A New Space Heater

[Zach Decou]

Hey guys. I'm a little giddy about my plans. I want to share them with you before I implement them in case someone else has any better suggestions or I am not seeing properly.

Once in a blue moon, some money falls into my lap. This time around it comes in the form of a second part time job and a couple tree removal jobs on the side. Usually the money gets sucked into the vacuum of home ownership or some other pressing need. But this time it's all fat. So rather than save it like a prudent person would do, I plan to blow it on a monster box who's only purpose is to eat x-plane 10 for lunch.

So what I want to do is get the best hardware out there with a lean toward bang-for-the-buck. I want to future-proof it as best I can against graphics tricks LM might choose to implement down the line (reflections, etc.)

Stuff:

AMD 8350 8 core oc to 4.2 GHz

Nvidia gtx 680 (have my eye on a 4gb)

1TB drive

32GB DDR3 memory

Other stuff to fill out the MOBO

Then a couple weeks down the line, a 27" monitor

Win8 and possibly OSX in virtualbox.

I haven't been ale to find a MOBO with the AM3+ socket AND pcie 3.0, so it's going to be 2.0 this go around.

I've owned macs for several years, so this build a pc from scratch thing is new ground for me. Thoughts?

[chris k]

Nice!

 

Ok - Drop the AMD and Go fastest i7, as "Single Threaded CPU Benchmarks" reveal Intel is way ahead of AMD in the processor game these days:

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

 

The Gfx Calls in X-Plane are all single threaded (scenery loads, AI etc are multithreaded), but the main gfx call is a single process. If FPS is what you're after, this is the route to take.....For what its worth! =)

 

+1 on the GTX680

 

- CK.

[mike10]

Nice! but as other said I would go with a I7  

 

I plan on doing some upgrades to my rig such as 16 gigs of ram and a 680   so please post on the performance you get out of yours.

[Zach Decou]

Hey guys. Sorry to dig up an old thread ( it IS my thread)

Looks like I'll be going the intel route. What are your experiences?

[Bobback]

I build a PC, use it for around 3 years, then i build a new one. Used Intel and AMD, now using an ATI VGA, but was always using Nvidia Cards.

For the cards, best cards out there are the GTX 590 and the ATI HD 6990. But both are older than the GTX600 series and HD 7900 series. So my advice is for the GTX680 you want, or an HD 7970. In recent benchmarks both are almost the same, Nvidia wins on some games, ATI on others, but if you plan playing other games, maybe you want the Physx feature that is Nvidia only.

Same for AMD FX8350. While it beats I7 on some benchmarks, on most benchmarks the Intel have a better performance, on some benchmarks even i5 can outperform the AMD proc, so maybe its a good idea to expend some more and get an I7 instead of the Fx8350. Look at Tomshardware to decide which one to buy.

Take a look at this benchmarks: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-amd-fx8350-fx8320-fx6300-and-fx4300-tested

 

Maybe AMD processors will be able to beat Intel ones next year or so, but now Intel beats AMD probably due to its hyper threading technology.

 

One thing that you may want to change, maybe an 500GB SSD instead of a 1TB HDD. Even if you want to spend less money, i would go for 16GB Ram and a SSD. 

Actually you haven't said if its going to be HDD or SSD, i just thought you mean an HDD. Im using 1 SSD for the OS only, and a RAID 0 config using 2 HDDs for games and some softwares, even using a raid 0 config, it is still much slower than using a SSD. 

Edited February 6, 2013 by Bobback