with my main two work ones (known as "go to war" machines) being Intel i7 - they're fast CPUs, but I still like the bang for the buck of the AMDs.
I think my favorite performance upgrade this past several years has been the advent of SSDs. It used to be that you had to run a huge cache controller to get that kind of performance.
I might well go intel 730 RAID 0 soon and see if I can break the 1G per second barrier. I remember debating with some tool at INTPc once that was trying to say that HD speed had no bearing on a gamer PC.

60 Ghash/s? Could you turn that cluster into a crypto miner for a day or so?

Still, for the benefit it seems overly risky. I don't know, maybe I'm just not used to the idea. I'll probably get a water/oil cooler eventually when I snag another $200 7990. Does your pump stop often?

Oh, wait, nvm... I see how water wouldn't be that much of an issue with the design of the H60. Still, sporadic pump failure doesn't sound good. I guess it could be mitigated by shutting off power when not around.

I almost went all LED a couple months ago... which really means I just bought a few LED bulbs... same thing practically.

Damn, that's a lot of laptops. I have no dog in that fight -- I would think RAM would matter a hell of a lot more than HD speed though.

[Horvack]

10TB (4x4TB HDD) raid setup in raid 5 configuration

From what I read, this is a huge mistake, especially if you're using consumer drives.

Using the formula at this site: http://www.raid-failure.com/raid5-failure.aspx
You have about a 27% chance of a successful rebuild with the typical consumer drive URE rate of 1 in 10^14. Even at the 10^15 rate, 87% is hardly acceptable. My understanding is that Dell no longer even offers RAID 5 on it's server controllers. The RAID 5 issues can be significantly mitigated by using lower capacity, higher speed drives, and especially SSDs.

Here are a couple articles making the case:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-rai...rking-in-2009/
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/05/...more-reliable/

To be honest, though, I'm just parroting online articles, as I've never been comfortable using any RAID level other than 1. So I'm curious, have you had real world success rebuilding arrays of that size multiple times? What controller card are you using?


To answer the original question:

GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK
Intel Core i7-4790K Processor (no OC so far, cooled with Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO)
G.SKILL Trident X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 2400
EVGA GeForce GTX 980
HT | OMEGA Claro Halo Sound Card
Intel 510 Series 250GB SSD
2x 4TB HGST Deskstar HDD (software Raid 1)
2x 1TB SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HDD
Cooler Master HAF X Case
Corsair HX Series 1000W PSU
Samsung UD590 28" 4K Monitor
Samsung P2450H 24" Monitor

This rig is overkill for me, but it's practically my only extravagance. I've been replacing parts as I feel the need - some of these parts are 3.5-4.5 years old (case, PSU, SSD, 1TB HDDs, sound card, 24" monitor), but have presented no problems at all. I'm considering an M.2 SSD as the next upgrade, but hoping for windows 10 and mature drivers first.

[NedLudd]

What are you guys using 4TB hard drives for? You run seedboxes from home or something?