Help Building a New Computer

[greenmedic88]

You ask a lot of questions, but then again, you are planning on dropping a lot of money on this, so it's understandable.

It took the better part of five years for quads to become the standard for any system that requires the extra processing power. Even today, most games run competently on duals, not that I'd recommend one to anyone building a gaming PC, even on the cheap.

Hex cores, barring AMD systems (who have used hex core designs in CPUs available for about or less than $300 simply because they provide less performance per core than their Intel counterparts) are pretty much for workstation or extreme high end gaming PCs currently. Gaming PCs with Intel hex cores don't even see much, if any boost in performance for games simply because no games are optimized to utilize the extra cores.

Even with the current rate of progress due to Moore's Law and all the R&D that goes on to keep the trend going, I don't see hex core systems being common for years, simply because there are limited applications that take advantage of the extra processing power.

For 3D artists who do a lot of rendering, hex cores pay off instantly. Same for video editors who do regular video encoding. Add post processing and video effects in apps like Adobe After Effects and the extra processing power will be put to good use. Photo editing generally doesn't require the same level of processing power barring professionals and digital artists who work with huge files. Music production requires less processing power, but with high end editing systems, it helps.

So maybe the question should be how long are you planning on keeping this system in the state it will be in once you build it, followed by when are you planning on doing a major upgrade like a CPU swap.

Personally, even if I was spending $4000 on an all new system build today (which in the US would pretty much give me carte blanche to build any configuration I wanted), it would be so with the acknowledgement that in no less than 2 years, there will be much faster components available at the same price or less.

So maybe the rule for anyone doing a pricey build is that they should only be doing it for a system they'll only be using for 3-4 years tops barring any major upgrades (I say 2-3). Anyone who justifies an expensive (for their budget) build with the rationale that it will last them forever (or even 5 years) is setting themself up for a disappointing shot of reality. If you're comfortable with that, then buy the best components available today that you can afford.

Otherwise, build a system on an i7 2600/2700k and you'll probably feel a lot better when you build a new system in another 2 years.

For me personally, if I needed to build a moderately priced system from scratch that gave me the best performance for my dollar, who works extensively in Maya (3D artist/animator) and works regularly with HD video (videographer) and digital photography (file sizes in the hundreds of megabytes), I'd build one on a 2600k and use it for the next 18-24 months while waiting for the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors. The only drawback is that I wouldn't be able to re-use the LGA 1155 motherboard (a $200+ part) and RAM, which is nothing at $85 for 16GB in the US currently. Add the $300 2600k and that's really only about $600 worth of parts that I'd be replacing, which is nothing over the span of even 18 months.

If I went with an LGA 2011 motherboard today (cheapest being a $300+ part, closer to $400) my cheapest CPU option (unlocked since I'm an overclocker) is a $600 Core i7 3930K. Add in another $85 for 16GB of RAM and that's about $1,100 worth of components to be replaced, meaning I'd probably be using that set up for quite a bit longer.

For the record, I did a rebuild in early 2010 based on an i7 920, LGA 1366, 12GB RAM and currently do most of my Maya (not rendering) and video editing work on an i7 quad MacBook Pro. The PC is currently only used for rendering and the occasional game so I won't bother to upgrade until I need more processing power, which will probably be to an Ivy Bridge CPU on an LGA 2011 motherboard with 32GB of RAM.