Topic: New machine setup... (Read 1321 times)

unless ur going with SSD that's on sale/rebate (making it around $1 a Gb)... ur better off using a laptop drive (ie momentus XT: which is a great hybrid drive that has performance similar to ssd but also have large capacity) or you can always buy 16Gb that has fast write to just run minning off it...

yes crossfire decreases mining performance. but if you're only mining casually and your primary focus is games i wouldn't worry about it too much

I have one game which I play where the difference between 7-7-7 and 9-9-9 has an effect on the game... Dwarf Fortress!

First of all, Windows hoarding memory is a GREAT thing.  It does cool stuff like that to prefetch commonly used software and programs, which means they launch much more quickly.  The more RAM Windows uses, the more responsive your system is going to be.

Secondly, Zncon, ram speeds have virtually nothing to do with performance, unless all of your other equipment is very high end.  The only place you'll find an improvement is in synthetic benchmarks.  Always go for more RAM GB than higher RAM speeds.

Thirdly, if you're going to be mining at all, I would definitely go with the ATI cards.  NVIDIA cards may be a slightly better value for gaming, but all of that value would be lost in just a month of mining.  NVIDIA cards would lose more in electricity than you would gain by mining, so if you want to mine, you can't go NVIDIA, or you will lose money the moment you start mining.

Fourthly, the OP didn't say anything about overclocking, so I don't know why you all are concerned about how he might have to lower his overclock to use more RAM.

viper, my recommendation is to go with the CPU/motherboard you specified, don't go for 32GB of RAM (as others pointed out, you would need very expensive high-density sticks to do so), but 16GB would be nice (8GB will start bottlenecking general system performance in the near future), and go with an ATI card since you want to mine.

IMO 32gb sounds nice, but you're going to end up sacrificing speed to hit that. I think you'd be better off with 8gb or 16gb and some 7-7-7 (or faster) chips.

ok OP, based on your last post, it looks like money IS a factor. ditch the 6990, it's hard to find and also overpriced, get two 6970 instead and crossfire them. and i asked earlier, what are you going to be doing with the computer to be wanting 32gb of memory? what makes you think windows will hog 32gb of memory for itself? i bet you won't even use over 8gb for gaming, mining, and general daily usage. do you wallet a favor and grab 2x4gb for $50 instead

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104266

Well congrats, and if I can give you some advice - put that money in a college fund instead.  You'll thank yourself so hard in 18 years you'll knock a hole in your chest from patting yourself on the back.

It's best to use 2 RAM modules on a dual channel board or 3 modules on X58. Adding more modules puts more stress on the IMC and can easily force you to lower your CPU overclock to get it stable.

I admit it's been a while since I've messed with CPU overclocking but that's really the first I've ever heard of such a thing.  From what I do understand of modern memory controllers, specifically their decoupling of CPU/memory clocks and voltages, I can't see why it would be a problem.  Whatever, OT.

I can say if you're building a gaming machine, build a gaming machine.  Unless you're mining on it 24/7 it's not going to pay for itself anytime soon, and from the specs it sounds like you've got a bit of cash to throw at it.  There's nothing more disappointing than going 'budget' or making compromises when you don't need to.

using a somewhat outdated x58 chipset you could easily get 32gb of memory that or a server grade motherboard. Nvidia cards are no good as haploid said. for gaming that machine sounds like overkill but typical the goal of high end. for mining some of the choices are simply silly but since this is dual purpouse ...

are these parts already bought?

even when going from 4gb to 8gb, system stability is affected when overclocking the CPU and/or memory. now 32gb is 4 times this much, i can't imagine it wouldn't affect stability, even when not overclocking. and on top of that, Z68 chipsets only has 4 slots for memory, so to get 32gb, you need extremely high density memory sticks. currently, there's only a few models of 8gb memory sticks, which are at premium prices right now. i'm almost certain it's not possible to populate all 4 slots with 8gb density sticks, but it would be a nice $800 experiment.

Why would this effect system stability?  A bad DIMM perhaps, but as long as the OS can address all the memory there should be no stability hit..

nvidia is out of the question if you're going to have it as a part time mining rig. with the current difficulty and profit, don't bother mining if you decide to go with nvidia. and as a gaming rig, quad crossfire doesn't scale as well. seems like money isn't an issue, so i would just get a single 6990 or 2x 6970.

32gb of memory is just absurd. what programs will you be running? unless you'll be doing a lot of VM stuff, 32gb of system memory is way overkill, and it will probably throw off system stability.

.