pouët.net

Hi Guys,

my Laptop (which i used as Desktop PC, since the keyboard broke) died on saturday.. i would say it's either the mainboard or the cpu.
But since it was quite ancient nevertheless (>5 years) and even (hd) videos of demos stuttered i decided to buy a new desktop machine.

I plan to code with it (perhaps also on osx native or in a vm) and to watch demos
The budget is around 500-600€.
I looked around and read a few tests and came up with this config:

CPU
Intel Core i5-2500K, 4x 3.30GHz, boxed - ca. 180€
these intel i5 2500's seems to have the best buck/boom ratio atm, also intel is needed for osx.

Board
ASUS P8P67 Pro - ca. 140€
I'm no expert in boards but in the past i always had asus and was quite happy.
btw. what's the difference between pro and deluxe besides the price tag?

GPU
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850, 1024MB GDDR5, 2x DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, lite retail - ca. 140€
Radeon or Nvidia?! AMD seems to be cheaper with comparable results atm?!
Does this GPU suffer for watching all the latest demo, and perhaps the upcoming ones (atleast this year) ??

RAM
2x4GB for around 70€
Dunno what Company to choose.. Kingston used to be good?! Does the brand matter in RAM nowadays?

Disk
for budget reasons I chose to buy only a 1TB HDD first for around 50€, and upgrade later to a SSD for system partition. Can I easily clone the system partition from HDD to SSD then?

This config would cost 580€. What do you think? Any suggestions on what to change? As this is a rather big investment for me I don't want to make the wrong decision. Thanks in advance!

you already got a PSU?

yeah make sure you have a decent PSU, the cards are quite hungry these days (id say 500W min). also id personally go for a nvidia gfx board. while its true that AMD usually offers "more bang for the buck" nvidias are proven to produce less trouble and if its just because they shove their cards up coders asses ;)

v3nomsoup:
Mainboards and AMD CPUs are cheaper than Intel's ones too if you want to save some bucks but you may know that.
One thing to consider if you want to buy reliable hardware for years is to choose a main or gfx board with solid capacitors instead of standard electrolytic capacitors. Although the plague due to unreliable caps was a previous issue, solid capacitors have better electric characteristics. It is so frustrating to get an hardware failure because of one of this capacitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
Most of manufacturers (Asus, Gigabyte) made this transition but you can still find some standard electrolytic capacitors on cheaper boards.

oh yeah, i forgot about the psu. i've got a beQuiet 400W here, I think I'll just try it out if it is enough.

sylvao: thanks for the hint! i'll watch for those solid capacitors. and yeah, intel is the only "must" since i want to have the option to run osx natively in the future. there are patched osx kernels for amd out there, but with an intel cpu and a bit luck you're able to run original kernels.

I would wholly recommend against building a machine with the plan to use it as a demobox and a hackintosh. Hardware priorities just do not match up, and there are several exotic terms for what the long-term experience is like. None of them is "silky smooth".

If that doesn't dissuade you, at least pick an Intel CPU and a Gigabyte mainboard. Then the headache will be to pick the right graphics card without going back a few years just to get OS X running.

Thanks shifter. Yeah, it seems that there are several problems considering hackintosh and new hw. But hackintosh is not top priority, as I have osx running on my (rather slow) netbook atm. 
I think i go for a demobox together with trying to run osx in a vm. That sounds promising if you have enough horsepower http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39159/is-it-possible-to-run-osx-in-a-virtual-machine. But i would like to have the option to run osx on it natively in the future. (When the hw is ancient enough), thus intel.
If osx wont run in the end its no drama, that would only be the cherry on top of it :D

All that for a demobox?! Sounds way overpowered just for youtube :P

Another thought on amd/nvidia: if you're doing opengl stuff, your code is much more likely to be compatible if you code on AMD. Nvidia's glsl compiler is way too relaxed about errors in your code (even if they do save some bytes).

Oh, and my experience on osx: amd is much better. I've seen major issues with nvidia cards due to shitty drivers. It seems about the opposite of windows.

Every decent dual or quad with a SM4 capable graphics card is good enough to be called a demobox these days.

And there's no need to look into the future. CPUs and GPUs are developing. So... even in 2 years your now-to-date system might look old fashioned.

im afraid the nvidia vs ati argument has nothing to do with performance or price - if you want all the opengl apps to work you're stuck with nvidia.

I have an ATI 5770 and regretting that.

v3nomsoup: i'm running a i7-2600k with the P8P67 Pro - works great!

macosx will work with this config, just make sure you get the right boot loader. there should be also a preconfigured iso floating around... i tried it once with my copy of snow leopard but failed in the end getting mx gtx570 to work.

smash: Then again, there's not that many big applications that only support OpenGL any more, much thanks to Intel.

If you buy a PC for watching demos, buy NVidia. If you buy one for making demos, buy AMD, it's cheaper and you will make more compatible demos. If you want to make 4K's buy NVidia, that will safe you a few bytes (as far as i know).

I have an AMD and I can hardly run any 4k, and most OpenGL demos are at least a bit buggy. I don't regret it, i just curse those lamer coders who can't code correctly.

Same here, AMD for development, NVIDIA for watching demos / gaming.
AMD drivers used to suck big time but now with the ATI HD and a carefully chosen driver you are pretty safe. AMD gave us gDebugger, Code Analyst...
Seriously NVIDIA can go to hell with these non-conforming OpenGL extensions that do not trigger any warnings. Also, AMD driver bugs are a pain in the ass but NVIDIA multi-threaded driver bugs will drive you mad.

So this about ATI vs. NVidia graphics... again?! -.-

Safest is to use DX. but sure...

They BOTH SUCK BIGTIME @ OGL and that drivers level. Both vendors support GLextensions that are good for their whatever special cases and techniques but are not available on the other side. Which makes them UNUSABLE.

i code on intel 965 express chipset and watch demos on youtube/capped.

Well, use OpenGL >= 3.2, no more extension thingies to bother with, runs on NVidia and ATI ... the only real difference is the shader compilers, in some cases compiler warnings generated by e.g. ATI will cause an error on e.g. NVidia ...

Well, i got a Phenom II X2 from some OEM-Upgrader for 52€ in Spain. I was able to unlock the other 2 cores without any problems yet. I use it for Photoshop now and it utilizes all cores. Also, many demos did profit from it aswell.

Things like these, and the memory buy taught me that its hard to compare prices today. You need to find reviews of each component on the web and magazines. I'm not sure if that deal with 2x2GB 1333/CL9@7 for 42€ was a good deal anymore....

Well, except that most demos wont work on my old HD3870, which is also a pain in the ass...

Interesting. I've been curious how Apple deals with the NVGL nonsense. Is it the same or isnt the driver responsible for as much as in Windows?