Variations for (DE) 1000Eur Build + extras

Hardware Build a PC
1

Thanks to all in advance for any help, advice, corrections and tips on helping me with this build.

The infos:

Germany, ~1000eur (+-150eur), I use minfactory.de and de.pcpartpicker.com as my baselines.

Gaming, Twitch, Lightroom 4.0-5.0+, OpenCL (No cuda Bullshit), Scientific Computing (cores, cores cores) (prototyping), Overclock CPU+GPU, No OS needed, Dual Monitor, Fingertipgrip Mouse for Dota 2 and all games.

So far I used the fx8350 + 7950 + Sabertooth video build as my baseline. I am looking for perhaps 2 alternative builds as to be able to make my decision. On both version I need WIFI, BLUETOOTH, CARD READER, either 8350 or 8320, CD-RW, Peripherals, and Dual Display Support. Versions:

  1. All-in Performance overclock high end part build.
  2. Superbudget version (small overclock?).

On the budget version I can live with 500gbs of storage, msi low end motherboards and reference cards, fx8320 (8 core is a must for work), non future proofing (no crossfire in the future), 1333 8gb and enough air cooling to save money and the bare minimum of reliable PSU + ugly case.

On the All-in version an SSD for OS and stuff would be nice, a higher OC-able version of the 7950 card is desirable. A good mobo that allows for both over-clocking and future crossfire, the required PSU for future proofing and long term high loads (1000Watts? what is good here? 2 rails? 3 rails? crossfire support?)  and a reliable Cooling (noctua D14? h100i?). 16GB would be great for ram but dont know if 1600mhz or more would make any difference in this kind of build. A case with great cooling and no front door is important. Nothing pretentious would be great, something simple single color no leds etc.

The next SUPER important thing is a mouse. I am looking for a fingertip-grip mouse with around 100mm (3.9inch) length and 7+ buttons (Wired or wireless). I really love my logitech  (old) that has 3 buttons on the wheel < | > and one with this would be awesome. With this I have been having trouble :(

The most expensive components where I can see money being saved is the MOBO, PSU, Cooling Unit, Ram.

It seems that If I decide not to overclock and forget the crossfire, old 970 ud3 models of the gigabyte MOBOS would suffice, bringing the high wattage requirement in the PSU also down and also the cooling unit.

Are there thing, version of hardware or setups that  I should be considering and perhaps changing? Does anyone know about stores online? Some places seem to build similar rigs with 3 year warranty for around 150eur more. I could build it myself no problem and hope to do so, but warranty seems worth it too... If the budget version seems better in the price/performance ration then I could go for that. But being able to keep this rig for at least 4+ years would be great.

Again the cores and OpenCL is of great importance to me because of the HPC work I do. (Prototype locally before running on big clusters.) Being an amateur photographer Lightroom is also important, but I rather go OpenCL than CUDA unless there are better price/performance ratios for some GTX cards.

Greetings!

Thanks again for any help!

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970 UD3 is not compatible with the FX8350. It can handle a 145W TDP with an overclocked Phenom II X4, but only up to about 100W with an FX6300 overclocked. It won't even run an FX6350 safely, and those models are also excluded from the BIOS, so the system just won't work at all. The VRM MOS-FETs are not cooled and it's a 4+2 phase design with good quality but midrange current FETs, an FX8350 is a powerhog, it really is, you need a much heavier VRM assembly for it (gigabyte 990ud5 or asus sabertooth will do), or you will end up with a burned out board sooner or later, and when MOS-FETs go, they often go exothermally, it can burn down your house.

Check the gigabyte website if you don't believe me, I not kidding about this, if you're going for an AMD FX8350, get a board with a higher end VRM assembly. I would prefer the gigabyte 990fx-ud5 over the sabertooth on a HPC system, because asus linux compatibility is not what it should be, not that gigabyte is perfect, but it's better, and at least they charge less for their boards, and they don't have the obnoxious Asus colour schemes, they are simply all-black.

Lightroom has no acceleration (CUDA or OpenCL) whatsoever, it literally runs on everything, and it runs nice and fast in wine 1.7, even though it's a "bad" program that's really focused on Windows, to the extent that it needs the wine gecko libs to even work, which is retarded, but you'll probably install windows in a container anyway to play games right, it's better to keep your HPC orientated system clean and just run windows with kvm or hypervisor to play games or use lightroom. I assume you're using OpenSuSE, as you're going for HPC in Germany, and that contains Xen by default, so really easy. Fedora doesn't provide xen hypervisor, because of legal bullshit, but it certainly works if you install it from another repo, the easiest thing is to use the build service from suse, you just select that you want a fedora rpm, and it pacakges it for you to download. Darktable does do both opencl and cuda, and generally works better on AMD cards, there always seem to be compile errors with bilateral filters, especially those that use atomic instructions, and some other plugins with nvidia if you enable opencl or even worse cuda. Lightroom 3.6 was fast, LR4 and 5 are slow and sometimes buggy, and they offer no better image quality, and the extra features they offer are just window dressing basically.

I have a few HPC rigs. My main goto systems have always been Opteron based, and I use firepros with them. The opteron systems are so damn stable, you certainly won't regret going AMD for HPC applications. In windows, intel solutions may still be faster, but it's not like you can do HPC in windows anyway, and in linux the extra cores definitely show their potential, especially for HPC applications in combination with an AMD GPU. I assume that you're going to compute with double precision for prototyping, to lessen the effect of the Von Neumann random-based approximations, so you'll need all the opencl power you can get. Nvidia sucks for opencl in linux, the nouveau driver doesn't work at all, it doesn't rev up the GPU clock, and has no opencl support, and the proprietary drivers are fine, but if you install them it really screws up any attempt at compiling opencl source, because of the ambiguity between opencl and cuda libs and the improper registration of the different GPU models, it's just a huge waste of time to hack your way through it.

The 7950 is a good choice, it's nicely overclockable, but a 7970 is not much more expensive and has more FPU units. Very important is that you get an AMD card with as much on-board RAM as possible, because for most opencl applications in linux, only half of the on-board RAM of an AMD card will be available for opencl job caching, and the AMD stream processor array is fast, so the more RAM on the GPU, the more leverage you get from it.

In SATA SSDs there is only one choice, Samsung, way better than anything else, for HPC use the 840 pro series. In the near future there will also be PCIe SSDs from Samsung, and that is certainly worth it, it makes a huge difference in system speed for sustained high load applications like prototyping.

Also, the FX8350 gets really hot when it's at sustained full load, so get the best cooler you can buy. A Noctua NH-D14 is an excellent choice and is many times more reliable and quiet than any AiO liquid cooler, provided of course that there is sufficient airflow into your case. For HPC, I would definitely recommend a high airflow case. I like to use the Antec NineHundred and TwelveHundred cases, they come with an internal fan mount that can be placed in the top three 5.25" bays, which are the only ones that don't come with a fan yet, so that the entire front of the case is air intake, and with the rear exhaust case fan, that causes an ideal wind tunnel over the processor, through the NH-D14. The temperatures I get in those cases are spectacularly low in comparison to most other cases. You'll probably want to swap the antec fans with Noctua case fans for silence in those cases though. Those Antec cases really last forever, they are very solid, it's like Lian-Li quality, but without the annoying aluminium, so flexfree and with less dilatation, and they stay looking like new, which is a problem with aluminium cases.

For power supplies, seasonic and everything based on that is good, bequiet is very good, and my favorite is Tagan, but you'll probably not find a strong enough power supply in the Tagan consumer series. BeQuiet has a very good price/performance ratio in Germany, and those PSUs are top quality. I would go with an 850 W PSU minimum.

Also check prices on atelco.de. That's my favorite supplier, and I can only recommend them.

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@Zoltan
Hey man, thanks for the great reply! You indeed got everything right! Thanks for corroborating my decition of AMD parts. My main worries were the PSU for Crossfire and MOBO. It seems that Arstock also offers some 990x solutions, how are those with quality for OC and Linux?

Regarding the PCI-e SSD's I could just wait and wait for some of those in the future, not a MUST atm.

Airflow was also a worry, and perhaps I will do just that and replace fans with quieter / better ones.

I will also check the reocmended store!

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@Zoltan. I have a 970 UD3. It has 8+2 Powerphases and can run my 8150 with a 4.8GHz OC pushing 1.55V.

The 8350 consumes less power (I THINK) 

So it might work. 

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If I were you, I'd hurry to an electronics store and get small copper heatsinks for MOS-FETs, and put them on the exposed square chips that are in a row next to the CPU. Also make sure they have proper cooling. Gigabyte boards are tough, they can take a beating, but the board is actually only approved up to a dimmed OEM version of the FX6100, and Gigabyte knows why. Count the phases, every relay is a phase, and tell me how much phases there are on the 970ud3 lol, I know Gigabyte sells it as 8+2, but it's actually 4+2. Asus does exactly the same thing, nothing bad about it, but there are basically only 6 or 7 physical phases on any motherboard, and to be honest, for general use the number or phases doesn't matter that much, it's just a marketing spec, but for the OP's use case, it matters. The Phenom chips don't have dynamic power management in such an advanced state as the FX chips, therefore they draw constant power and run cooler, even though they have a higher TDP. The FX8150 actually uses less power than the FX8350, the FX8350 has better dynamic power management, so a lower TDP, but that's hardly indicative of anything, it also has less proportional overclocking headroom. What makes chips really hot is switching modules on and off, so that different current levels are required. In fact, part of that had to be solved by Intel for their Haswell design, they had to integrate a layer of VRM functionality in the CPU so that the CPU wouldn't overload the mobo's VRM by acting as if it required a more steady current. There are multiple factors that make this the way it is. Bottom line is, maybe for you it works just fine (but I would check the bottom of the mobo for burn residue under the MOS-FETs to make sure), but the OP wants to use the rig for prototyping, which requires a sustained 100% load, and the 970ud3 will not go along with that on an FX8350, it WILL burn in such an application, it's just not made for that. Also in linux, the different cores work much harder than in windows, because the job distribution is in the system itself, and not application dependant like in Windows (even though it can be, and application could want to run on less cores for instance, but not many applications do that). That puts extra strain on the VRM also, because they won't have time to cool when running on 100% on all cores for hours and hours without pause. In fact, even a Maximum V is not made for that, to be perfectly honest an opteron on a tyan or asus workstation board is probably a much better solution, but it also brings along a 2000 USD+ budget.

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Asrock series 9 are expensive, but good as far as I've heard. I must admit that I never buy Asrock myself though, but that might change when I can't escape buying a consumer grade Haswell desktop, because for Haswell they are the only high performance option because they don't block hardware virtualization, but I try to avoid Haswell at all cost because it's a bit too much of a ripoff in my opinion for several reasons, but most importantly, because they don't work well in linux, they are about 30% slower than ivy bridge, and those are not yet fully operational in linux, sandy bridge is still king for sustained full load operation. Haswell CPUs are windows optimized CPUs with longer pipelines, no capability to run at 100% all of the time because they'll autothrottle as soon as all cores are under any load, etc... they are just not made for my use I guess. I tend to buy what's most sold out of the range of products that suit me, because the rule with open source is: the more of a model that is out there, the more support the community will provide. So I don't usually buy boards like the Maximus V or "gaming" boards, because there are so few sold that there is an open source support risk. I would go for an Asus TUF board or a Gigabyte UD5 board, just because I know that they use pretty good parts. I also know that these are the most sold consumer range performance boards. Probably the MSI Military boards are in the same league, but there are less MSI board sold, so open source support may be a bit iffy in the long run.

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I have 10 total power phases, so 8+2. 

And I ran p95 for twelve hours, on its toughest tests.

As long as you have good Airflow, it's not a problem.

 

On a side note, this board is terrible. Don't buy it, don't even look at it. Asus is leading the motheroard market right now.