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I think we need some build threads around here.


AshleyAshes
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We get a lot of tech support request threads mostly but maybe we could use some build and project threads around these parts.  I have a few I could do in the near future but that's about it.  Recently I rebuild my living room HTPC with a hand-me-down Radeon HD 7950, meaning it's now a PS4/Xbox One killer PC console and it's made ENTIRELY out of spare parts.  I think that's an interesting topic especially since not a single part of it is new other than some expansion slot covers and a USB3 kit port in the 3.5" bay. :P  I also have some new German 'Blacknoise' fans that I'm going to swap in for the Corsair ones in my workstation's Corsair H80i cooler that would be interesting.  They should be a LOT quieter.  Much later I'll be rebuilding my server into a FlexRAID server and adding 8TB drives, a server post could come from that.

But we have lots of people on this forum actually USING tech and maybe we could talk about what we're putting together and using? :P

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Not exactly a personal build, but I've just put in a purchase order for a new office computational server; hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll actually have the parts. It's a dual Xeon e5-2690 v3 build starting with 128 GB of RDIMMs. I'm really looking forward to finally getting to assemble a dual processor system, and I'll post full specs and other details once it's running.

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41 minutes ago, Onnes said:

Not exactly a personal build, but I've just put in a purchase order for a new office computational server; hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll actually have the parts. It's a dual Xeon e5-2690 v3 build starting with 128 GB of RDIMMs. I'm really looking forward to finally getting to assemble a dual processor system, and I'll post full specs and other details once it's running.

Is this not going to be a rack unit then?  I mean, you can totally build rack units yourself, though most often people buy highly compact stuff that fits in 1 or 2U from Dell, HP, or some other OEM.

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6 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Is this not going to be a rack unit then?  I mean, you can totally build rack units yourself, though most often people buy highly compact stuff that fits in 1 or 2U from Dell, HP, or some other OEM.

This is going to be a tower chassis. Since the NSF doesn't like providing funding for computational resources, we'll probably never have need for an actual rack and parting it out ourselves saves some money.

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52 minutes ago, Onnes said:

This is going to be a tower chassis. Since the NSF doesn't like providing funding for computational resources, we'll probably never have need for an actual rack and parting it out ourselves saves some money.

I can see that, a rack is really an investment with intention for more machines and while you can run a rack machine without a rack, they really aren't meant for that and kinda ugly.  Oh, I forgot, I also have some other spare parts, like that box full of Q6600 boards.  I was musing the idea of upping one of those to 8GB of RAM, hten sticking my 8GB Radeon R9 390X in it and seeing how much an impact the CPU has.  I imagine it would vary game to game but if it performed okay, it'd be an interesting metric.

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4 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Oh, I forgot, I also have some other spare parts, like that box full of Q6600 boards.  I was musing the idea of upping one of those to 8GB of RAM, hten sticking my 8GB Radeon R9 390X in it and seeing how much an impact the CPU has.  I imagine it would vary game to game but if it performed okay, it'd be an interesting metric.

Huh, that's actually a hard one to predict. That's a 2.4 GHz quad core, right? It seems like most newer engines can take advantage of at least 4 cores, but if there's any single-process bottleneck then it might choke.

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49 minutes ago, Onnes said:

Huh, that's actually a hard one to predict. That's a 2.4 GHz quad core, right? It seems like most newer engines can take advantage of at least 4 cores, but if there's any single-process bottleneck then it might choke.

Yeah, but at the same time, at least on the high end, CPU doesn't count for much. For example my i7 3770K and i7 Extreme 4930K (6 cores), even overclocked to 4.5ghz on the hex-core, still doesn't manage to do better than the other in my tests but this would vary game to game too, some games really ARE CPU intensive and others are really all about the GPU.  So I think it'd be interesting to put a disgustingly near top end GPU and bench it in some oddball systems.  I'm sure the Q6600 would be SLOWER than my newer and faster quads but the interesting bit would be 'How MUCH slower would this CPU that you can get for $25 used on eBay be?'.  I think it'd be competitive in a lot of cases.

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4 hours ago, hectichusky said:

I'm still running a Phenom II X4 for a CPU hahahah what is wrong with me.

I wanna switch to Intel and try building a hackintosh tbh

The AMD A8-3870K that I ran in my Server/HTPC in the bedroom was basically just a Phenom II X3 3.0ghz with some Radeon graphics guts bolted to the chip, still a pretty capable piece of hardware for a lot of tasks.  ...Though the mobo died, I still have the CPU, but it's been replaced with an Intel.  I am eyeing a socket FM1 mobo to get it cooking again though.

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2 hours ago, 6tails said:

I got him an 8GB R9 390 (no point in spending an extra $100 on the 390X which is just a stable measly 50 MHz overclock and no other difference.)

Uhhh, the 390 has 2560 shader units and 160 Texture Mapping Units, where as the 390X has 2818 shader units and 172 TMUs.  While one could argue that this increase in performance from the higher count of shader units and TUMus doesn't ramp up with the increase in cost, it doesn't change the fact that apples to apples, the 390X is a card with superior horse power that can be objectively measured beyond it's slightly higher clock speed.

Edited by AshleyAshes
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6 hours ago, 6tails said:

*click* Oh, lookie there, there's the extra shaders and TMUs unlocked.

*cough*

You're still spreading inaccuracy.  Only some 390s (And 290s) disable the extra shaders and TMUs by firmware where others have it disabled by having their internal connections cut off by a laser during manufacturing.  The laser cut models obviously have no way to re-enable those shaders or TMUs and one must carefully buy the correct reference models if they intend to do that unlocking.  So say there's outright no difference is to spread inaccuracy and confuse people.

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2 minutes ago, 6tails said:

Actually, given I only mentioned MY card, there were no inaccuracies put forth. Not my fault you can't pick up on context.

So, no, it is in fact YOUR aggressiveness is what's irrational.

The mental hoops you'll jump through to get into an argument and then 'win' it are amazing. O.o

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On 24.1.2016 at 1:42 AM, 6tails said:

BTW, Cities: Skylines, PERFECTLY FINE ON AN i3 WEAK Surface Pro, now that I bought one.

Which you said wouldn't run for shit.

I said it wouldn't run decently... somewhat:

Quote

If you can life with cities skylines at low fps rates the MSI is going to do it.

And there it is at buttery smooth 20 fps. Because pictures or it didn't happen. (Yes it's a HD 4000 and not a HD 4200 but go through the specs and see why I don't care.)
And even if. What does it prove? How does the R9 390 magically perform better?

You just jumped onto a different argument with no relation to the original R9 390X vs R9 390 discussion.

You are so commonly going sideways on these arguments.
Arguing "Oh, and Unity is an horribly-optimized game engine in the first place." like if that somehow makes it optimized and run smoothly.
And don't get me started on this retarded VGA-would-be-superior-if-it-wasn't-all-crap discussion.

Edited by Luccus
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Oh my god, we're just discussing ideas for other threads people could make in the future.  No one fucking cares about your ego 6tailz.

So, anyway, my plans have changed a bit, I have some older and smaller HDDs that are still serviceable that I'm going to toss into my server to put off needing to buy a pair of 8TB HDDs since that's, ya know, not a cheap endeavor.  But since I have a Radeon HD 6850 in my server, it has an mATX board, it has a pair of 1x PCI-E slots hidden by the cooler.  So while obviously not the most high tech endeavor, once the cheap parts arrive from China, I'll be covering using PCI-E riser cables to access those hidden slots so I can add a PCI-E SATA controller below the motherboard. :D I'll detail it with a good amount of photos.  Mainly, I just think that this forum could do a bit more than 'Tech Support' and 'Help Me Buy A Thing' threads, which are totally valid threads, we could just use some more variety. 

Edited by AshleyAshes
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My parents asked me for a Home theatre solution, so I dug up a
Raspberry Pi 2, 16GB SD card, an old W-Lan dongle and a cheap wireless keyboard-touchpad combination.
I installed XBMC, did some fiddling and found it does a nice job (even without the pay-for-codecs) at 1.1 GHz.

The only thing that currently doesn't work is the W-Lan dongle I had at hand.
I was considering compiling the driver myself but I want to get a faster AC one anyways so... yeah - less effort for me.

Hope that qualifies as a build.

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28 minutes ago, Luccus said:

My parents asked me for a Home theatre solution, so I dug up a
Raspberry Pi 2, 16GB SD card, an old W-Lan dongle and a cheap wireless keyboard-touchpad combination.
I installed XBMC, did some fiddling and found it does a nice job (even without the pay-for-codecs) at 1.1 GHz.

The only thing that currently doesn't work is the W-Lan dongle I had at hand.
I was considering compiling the driver myself but I want to get a faster AC one anyways so... yeah - less effort for me.

Hope that qualifies as a build.

But it's not a thread dedicated to the project now is it!? :P Though the Pi is cool in what it can accomplish.  A lot of people are using Pi2's for Kodi where as I'm a crazy person who throws a 3770K at Kodi. ^_^;;;;;

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7 minutes ago, 6tails said:

You are dead wrong, Ashley. Every R9 300 series is the EXACT SAME HAWAII R9 200 series from last gen.

Uhh...

Quote

Only some 390s (And 290s)

This is me, lumping the 390 and 290 together as they are rebadges of each other.  Then you have now declared that I am wrong, 'dead wrong' as you say, about them lumping them together and being badges because... They should be lumped together because they are rebadges of each other!

What the hell 6tailz?  Are you so despite for an argument to win that you are now trying to correct me on something we don't disagree on?

Edited by AshleyAshes
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I've edited my post above just before you posted that.  Sorry for the delay, the quote system on this forum is pretty terrible and editing in a quote from another post turned out to be a huge pain in the ass, ya know, with the correct date and time.  However since you won't get a notification that the post was edited, I will re-iterate clearly.

No one is saying that the 290 and 390 are not rebadges.  I lumped them together because they are rebadges.  I had no need to include the 290 in brackets because it wasn't what were talking about but since they are rebadges and the same trait applies, I added it for extra information.  So please calm down.  You are not winning an argument here about them being rebadges because I have not disputed it.  Infact I entirely agree with it.  I am very confused as to why you think I said they wern't rebadges though.  How did you get that from what I wrote?  How did you manage to interpret "390s (And 290s)"s as "The 390 and 290 series are entirely different from each other and totally separate products so fuck you 6tails!"?  I can't imagine how you did that but... Okay?  They aren't.  No one is arguing that they so, I guess you win?  You win the argument that they are the same chips.  There was just no one to win against because no one held an opinion counter to that.  So... Uhh... Cool?

Also, actually totally thought it was with a Z, my bad?

 

So anyway, random and unprovoked arguments aside, yeah, I hope we can put together some cool build threads in the future. ^_^  I'm mostly waiting on parts from China before I can post any though. :(

Edited by AshleyAshes
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Still rocking a 2500k OCd to 4.4GHz. I swear this thing will last forever, after all the years it's still holding up against common gaming builds.

I also bought a bunch of 3mm pink LEDs (kinda ended up lavender) with the same volts and amps as the blue ones in the fans that came with my case, then I cut the old lights out and soldered in the new ones. I didn't want a generic-colored build but finding pink fans was impossible. Tried buying one and this is what came in the mail: 

JmYcXcHm.jpg

Weird, pink plastic fan with blue LEDs. And it looks orange when it's on. Thanks Mao

16gb 1333 HyperX ram

240gb SSD, two 1TB hard drives (even older than the processor)

Dual 2gb 7850 in CFX

And an Antec Earthwatts (super sexy green) 650w power supply, cables all tucked away and tidy.

When I put this thing together it was super badass, about on par with the GTX 590 which was one of the top cards at the time. 

otCup7Ll.jpg

0oovaaCl.jpg

 

And these pictures were taken before the SSD was installed and before I put the 150mm fan in the bottom and the 120mm LED fan in the back, but it's easier to see with the better lighting and shit 

025uyqsl.jpg

xAQWAiRh.jpg

The heatsink fan is facing the wrong way because it wouldn't fit over the ram. Also thought having the rear exhaust fan and the heatsink fan blowing away from each other would create negative space, cooling the processor better, but I think that's just me trying to make myself feel better about it being wrong.

Also have a 24" Acer monitor, Razer Anansi and Naga Epic Chroma as peripherals. And a simple 2.1 desktop sound system but my TV has an Energy CS-30 soundbar and subwoofer so sometimes I play music to that through the HDMI cable c:

HOPE YOU LIKE MY LONG ASS POST WITH SHIT NOBODY CARES ABOUT

Edited by Ves
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7 hours ago, Ves said:

Still rocking a 2500k OCd to 4.4GHz. I swear this thing will last forever, after all the years it's still holding up against common gaming builds.

Is that the Gigabyte P67A-UD3 or something similar? ^^  I had one of those when I build a 2500k system, for complicated reasons I now only have the mobo but no CPU for it, but I remember it fondly.  I'm still eyeing a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge to go into it and service it for rendering or something but no hurry.

And, yeah, you're right, the 2500K really is ALL you need these days.  It's more than enough even for CPU bound games and you can just toss a new GPU into it when needed and that is a machine that shows no real major weakness.  You don't need anything more unless you are getting into intense creative stuff like video or CG and even then it can truck along okay if you don't have the budget to get something bigger.  They even have decent value on eBay still because they are still just great chips.

Also, I recently overclocked the HD 7950 in my HTPC, it's a 3770K system but still, I'm sorta curious how 2x 7850 competes against an overclocked 7950.  Any interest in a friendly little benchmark race? :)

Edited by AshleyAshes
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On 1/24/2016 at 0:05 PM, Luccus said:

My parents asked me for a Home theatre solution, so I dug up a
Raspberry Pi 2, 16GB SD card, an old W-Lan dongle and a cheap wireless keyboard-touchpad combination.
I installed XBMC, did some fiddling and found it does a nice job (even without the pay-for-codecs) at 1.1 GHz.

The only thing that currently doesn't work is the W-Lan dongle I had at hand.
I was considering compiling the driver myself but I want to get a faster AC one anyways so... yeah - less effort for me.

Hope that qualifies as a build.

Kinda intrigued by this. Photos, build doc, anything else related you can share?

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6 minutes ago, Ginpanther said:

Kinda intrigued by this. Photos, build doc, anything else related you can share?

I've never done it myself but there's actually prebuilt version of OpenELEC (An 'Applianceized' side-port of Kodi/XBMC) that's pretty typically used on the Pi 2's.  So you can get all in one images for the Pi 2 that are ready to go.  It's a strongly suggested piece of hardware since it has h.264 hardware acceleration built right in and a decent enough CPU for most audio formats and rendering the skins.  It lacks any future proofing, no HEVC support or 4K, but when a Pi 2 costs like $39.99 it's a great price for a piece of hardware that's only ready for 'Right Now'.

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4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Is that the Gigabyte P67A-UD3 or something similar? ^^  I had one of those when I build a 2500k system, for complicated reasons I now only have the mobo but no CPU for it, but I remember it fondly.  I'm still eyeing a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge to go into it and service it for rendering or something but no hurry.

And, yeah, you're right, the 2500K really is ALL you need these days.  It's more than enough even for CPU bound games and you can just toss a new GPU into it when needed and that is a machine that shows no real major weakness.  You don't need anything more unless you are getting into intense creative stuff like video or CG and even then it can truck along okay if you don't have the budget to get something bigger.  They even have decent value on eBay still because they are still just great chips.

Also, I recently overclocked the HD 7950 in my HTPC, it's a 3770K system but still, I'm sorta curious how 2x 7850 competes against an overclocked 7950.  Any interest in a friendly little benchmark race? :)

Very close, it's a Z68A-D3H

And I'll take that offer, I've got a bunch of 1080p Unigine scores I can give you, or I'll make new ones based on your settings. :D 

If you want we can also see how they compare in high-resolution testing, the tv in here is plugged into my computer and it's 4k

Edited by Ves
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15 minutes ago, Ves said:

Very close, it's a Z68A-D3H

And I'll take that offer, I've got a bunch of 1080p Unigine scores I can give you, or I'll make new ones based on your settings. :D 

If you want we can also see how they compare in high-resolution testing, the tv in here is plugged into my computer and it's 4k

I can test that one out, and I'd say Fire Strike in 3D Mark and er, do you have Tomb Raider for it's benchmark?  Also, GTA5 if you have it would be a good benchmark, but Ic an't remember if it's benchmark actually SCORES or just lets you test to see your framerate.  The highest res display I have is 1440p and I can honestly say that my box would yield unplayable performance at 4K at most games worth testing. ^_^;;;;  My workstations 380X could compete, but not a 7950 with 3GB of VRAM. :P

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Yeah, 4k is pretty much impossible for me, but some cards suffer less from higher resolutions than others so eh

I like the Unigine benchmarks because your other hardware has very little to do with your final score, it's basically entirely card-based unless a bottleneck is present. Aaaaand I don't have Tomb Raider but I do have GTA and can get 3Dmark c:

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16 hours ago, Ginpanther said:

Kinda intrigued by this. Photos, build doc, anything else related you can share?

I didn't do pictures and my parents are ~100km away from where I live. And the Pi2 doesn't like close up shots ;3

But the setup is pretty straightforward.
Get a Pi2 and a power supply too, get a micro SD-card (preferably with a full size adapter), get a monitor and grab a keyboard.
Take the micro SD-card and install OpenELEC or XBMC OSMC on there.
Slap it into the Pi and plug everything in.
Both, OSMC and OpenELEC, will run you through a one time setup.

Networking can be tricky tho'. A LAN cable will of course run out of the box.
But some WiFi adapters might not be supported check for these first.

BTW: I want to install a 802.11ac WiFi adapter. You won't need to do this as the Pi only has USB 2.0 ports. I mostly do this because it buys me some range and unused channels.

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A few years ago I built a gaming rig that gives current gen consoles a run for their money. A Core i7, 16 GB RAM, and a 2gb GTX 660 give my baby the power it needs to run all the latest games on medium to high settings.

Man, my GTX 660 is a tank. It runs Just Cause 3 medium settings despite it being below the listed system requirements, while much newer cards struggled to run the game. It can also run GTA V and Mad Max on high settings, which is mental for a 3 year old GPU. Maybe I should get a second GTX 660 and SLI the two.

Edit: looks like I could get one used still. This is the exact card I have. http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-SUPERCLOCKED-Graphics-02G-P4-2662-KR/dp/B00966IREK

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an old m4a89gtd pro/usb3, a couple of hd 5750's in crossfire, ocz vertex 3 sdd (256?), phenom II 965, and 6gb of god knows what memory... some psu, no idea off-hand...

i haven't paid much attention to that thing for a while, but it's still chugging along hahaha.

Edited by Wrecker
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I just downgraded my PC :V I got a GTX 960 because I wanted to do a little bit of PC gaming again.
Yeah, that didn't happen... I got the card at the beginning of January and since then I touched Fallout 4 once to test the performance.
So I'm just gonna send the card back tomorrow and I just put my Radeon HD 5670 back in. I can spend those 200€ on more useful things than on a GPU that literally won't do anything in my PC. I was even thinking about using the internal Intel GPU instead to save power, but the Radeon is mostly just idling in my PC anyway so who cares.

So all in all this is what I'm running right now:
Intel i5 6500 (Skylake)
ASRock B150 PRO4/3.1 S1151
16gb of DDR4 RAM
Radeon HD 5670
Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium (kept from my old system)
240GB Samsung Evo 840 SSD as a system drive
An old 250gb HDD for storage that I REALLY need to replace soon because it is ancient
And another 1TB storage drive.
The whole thing is powered by a 450W be quiet! PSU.
There is also the DVD+RW drive that I never use, a 1.5TB external USB 2.0 storage drive for crap and a 1TB USB 3.0 storage drive for my RAW files.

The main task of this rig is photo editing and that works like an absolute treat. With my old PC (AMD Athlon II X4 620 BE) going through and editing 500-800 photos took forever because loading the files in Lightroom was slow as hell. When I started editing at like 6pm I was done at midnight at best. With the new PC I'm done in two to three hours!

A new GPU will start to make sense for me when I upgrade to 4k and beyond in the future. Because for that this Radeon HD 5670 won't do at all.

Edited by Käpt'n
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