this is what I'm doing for fun these days ...

[maxd]

I've been doing a bunch of research on the next -- and pretty much the last -- major component of my system, the graphics card (aka GPU).

For a variety of none-too-interesting reasons I've focused mainly on Nvidia-based cards and had more or less narrowed things down to GTX 770 and 780 cards. They are pricey -- €250-400 for the former and €400-500+ for the latter -- but they are top-shelf cards that should be sufficient for our wants and needs for several years to come.

For anyone in a similar position I STRONGLY urge you to take a look at the new "Maxwell" cards being released throughout the summer and fall this year. The 750 and 750 Ti are already out and they have shown some serious advantages over cards with similar prices and specifications. In particular the Maxwells are showing that they use roughly 30-50% less power and that means they run a LOT cooler and (consequently) a LOT quieter. For a noise-phobic computer freak like myself this is very good news indeed!

I've been focusing on Linux results for obvious reasons -- the results are similar on Windoz -- and there it seems the Maxwell cards may prove to be a very sweet spot on the GPU market. See

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at phoronix.com for details, and make particular note of the heat, noise and efficiency scores of the 750/750Ti. Pretty remarkable!

There is every reason to believe this trend will continue for the forthcoming Maxwell cards, the 870 and 880, which are expected to be released over the next few months. And that is why I am very happy that I've waited for my GPU. The word is that the top stock Maxwell-based card, the 880, will ring in at around €450 and that means it will be fully competitive with the non-Maxwell 780 prices. Colour me interested!

From what I've read and absorbed over the last several months I think it's not unreasonable to speculate that the Intel-facing CPU-RAM-GPU scene is pretty much cresting in terms of the current generation of gear. Most of the basic architectures have been around for a few years now and the latest releases are all trending toward power efficiency tweaks. Boring maybe but great news for folks like me who what powerful gear with minimum racket and good prices.

The next-gen stuff is just starting to appear -- for instance the first consumer-ready DDR4 RAM has just been released -- and that is likely going to be a whole new wave of CPU-RAM-GPU tech. Wonderful news for the gear heads I'm sure but bleeding edge is not where I like to be so I'm happy to hold back a little and get good, solid, stable kit for reasonable prices. The fact that it's (comparatively) cool and quiet is exactly where I would hope to be.

 

[same_old]

I just spent $5k on a new gaming rigg, got all the bells and whistles. Been playing "call of duty-Ghost) and I'm getting a constant frame rate of 200 so it's a dream so far. Got SLI 590 Nvidia cards, 24 gig of corsair ram. barracuda X2 terabit hard drives. Water cooling etc- I just make sure that all parts can be upgraded.

 

[NetEntFollower]

I just spent $5k on a new gaming rigg, got all the bells and whistles. Been playing "call of duty-Ghost) and I'm getting a constant frame rate of 200 so it's a dream so far. Got SLI 590 Nvidia cards, 24 gig of corsair ram. barracuda X2 terabit hard drives. Water cooling etc- I just make sure that all parts can be upgraded.

You spent $5k on a gaming rig and settled for SLI GTX 590? WHAT?

 

[maxd]

You spent $5k on a gaming rig and settled for SLI GTX 590? WHAT?

+1. Seems an odd and disproportionately pricey choice.

For my part I've decided to go with a GTX 750 Ti for now. They're modestly priced, €100-150, and a good number of the games I really want to play -- Divinity Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, etc -- don't/won't actually have particularly high GPU requirements. A 750Ti should be fine for those.

Other games I'd like to get into -- Shadows of Mordor, Thief 2, Witcher 3 -- will defo need a more muscular GPU. They are mostly coming out in the next few months so around Christmas I can upgrade to a higher-end card, likely a GTX 870/880 which are out soonish as well. I'll bump the 750 into a second, more modest micro-ATX rig I'll be building and it should be perfect for that.

As to my current rig, The Blue Max, everything is sweet but I definately over-spent on the CPU and RAM. I'm not complaining -- good to have the juice there if and when I need it -- but in truth I've never seen the CPU go over 25% load under normal (non-synthetic) use -- 2-5% is typical -- and I doubt I've ever used more than 20% of the RAM. I would have been plenty good with say 8GB and something like an i5-4590. That would have saved me about €200ish which would have bought me the 750Ti graphics card and a spiffy gamer's mouse -- anyone want to gift me a Corsair Vengeance M65? -- to boot.

Best piece of kit I got though -- thinking bang-for-the-buck -- has to be the SSD. If you use a computer you should have one, it's that simple. Performance -- as in real world, every day, all day performance -- is dramatically improved by going the SSD route for boot+OS+programs (as long as you do a bit of research and tweak your system slightly to treat the SSD properly). HDDs are cheap so grab whatever you need, dump your media, temp, and working files on it, and you're on your way to computer happiness. Seriously, the SSD is nothing short of a revolution in OS performance. Hybrids don't seem like such a great idea to me because you want to have total control over what goes where and AFAIK hybrids don't lend themselves to that kind of micro-management so easily.

SSDs are plumetting in price -- $0.30-0.50/GB is totally feasible -- so there's really no excuse to hold off. I got a 512GB SSD and it's massive for what actually goes on it. A 128GB would have been fine but those smaller SSDs usually take a performance hit so 250ish GB seems to be the sweet spot, for now. Crucial MX100, Samsung 840 EVO and OCZ Vector ARC 100 are all good choices that I know of, doubless there are others too. It'll be the best $125 you'll have ever spent on computer gear!

Just a footnote here on computer gear choices: the Logitech Anywhere MX Wireless is a superb mouse .. for about 6 months! Then apparently the switches start to wear out and it's DOA. Bummer! I'd say grab one if someone is giving them away but be prepared to have your heart broken when the damn thing does its kamakazi routine and turns into a paperweight. I believe that's what the term "ratfuck!" was invented for.

 

[NetEntFollower]

I also feel that SSDs are crazy in terms of bang for the buck. Also, you notice the performance right away.

I'm thinking about getting another GTX 770 so I can SLI and run those games you mentioned, specifically the Witcher 3.
Definitely considering getting another SSD and RAID0'ing.

Mouse:
I have a Logitech MX518 which I got 7+ years ago. Still works perfectly fine and it's a damn shame because I want a new mouse dammit!

 

[maxd]

Quick update, and a shout-out to Noctua for excellent customer service:

STILL haven't bought my graphics card, partly because I was waiting for the dust to settle on the September Maxwell releases -- the GTX970 and 980 -- and partly because the tax authorities in France have decided to empty everyone's pockets in order to (re)fill theirs.

That said the time is near and it'll be a GTX970 for two reasons: very good performance at reasonable prices AND low-heat/low-dB characteristics. A winning combo IMHO.

Now the Noctua story: I've upgraded my case fans a couple times since I bought my Cooler Master HAF XB enclosure in my quest for low noise operations in a fairly dust-prone environment. Here's what I'm working with:



Behind that front grill I've installed a sheet of dust-proofing material -- basically open-cell foam sheet -- and that works reasonably well at keeping the dust inside the case to a minimum.

I started by swaping out the stock fans -- okay but smallish (120mm), too noisy and not PWM -- for a pair of Noctua NF-P14s redux-1200 PWM:



Nice fans, very quiet but my airflow through that dust-proofing wasn't great. That's when I learned about static pressure and how some fans were optimised to suck better through grills, sheeting, etc. So, fan upgrade #2:



These were NF-A14 industrialPPC-2000 PWM and they worked pretty damn well. Seemed to suck twice as much air into the case through that front grill+foam without being much noisier.

Things were going okay but I thought I could do better so I covered over the side grills, etc, and replaced the mesh-top lid with a windowed version (ridiculously cheaply too I might add) in order to force a front-to-back air flow. Bingo! : case temps dropped about 5°C and the fans spun down to barely audible.

Fast-forward to a week ago when I (very foolishly) decided to try a new desktop management (DM) package (in other words different eye-candy) in my work environment. It completely borked my system, all I could do was boot to a black, seemingly dead screen. Reboot, reboot, fiddle, reboot, etc .. and I somehow fried one of the nice new fans.

After a few sweaty hours I managed to rip out and purge the offending DM, got my system back running, replaced the dead fan with one of the previous Noctuas and I was pretty much back in business.

So what to do about the dead fan? Box said it was under 3 year warranty so I figured "what the hell" and dropped them an email. A couple of emails later they told me a new fan was on the way to me and that all I had to do was destroy the old one, send them a pic that I had done so, and we'd be done. Nice!

So yeah, to Noctua for not only pushing the envelope in terms of the fans they have on offer but standing behind them 100% and without hassle. Very nicely done guys!

 

[maxd]

FINALLY got my graphics card over the holidays:



Hit a Catch-22 when I tried to install the card's drivers off of geforce.com: with the card installed all I got was black screens but without the card installed the driver installation reported "no card installed" and "failed pre-condition criteria". Turned out the trick was to leave the card out, ignore the "pre-condition" errors and install the drivers anyway, then put the card in and boot up. All good!

The good news is that everything looks great! Card is very quiet, highly energy efficient and posts well on the typical benchmarks. I ran a number of the Phoronix test suites (linux stuff) and my results for the card match Michael's (the Phoronix guy) by +/- 1-2%. Seems pretty good to me since all I'd done is install the card and drivers, boot the machine, and run the tests. No tweaking or fiddling for better results. At full load the card's fans finally spin up but you barely notice it. I'm not even sure it loaded the PSU enough for it's fans to kick in. Heat on the card ticked up to around the mid-50s but stabilized there and cooled quickly once the load was off. I let those tests run for an hour: no probs and no significant wobbles in performance which indicates that all is fairly well.

The bad news is that I haven't actually played anything, partially because (a) there seems to be rather few games with high-end graphics that'll actually run under Linux and (b) I tried one of the games I've been looking forward to (Wasteland 2) off of Steam and quickly ran into problems. Game starts then immediately crashes, happens every time. Seems there are some OpenGL issues that need to be resolved. I simply haven't had the time to dig into this so .. no joy yet.

Apparently some of the games I'm interested in will run via Wine, etc. Maybe I'll check out that approach sometime after ICE/LAC.

TBH though it looks like any decent (read "sexy graphics") modern games are going to require Windo$, at least in the short term. That's an underwhelming prospect for a Linux fan-boy like me but there you go I guess. It sounds like Win 10 is coming along nicely, maybe that'll be available by the time I get back to this in a serious way.

I see that my card has received top listing on a number of "Best Hardware of 2014" lists so that's comforting. It'll be nice to see the thing in action sometime. If the benchmarks -- especially the Unigine tests -- are any indication it should be a beautiful thing.

 

[Casinomeister]

Geek.

 

[maxd]