Building your Optimal Computer System

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Nec_V20
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Posts: 937
Joined: Mon Jul 21, 2014 11:19 am

Building your Optimal Computer System

#1

Post by Nec_V20 »

There are a lot of people who "advise" with regard to styling themselves as "self help" gurus on how to build computers - either in your personal life or on YouTube.

What cheeses me off no end is that the advice usually just deals with the sexy bits, but is conspicuously low on important details. Even though this will be dated in a couple of years I want to try to keep this as generic as I can so that even though the hardware has changed the spirit of this article will still remain valid.

I will break it down for you, if you want to build a gaming rig (and where there is a change with regard to building a computer not primarily used of gaming or the games are not hardware intensive) from vital through important to negligible.

Vital:
1) PSU - Power Supply Unit

This is going to be really long and I don't care because people who read it will walk away more informed:

Why is there such a difference in price between various Power Supply Units which purport to do the same thing?

The secret is known as "cost down".

What happens is that a design for an absolutely perfect PSU is created, then there is a round of eliminating components to save cost. If that works then another round of elimination is started and tested until there is a design which no longer works - one then goes back a step to the absolute bare minimum which did work.

So that's it? Not by a long shot. Now that there is a bare minimum of components which will work the next phase of "cost down" is put into effect. In this round the high quality components (such as capacitors) are replaced by lower quality ones. This is then tested and if it still works then those lower quality components will be replaced by even worse quality components. This continues until the PSU once again fails and then the process is taken one step back to the design which did still work.

So that's it then rock bottom has been reached?

Not quite; now that the design has been minimised and the components have been "cost downed" the focus is on the safety of the device itself. Do we really need all of them? Of course not, so various safety components are eliminated or replaced by cheaper alternatives until they can technically say that they are in compliance with safety standards without actually lying outright.

How can you tell a PSU from a potential IED (Improvised Explosive Device)? Simply by picking it up. If you pick up a PSU and it feels like all it needs is to be sealed and have some helium added to it to make it fly away then you are dealing with an "AL-Q Taliban Special" (AQTS). Another indicator would be the presence of a switch on the back of the PSU around the power switch where you can choose between 110 volts and 230 volts. If one looks at the label on the PSU and it has an entry for "-5V" on it then it is an IED candidate. If you look at the Amps with regard to the various voltages and the "+3.3V" and "+5V" are higher than the "+12V" then again you are dealing with an AQTS".

Last but not least there is of course the price. If a deal looks too good to be true then in the case of a PSU it most certainly is.

What are the typical "features" of an "Al-Q Taliban Special" IED? One of the main "features" is that this type of device will generally use your hardware as a fuse to defend itself against detonating. It is only logical (well in the minds of the designers) that the PSU has to be defended against damage by eliminating the cause of the threat, namely the motherboard and/or some other offending parts of your hardware.

If you are lucky then all that will happen is that the AQTS will just not turn on. Not so lucky if if it makes large "bang" noise and/or issues magic smoke. Unlucky if the "bang" noise and/or magic smoke results in the PSU catching on fire, and you can see the results of something like that here: (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26 ... eg_reader/)

Of course the worst luck is if it catches fire and you are not there (or asleep) to put it out before you lose your home and/or your own life and life of your loved ones.

Another "feature" of the AQTS is that although it is rated at a certain wattage it will never attain that performance in real use. Generally one of these devices will be "good" if they can actually put out half of the rated wattage. One thing you can be certain of however, if you buy a "700 Watt" IED then you will NEVER, EVER, be able to run 700 Watt worth of hardware from it - not even close.

One should not expect any kind of efficiency from an AQTS and the only "80+" energy rating is the writing on the box. What this means is that within a year (if it lasts that long) the AQTS will have ended up costing you more in wasted electricity than buying a proper PSU in the first place.

The most trivial of the "features" of the AQTS is the absolute dearth of connection cables issuing from it. Not only will there be a lack of those cables but the ones that are there will also be much too short.

The cheap price of the AQTS is also offset by its short lifespan. If it lasts for more than a year of normal use before it dies (and hopefully does nothing else) then the person who bought it can consider themselves lucky.

So what can you expect from a PSU that costs a bit more money? Safety features for one (for both the PSU and the attached hardware), they will also perform to their rated wattage and also have a priority for the "+12V" rail over the other two. Really high quality PSUs (like the Corsair AX860i) will happily run ABOVE their rated wattage. For instance the AX860i has been tested and showed no signs of wear running at almost 1,000 Watts:(http://www.kitguru.net/components/power ... review/11/) If anything goes wrong with a real PSU then it will quietly shut down, that is it will go out with a whisper rather than a bang. You can also expect the PSU to last and do its job for years.

In conclusion next to pouring a bucket of water over your running computer the PSU has the potential to do the most damage to your system. If you have a neighbour downstairs who is considering building his own computer and you see him eyeing advertisements for an "Al-Q Taliban Special", offer to give him an extra $30 or so towards buying a decent PSU - it might just save your life.

Another good reason buying a high-quality PSU is that they will reliably allow your computer to enter the lowest power sleep state. In this state the computer draws very little more power than it would if you turned it off completely, yet, at the touch of a key, press of a mouse, or if required a signal from the network, it will be instantly awake.

Cheap PSU's will not be reliable, even in higher powered sleep states, but are guaranteed to be useless for the ultra-low power sleep state - they just cannot reliably supply the low voltages over longer periods of time (or at all).

Why should you care?

If you are even remotely like me, then, if you are working on a project, you will have a number of applications open, probably your browser has lots of tabs open to sites you have searched for or are posting to. Unlike me most of you will, when you get knackered, save everything, shut down the computer and then the next day have to painstaking load everything again; or leave everything open and your computer running, wasting a huge amount of electricity, whilst you go to bed.

Not only does this waste time, but also, if you were doing Internet searches require you to reload all the sites (which goes to the detriment of your download quota). There might also be sites that you found by accident with valuable information and you just cannot remember what the name of the sites were, so you spend ages trying to find them again.

With a good PSU you can just put your system into a deep sleep and with one press of a key be exactly where you were when you left off.

Especially for a gaming rig you have to have a PSU which will reliably supply the voltage to your graphics card if you want to avoid a CTD (Crash To Desktop) or a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death).

Graphic Cards are very sensitive to voltage fluctuations. Cheap PSUs will, if they pay any attention at all to system stability, overvolt the 12V rail at lower energy demand so that with increased energy demand it will not drop below 12V by an amount sufficient to cause a CTD or BSOD (at least in theory). This overvoltage at lower demands upon the Graphics Card will translate directly into:

A)Wasted heat

B) Decreasing the life expectancy of your Graphics Card.

C) Dramatically decreased system stability.

Graphic Card drives are implemented at the kernel (Ring-0) level of your OS/CPU. What this means is that any miscommunication between the OS/Application and the Graphic Card will result in a immediate kernel panic and your system failing. If you are lucky then only the gaming application will crash if the miscommunication was only local to that application.

Another thing to consider with regard to PSUs is that the high quality ones will come with a fan, but will not actually activate that fan until it is needed to cool the components inside it. This means that it does not suck in crap from the environment to coat the components (insulating them and causing them to lose efficiency in getting rid of heat) and thus creating more points of failure for the PSU (dust for instance can cause a short circuit either from static electricity or conduction if the dust becomes humid enough).

Further down I will introduce some factors which will help offset the cost of a high quality PSU without compromising computer performance.

... More in Part 2

Nec_V20
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Re: Building your Optimal Computer System

#2

Post by Nec_V20 »

Part Two

2) Motherboard

The Motherboard is where everything interfaces i.e. comes together. If you have a shit motherboard then no matter what high quality components you have in your system otherwise they will not be able to perform with the performance you may expect from them; or at high load at all.

Low cost Motherboards have the obvious deficiencies - lack of expansion ports. This ranges from SATA ports to USB ports.

With USB ports this is especially critical because on cheap motherboards all of them run off one fuse. If that blows then all of your USB ports are useless at one fell stroke, resulting in you having to buy or replace the entire Motherboard; good Motherboards have a separate fuse for every port, so that if one goes then you can carry on with those you have left.

Also all other things being equal (see casings) the voltage supplied to the USB ports should be consistent and continuous. This is not the case when the attenuation of electrical current is taken into account with regard to external USB ports. It is not important what power is sent TO the external port which is important, but rather the amount of power received BY the the device which decides whether it functions or not. For instance on a cheap motherboard one device on one external USB port will function; two devices on two of the external USB ports and neither of them will function.

With a low cost motherboard, if the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) gets corrupted (for instance from a BIOS update) then you will also have something indistinguishable from a rock on your hands; with a high quality Motherboard you will be able to recover your system in this eventuality. On a high quality motherboard the BIOS chip will be socketed and not soldered, so that if the BIOS chip fails it can be replaced.

High quality motherboards will assure that all compatibilities are complied with, with all devices attached, low quality motherboards will only comply with those required and not those potentially demanded of them. In this regard I could name so many conflicts that it would fill two pages of text.

Then there is bus length to consider.

All signals from the same kind of devices on the motherboard should have the same amount of length to travel to the device interpreting those signals on the motherboard.

It is not such a big deal if you have a motherboard with only one Graphics Card in it. Also not a big deal if you have two Graphics Cards slotted in it (as SLI or Crossfire) - until you run a game at the highest resolution with the highest settings. THEN signal interpretation becomes VITAL! And that can only be regulated over the bus length (length of the pathway) - anything below 100% is as good as 0% under load. Also the materials steamed onto the those pathways has to be of uniform quality and consistency.

If you just want something that works under minimum load then go for the cheapest motherboard. If you want something that works no matter what, then expect to spend a few dollars more.

Personally I like Gigabyte motherboards because they are solid. Not the greatest "performance" but they do have high quality capacitors and VRMs - just don't go for the cheapest ones (yes Gigabyte does make "price conscious" shit).

That's it for the vital.

Nec_V20
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Re: Building your Optimal Computer System

#3

Post by Nec_V20 »

Between vital and important:

Case and Cooling

I was almost tempted to put these into the "vital" category but I felt it would have taken away from the importance of the two things I mentioned there.

3) Why is the case important? In one word, airflow. You want lots of air circulating around your components to take the heat away. Yes, sure the graphics card you have has three fans on it etc., et al., ad nauseam, but if you have SLI or Crossfire then you have dead zones where the heat just recirculates around the GPUs. You want a case that blow in cool air (and extract hot air) so that you do not have your components dying of heat death or lowering their performance due to thermal throttling.

The dirty secret with regard low cost cases is one of the reason for the low cost is that the quality of the wiring to the external USB ports is inferior. What this means is that because of the attenuation the voltage reaching those devices and/or acquisition the signal of is not adequate to sustain their reliable (if any) communication with the USB interface on the motherboard, causing them to fail.

There is no fault tolerance with regard to this kind of signalling so it is either all or nothing.

With cheap cases you get nothing a lot of the time.

There is also the incidence of noise. The smaller the fan the higher the noise. Sure you can get low noise 120mm fans, but they cost a boatload (the best fans are Noctua fans) and will very quickly gobble up the money you saved on a "bargain" case.

The other thing you have to ask yourself is, even if you are willing to put up with the noise of a 120mm fan or fans, do you really want your PC to act a vacuum cleaner for your house?

Because of the speed of rotation to attain the airflow to reduce the temperature, even smaller fans which you did not notice the sound of will piss you off, if you have to run them at full speed to acquire the system temperature and then the dust adheres to them becoming unbalanced with regard to the individual vanes of the fan and they start making a (usually fucking annoying) noise.

My personal favourite absolutely affordable case is the CoolerMaster HAF XM (there are a number of HAF cases so the "XM" is important). It can house four 200mm fans (which makes it damn near silent in operation - silent as in I have one about one and a half feet away from my ear on my desk and I cannot hear it when the system is running).

3b) Cooling

By cooling I mean CPU cooler.

Here you have the choice between dry and wet.

Let's take a look at the advantages of both:

Dry Cooler:

These are coolers which don't rely on a radiator and they have no advantages over their "wet" counterparts and a boatload of disadvantages.

Disadvantages:

1) Compared to the AIO wet competition they cost the same if not more.

2) Compared to the AIO wet competition they create more thermal problems within the the computer (all they do is recirculate the hot air in the computer case and exacerbate the ability of the other subsystems such as the Graphic Card to dissipate heat - especially in a constricted confine).

3) Wieght.

If you want to have an efficient air cooler then it has to have weight. This weight is borne by the motherboard and if you are moving your computer for any reason and it get jostled by dropping it or rough handling of any sort then it is quite possuible (especially if you have bought a cheap motherboard) that the entire CPU socket gets damaged and you have an intact CPU cooler and a no longer functioning computer.

4) Bulk

Because of the sheer footprint of a really effective dry CPU cooler it cover and disrupts effective airflow over other vital components surrounding your CPU such as capacitors or VRMs. So your CPU remains cool, but a capacitor may overheat and blow, thus reducing your system to a rock or the VRMs may overheat and cause your system to crash (or become a rock).

Wet Cooler:

Simply put you cannot beat the Corsair OEM AIO water coolers. They put the weight of the business end (radiator) where it belongs - attached to the case and NOT the motherboard. This means that if you happen to move your computer and bump it or drop it whilst moving it you will not risk tearing the guts out of your motherboard if you used an air cooler - 'nuff said?

Because the radiator is attached to the periphery of the case the heat of the most TDP intensive portion of your computer is optimally transported away from the rest of the system.

The footprint on the CPU is small so the airflow through the system will easily cool the the capacitors and the VRMs of your motherboard.

Where is the downside of a water cooler?

In the instructions from the manufacturer with regard to how to set up the fans.

Believe it or not he morons actually recommend the fans blowing air INTO the case.

Sure the ambient air will be cooler however:

A) The air being sucked in will also carry dust which will over time clog the radiator and degrade the efficacy of the heat exchange.

B) Blow warm air into the case which will reduce the heat dissapating capacity of other subsystems (Hard-drive and Graphics Card for instance)

Important:

1) Graphics Adapter

For a gaming rig the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is the sine qua non of performance. Save on the next "Important" item if it means that you can afford a better GPU card.

The better the GPU and the more ram the less heat the total system gives off. If you want a silent system the spend more on this for a given performance.

Games have adapted to GPUs and many of the functions normally dealt with at the CPU level are shunted to the GPU.

Personally I have an enduring hate for Nvidia based Graphics Cards because of their fraudulent advertising which can only be explained by reviewers or magazines propensity to be bribed by false advertising - YMMV.

I will stick with ATI/AMD because they are honest with what they promise and what they deliver with regard to their hardware and drivers in conjunction and the OS with regard to stability.

Nvidia, are lying shitbags. They make stable drivers for the benchmark tests and the suckers who buy their products have to deal with system crashes in real time for about three to six months until they get the bugs worked out. They get the bugs worked out by degrading the performance of the cards. They are lying shitbags and defraud their customers.

2) CPU (Central Processing Unit)

For gaming there is just no way around an Intel CPU. Games are notoriously SHIT at utilising multiple cores - they are just not built with multithreading in mind. So you can just ignore every single AMD CPU out there. Intel did a great job with their Haswell CPU for performance and energy saving. Intel saw the writing on the wall and with a reasonably priced Haswell CPU you will be happily gaming for the next five years or so (and I mean 24/7 if you follow my advice with regard to the "vital" components).

This having been said, one does not need the ultimate, most expensive, Intel CPU out there. One can go for a "weaker" CPU and invest the difference in a more powerful graphics adaptor (GPU). The days when overclocking the CPU was the secret to gaming performance has long since died.

If you do not need gaming performance then the cheapest by far alternative is an AMD CPU. Seriously there is no comparison.

Aside from gaming performance the AMD has the Intel competition beat hands down and all of it on one chip. The Intel competition has to have a dedicated GPU subsystem to even compete on a level playing field.

3) SSD

Get an SSD for your operating system. You do not need one for your games. A 128 GB SSD is more than enough for your needs and just install everything you could never do without onto it (OS, Browser, Office Package) so that it is easy to back up to the terrabyte Hard Drive you choose.

Negligible:

RAM

This is the biggest con out there. THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE GAIN WHATSOEVER FROM "OVERCLOCKED" RAM. Buy good quality normally clocked RAM (make sure it is CL9 RAM for DDR3).

Hard Drive

Don't just buy an expensive high capacity SSD, Buy a 128GB SSD for your OS and things you cannot do without and a four terabyte HD for games and shit and you will be sorted. I personally prefer Seagate (that is my personal bias).

Nec_V20
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Re: Building your Optimal Computer System

#4

Post by Nec_V20 »

The way that most self styled "gurus" advise with regard to building a computer and the sometimes glaring oversights would be summed up by my irritation when watching the series "The Six Million Dollar Man" when I was a kid.

When I watched it I could never get past the question, "If Steve Austin has a bionic arm and two bionic legs, why doesn't his normal, non-bionic spine snap like a matchstick when he tries to lift up a truck?".

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