Gagzila's Gaming Rig for 2012

[Gagzila]

Thanks Michael, it's good to feel alive again ....now battling with another PC issue, that off running SSDs in AHCI mode while running HDDs in RAID.

 

Terano...I have my graphics cards in slots 1 and 4, this is to give the first card's fans some breathing room as they are double slot cards and it keeps both on separate PCIe x16 channels. This basically blocks both standard PCIe and PCI slots. In your case you should be able to run the graphics card in slot 2, leaving both standard PCIe and PCI slots free for a wireless card.

 

My suggestion though would be to go the smaller and much cheaper version of my mobo, the ASUS Maximus IV Gene Z, as it saves you close to $200 and will help bring you closer to that $2K budget. Get that and a USB wireless dongle for you wireless network connection. I've not had any real experience with the USB wireless dongles so someone may advise against this but I've seen them working fine on a mates computer and also on a SMART TV and you've still got an onboard ethernet port if you need better data rates.

 

The only thing with that setup is you've got no option for a second graphics card in crossfire down the track or other expansion slots for other cards you may end up wanting to run...but you may upgrade to a high end dual GPU card in the future and simply be happy with what's already supported onboard.

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

[Gagzila]

Ok, got some benchmarks on the SSDs...not the results I was expecting but then I don't know how they relate to the hardware specs, if other people could comment on their finding that would be great so I can find out whether mine are not running at their optimum.

 

I did one run after a fresh windows install, 60GB with OS

 

120GB for games, empty currently

 

I then setup my four 2TB HDDs in RAID 10, installed the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers and setup 4 partitions, then re-ran the benchmarks...I was able to do this with setting the BIOS back to AHCI mode for the SSDs after setting up the RAID

 

120GB

 

It also gave me the option to test the RAID partitions, so tried one out...the speeds surprised me on the SEQ test but as soon as she hit the 4K tests it bogged right down, to the point I couldn't be bother waiting half an hour for it to finish one test and so aborted it

 

Below are the OCZ specs on these SSDs from their website:

 

60GB Max Performance*

Max Read: up to 525MB/s

Max Write: up to 475MB/s

Random Write 4KB: 50,000 IOPS

Maximum 4K Random Write: 80,000 IOPS

 

90GB - 120GB Max Performance*

Max Read: up to 525MB/s

Max Write: up to 500MB/s

Random Write 4KB: 50,000 IOPS

Maximum 4K Random Write: 85,000 IOPS

 

So going of the benchmark results I am only seeing half performance for some reason but at the same time, I have no idea how comparable the results from the AS SSD Benchmark application are to the actual specs provided by OCZ...if someone else can comment on their experiences and what they think about my results that would be great to give me some idea.

 

Also just thought I would include a quick pic of my storage setup, I have a few mapped network drives setup from my 1TB NAS to so I've got quite the storage options at hand

 

Should start getting some game benchmarks up soon.

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

[Mercman]

like the pics.

 

the build looks awesome.

 

congrats!!!

[OrangeJuice]

What on earth are you doing with 9TB?? Also only 111GB for games? Rage alone would fill up 1/5th of that.

Edited October 24, 2011 by OrangeJuice

[Gagzila]

What on earth are you doing with 9TB?? Also only 111GB for games? Rage alone would fill up 1/5th of that.

 

OJ...you and others that post randomly would really do yourselves a service to read the thread from the start before posting, if at all . It's 4TB of local storage as it's 4x2TB HDDs in RAID10 so you loose have of the drives to the mirroring. And I can tell you it will fill up one way or another ...I will probably only have 3-4 games that will benefit from being installed on the SSD and that's generally all I play at a time, so as I finish some games they can be removed and others installed in their place on the 120GB SSD.

 

Getting back to testing out the system....some CPUZ and GPUZ info on the system, the CPU is sitting at it's idle core speed

 

Here are some 3DMark11 benchmarks, using the basic trial install with the performance setting (1280x720)...Default BIOS settings

 

OC turbo multiplier to 4.5GHz and RAM to its actual factory speed of 1600MHz (was running at 1333 on default BIOS settings)

 

OC turbo multiplier to 5.0GHz, RAM stayed the same

 

OC turbo multiplier to 5.0GHz, RAM stayed the same, OC the GPU's cores with Afterburner from 850MHz to 900MHz and memory speed from 1300MHz to 1325MHz (which is max on both settings)

 

I found that the CPU doesn't seem to make use of it's standard clock speed of 3.4GHz, anytime the PC calls it just boosts straight to it's max turbo clock of say 5.0GHz...I thought it was supposed to run standard at it's base clock speed and multiplier and dynamically ramp up to the max if needed. Unless it is doing that and just instantly knows it needs the extra oompf, but it seems even a program excution task such as opening an app will kick the CPU from its idle at 1.6GHz straight to 5.0GHz for the split second it needs the processing power and then drop back to idle. Does anyone else find this odd?

 

The CPU performs admirably OC at 5.0GHz...stable as and doesn't ever break a sweat, easily staying below the 40deg mark. Though the benchmark software doesn't seem that process heavy or constant so may be false results. What's a good program for testing stability, I've seen a lot of people using something called Prime95?

 

That's it for the night anyway, some actual game benchmarks will be next which should give a better indication of overall performance as the 3D benchmark only runs on a single monitor and doesn't seem to bother the beast to much really

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

Edited October 24, 2011 by Gagzila

[Fogel]

What controller are you using on the SSD? I recommend Intel and not Marvell. Ensure you also have the controller/driver support for 2TB and above.

 

Looks like your lack of HDD speed is from the drivers/controllers you are using, but without seeing your config in person it is hard to know.

[Black64]

What on earth are you doing with 9TB?? Also only 111GB for games? Rage alone would fill up 1/5th of that.

 

Exactly what I was going to say. +1

[Gagzila]

What controller are you using on the SSD? I recommend Intel and not Marvell. Ensure you also have the controller/driver support for 2TB and above.

 

Looks like your lack of HDD speed is from the drivers/controllers you are using, but without seeing your config in person it is hard to know.

 

Hi Fogel,

 

Your post seems about as coherent as Michael's (Stonerboy) was in my Drives and Storate forum thread

 

As El_Capitan so exactly described my setup in that thread, my setup is as below:

 

Marvel Sata 6GB port 1 - Spare

Marvel Sata 6GB port 2 - DVDRW Drive

 

Intel Sata 6GB port 1 - 120GB SSD

Intel Sata 6GB port 2 - 60GB SSD

 

Intel Sata 3GB port 1 - 2TB HDD

Intel Sata 3GB port 2 - 2TB HDD

Intel Sata 3GB port 3 - 2TB HDD

Intel Sata 3GB port 4 - 2TB HDD

 

When you say lack of HDD speed I assume you mean SSD speed? As that is what I was asking about LOL. And when you say driver support for 2TB and above, do you mean for the HDDs? As yeah the SSDs are only 60 and 120GB. The 4TB from my RAID10 setup is working beautifully as you can see in the above screenshot.

 

I've updated their firmware to 2.15 to combat the SSD disappearing issue. I thought maybe I needed a tool to align the start of the data better but from what I've seen in before and after benchmarks, it's only a marginal increase in performance, like an extra 50mb/s on say the SEQ test where I'm at half speed compared to the specs. But then do people think the AS SSD results are directly comparable to factory specs? As I remember reading, it's a self made benchmark program by some programmer that misses out on support on a few things and is just good for a general comparison when changing / updating settings?

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

[medbor]

Hi Fogel,

 

Your post seems about as coherent as Michael's (Stonerboy) was in my Drives and Storate forum thread

 

As El_Capitan so exactly described my setup in that thread, my setup is as below:

 

Marvel Sata 6GB port 1 - Spare

Marvel Sata 6GB port 2 - DVDRW Drive

 

Intel Sata 6GB port 1 - 120GB SSD

Intel Sata 6GB port 2 - 60GB SSD

 

Intel Sata 3GB port 1 - 2TB HDD

Intel Sata 3GB port 2 - 2TB HDD

Intel Sata 3GB port 3 - 2TB HDD

Intel Sata 3GB port 4 - 2TB HDD

 

When you say lack of HDD speed I assume you mean SSD speed? As that is what I was asking about LOL. And when you say driver support for 2TB and above, do you mean for the HDDs? As yeah the SSDs are only 60 and 120GB. The 4TB from my RAID10 setup is working beautifully as you can see in the above screenshot.

 

I've updated their firmware to 2.15 to combat the SSD disappearing issue. I thought maybe I needed a tool to align the start of the data better but from what I've seen in before and after benchmarks, it's only a marginal increase in performance, like an extra 50mb/s on say the SEQ test where I'm at half speed compared to the specs. But then do people think the AS SSD results are directly comparable to factory specs? As I remember reading, it's a self made benchmark program by some programmer that misses out on support on a few things and is just good for a general comparison when changing / updating settings?

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

You should still be far above 300 in both read and write. try with other programs (read a review of your discs and compare with the same programs on you discs)

 

Do you volt clock at all for the turbospeeds? You might see a crash otherwise when things get intensive. My favorite program for stability testing is OCCT (linpack) because it usually gives fast results, then after an hour or so you can move to a long duration of prime95. Riva tuner can overclock your gpus higher if you need it.

[Stonerboy779]

Haha

 

Make fun of the crappy keyboard on my phone screen. Also starting work at 6am takes its toll.

 

Nice scores on 3DMark but you can get it higher than that

 

The speed of those SSDs hardly seems right and I thought like Fogel that you had used the marvel controller and not Intel. However it seems El_Capitan has you steered the right way with connections. However have you double checked your mobo specs to see which ports are which.

[Gagzila]

You should still be far above 300 in both read and write. try with other programs (read a review of your discs and compare with the same programs on you discs)...Do you volt clock at all for the turbospeeds? You might see a crash otherwise when things get intensive. My favorite program for stability testing is OCCT (linpack) because it usually gives fast results, then after an hour or so you can move to a long duration of prime95. Riva tuner can overclock your gpus higher if you need it.

 

That's a good idea Medbor, will try that out and see how I go regarding the SSDs. For the voltage, I used the XMP mode in the BIOS which automatically updates memory and power settings for the OC your running, PC voltage just sits on auto and seems fine.

 

Haha ...Make fun of the crappy keyboard on my phone screen. Also starting work at 6am takes its toll....Nice scores on 3DMark but you can get it higher than that ...The speed of those SSDs hardly seems right and I thought like Fogel that you had used the marvel controller and not Intel. However it seems El_Capitan has you steered the right way with connections. However have you double checked your mobo specs to see which ports are which.

 

LOL, fair enough...my typing wasn't the most legible last night either typing replies...had to correct myself many times and edit a post or two

 

Definitely have the right ports as per listed in the mobo manual. Will try finding a review on the SSDs and running the same benchmark software to see what I get.

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

[Fogel]

Sorry, I'm a slow typer so my mind definitely thinks faster than I can type ...and since I'm pretty slow overall you can imagine just how slow I type.

 

As you caught on and as Stoner pointed out, I just wanted to make sure you connected your SSDs to the Intel Sata III ports and not Marvell. Looking at some of the benchmarks online (really quickly i might add as it is almost go home time) it looks like you are in the right vicinity with your benchmarks. We'll see what you come up with in your searches as you have a more vested interest so will probably do a more thorough job searching, heh.

 

Oh and I also wanted to make sure you installed the correct controllers/drivers and just didn't install everything off of your motherboard disc. Also best to get the latest and greatest from the web as the disc almost always has old drivers on it. Sounds like you are staying on top of it as you installed the latest firmware.