Buying some new parts

[RayTheKing]

Oh my god, I nearly cried reading this thread xD! Poor Fred got 2v1ed.

But in all seriousness, the Xeon and FX 8320/8350 (OCed) are all powerful enough for OP needs, but the Xeon will give less headaches.

I just think that OP needs to increase his budget for more RAM. It looks like he'll need a crap-ton.

 

[Dopekitten]

Hey so even though that was a heated discussion, it was useful for me to understand the differences between the various options. Judging from what's been discussed it seems like the Xeon would make more sense at this point.

I think the Xeon is a reasonable choice in general, but I just wanted to compare it to the i5 4670k more in depth. Now I touched on this briefly before, but mfenn said it probably wouldn't be worth it. However, looking at prices, I could buy an i5 4670k + z87 motherboard + a cooling solution for roughly same price as it would cost me to simply get the Xeon + an H87 Motherboard. I.e.:

i5 4670k + ASRock Z87 Pro3 for $312
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...&SID=u00000687
and
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO for $35
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103099
Total = $347
vs.

Xeon E3-1230 V3 for $255
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687
and
ASRock H87 Pro4 for $83
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687
Total = $338

And from my understanding, looking at benchmarks comparing the i7 4770k to the i5 4670k (where the Xeon is ~5% slower than the i7 4770k)
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/836?vs=837
The largest gap appears to be in the 7zip performance, so I assume this abuses the multiple threads the most, and the difference between the i7 and the i5 is about 27% (so roughly the xeon will be 22% better in heavily threaded applications than the i5 at stock clocks). The other benches suggest that the i5 is within 5% of the i7 in applications that don't abuse the hyperthreading aspect, so we can expect the Xeon to perform on par with the i5 in non-heavily threaded scenarios

So in the worst case scenario, I'd have to overclock my i5 4670k to increase it's performance by 22% in to match a stock Xeon E3-1230 V3 in the worst case scenarios. At a 3.5ghz stock clock, that means i need to achieve an increase of 0.77ghz, or overclock the i5 to 4.17ghz. But this also means that in any scenario that is not the worst case scenario, I'd have a somewhat significant benefit in speed (up to around 20%).

From what I've read, 4.17ghz would be fairly doable on an i5 4670k, since I guess the typical overclock is around 4.5ghz?

So my question is therefore, with these assumptions, in theory I could spend $9 more, forgo the Xeon and buy an i5 4670k, and overclock it to 4.2ghz (with hopefully no voltage increases), and achieve better performance in any scenario but the worst case for a very tiny increase in price, and still achieve par performance in the worst case scenario. I am not super concerned about resale price, I doubt that I will be reselling this in a time frame where it would make a difference if I had overclocked it or not.

Is this worth it in this scenario? Is it possible to reliably overclock an i5 4670k to 4.1 or 4.2ghz with minimal or no voltage increases? If not, what sort of voltage increase would I be looking at, and what sort of impact would that have on chip lifetime (although I know that's pretty much an unanswerable question).

Also as a separate note, what do you guys think about the 7870 Myst Edition cards? There is a PowerColor card on Newegg right now for $140 which seems ridiculously cheap to me. From what I can tell, you guys don't think that anything short of a 7970 will last effectively for 5 years. If I was willing to upgrade the GPU 2.5 years down the line, would the 7870 make more sense at this point then?

Again, thanks for the help, taking a crash course in current hardware parts is much easier with some guidance :thumbsup:

 

[mfenn]

So in the worst case scenario, I'd have to overclock my i5 4670k to increase it's performance by 22% in to match a stock Xeon E3-1230 V3 in the worst case scenarios. At a 3.5ghz stock clock, that means i need to achieve an increase of 0.77ghz, or overclock the i5 to 4.17ghz. But this also means that in any scenario that is not the worst case scenario, I'd have a somewhat significant benefit in speed (up to around 20%).

This is not quite true. Z87 boards implement MCT, which will take the CPU to its max single-bin turbo speed even when all 4 cores are loaded. That means the i5 4670K and the E3-1230 V3 would be at 3.8 GHz (same base multi and turbo bins). A 22% overclock over 3.8 GHz is 4.63 GHz, which is quite a bit more aggressive for a Haswell. You can certainly get there with enough cooling, but a 212 EVO won't do it.

Also as a separate note, what do you guys think about the 7870 Myst Edition cards? There is a PowerColor card on Newegg right now for $140 which seems ridiculously cheap to me. From what I can tell, you guys don't think that anything short of a 7970 will last effectively for 5 years. If I was willing to upgrade the GPU 2.5 years down the line, would the 7870 make more sense at this point then?

The 7870 Myst is basically a 7950 except with 2GB of RAM. I think that's a totally reasonable choice if you plan to upgrade sooner.

Again, thanks for the help, taking a crash course in current hardware parts is much easier with some guidance :thumbsup:

Glad to help.

 

[Dopekitten]

Ah, I totally forgot about TurboBoost, lol.

Ok well I guess I will stick with the Xeon. It does sound like it would be worthwhile though to get a Z87 board just so that I can have the Xeon turbo boost up to 3.8ghz, even though I won't overclock it.

Or do the H87 boards have MCT as well?

 

[mfenn]

Yeah, H87 boards will do Turbo to the max bin as well.

 

[Dopekitten]

So, this is what I'm looking at as the final score: (will probably order this weekend). I've decided that I am keen on an mATX case since my huge antec 1200 sort of annoys me now at how big and heavy it is (me 5 years ago really liked it though, sigh)

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1VOVv

The plan is to use MCT to stick the Xeon at 3.7ghz all the time. The next step up is getting the 4770K for ~$100 more for maybe 20% more performance after overclocking it. I guess I don't get QuickSync because the Xeon doesn't have integrated graphics, I guess this is a non-issue though since while I do encode video sometimes, I don't think I'll ever be under time pressure to do it.

I am slightly worried that the intel stock heatsink won't be sufficient (while the Xeon is turboing with all 4 cores to 3.7ghz) since I have no experience with it and tbh it looks pretty shitty. Should I be? I worry about high temperatures in terms of how they affect the lifetime of the chip.

With regard to the video card, it's really one of these choices:
GTX 780 - $500 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814500300
7970 - $270 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150665
7870 Myst - $160 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131484

Obviously in decreasing order of price/performance. I don't really like the how the 7870 Myst only has 2gb of vRAM, seems like 3gb is what I would want if i was going to hold onto this card for a while. I think that if I got this card, I would be upgrading down the line earlier than I would normally.

The 7970 has 3gb of vRAM, and is faster than the 7870 LE, but not by much (maybe 25% at most), but costs almost twice as much. Not sure if I'm entirely keen on this.

What I am somewhat keen on though is getting an nvidia card because shadowplay looks pretty awesome. However, pretty much none of the cards they offer can even remotely match the price/performance of the ati cards. The GTX 770 or GTX 760 are probably what I should be looking at, but they offer similar performance to the 7970 and 7950/7870 Myst respectively, but cost roughly $60 more for each and only have 2gb of vRAM. Only the GTX 780 is the winner in it's price bracket (for now) since the R9 290x has heat problems and from what I understand is difficult to find in stock anyway. It's pretty much outside of my budget, but if somebody made a great case for it, then I might be able to figure something out.

I guess that the most reasonable choice at this point in time is the 7870 Myst Edition. It's annoying since I really missed out on the $180 7950 cards that were for sale maybe a week ago, those would have been perfect.

With regard to the case, I chose this one since it's cheap and seems very decent. Others like the Corsair 350D seem way too expensive.

 

[mfenn]

The stock cooler on the Xeon is pretty small. It will cool the CPU no problem, but does get fairly loud under load. You can get an inexpensive cooler like the Hyper 212+ if you think that the noise will bother you. If you do get the cooler, swap out the RAM to a standard height kit like this Crucial Ballistix. Otherwise you can run into clearance issues.

As for the GPU, the best price/performance out of the 3 cards you listed is the 7870 MYST. However, it is also the lowest performance and you're going to want to replace it in ~2 years. Personally, this is my preferred way of doing things because it results in the lowest expenditure of money over time.

As for Shadowplay, the Xeon is powerful enough to do normal software OBS streaming no problem.