Sub £500 gaming systems from aria.co.uk
Gladiator IBIS Deluxe Intel Core i3-2100 £449
Intel Core i3-2100 3.10GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor
Radeon HD 6770 1024MB GDDR5 DirectX 11 PCI-Express Graphics Card
4GB Mushkin Silverline #996768 (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz 9-9-9-24
1TB Seagate Barracuda Green ST1000DL002 3.5" SATA II Hard Drive
Gigabyte GA-H61M-S2 Intel H61 (REV B3) Socket 1155 DDR3 PCI-Express Motherboard
500W Coolermaster Elite Power ATX2.3 Power Supply
BitFenix Outlaw Black Midi Tower Chassis
LG 22x DVD-RW SATA Black Optical ReWriter Drive
Gladiator Punisher Pro AMD Llano 3850 £399
AMD Llano A8-3850 2.90GHz (Socket FM1) Processor
Radeon HD 6550D DirectX 11 Graphics
4GB Mushkin Blackline #996659B (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz 9-9-9-24
1TB Seagate Barracuda Green ST1000DL002 3.5" SATA II Hard Drive
Gigabyte GA-A55M-S2HP AMD Hudson D3 (Socket FM1)
450W Coolermaster GX 80PLUS Bronze Power Supply
BitFenix Merc Alpha Black Midi Tower Chassis
LG 22x DVD-RW SATA Black Optical ReWriter Drive
Both of these systems are bellow £500, In terms of performance, the IBIS intel system is better than the Punisher AMD system. However the AMD system is cheaper. The i3 2100 is faster than the AMD APU, despite the fact that the APU has twice the cores, the extremely effcient sandybridge architecture of the i3 means it is faster in most benchmarks. Also the GPU built into the AMD chip is not as fast as the graphics card in the Intel system, it is not capable of running as graphically intence applications as the intel system.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Upgrading a system
There are many ways you can upgrade a system, to name a few, adding more memory, upgrading to a higher CPU or adding a second graphics card.
Bare in mind that adding a second graphics card in SLI or crossfire does not double the performance due to driver scaling. It also does not double the amount of graphics memory availible, this is because of the way it works, generally two cards render in SFR (split frame rendering). This is were each card gets 50% of the frame to render so each card does not get half the work since it renders roughly twice as fast.
There are also a limited number of upgrades possible before you need to change motherboard, you can only upgrade to a cpu on the same socket your are using, and you can't install DDR3 in a DDR2 or below motherboard. You may also need to upgrade powersupply to power new components. You also need to remember that there is a chance you will need to upgrade case to house larger or different sized components aswell as to provide cooling better cooling.
So, if you are a gamer and you are running an old graphics card it is definantly worth upgrading to a newer one. The card you choice should depend on the type of gaming you are into, for example if you just play world of warcraft you won't need anything more than a nvidea GTX550Ti or a AMD HD6870. However if you like to play games like crysis and more graphically demanding games you need to consider cards like the GTX580 and the HD7970. You can also think about adding a second grapics card in SLI or crossfire to increase performance, but remember that a single faster card is better than two slower cards.
In order to determine what is holding your system back you can run benchmarks like PC mark or even the standard windows index, which ever gets the lowest score you should think about upgrading. For example if you have a high end graphics card like a GTX570 and your running an old pentium CPU the chances are that the CPU is holding the system back and you should upgrade to a newer processor.
If you are video rendering and you need to upgrade you should look at your specs and decide what is too low, for example, if you are only running 2GB of memory you should think about going too 8GB or possibly even more. If your software is CPU based and your budget allows it upgrading to a 6 core CPU would be worth the money, on the other hand if the software you use supports CUDA rendering you should think about getting an new nvidia graphics card with as many CUDA cores as possible, for a example a GTX580 has 512 CUDA cores were as a GTX590 has 1024 since it is a dual GPU card.
Bare in mind that adding a second graphics card in SLI or crossfire does not double the performance due to driver scaling. It also does not double the amount of graphics memory availible, this is because of the way it works, generally two cards render in SFR (split frame rendering). This is were each card gets 50% of the frame to render so each card does not get half the work since it renders roughly twice as fast.
There are also a limited number of upgrades possible before you need to change motherboard, you can only upgrade to a cpu on the same socket your are using, and you can't install DDR3 in a DDR2 or below motherboard. You may also need to upgrade powersupply to power new components. You also need to remember that there is a chance you will need to upgrade case to house larger or different sized components aswell as to provide cooling better cooling.
So, if you are a gamer and you are running an old graphics card it is definantly worth upgrading to a newer one. The card you choice should depend on the type of gaming you are into, for example if you just play world of warcraft you won't need anything more than a nvidea GTX550Ti or a AMD HD6870. However if you like to play games like crysis and more graphically demanding games you need to consider cards like the GTX580 and the HD7970. You can also think about adding a second grapics card in SLI or crossfire to increase performance, but remember that a single faster card is better than two slower cards.
In order to determine what is holding your system back you can run benchmarks like PC mark or even the standard windows index, which ever gets the lowest score you should think about upgrading. For example if you have a high end graphics card like a GTX570 and your running an old pentium CPU the chances are that the CPU is holding the system back and you should upgrade to a newer processor.
If you are video rendering and you need to upgrade you should look at your specs and decide what is too low, for example, if you are only running 2GB of memory you should think about going too 8GB or possibly even more. If your software is CPU based and your budget allows it upgrading to a 6 core CPU would be worth the money, on the other hand if the software you use supports CUDA rendering you should think about getting an new nvidia graphics card with as many CUDA cores as possible, for a example a GTX580 has 512 CUDA cores were as a GTX590 has 1024 since it is a dual GPU card.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Which of the workstation machines?
Both platforms have their merits as well as drawbacks, The Opteron system has 4 times the number of cores as the SR-2 Xeon system aswell as 2.6 times the memory. However the xeon is considerably faster than the opteron in many benchmarks:
Cinebench 11 and 10 respectively
Higher is better
- x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
0
3
5.5
8
10.5
13
15.5
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
- 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
- Intel Core i7-930
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
Lightwave 9.6
Lower is better
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
0
25
50
75
100
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
- 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
0
3
5.5
8
10.5
13
Euler3D
Higher is better
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
- 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
FlamMap
Lower is better
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
- 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
WPrime32M
Lower is better
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
- Core i7-980X Extreme Edition
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
- 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
- 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
- Core i7-930
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Folding@home
Higher is better
- 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
- 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
- 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
All benchmarks were taken from http://www.bit-tech.net/,
As you can see, in most tests the Xeon's (model bellow the one in my system) beats two Opteron's. The xeon machine beats the Opteron in five of 8 benchmarks, however the benchmarks the Opterons win are heavily multithreaded tasks such as http://folding.stanford.edu/ and WPrime. While the Opteron system has 4 CPU's, most workstaton applications don't really support that many cores, however in cases where they can, the Opterons beat the dual Xeon's hands down. Since the opteron system has 4 CPU's it's scores will be better than in these benchmarks since only two were used, however you must keep in mind scaling and twice the processors will not equal twice the performance.
In most cases, the 48GB of memory in the SR-2 Xeon rig is plenty, however for really extreme rendering and calculations more may be needed, this is another time when the AMD system will be better. However the Opteron system does not support any kind of overclocking and only runs slower DDR3 (1333MHz VS. 2000MHz).
In conclusion neither machine is better than the over overall, if you are doing tasks which won't use the cores the Opeteron system has and you need a faster chip overall, you should go with the Xeon based system. However, if you are running software that won't use all 48 cores you will find the xeon machine faster.
Workstation PC (Opteron based)
The system I have decided on for the high end workstation PC (Opteron) is:
Case - Lian-Li V2100
CPU - 4X Opteron 6174 Magny-Cores 12 Core
Mainboard - Tyan S8812WGM3NR
Memory - 128GB Hynix server 1333MHz
SSD - OCZ Z-Drive R4 800GB
HDD - 3TB Hitatchi Deskstar
Graphics - 6GB PNY Quadro 6000SDI
Power Supply - 1500W Enermax Modular
Cooling - 4X Noctua NH-U12 DO
The total price for this system is £16012. The four Opteron 12 core's mean there are 48 cores, despite being slower core for core and clock for clock than their Xeon counterpart, the extra cores mean it is excellent for multi-threaded applications. The massive 128GB of memory mean you could use this workstation for anything memory hungry. Another massive bonus with this machine is that it runs server memory which has error correction algorithms. With this same Quadro card as the Xeon based system, this machine has no problems with 3d visualization in software such as 3DS max. Once again it has the OCZ PCI-E ssd which gives speeds of up to 2GB/s making everything load so fast. The Noctua coolers are more than capable of keeping the 48 cores running cool and quiet.
Case - Lian-Li V2100
CPU - 4X Opteron 6174 Magny-Cores 12 Core
Mainboard - Tyan S8812WGM3NR
Memory - 128GB Hynix server 1333MHz
SSD - OCZ Z-Drive R4 800GB
HDD - 3TB Hitatchi Deskstar
Graphics - 6GB PNY Quadro 6000SDI
Power Supply - 1500W Enermax Modular
Cooling - 4X Noctua NH-U12 DO
The total price for this system is £16012. The four Opteron 12 core's mean there are 48 cores, despite being slower core for core and clock for clock than their Xeon counterpart, the extra cores mean it is excellent for multi-threaded applications. The massive 128GB of memory mean you could use this workstation for anything memory hungry. Another massive bonus with this machine is that it runs server memory which has error correction algorithms. With this same Quadro card as the Xeon based system, this machine has no problems with 3d visualization in software such as 3DS max. Once again it has the OCZ PCI-E ssd which gives speeds of up to 2GB/s making everything load so fast. The Noctua coolers are more than capable of keeping the 48 cores running cool and quiet.
Workstation PC (Xeon based)
The system I have decided on for the high end workstation PC is:
Case - Xigmatek Elysium
CPU - 2X Intel Xeon X5690 Six Core
Mainboard - EVGA SR-2
Memory - 48GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz
SSD - OCZ Z-Drive R4 800GB
HDD - 3TB Hitatchi Deskstar
Graphics - 3GB Asus GTX 590 Along with a 6GB PNY Quadro 6000SDI
Power Supply - 1500W Enermax Modular
Cooling - 2X Corsair H100
The overall price for the system is £15312. The EVGA SR-2 Mainboard supports two intel LGA1366 Xeon's making for a total of 12 cores and 24 threads to make rendering very, very fast. The 48GB of 2000MHz DDR3 is plenty for rendering massive and complex animations, when coupled with the nVidia Quadro 6000 workstation card makes the pc able to render and visualize anything. There is also a GTX 590 which has two GF110 GPU's which allows the system to run any game at the moment, this is especially useful for game designers. For storage there is a 800GB PCI-E SSD with speeds of up to 2GB/s which makes loading software and files insanely fast, this is especially useful for software like Photoshop. To power the system there is a 1500W Enermax 80 PLUS Gold power supply which is plenty to power the system while maintaining a high level of efficiency. Finally keeping the dual CPU's cool are two Corsair H100's.
Case - Xigmatek Elysium
CPU - 2X Intel Xeon X5690 Six Core
Mainboard - EVGA SR-2
Memory - 48GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz
SSD - OCZ Z-Drive R4 800GB
HDD - 3TB Hitatchi Deskstar
Graphics - 3GB Asus GTX 590 Along with a 6GB PNY Quadro 6000SDI
Power Supply - 1500W Enermax Modular
Cooling - 2X Corsair H100
The overall price for the system is £15312. The EVGA SR-2 Mainboard supports two intel LGA1366 Xeon's making for a total of 12 cores and 24 threads to make rendering very, very fast. The 48GB of 2000MHz DDR3 is plenty for rendering massive and complex animations, when coupled with the nVidia Quadro 6000 workstation card makes the pc able to render and visualize anything. There is also a GTX 590 which has two GF110 GPU's which allows the system to run any game at the moment, this is especially useful for game designers. For storage there is a 800GB PCI-E SSD with speeds of up to 2GB/s which makes loading software and files insanely fast, this is especially useful for software like Photoshop. To power the system there is a 1500W Enermax 80 PLUS Gold power supply which is plenty to power the system while maintaining a high level of efficiency. Finally keeping the dual CPU's cool are two Corsair H100's.
Office PC
Case - Silverstone SST-SG02W-F
CPU - AMD A6 3500 FM1 Triple core
Mainboard - MSI A55M-P3d
Memory - Corsair XMS3 DDR3 4GB
Hard Drive - 320GB WD Blue
Power Supply - 480W Be Quite Straight Power 80 PLUS Gold
The overall price of this system is £360. Because this pc is designed for an office were there will be many of these running at one time for basic tasks like invoicing and emailing, one main concern was efficiency. For this reason a 80 PLUS Gold power supply was selected along with low power components to reduce the amount of power needed. This is vital for a business as it reduced the overheads. I choose not to include a disk drive to avoid employees loading their own software onto the network and from watching DVD's at work. The hard drive is only 320GB as the pc will be connected to a file server so a larger hard drive would be overkill. The CPU is actually an APU which is a combined CPU and GPU. It is more than enough for basic office tasks.
CPU - AMD A6 3500 FM1 Triple core
Mainboard - MSI A55M-P3d
Memory - Corsair XMS3 DDR3 4GB
Hard Drive - 320GB WD Blue
Power Supply - 480W Be Quite Straight Power 80 PLUS Gold
The overall price of this system is £360. Because this pc is designed for an office were there will be many of these running at one time for basic tasks like invoicing and emailing, one main concern was efficiency. For this reason a 80 PLUS Gold power supply was selected along with low power components to reduce the amount of power needed. This is vital for a business as it reduced the overheads. I choose not to include a disk drive to avoid employees loading their own software onto the network and from watching DVD's at work. The hard drive is only 320GB as the pc will be connected to a file server so a larger hard drive would be overkill. The CPU is actually an APU which is a combined CPU and GPU. It is more than enough for basic office tasks.
Home theatre PC
The system for a HTPC (up to £500) is:
Case - Lian Li PC-Q07B
Mainboard /CPU -ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe /AMD Zacate 18W
Memory - Corsair vengeance 1600 MHz DDR3 4GB
SSD - Corsair Force 60GB SATA III
Graphics - Asus GT 520 1GB Fan-less
Power Supply - Silverstone Nightjar 400W Fanless
Cooling - Noctua NF-S12B FLX
Blu Ray - LG CH10LS20 Reader
The total price for this system is £493. When choosing the parts for this PC, silence and low power draw were very important, for this reason fan-less components were choose such as the motherboard (integrated CPU), the graphics card, which is perfect for playing 1080p video, and finally the fan-less power supply which is the perfect wattage to power the system. I would also run Linux on this machine as it is free and there is excellent home cinema software available. For extra storage you could add an extra hard drive or connect the system to a home server.
Case - Lian Li PC-Q07B
Mainboard /CPU -ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe /AMD Zacate 18W
Memory - Corsair vengeance 1600 MHz DDR3 4GB
SSD - Corsair Force 60GB SATA III
Graphics - Asus GT 520 1GB Fan-less
Power Supply - Silverstone Nightjar 400W Fanless
Cooling - Noctua NF-S12B FLX
Blu Ray - LG CH10LS20 Reader
The total price for this system is £493. When choosing the parts for this PC, silence and low power draw were very important, for this reason fan-less components were choose such as the motherboard (integrated CPU), the graphics card, which is perfect for playing 1080p video, and finally the fan-less power supply which is the perfect wattage to power the system. I would also run Linux on this machine as it is free and there is excellent home cinema software available. For extra storage you could add an extra hard drive or connect the system to a home server.
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