Upgrades galore!
Some of you might know that my main/gaming rig was powered by an old AMD Dualcore processor from 2007. The power of that “thing” was enough back then but nowadays it is NOT. When my water-cooling systems pump started to make noises like a Leopard 2 tank a few weeks ago, I just felt like it’s time to get a new rig. So for my birthday, I got myself a few boxes full of shiny, new hardware.
Now let’s see what I got after the jump:
Processor:
After looking at benchmarks I just had to go with… AMD!!! Yes, you heard right.
If you are going to build/order/beam over a new rig everyone seems to go for an Intel i7 (or if the budget is tight an Intel i5 processor) now. Looks like most people have forgotten about a certain innovative CPU maker called AMD or they where to shocked by the Phenom 1 dilemma.
Yes, the newer Intel CPUs are ahead of AMDs CPUs in most synthetic benchmarks (encryption works way better on AMD CPUs for example) but how does this translate to gaming performance for example? The truth Intel doesn’t want to hear is: Get a decent, well priced CPU and spend the money on a powerful graphics card if you are a gamer.
AMD is well off here of course because they offer both and the current Nvidia line-up is… crap. (Unless you want to heat your house with your graphics that is.)
If I would be into heavy video editing for example a Intel i7 quad or sixcore CPU would make sense but for my needs definitely not.
So I got the top of the line quadcore CPU from AMD, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition for 150€.
Specification:
Quad-Core "Deneb" • TDP: 125W • 45nm • L2-Cache: 4x 512kB • L3-Cache: 6MB shared • Hypertransport: 4.0GT/s • Memory Controller: Dual Channel PC3-10667U (DDR3-1333), Dual Channel PC3-8500U (DDR3-1066), Dual Channel PC2-8500U (DDR2-1066) • Stepping: C3 • MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4a, Enhanced 3DNow!, NX bit, AMD64, Cool’n'Quiet, AMD-V
Obviously an improvement over the old processor.
It’s Black Edition CPU which means I can set the multiplier up to x35 which would result in a core speed of 7GHz, theoretically. In real life this would not go that well for the CPU. Unless you use N2 cooling cause then it is possible:
Motherboard:
I was a little bit in a pinch here. Should I get a “old” board with a 790 chipset or one of the the just released 890 chipset boards?
GX890 of course!
In fact Gigabytes first motherboard featuring the 890 chipset, the brand new GA-890GPA-UD3H.
Feature list: (A geeky one. If you like to see the important features wrapped up in bright colours take a look over here: www.gigabyte.com.tw/mb_890gpa_ud3h/ )
- ATX Form Factor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm
- Support for Socket AM3 processors, new generation AMD Phenom™II X6 processors included
- Hyper Transport Bus: 5200 MT/s
North Bridge:
- AMD 890GX, South Bridge: AMD SB850
- 4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory, support for DDR3 1866(OC)/1333/1066 MHz memory modules
- Integrated Memory: 128MB DDR3 SidePort memory
- Onboard Graphics (ATI HD 4290)
- Realtek ALC892 High Definition Audio, 7.1-channel, Dolby Home Theater, S/PDIF In/Out
- 1 x Realtek 8111D chip (10/100/1000 Mbit)
- 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16
- 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8
- 3 x PCI Express x1 slots
- 2 x PCI slots
- South Bridge:
- 6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors 6 supporting up to 6 SATA 6Gb/s devices
- Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, and JBOD
- 1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices
- 2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors supporting up to 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
GIGABYTE SATA2 chip:
Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD 
iTE IT8720 chip: 1 x floppy disk drive connector supporting up to 1 floppy disk drive
IEEE 1394: 3 x IEEE 1394a ports (1 on the back panel, 2 via the IEEE 1394a bracket connected to the internal IEEE 1394a header)
- USB: Integrated in the South Bridge:
- Up to 14 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (6 on the back panel, 8 via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers)
- Up to 2 USB 3.0 ports on the back panel
NEC D720200F1 chip:
- USB3 is not implemented into the chipset but comes with the NEC chip. I’m not surprised. Is there another USB3 chip out there in the wild yet?
Back Panel Connectors:
- 1 x PS/2 keyboard port or PS/2 mouse port
- 1 x D-Sub port
- 1 x DVI-D port
- 1 x HDMI port
- 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
- 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
- 2 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports
- 1 x IEEE 1394a port
- 1 x RJ-45 port
- 6 x audio jacks
The layout is nice and tidy, connectors are well placed. What I’m missing is the e-SATA port. The comparable ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 comes with one of those but with less USB ports and some folks reported stability problems with the current BIOS on the ASUS board, so Gigabyte this time. My next external drive will be a USB3 model anyway.
Performance wise the 890 chipset performs slightly better than the 790 chipset according to the interwebs. Furthermore the SATA3 integrated into the new chipset seems to perform better than the usual Marvell controller found on former boards. I guess it’s time to get a SSD soon.
What I’m wondering about is: WHY ARE THERE IDE AND FLOPPY CONNECTORS ON THAT BOARD? It’s 2010! Who is still using IDE drives? A IDE port next to a next gen SATA3 port looks just wrong!
The accessories are a little bit disappointing though. I would prefer a USB/firewire bracket over those stickers and the DVD with already outdated drivers. Only two SATA cables aren’t a problem for me (I have more of those lying around than I could ever use) but if a random Joe buys this together with two hard drives and one optical drive this could be a problem.
But after all the board isn’t a bad deal for 112€. Comparable Intel socket 1156 boards cost more and have only two SATA 3 ports (via the Marvell chip) and a drawback: If you use the USB3/SATA3 Turbo mode the primary PCI-e 2.0 x16 port runs in x8 mode and the second PCIe 2.0 x16 ports runs in 0x mode (LOL) on some Intel boards. I guess that’s because the Intel chipset provides only half the bandwidth of the AMD chipset.
This shouldn’t be a problem for a current, common setup, but lets say you have a ATI Crossfire setup with two 5850 running on your Intel Core i7/i5 rig. In a few months you buy a external USB3 drive and suddenly your second graphics card is unusable. Not that great if you ask me.
Memory:
Not much to mention here. First I wanted to get 8GB DDR3 ram but the current memory prices are completely fraked up. So I just bought a “cheap” 4GB OCZ Gold Low-Voltage DIMM Kit (DDR3-1333, CL9) for now.
Cooling:
Yes, I got the boxed version of the processor which comes with a AMD stock cooler. But who would use those?
So I got myself a nice piece of engineering from Japan manufactured in Taiwan:
\o/ WUAHHAHAHA! That’s the Scythe Mugen 2 Rev. B.
Ährm yeah, its a little bit bigger than the stock cooler. Even bigger than Japanese roris!
Combined Dimensions:
130 x 100 x 158 mm / 5.12 x 3.94 x 6.22 in
Fan Dimensions:
120 x 120 x 25 mm / 4.72 x 4.72 x 25 in
Noise Level:
0 ~ 26.50 dBA
Air Flow:
0 ~ 74.25 CFM = 0 ~ 126 m³/h
Fan Speed:
0(+200 rpm) – 1,300 rpm(±10%)
Weight:
870 g / 30.69 oz.
Material of Base Plate:
Nickel-plated copper
Comes with all screws and stuff to mount it on Socket 478/T/LGA775/LGA1156/LGA1366 and Socket 754/939/AM2/AM2+/AM3/940 motherboards, a back-plate, a fan mounting thingy, a Scythe Slipstream fan (SY1225SL12LM-P), a manual and some thermal grease.
The mounting system is little bit different than what I’m used to. You basically screw the mounting parts matching your Socket to the bottom of the cooler.
After applying some thermal grease (I used Arctic Silver 5) you have to mount the backplate from the bottom of the motherboard, which is tricky.
The best way to do it is by flipping the cooler over and basically mount the motherboard on the fan as shown in the following clip. (It’s in German but you should get it.)
No compatibility problems with the motherboard but memory modules with high cooling fins could cause problems.
Looks quite impressive compared to the old motherboard. I don’t want to think about the price of the ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition board back then. (~260€)
Time to put all that goodies inside my old case.
Old setup:
New setup:
Removing the liquid cooling system took most of the time, because you don’t want to have green coolant in your case, right?
In the front and in the back I mounted silent 800 RPM Scythe Slipstream fans.
My Enermax case comes with a 240mm LED side fan which makes sense in a liquid-cooled system but usually messes up the airflow if you use a tower CPU cooler. So I just removed it.
The Mugen 2 gets enough cool air trough the mesh windows anyway.
After a few days the Arctic silver seems to break-in and the temperatures as well as the noise is quite good.
Idle (=Firefox+Winamp+Livemail+Tweetdeck+Skype+MSN+ Ultramon+CCC+Avast+a to of background applications): The system is highly unimpressed. The loudest parts are the hard drives.
Stress (=Prime95, In-place large FFTs for over half an hour): Still cool and quite silent.
3,8Ghz runs with a core temperature of 48°C! 4Ghz should run fine too, but I don’t need the power at the moment.
I’m highly impressed how far air cooling has come. I’m actually glad that I don’t have to deal with those aliens living inside my cooling systems any longer. ^^;
Urgs… wäähhh! You don’t even want to know what life form dwelled inside the coolant reservoir. It was nothing from this world, that’s for sure.
After applying some car polish even my case is like new again.
I could post a ton of benchmark results like I did on my Radeon 5770 review but who would care how much better this system performs than a randam2 1/2 year old system?
The system feels fast as hell, standard tasks are blazing fast, the real bottleneck, like in most systems is the hard drive now. All games (besides Metro 2033 obviously) are running with maximum settings on 1920×1200. Bad Company 2 finally performs well and thanks to the Catalyst 10.4 preview driver I’m now usually the first on the maps. (Feel free to add me btw. Ingame name: hikky. Yah, I’m that medic who is NOT running around with a M60.)
I’m really happy with my new rig and it was definitely worth every single one of those 390€.
One tip if you get this board too: Do NOT use the Easy Energy Saver (EES) app from Gigabyte. While Easy Tune is a great application, EES is garbage. It saves a few watts and keeps my system ~1°C cooler by decreasing the Vcore! This cause applications to hang now and then, which is not what you would want. FAIL!
That’s remind me I should upgrade my rig. Congratulation and enjoy gamin, by the way.
Well for 390€ that certainly is a terrific upgrade!
While I’d first would have thought to advise getting Intel processor, if you can get the AMD one for that price and get such a well decked out, complete motherboard for the accompanying reasonable price then AMD here is the best choice for your needs indeed. Plus that motherboard is more future-proof if it has such better integration of Sata 3 and USB3, very sweet.
I have the original Scythe Infinity (before it was renamed Mugen) and it’s an amazing CPU cooler, quiet and super performing. To this day its unbeatable in price/performance. (Sure some cool better, but at what cost.)
Do like that now at least Scythe has a decent backplane and screw mounting system, mine still has the basic pushpins, though they’ve held on fine all this time.
Those Scythe case fans are terrific as well, they make excellent quiet products.
Smithy´s last blog ..Anime DVD loot
Hehe nice new system ^^
A new system is alway so much fun.
I’m planning for one too. But next year since I have to pay for my laptop.
And I’m waiting for those full USB 3.0 Motherbords. And it will be Intel and Asus again since I’m using them since my first computer and had no problem.
But your CPU cooler could be bigger then my Xigmatek Red Scorpion.
And you are righ with that RAM prices. They a way too much. And they still not dropping.
GREW´s last blog ..Reimu invades your Desktop!
Nice components^^
want to made a update next Month. Wait, “want to buy a new rig” ist more precisely^^” Most Parts are from 2005 or older.
Next rig would also be AMD/ATi again for me.
I don´t think, that the prices for RAM are to high. Ok, the cheaper the prices the better for the buyer but after the phase with really low RAM prices, they are now normal. My old 2GB DDR400 RAM Kit has cost 250€ so I don´t think, that 100€ for a 4GB DDR3 Kit is really expensive.
@RyoBase
Thanks, I sure will.
@Smithy
Oh, the Mugen/Infinity had pushpins before? Interesting considering that it was ~100g heavier than the Mugen 2. Most Scythe coolers come with their backplate system now, but whats strange is that the new Yasya and the new Grand Kama Cross have pushpins. o_O
And yes, the fans are really the best I had so far, Scythe has now released a new 140mm fan series which is compatible to 120mm case fan holes. Even more silent!
@GREW
I aused Abit, DFI, ASUS and Gigabyte boards so far and I guess if I would have to choose I would either get a ASUS or Gigabyte board. EVGA looks interesting too. Didn’t have any problems either so far, besides a certain AMD Opteron “experiment” that didn’t go that well in 2007. ^^;
Hm, you might have to wait a little bit longer if you believe the rumours floating around on the internet earlier this month: “Intel has no plans to integrate USB 3 into its chipsets until 2012 at the earliest”.
Unless they surprise us with their X68 chipset, Intel will most probably use the NEC controller too.
And yes, the world has gone mad, actually the RAM prices are increasing! T_T
@JimmPantsu
2005, oh snap! So I guess you have an single core Athlon 64 or eventually X2?
Normal RAM prices? NO! Hardware is becoming cheaper. For example: My SingleCore Athlon 64 3700+ costed ~280€ or so back then. A new Phenom 2 is between 100 and 150€ (besides the new 6 core models which would eventually be comparable to the FX CPUs from back then).
Any ideas what will be inside your new system yet?
100€ for a good 4GB DDR3-1600 Kit today vs. 250€ for a good 2GB DDR-400 Kit back then. The normals trend of cheaper Hardware is obvious, am I right?^^
Ok, as I already said, you are right that it is better wenn the prices (for good hardware) are cheaper.
At the moment it is the lowest of all athlon x2. the 3800+. befor it was a opteron 144.
My ideas for the new system are almost final. The points where i´m not really sure are the cpu (Phenom II X4 945 or the coming Phenom II X4 960t. also a X6 would be fine^^), the mainboard (i´m waiting for the 890fx boards) and if it should be a ssd for the OS. But it is clear, that i want to have a rig that is silent and has low power consumption (no overcklocking but undervolting^^)
@JimmPantsu
Oh ok, the 3800+, my imouto had this CPU before she got my old X2 6000+ last week.
The 945? Hm, its literally “cool” but why not the 955 or 965? The 960t won’t be available for a while, and according to the rumormill it’s a X6 with a damaged core.
The X6 CPUs will have a turbo boost, which means a higher core speed than the default one if certain applications require it. Like on the Intel i5/i7 cpus.
ASUS plans to add this functionality for Phenom 2 X4s too, but only for the Black Edition CPUs. So personally I would recommend getting a X4 BE. My 965 would run fine with 4Ghz and air cooling for example!
A X6 makes only sense if you intend to use applications which are able to use 6 cores. Most games don’t.
Undervolting? Why?
because of the power consumption? –> not noticeable
because of the durability of the CPU? –> you don’t want to use it for 20 years right?
because of less heat? –> ok, makes some sense, but compared to those old 90nm CPUs the new ones are awesome. But most of the time my 965 runs @ 800Mhz/0,94V. Do you really need to undervolt this CPU?
The time would show, if the 2 deactivated cores of the 960t are all damaged or if, as the X3, the cores are only deactivated but not damaged.
Don´t need a 965 or a (aside from the turbo boost) overclocked quad core. The 955 BE would be a “nice to have” opinion. As my mainboard wouldn´t probably a ASUS, their own turbo boost is uninteresting for me.
The X6 is also a “nice to have”. I would anyway only buy the smalest of the hexacores.
To reduce the voltage is besides a smaler manufacturing process and a new architecture the best way to lower the power consumption. You are right, in idle the difference isn´t really high but under load it is clearly noticeable.
My PC runs 24/7 so, also it isn´t much for a moment, in a year it is quite a bit what i could save (ok, ok, to shut down the pc would be a lot more energie saving. I know^^”)
@JimmPantsu
Hm, ok then get the 955 at least.
24/7? why? Are 1-3 seconds to wake it up too much? You might want to rethink that. HDDs, fans, and what not just running for the lulz all night long for what purpose exactly?
How often do you expect to use your new CPU in load? ^_^
My pc would use more than 1-3 seconds zu wake up from the stand-by. Also when the pc makes problems, it is when it is booting. compared to the past, there isn´t always a reason why the pc has to run 24/7 but it has become a habit. Turn off the display and go away/sleep. Maybe, when i´m living alone, this will change.
I knew, that it isn´t good for the mechanical parts. One fan has broken down so far. The noisy northbridge fan. My sys hdd runs since 2003 in my pc and has over 30.000h runtime. Now comes the first damaged sectors. Maybe the reason why I like hitachi more than the other companys for HDDs
@JimmPantsu
Wouldn’t even a old & crappy system wake up in a few seconds with Windows 7?
You should really change that behaviour with the new system IMO. Since 2003 uhu, SATA 1? @_@
SATA? IDE
@JimmPantsu
OMFG, haven’t used an IDE drive since 2004 or so ^_^
GEEK!
And yeah, that’s pretty cool. But usually it’s not my computer core that matters, except when a fan dies, but the GPU’s, heh.
Guy´s last blog ..Discworld and Deus ex Machinas
This reminds me of the story, when I was once in Merico and rode on a horse.
I asked it, why it has such a long face. But the horse couldn’t understand such intelligent speech as the human language.. So it turned two times around itself and then shat on the floor.
Very nice information.