Computer Building a PC, give me your thoughts please

[john101]

Sorry, I meant your post: "Suppose you have an 8Gig swap file and you create an 8Gig partition for it. How is the SSD NOT going to write to the exact same place every time?"

edit add:given that the 8gig partition is the 'exact same place'. A 4k file using leveling is written to that 8gig but to different places on the 8gig.

edit add2:

options: turn off swap entirely. maximise RAM. put swap on another drive, hdd or ssd.

all of which, depending on what programs you run and how you use the computer, have their own issues. For me maxing ram and putting the swap (Linux) on a separate HDD is probably a way to go.

ATM I have max ram for the MB and the swap set by linux installation on the main SSD with a couple of, 1 and 2Tb, external mechanical drives for storage.

edit add3: also: maximise the swap space so that the levelling technology has more space to work on. I understand there are limitations to this. 16 g for linux. Don't know about windows.

 

[rbelli1]

How is the SSD NOT going to write to the exact same place every time?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

BoB

 

[phinds]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

BoB

You are not paying attention. Reread post #28

 

[Vanadium 50]

:given that the 8gig partition is the 'exact same place'. A 4k file using leveling is written to that 8gig but to different places on the 8gig.

Swap partitions are not swap files. When a swap partition is activated, the SSD has no idea that it's data is out of date. So it can't just start from scratch and remap the whole partition. Furthermore, typical segments swapped are smaller than the SSD cell size. That also runs the number of writes up. Basically, file systems are smarter than plain old partitions.

 

[john101]

Swap partitions are not swap files. When a swap partition is activated, the SSD has no idea that it's data is out of date. So it can't just start from scratch and remap the whole partition. Furthermore, typical segments swapped are smaller than the SSD cell size. That also runs the number of writes up. Basically, file systems are smarter than plain old partitions.

In order to try to understand what you just posted I'm reading/bookmarking this : https://www.linux.com/news/all-about-linux-swap-space .

 

[rbelli1]

You are not paying attention. Reread post #28

The logical view of whatever you place on the drive is mapped onto the whole underlying storage medium. At least that is the idea. Whether that is actually the case for a particular device is unknown. This also relies on proper operating system support.

So with crap OS support and a crap SSD firmware you are probably right.

BoB

 

[phinds]

The logical view of whatever you place on the drive is mapped onto the whole underlying storage medium

Well, if that's true, then I'm wrong. My assumption is that like on a hard drive (where I know this to be true) once a partition is set, it doesn't move and if you have an 8 gig partition and write an 8 gig file to it, there is exactly one place it can go every time you write it. Perhaps the O.S. treats SSDs differently but I can't see why they would. Perhaps the internal SSD computer can move a partition around for load leveling. I did not think so.

 

[rbelli1]

Perhaps the internal SSD computer can move a partition around for load leveling. I did not think so.

The drive is block based. It knows nothing about partitions or volumes.

Wear leveling is what happens on properly designed drives. It is aided with operating system support by the trim command.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing)

BoB

 

[gvlr96]

GPU's aren't just for gaming. If you use the CPU for graphics I know from experience that even basic web page stuff will take time to load on Pentium processors. I'm not so sure about how an i7 copes with this so you may want to check that out first, but a basic graphics cards below gaming standards will definitely solve this. You might as well have a cheap CD drive as you don't know what the future will hold (software packages still come on CDs). I agree with he commentors saying go for more than 300W. 600W will be a safer bet for now and will give you a better platform for future upgrades

 

[Jamison Lahman]

When building a computer, the smallest pieces are usually the most important and most overlooked. They're both less than $5 and an electrostatic wristband and a motherboard speaker can save you from massive headaches in the future.

I know you said you do not plan on gaming, but GPUs can be extremely useful in parallelizing large computational simulations. See: http://www.nvidia.com/object/what-is-gpu-computing.html and http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html
Nvidia seems to be the leader in GPU computing and is more compatible with CUDA and OpenACC and it has been my experience that AMD GPUs are a nightmare with Linux drivers.

 

[Sherwood Botsford]

Some years ago, I was spec'ing out servers. So I spent a lot of time on Tom's Hardware page, analyzing benchmarks from the several generations of processors and motherboards.

Conclusions: The single biggest factor was front side bus speed. Unless you write code that spends a huge fraction of it's time using on chip cache, talking to memory is first priority. It was worth it to drop the clock rate on the CPU if doing so allowed a smaller divisor for the FSC. Over all an N% increase in FSB speed translated to typically N/3% faster benchmarks. CPU increase of N% translated to about C/10% increase in bench marks.

Second biggest issue: You *really* really want to have enough ram that you don't swap. Pogo Linux now sells servers with a TB of ram. (NOT SSD, *RAM*) Even SSD access time is measured in hundreds of milleseconds.

This was over a decade ago. YMMV

 

[fluidistic]

GPU's aren't just for gaming. If you use the CPU for graphics I know from experience that even basic web page stuff will take time to load on Pentium processors. I'm not so sure about how an i7 copes with this so you may want to check that out first, but a basic graphics cards below gaming standards will definitely solve this. You might as well have a cheap CD drive as you don't know what the future will hold (software packages still come on CDs). I agree with he commentors saying go for more than 300W. 600W will be a safer bet for now and will give you a better platform for future upgrades

I don't plan to get a cheap CD drive, it's been years I haven't used a CD (or DVD), plus if I really need it, my laptop has a CD drive that I guess works. I do not purchase software packages.
The integrated intel GPU that comes with the processor is good enough. Apparently can watch (decode?) 4k videos at 60 fps without trouble which is way more than I will ever need. My screen resolution will be less than that.

When building a computer, the smallest pieces are usually the most important and most overlooked. They're both less than $5 and an electrostatic wristband and a motherboard speaker can save you from massive headaches in the future.

I know you said you do not plan on gaming, but GPUs can be extremely useful in parallelizing large computational simulations. See: http://www.nvidia.com/object/what-is-gpu-computing.html and http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html
Nvidia seems to be the leader in GPU computing and is more compatible with CUDA and OpenACC and it has been my experience that AMD GPUs are a nightmare with Linux drivers.

I'll just touch metal from time to time to discharge myself, I don't think I'll buy an electrostatic wristband.
I hope the motherboard speaker comes with the motherboard, if not... then I don't think I'll buy one.
I know about the GPU's being used in massive numerical simulations but the GPU isn't used in the softwares I have used thus far and I doubt it will be of any importance for the next years for my use.

 

[Jamison Lahman]

I don't plan to get a cheap CD drive, it's been years I haven't used a CD (or DVD), plus if I really need it, my laptop has a CD drive that I guess works. I do not purchase software packages.
I'll just touch metal from time to time to discharge myself, I don't think I'll buy an electrostatic wristband.
I hope the motherboard speaker comes with the motherboard, if not... then I don't think I'll buy one.

Altogether a wristband, speaker, and optical drive will likely cost <5% of you total build, but it's your money.
DVDs can be a nice storage alternative since you will only have one physical drive.

 

[Jamison Lahman]

Not sure if anyone's mentioned but there are online calculators which estimate a build's power consumption which I would highly recommend before selecting a PSU.

 

[rbelli1]

Pogo Linux now sells servers with a TB of ram.

After a quick look I see they offer 12TB of RAM in one model!

BoB

 

[phinds]

After a quick look I see they offer 12TB of RAM in one model!

BoB

I think you mean 12TB of HARD DRIVE space.

 

[rbelli1]

I think you mean 12TB of HARD DRIVE space.

No.

http://www.pogolinux.com/quotes/editsys?sys_id=978801

Look at the Memory dropdown. $171k for the 11TB upgrade from the base unit.

BoB

 

[phinds]

No.

http://www.pogolinux.com/quotes/editsys?sys_id=978801

Look at the Memory dropdown. $171k for the 11TB upgrade from the base unit.

BoB

EEEE GADS !

 

[rbelli1]

EEEE GADS !

Yes!

And you'll probably find them on fleabay in a couple of years for 50 bucks.

BoB

 

[fluidistic]

Not sure if anyone's mentioned but there are online calculators which estimate a build's power consumption which I would highly recommend before selecting a PSU.

I used the power calculator from Pcpartpicker, it was between 100 and 200 W if I remember well. But it was written that the cpu could use 65 W maximum (on Intel's website the TDP is indeed 65 W) but after reading the Wikipedia's article on the TDP, I was left extremely confused. I've read a review of the intel core i7 7700 and the guy said it used up to 106 W under heavy load. So the calculations done by Pcpartpicker seems totally wrong to me now.
Hence a 500 or 600 W PSU is a safe bet for me, as you guys suggested.

DVDs can be a nice storage alternative since you will only have one physical drive.

Like I wrote in the first post, I have an external 500 GB mechanical hard drive (that I use for back ups). I can forget about DVD's :)

 

[john101]

Some thought should be given to choosing a case to house the components in. They can be functional and or fancy.

Factors affecting choice:

Type of motherboard. Generally a case will house most boards. Some latest boards need special cases.

Do some research on cooling, cross ventilation, positive negative pressure.

Consider room to put your hands into access parts.

(I don't buy new cases becuse I've got so many salvaged ones to choose from. I do keep a large all aluminium Lian Li upside down case because I like its fan configuration and large size.

In salvaging a number of cases I get lots of little components that are useful like screws (I particularly like the knurled ones that I can remove and tighten by hand), mountings, motherboard speakers, fans, cables, led's, switches.)

 

[rbelli1]

all aluminium Lian Li

I have one and it is really well built. The all aluminum construction helps with cooling the drives bolted to it. The one I have has removable drive cages and that makes working on it easy. You will pay for the privilege but is money well spent.

BoB

 

[Aufbauwerk 2045]

http://www.cherry.de/cid/index.htm?

 

[fluidistic]

I've ordered all the parts from amazon, I used pcpartpicker and IRC for suggestions.
These were my choices : https://fr.pcpartpicker.com/list/6CtQBP. I also bought a 24' 1920x1080 monitor. I would have liked a 2550x1444 resolution but the prices were almost 3 times higher, not worth it for me.

 

[phinds]

I've ordered all the parts from amazon, I used pcpartpicker and IRC for suggestions.
These were my choices : https://fr.pcpartpicker.com/list/6CtQBP. I also bought a 24' 1920x1080 monitor. I would have liked a 2550x1444 resolution but the prices were almost 3 times higher, not worth it for me.

Hm ... pairing an i7 with only 8Gigs of main RAM seems odd. If you are enough of a power user to make anything like significant use of an i7's capabilities, you are going to want 16Gigs.

 

[fluidistic]

Hm ... pairing an i7 with only 8Gigs of main RAM seems odd. If you are enough of a power user to make anything like significant use of an i7's capabilities, you are going to want 16Gigs.

I don't know whether it's odd. But you're right in that I'll want 16 GB. I picked 8 GB just to see how it goes, if I ever use the swap (I'll put swapiness at 10 or so), I'll seriously consider upgrading to 16 GB.
But 8 GB shouldn't be that small until I use a VM in which case the problem of low RAM might pop up.

 

[rbelli1]

Putting the memory cards in in pairs is often required and usually increases performance even if not required. Some MB can increase memory bandwidth even more if you use 4 modules of all the same size.

BoB

 

[fluidistic]

Putting the memory cards in in pairs is often required and usually increases performance even if not required. Some MB can increase memory bandwidth even more if you use 4 modules of all the same size.

BoB

I didn't know it was sometimes required but I did know that 2 x 4 GB is usually faster than 1 x 8 GB thanks to dual channel. I didn't pick 2 x 4 GB sticks because I may upgrade to 2 x 8 GB in a very near future and I'd like to have some more room for upgrade, and I have only 4 slots.

I forgot to mention I will attempt to build the pc myself once I receive all parts.

 

[fluidistic]

Ok thank you guys, you convinced me to order another 8 GB stick of RAM, same brand, frequency, etc. than the one I had ordered.

 

[fluidistic]

I've just finished to build the computer though I didn't try to power it on yet. Here's is how it looks like: http://imgur.com/MNG4Q6b (http://imgur.com/MNG4Q6b).
I had read how not to mess up thanks to google but I still managed to mess up in a way nobody has ever messed up before : I removed the 4 expansion slots in the back of the case, even though I won't use any of those. So my case is more opened than it should, not that big of a deal, but still. I made this error because I was sure I had to remove "something" (in particular the I/O panel that comes preinstalled with the case, but there were none) because that's what I had read in the tutorials I had read.
There were several steps where I was unsure on how to build, like when I realized the case fan had a 3 pins connection but the motherboard only has 4 pins connectors for fans. Little did I knew that it's normal and I could still plug it.
Or the power to CPU cable, the pins doesn't match the ones on the motherboard (some are square and others have a different form). Again, I didn't know that it's normal and that I could still plug the power cable into the motherboard even though all pins don't match.
All in all, a pretty enjoyable experience.