Options and opinions

[valyn42]

All this talk of upgrading has got me fingers itchy to build again. Haven't built one in over 4 years now, so I'm a bit rusty. Told my Pops I would build him one as soon as I closed on my house, and that is coming on Friday morning(I hope!). So details...

Dad's requirements: Quiet(no liquid cooling in my computer son, what are you on drugs? ), point-and-click fast(so I'm thinking SSD with plenty of mem), and a good tv tuner card. The rest is up to me with ~$1500 of his money. I'll be able to steal some cycles from him, but this is not a 24/7 cruncher.

Just from doing some reading here and researching.. I'm thinking of the HAF-X case with a 1000w psu (I'm thinking of stealing some extra gpu cycles here like maybe a pair of 460's or so), a decent size SSD(128) and likely 16G of memory. Haven't decided on anything, so I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks

[joker]

First question: what is going to be doing with it? If he is just going to be surfing the net and watching TV on it, you may not need an SSD or a ton of memory. Just a thought. I am sure that the other hardware gurus will chime in on this.

[valyn42]

The more info the better. Other than the usual surfing and reading, video encoding to put movies on mom's ipad is the hardest crunching he does. He also has it set up as a music server for Sonos and such, but nothing major. He just wants programs to load faster(especially windows) when the clicky happens...

[Maxwell]

I don't think you need nearly that much RAM. 8GB is likely plenty...

SSD would be good, but couple that with a large second HDD to store big things (and backup the SSD). If you're set on going one drive (or you want super high speed across the board), try something like this.

XP is a faster OS than Win7, though if you go with a SSD, that will be mitigated.

HAF 932 is quiet and a great cooling case, and is about $40 cheaper than the HAF-X. Unless you are sticking 3 GPUs in there *coughDrPopcough* you'll be happy with it.

AMDx6 is probably the way to go. Cheaper, will handle what your Pops is doing. I would buy cheap on the processor and OC it (moderately). Don't spend extra $$ for something you can make it do yourself.

Video card - quiet is key. I have this card in my box I'm typing from, and it has a nearly 20% OC on it with fans at 50%, and the crickets outside are louder than the entire box (it's in a HAF 932).

[zombie67]

GPUs are noisy. Especially those running hot due to crunching.

Ran should be 1gb per thread. 2gb per thread if you can afford it.

[DrPop]

A pair of 460's would be nice and quiet. A pair of 560 Ti 's or even 570's even better.
SSD is not a bad idea. You could get a nice 64GB SSD for ~$100 on sale. Then get him a large HDD, say 1TB for $60. Put the OS and install all the apps on the SSD, and then set it so his storage drive for pictures, movies, music, is all on the HDD. Way awesome speed and way awesome storage capacity that way.

I'd look at a Sandy Bridge i5 2400 for budget or go the full montey with Sandy Bridge i7 2600K for $100 more. For mobo, we need some more info for recommendations. Will you ever be tempted to run 3 GPUs, or will 2 be the max?
You can set all kinds of flags for the latest BOINC client, like make it stop crunching when a certain .exe file runs, set it to crunch only at certain times of the day; only when idle, etc...lots of ways to make the rig really snappy for Pops, but still get millions of good credits too!

The number of GPUs will help with the case and PSU recommendations as well. You can go quite a bit cheaper than a HAF-X and 1000W if you are doing 2 GPUs. But for 3 GPUs, that is what I would recommend.

I would also say 8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM at this time. He would not notice a difference with any more RAM for what he's doing; so I would be going for 8GB and throw the extra $ at the better CPU or GPU.

[DrPop]

Max has good ideas- almost same as mine lol!
AMD X6 is a solid system, and you could rock it cheaper than the Sandy Bridge. However, I have to admit it is less powerful, and cost per GFLOP they are the same. If it comes down to the wire, I would rather have faster, newer Generation GPUs and a less powerful CPU, but that's just me. GPUs become outdated and the bottleneck faster than CPUs do...that is what I hate about laptops, is that you're locked into a GPU.

I think at this point we definitely need to know the answer to: 2 GPUs or someday 3 . . . and then we can give specific advice with parts from Newegg for that $1500...and we can do a build up with Sandy Bridge, and one with AMD x6 and then see which one you like the best.
I'm going to say at the outset and from recent hard learned experience- -if Pops likes quiet, then might want to stick with 2 GPUs. 3 is awful hot and therefore more noisy to cool...

[Maxwell]

Esp. if this is going to be an occasional cruncher, I think a cheaper processor is best - DrPop is right *coughdamncough* that the Sandybridge will get you more output, but I would personally not spend more money for such little return (due to the occasional-ness of the crunching).

Another spot to potentially save $$ is the PSU - if you're not going to put a bunch of big cards in there, you don't need 1000W. But that depends big time on how many GPUs...

[valyn42]

Keeping it quiet is key, so from your hard-earned experience, it sounds like 2 GPU's is what will be going in it. We've got a 1TB SATA II in his existing machine as storage, so I think we are good there(he doesn't keep near as much as I do). With a full tower case, I could always add a SATA III down the road.

Keep the comments coming though, it looks like a picture is coming together for a nice little build

[DrPop]

2 GPU rigs it is, then! I will spec 2 builds, one AMD, one Intel. I'm at home on the smart phone (finally picked up an Atrix) so it will take me a bit. Then all the guys can throw in their opinions and you could easily tweak the builds to suit your final taste.

Quick question: is $1500 a target, or is it more like, "as cheap as possible with $1500 the upper limit?"

Also: does he have an OS already or do we need to include Win7 in the $1500?