My new i7 build (and why)

neil_g said:
ouch, looks like the cheapest route to an i7 in an iMac starts at £1400?
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Not i7 or not 27".... You're looking at £2700 for a similarly spec'd i7 based system to the ones you or I have Neil :eek: (although £320 for 16G of memory is having a laugh!)

Really, REALLY, the mac is only a PC in an expensive case... You could have change out of £1700 for a PC of the same specs (including monitor ;))...
 
neil_g said:
holy hell.

to think i "only" spent £650 on i7 processor, motherboard, 16gb memory, case. by the time you got power supply, hard drive and graphics youre looking at what £800-850?
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Uhuh.. Even if you get someone else to build, the i7-2600ks are coming in around £800 inc Win7 (see: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/I7-SANDYBRIDG...t=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item5d2f0f6917 as a first ebay result and this one has a P67 board so you can overclock ;) :p) Another £850 for 27" or less for 2x 24" IPS....
 
I'm just saying, but there is no way you can run all of that a 430w PSU, PSU's are THE WORST thing to skim out on. Buy a good branded 800w or so PSU and fit it. Running an i7 and the rest of the gubbins on 430w is gunna be hard.
 
neil_g said:
i run mine on a decent brand 480w.
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Really? Damnnm stuff must of gotten alot more efficent since i last built a PC then :/ last time i built a rig was when the first Core 2 Duos came out, and it struggled to run a 550 OCZ Supply :(
 
SimonUK said:
Really?
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yup..

Intel Core i7 2600K / Alpenfohn Panorama Low Profile Cooler
Gigabyte GA-HA65M-UD3H-B3
16GB (4x4GB) Corsair DDR3 XMS3 (well, 8Gb until I get sense out of Gigabyte)
OCZ Vertex 60Gb
Samsung F1 1Tb
XFX HD 4650 1GB
LG BD-RE & DVD±RW
Lian Li PC-V354B Black (2x 12cm and 1x 14cm fans)
BeQuiet 480w BN121

:)
 
I just wish I knew what the hell you guys are talking about!

I`ll just resort to shooting squirrels...............:D
 
SimonUK said:
Really? Damnnm stuff must of gotten alot more efficent since i last built a PC then :/ last time i built a rig was when the first Core 2 Duos came out, and it struggled to run a 550 OCZ Supply :(
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The i7-2600K is thermally rated at 95W, so not too problematic. The big variable tends to be the graphics card. Have a look at this which is the total power draw of an i7-920 @ 3.33GHz (so first gen i7 which is 130W TDP and hence higher than the i7-2600K) plus top end Asus mobo, 6G memory, 120G SSD and the stated graphics card.

24696.png


Clearly, you'd need some headroom in any power supply, but a 480W decent brand should eat the lower draw cards for breakfast...
 
Well the power lead arrived yesteday, along with a PCI-e card to give me another 2 USB 3.0 ports (future expansion). They've been installed and the system booted first time with no problems. All the drivers have been installed and updated and it's running sweetly. And using the ASUS Autotune tool, the CPU is clocked to about 3.6, a little up from the 3.4 rating.

I've run the IntelBurnTest to stress test the CPU and check temps. and all passed with flying colours, with the temps peaking at 65 degs on all 4 cores.

Much improved Windows Experience score, which I know means very little, but a big improvement on my previous system, even with the integrated graphics.

The Photoshop radial blur test returns approx 18.9 secsonds - good or bad?

But, the Photoshop Retouch test returns an improved result over my previous system, but not what I was expecting. The score I got was 42 seconds, consistently over six tests with no other prgrams or background programs running.

So, any bright ideas how I can improve this score? I was expecting sub 20 seconds and am disappointed at 42 seconds. Do I need to move away from integrarated graphics and install a seperate graphics card? I know an SSD will give me quicker boot times but, as far as I'm aware, won't have any effect on these types of tests.

Any suggestions very welcome!
 
interesting on the high retouch time..

there will be a resource overhead having an integrated graphics card but nothing that should cause too much of a slow down. out of interest can you remove the overclock and give it another go?
 
chphotos said:
The Photoshop radial blur test returns approx 18.9 secsonds - good or bad?
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My 13% overclocked i7-2600K does this in just under 17 seconds.

chphotos said:
But, the Photoshop Retouch test returns an improved result over my previous system, but not what I was expecting. The score I got was 42 seconds, consistently over six tests with no other prgrams or background programs running.

So, any bright ideas how I can improve this score? I was expecting sub 20 seconds and am disappointed at 42 seconds. Do I need to move away from integrarated graphics and install a seperate graphics card? I know an SSD will give me quicker boot times but, as far as I'm aware, won't have any effect on these types of tests.
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Something is very wrong here. I have a laptop with i7-2630QM which takes around 17 seconds whether the display is running on the integrated graphics or on the 525GT that is in there (you can switch the graphics accelerator off on the laptop). It is not the GPU that is slowing you down. As I said elsewhere, my overclocked desktop i7-2600K does this in 10 secs. Neils does it in 12.9 I think.

Are you sure you're using the right test image? I can have my 16Gb machine paging like mad if I run it on a saved version of the image after it has been run through the action. The image you use should be that of an eagles head and 3504 x 2366 in size and 3.5Mbytes on disk.
 
@ Neil - I've tried it with no overclocking, Turbov boost (Asus One Touch Overclock) and Asus Optimised Settings and the result is exactly the same.

@Andy - I'm positive I'm using the correct test image. It's 3.4 m on disk and I've not saved it. But to be sure, I've downloaded a fresh version.

I'm using PS CS4, which is the consistent thing throught the tests. I'm presuming that the version of Photoshop being used should make no, or little difference?
 
chphotos said:
@Andy - I'm positive I'm using the correct test image. It's 3.4 m on disk and I've not saved it. But to be sure, I've downloaded a fresh version.

I'm using PS CS4, which is the consistent thing throught the tests. I'm presuming that the version of Photoshop being used should make no, or little difference?
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I believe CS5 is slightly faster, but nothing that would make that amount of difference. Image sounds right, the other benchmarks sound right... Dunno what is happening here...
 
Well I can't figure it out. But I'm going to install Windows 7 on another partition, so I've got a fresh and clean install, with only Photoshop and Lightroom installed and I'll see how that goes.
 
A fresh Windows installation, updated motherboard drivers, ASUS utiilities and PS CS4 installed, and nothing else. This setup now gives a repeatable 11.9 secs on the PS retouch speed test. Now I'm happy.

I'm not sure what was causing the bottleneck before, but seems it was a Windows/software issue.

I'll load my other essential software later and see if that has any effect. Just goes to show, even if you think your Windows installation is clean, it just nay not be.
 
chphotos said:
A fresh Windows installation, updated motherboard drivers, ASUS utiilities and PS CS4 installed, and nothing else. This setup now gives a repeatable 11.9 secs on the PS retouch speed test. Now I'm happy.
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Phew... Glad you got there in the end :)
 
hurrah!

i went against all of my usual advice and didnt do a fresh install when i rebuilt mine, didnt have the time. touch wood it seems alright, but i did scrub out the old drivers before i stripped it down.
 
With hindsight, I should have done precisely that, but I was trying to save time. And in the end it cost me more!! Just in the process of finishing the last of the software installs.
 
PDub said:
New times. :)

15.8 seconds

and 30.7 seconds.

27" iMac i5 2.7ghz, 4gb ram, 512mb 6770 ati card,
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That's a bit better ;)
 
Tell me about it, sooooooo much quicker than my old setup! Not like you lots custom builds but i dont do anything other than photo editing on it so the extra speed youd hardly notice imo.

If i wanted to play games on it i would probably build a machine.
 
PDub said:
Not like you lots custom builds but i dont do anything other than photo editing on it so the extra speed youd hardly notice imo.

If i wanted to play games on it i would probably build a machine.
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Don't play games at all... I do image processing (5D2 raw files so large amounts of data) and video encoding where the extra speed is useful (I'm currently encoding a couple of programs I recorded off air last night for example).
 
arad85 said:
Don't play games at all... I do image processing (5D2 raw files so large amounts of data) and video encoding where the extra speed is useful (I'm currently encoding a couple of programs I recorded off air last night for example).
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Ahhh, would massively when editing i guess. how big are the FF raw files? My RAW are arounf 18mb each. The speed of rendering in preview on LR compared to my last system is night and day.
 
Hmm, I knew my Q6600 system is beginning to get a bit slow. Not horrendous by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly a lot slower than some of your i5 and i7 times!

ksimonian.com test - 42.4 seconds
clubofone.com test - 73.6 seconds

Can't wait to try out my macbook pro when I get my hands on it :love:
 
amjad175 said:
I think this is where the bottleneck was, integrated GFX chip.
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Probably already been mentioned....but graphics cards have bugger all to do with performance in Photoshop etc. Even the basic on-board graphics subsystems will drive multiple 1920x1080 displays these days. Image processing is done on the CPU, the graphics card is just a pipe to display it on a screen. You're wasting your money if you buy a fancy graphics card just for photoshop.
 
After following this thread for a while and getting a 3.45 min result for the clubofone test on my old P4 machine I decided it was time to upgrade.

A nice new ASrock Z68 Pro3 mother board and Core-i5 2500k processor over clocked to 4.0Ghz, 8Gb DDR3 running Win7 64bit.
No separate graphics card, just running off the VGA port from the motherboard.

Just ran the tests again and get;

ksimonian.com test - 19.1 seconds
clubofone.com test - 7.4 Seconds

Very happy!
 
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Kieranbennett said:
clubofone.com test - 7.4 Seconds
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You sure of that one? that's 30% faster than an i7-2600k clocked to 4+GHz (and we have 2 on here now with very similar results). Your ksimonian.com one is in line with Neils and mine (i.e. a little slower).

They are nice fast machines aren't they ;)
 
Just tested again and got 11.8 seconds, but it is doing a couple of things in the background (ripping some music, backing up)

I'll try again later when everything is finished.
 
Ok, Can't replicate my 7.4 test, its now reliably just over 11 seconds (between 11.1 and 11.4)

Still happy though
 
11.x secs - all is well with the world again ;) :D
 
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