I still don't understand how an SSD is gonna help me out after an application/game is fully loaded. Especially with extra RAM present. :P

The reason for going 16 GB RAM is for being able to handle things now and in the future, as well as for being able to set up temporary RAM drives for certain programs. I know few programs now could ever burn through all of that, but then that's what I believed about having 2 GB of RAM just three years ago... >_>;

I understand that the 1155 socket is likely on the way out. Quite frankly, by the time I'm ready to upgrade to a new CPU again, I'll bet even the AM3+ socket will be obsolete, so it's a moot point. I've been faced with the ever-changing sockets problem every single time I've had to consider performing upgrades. The other catch too is that, just because your motherboard has a particular socket, doesn't mean it will be compatible with every CPU that fits in it. x_x;

Most of the benchmarks I was looking up prior only detailed raw power, in which the FX-8350 beat everything at its price range. However, when I started looking up gaming performance, it turned out the FX-8350 was good, but not VERY good, even compared to cheaper i5 CPUs. The i5-3570 is only $20ish more expensive than the FX-8350 yet has the best gaming performance possible before going i7, and making THAT jump also jumps the price. :P

I've also had a motherboard fail on me, plus a motherboard recently failed on a friend after only two years of operation. I'm not skimping on the motherboard because past experience has taught me not to. That said, MSI never got back to me about my concerns regarding their BIOS updates, and it's been over three days now. Even if ASUS' tech support sucked in the past, at least they had the decency to respond. :P

And again, I'd rather start without an SSD as I can always install one later on if the loading times without one bother me. ;)

OK chief...we can only share our experience since you asked. At the end of the day, it's your call. Cheers!

My dad has a machine with an 8 core FX series processor, and honestly, compared to the first generation Core i5 system it replaced, it feels rather sluggish. That being said, it's a great box for running multiple virtual machines at once.

sgt76 wrote:

OK chief...we can only share our experience since you asked. At the end of the day, it's your call. Cheers!

And don't get me wrong, I appreciate all the info I'm getting. :)

I do have a fairly set idea about how I want to proceed with things, but as I learn more and more about what I'm getting into, changes will happen. The thread I made on another forum asking about this got 100 posts long! Everyone has their own experiences and ideas about what makes a good system and I'm doing my best to take everything into account, coupled with my own research from various benchmarking and review sites.

All that said, I mostly just wanted to make sure I wasn't picking absolutely terrible parts that would die on me in the first five days of use. ;D

At the same time though, knowing my options is important so that I don't unknowingly restrict myself, and all of your opinions help with that too. :)

My advice is to not be afraid of being an early adopter if you have the cash. Every time I've bought an older ("top-of-last-generation") CPU or GPU, I've regretted how fast it becomes obsolete. Buying cheaper is okay if you plan to upgrade every 2 years, but I bought higher-end and my 3 1/2 year old machine is still fairly high end.

HunterZ wrote:

My advice is to not be afraid of being an early adopter if you have the cash. Every time I've bought an older ("top-of-last-generation") CPU or GPU, I've regretted how fast it becomes obsolete. Buying cheaper is okay if you plan to upgrade every 2 years, but I bought higher-end and my 3 1/2 year old machine is still fairly high end.

This is what I do, but with server boards. I'm running a dual socket F board. Basically the top of the line of the DDR2 generation. It was a bit of a downer for games that are primarily single/dual threaded. This is the downside to AMD. Now I'm running 2x 6 core chips and recent games can take advantage of this. Case in point Civilization 5. You would not BELIEVE just how processor intensive late game can be. My previous system was a dual 604 xeon. It still runs as my web/media server in my basement. It also used to be my Minecraft server but that's another story.

i'm not 100% certain, but I know ATI video cards can help in encoding video. (another strength of my 2x6 core chips) I'm not certain if Nvidia cards can, I'm relatively sure they can but I haven't looked at them. This should be a bullet point for someone like you. The less time you are dicking around watching your machine crunch video, the more you can be productive with something else. Naturally there is a price/performance ratio to be looked at, and honestly, I love running last generation server hardware.

People will tell you that more cores are better, and it is to a point. Honestly that point is about 6. I'm running a HD video encoding benchmark RIGHT NOW while writing all this. Care to guess how much cpu power its using? 70-80%. Software is still struggling to catch up to the whole multi-core business.

As of right now, AMD is superior in multi-threaded applications. TRUE multi-threaded programs will run better on AMD silicone. Intel on the other hand is KING of the single threaded arena. Dosbox, which is likely single threaded, will run faster on intel than amd. How much I don't know.

in ANY event, making the slowest part of whatever computer you have faster, is always the best option. Fastest processor in the world will spend a lot of time with its thumb up its arse if it cant get data from the hard drive fast enough. If I was you, I would get a pair (or 4 if you are feeling like splurging) of 60/120gb SSD drives. I say 60gb for a specific reason. In all actuality, they have just as much silicone as the 64gb drives, they just set aside a little more for when the silicon breaks down.

I have 4x 640gb western digital black drives. These are my "work" drives. I store and play all my games from them, when I dabble with video editing, these drives are where I do all the work. These drives are VERY quick, having significantly less seek times than the blue or green. The 4 blacks will cap out at 500MB/s. And if you think that is fast, look at the SSD benchmark next to it. Then realize that the raid controller I have on my motherboard is capped, and i'm only getting ~ 2/3 of the speed I should be.

If I can find a way to "overclock" the onboard raid chipset to 800mhz from its current 533mhz, I will most likely get my full speed of 2.4GB/s

Oh the benchmark i've been running is done here are teh results:

*below*

The benchmark can be found here: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=520

its an automated script that encodes 1080 video with the defacto x264 codec.

TBH: I'm more concerned with the in-editor preview strips that get updated than rendering speed, since while my videos render, I do other stuff like get my website updates ready. :)

I know the Black/Red WD drives are made for performance, but longevity is more important to me and from what I understand the Blue drives are the best for that, though I will admit, finding useful information about the differences between all of WD's drives is difficult. :/

WD make it quite easy I find.

Green are the cheapest drives per GB and meant for media. Not recommended as a system (Windows) drive. I have two 2 TB's in my TV PC for TV shows, movies, music stuff like that.

Blue are cheap drives per GB and can be used as a system drive. Not the bleeding edge speed, but good value and good performance overall.

Black are expensive per GB and great for a system disk.

And finally we have the raptor drives, very expensive per GB, but even fast than the blacks.

The red ones are quite recent. I know that they are popular for RAID setups.

I have SSD in three of my machines now, 64GB in my TV PC, 120GB in my gaming PC and 265GB in my office PC. My capture PC (S-Video and audio through a Titanium HD) has an older WD Black 500 GB. The capture PC has the least software installed. Just W7, Audacity and Cyberlink but takes FOREVER to boot and do things on compared to the other machines.

SSD is the best performance upgrade you can give a machine. It's like not having a 3D card back in the old days 😀 Once you had one, you never want to go back...

But you still didn't answer the question I was most interested in: Which has the better longevity? Black/Red, Blue or Green?

Gemini000 wrote:

But you still didn't answer the question I was most interested in: Which has the better longevity? Black/Red, Blue or Green?

Longevity is probably about the same for all of them, but the warranty period on the Blacks is 5 years compared to 2 or 3 for the others.

Honestly, these are hard drives. I wouldn't put much hope into reliability up to or even past the warranty periods. The quality control from most manufacturers seems to be fairly meh these days and I've had new 1TB Blue drives crap out days after installation. You can't really tell.

Gemini000 wrote:

But you still didn't answer the question I was most interested in: Which has the better longevity? Black/Red, Blue or Green?

We have this saying here: How long is a piece of string?

I always buy WD because even though they die as much as everyone else's, they tend to do it within the first month - making it less of a pain to swap them out for replacements.

Buy whatever is cheapest, except don't use a Green or any other sub-7200rpm drive for a system/programs drive.

I want to get an SSD myself, but I can't afford one right now. I won't go below ~250GB because I'm currently on a 300GB VelociRaptor (WD 10k rpm drive) and don't want to have to delete all my games to make my data fit. I also don't want to have all my games on a non-SSD, because those are what will benefit most (since I don't run many non-game apps, and I rarely reboot). I'm not in a hurry, though, because they seem to get cheaper, faster and more reliable the longer I wait.

Gemini000 wrote:

But you still didn't answer the question I was most interested in: Which has the better longevity? Black/Red, Blue or Green?

WD blacks are practically the ONLY consumer drives with a 5 year warranty.

Green drives are designed for non-stressful use. i.e. movie/music storage
red drives are designed for raid arrays.
blue are just "average"
black for the power user.

pick a drive that suits your probable usage pattern and it will last longer than if you had chosen a different drive. At least by statistics.

pick black.

$25 more to go for Black over Blue for the same space, speed, cache, etc., but the extra warranty period could very well be worth it, and I also like that several negative reviews I read about the Black drives were all centred around really stupid reasons, like having to buy another HD while going through the RMA process, or the drive being "slower" than expected, as if hard drives were ever "fast". ;P

Geeze, these numbers are adding up. I've already somehow brought the total up to $1,457 before taxes, and I originally budgeted for $1,300 before taxes. The taxes themselves will probably add another $200ish to the price.

...*shrugs* Still, buying a retail system with these parts would probably be far more expensive and come with all kinds of software I'd want gone... not to mention wouldn't come with a full copy of Windows but rather some crippled version that can ONLY be installed on the exact same HD the system comes with, so if you have to replace the HD, you're screwed. :P

Now, let's all argue about Windows 8! :D

OK yes, I know there's a thread for this, but I decided after watching numerous videos on YouTube that it would be in my best interests to install Windows 8 on this thing.

YES, I am VERY AWARE that the tiled "Metro" interface thing sucks and that there's a heavy emphasis on placing the mouse cursor on screen edges to access stuff, and that they tucked away the ability to shutdown/restart in a weird spot. Quite frankly, I was using mouse-on-edge stuff for years with my old Windows 98 system, so that's no bother, plus I don't manually shutdown/restart my system very often as it is, so having the button hidden away like that isn't a bother either. Not to mention you can turn the various search/shortcuts to Windows things like Bing on and off, which is good because I'll probably end up disabling ALL of them. :P

As for the live tiles thing, I like that you can make your own basic tiles to access shortcuts and applications, which is again similar to what I was doing with my Windows 98 system, where I had shortcut menus I could click on to get pages of icons. (This was before smartphones were all the rage too.) I can also just get rid of any tiles for Metro apps I'll never use... like all of them. And, if the tiles things truly does remain extremely annoying, I can just buy software that will bring the desktop back into the forefront and add in a Start Menu just like every previous version of Windows had. (TBH: I hardly ever touch my Start Menu as it is in Windows XP.)

Those are all the minor reasons though. The major reason I'm getting Windows 8 is simple: Performance. Out of all the reviews I've read/watched, even the ones that bash on the interface, the performance of Windows 8 is supposedly better than Windows 7 given the same hardware. Plus, I'm gonna be developing games for years to come so it makes sense to go with the latest OS out there unless it's truly a POS... like Windows ME. ;D

Gemini, if I was close enough to you, I'd slap you. The ONLY viable reason to go windows 8 is for touchscreen laptops and tablets. 8 will go down in history as windows ME version 2.0.

Win7 is damn near perfect.

luckybob wrote:

Gemini, if I was close enough to you, I'd slap you. The ONLY viable reason to go windows 8 is for touchscreen laptops and tablets. 8 will go down in history as windows ME version 2.0.

Win7 is damn near perfect.

Believe it or not, I've had nothing but trouble with Windows 7 the few times I've used it. Ironically, I've had LESS trouble with Vista... seriously. o_o;

Maybe life is trolling me. XD

Gemini000 wrote:

luckybob wrote:

Gemini, if I was close enough to you, I'd slap you. The ONLY viable reason to go windows 8 is for touchscreen laptops and tablets. 8 will go down in history as windows ME version 2.0.

Win7 is damn near perfect.

Believe it or not, I've had nothing but trouble with Windows 7 the few times I've used it. Ironically, I've had LESS trouble with Vista... seriously. o_o;

Maybe life is trolling me. 🤣

maybe it is. I've used a cracked copy since day one. HOWEVER the strange part is, using old server/workstation motherboards has its perks. Apparently, when installing windows 7, it finds a cd-key in my bios. I knew this was common in dell,hp,acer, etc, but I have a supermico board.

Anyway. I paid for and used vista all of a week before I went back to xp. win 7 has been AWESOME for me. And if you are getting new hardware, I'd be user to use 7. The physical core of vista,7 & 8 is the same (mostly). Its just Microsoft repeating itself. 95 > vista, 98 >7, me >8.

its only in the last month or so that windows 8 has even passed XP! Take a gander at the steam hardware survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey Windows 7 makes up for 67% of all systems that play games on steam. windows 8 has only just passed 10%.

it also gives you an "average" person's system.

luckybob wrote:

Gemini, if I was close enough to you, I'd slap you. The ONLY viable reason to go windows 8 is for touchscreen laptops and tablets. 8 will go down in history as windows ME version 2.0.

Win7 is damn near perfect.

So perfect it'll even run on a P3 Xeon rig.

luckybob wrote:

... Its just Microsoft repeating itself. 95 > vista, 98 >7, me >8.

Interesting analogy 🤣 .