Catching up with new hardware..

[Bill_Bright]

AIO (all-in-one) cooling has become quite good

I am glad you say this and I agree 100%. In fact, all OEM cooling has become quite good in recent years in spite of what you may have heard or wish to believe. It is critical to remember that ONLY Intel and AMD provided cooling solutions (fan, heatsink and TIM - thermal interface material) are warrantied to protect the CPUs they come with. And neither Intel or AMD want to replace their CPUs or coolers because of heat. For this reason, OEM coolers are more than adequate to provide sufficient cooling, even with mild to moderate overclocking - in a properly cooled case, of course, keeping in mind it is the case's responsibility to provide a sufficient supply of cool air flowing through the case. The CPU fan need only toss the CPU's heat into that flow.

It is also a fact that today's OEM coolers are much quieter than they used to be too. Perhaps not as quiet as some aftermarket coolers, but still quiet - quieter than many water cooled systems and graphics cards.

Unless you will be doing extreme overclocking, or need "silent running" in a home theater environment, I see no reason to go with an aftermarket cooler if your CPU comes with an OEM supplied cooler. Contrary to what some believe, lower temps are NOT automatically better. That is, a CPU running at 55°C will perform just as well, be just as stable and have the same life expectancy as a CPU running at 45° or 35°C. Properly cooled and maintained within its "normal operating range" is critical, but achieving lower than that does nothing, but provide bragging rights.

 

[hat]

I have to disagree with you @Bill_Bright, at least about Intel CPUs. It's no secret Intel has been cheaping out on cooling. They've used the same crappy cooler design for years, and now we have the even crapper half sized version of what used to come with the Pentium 4/D, older Core 2 Duos, and some i7 chips. Couple that with the abandonment of the solder/epoxy they used to use to mate the core to the IHS with in favor of some crappy thermal paste, and you've got a recipe for failure. Sure the chips can take 90C, but is that a comfortable number for any of us to see? Most likely no. And, even if they can run at 90C, I've heard too much about thermal throttling to trust that. And then what about longevity? How long can we expect a chip subjected to that much heat to last? I was still using a Q6600 until not too long ago, and I don't expect it to have lasted as long as it did with those temps.

Video cards however have had more than adequate cooling for ages. Gone are the days everyone has an aftermarket cooler on their GPU. There are plenty of great cooler designs on non reference cards, and even the reference cooler works just fine, especially with the way things are going with more efficient cards.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Not sure how useful PCI-E SSD would be honestly, unless you really need extreme throughput (more extreme than what traditional sata 3 SSD can offer) for some reason. I understand the M.2 SSD can be a nice idea, but for a desktop PC? Maybe not so much. It could be useful for laptops or maybe some really thin 1u servers or something. I remember one time my uncle showing me these servers he got from Dell which had a USB port right on the motherboard, and he was using it to load router software or something off a USB drive. M.2 could be radically better for a scenario like that, but for a desktop PC it kind of misses its mark IMO.

It's all relative to how much you value speed. Everything from booting/rebooting, to installs/uninstalls, to the speed of any program running on it, to level loading, texture streaming, and script and asset loading in games is going to be significantly faster.

There are basically 3 classes of SSD speed, the older outdated 2.5" that are at best twice the speed of a HDD, the newer 2.5" that are commonly over 500Mb/s read/write, and the better of the M.2 cards that start at 650Mb/s write and go up to 1500Mb/s.

Many scoffed at SSDs in general when they first came out because back then the cost, speed, capacity and reliability weren't justifiable for most. With M.2 drives the skepticism was more about not being able to use them for bootup when they first released. With the advent of the UEFI BIOS though, that all changes.

Clearly manufacturer's have embraced M.2, pretty much all 1151 MBs have it. They support it because they've seen a drastic rise in M.2 use among consumers. It's smaller, faster, and requires no cable hookup. Just the fact that M.2 drives had to be pulled out of OEM stock to satisfy demand in the desktop market should tell you that it IS in fact a big deal.

Like I said above, what is more a cause for skepticism is the abysmal performance of Skylake CPUs. They're pretty much a waste of the nice Z170 chipset. Intel have gone from pulling off minuscule performance boost tricks with their trickle out tick tocking, to literally sitting on their haunches and waiting for a biscuit, as if to say, "Isn't a better chipset enough"?

Here's looking at you in 2016 AMD. I'm rooting for Zen to do good things and at the very least wake Intel the hell up from their cyber snooze.

BTW, Bill, I could not get your "Intel admits marginalizing..." link to work. It's a good read though.

Here's a working link...

http://wccftech.com/skipping-desktop-broadwell-cpus-2014-mistake-admits-intel-svp/

I would like to add as well that I don't feel it's merely skipping new architectures and clinging to refreshes that has hurt Intel's desktop sales. The focus on integrated graphics and low wattage/heat is just as much of a concern. It's no coincidence that Skylake failing to best the prior gen came at a time when onboard graphics are being pushed higher and higher, taking precedence even over onboard memory controllers.

The 4790k should be looking at the 6700k like this , saying, "What's all the fuss about"? We often look at AMD's blunders with face in palm and say, why? What about Intel's blunders though. If they want to compete on the APU front, do it with a proper chip designed specifically for that purpose. There's no sense in mucking up a perfectly good desktop gaming chip with graphics no desktop gamer will ever use. It's looking as bad as MS' one size fits all OS for desktops and tablets.

 

[kn00tcn]

I've already learned a ton from this thread. SSDs were supporting operating systems and I am not sure about Sata III back then. This new PCI-E interface for SSDs is certainly new on me. I haven't googled it yet but it sure sounds weird. :/

I imagine chipsets and newer motherboards are going to be the most difficult part of this. I can't tell when someone is talking about a platform, chipset, or socket. :/

Don't know if anyone remembers but AMD was ruling the budget scene back when, and the i7 920 was top notch. I remember the idea of i5 and i3 and believe it was marketed then. Now I have to learn different gens to understand what i3 surpasses i7 and such if thats the case, which it seems to be.

I feel like a total dunce now and I felt like there was nothing to do or learn back then which could be the reason for my hiatus.

i'm trying to understand your thought process, it appears as if you're assuming there's all this new complexity & are also negatively putting down your own ability

we have had RAID cards in pcie back in your time, they had sata ports, you plug your drives in, you get high performance, so how can it be weird? pcie is a slot that supports data transmission & power delivery, it's not to do with graphics although that's the most common use of course

as for the gens.. again, do not cloud yourself with anxiety, higher number is usually better, if a number looks way off, you simply search it, find out its year relative to the other model you are comparing

I learn very well with videos and wondered what would be some good topics to look up? Or if you know of any good Youtube channels, etc.

ouch... to me that's one of the worst ways to learn a set of letters, numbers, diagrams, etc

one idea is to look at 'list of intel chipstes' or 'list of intel sockets' on wikipedia, you would see how the overall idea of a computer hasnt really changed in many years, some features that used to be part of the northbridge chip are being integrated onto the cpu (memory controller, graphics, drive controller, etc)

how is the above chart? you now know the basics of just about everything intel that's consumer desktop, except for the chipsets & sockets

http://ark.intel.com/ intel also provides a bit of an interactive list of everything, you can even compare multiple specific processors like this http://ark.intel.com/compare/75048,65520,52210,37159,29765

feel free to tell me if a wall of text like this is overwhelming

I saw a thread where people are going back and forth about the z170 over the X99 ''chipset'' (correct?) in a thread on here. Can you maybe explain that argument? I can see the difference but is just a preference matter?

see this is perplexing me, it is almost the exact same situation in 2008 that you said you are familiar with, back then the p45 was the upper end consumer chipset & x48 was the workstation/poweruser one that just has more lanes/bandwidth/sata ports/etc

one difference now is the schedule is a bit shifted... there is no x109 chipset yet, & intel usually comes out with the large 'professional' cpu in a given architecture (the codename column above) many months or nearly a year after the consumer launch

anything i say is with the intent of self-improvement, efficiency, or critical thinking, it's to level-up

i am capable of creating animations if it has to come to that

i would go for the overall model numbers first, then learn about performance, power/heat, price, or any of those other details later

as for something new that you might want to get excited about, amd recently released a graphics card that has the gpu & the vram as part of a single core package, plus the vram itself is stacked vertically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory

in 2016, we should be seeing the second generation from amd along with nvidia's first cards

 

[cameronh779]

@kn00tcn

Very helpful post. That picture helped a lot and I saved it to refer to later if needed. Read the articles and such and you were right I am thinking about some of it a little two hard. I'm sure it will all come in due time. Maybe a patience learning exercise.

 

[vega22]

Not sure how useful PCI-E SSD would be honestly, unless you really need extreme throughput (more extreme than what traditional sata 3 SSD can offer) for some reason. I understand the M.2 SSD can be a nice idea, but for a desktop PC? Maybe not so much. It could be useful for laptops or maybe some really thin 1u servers or something. I remember one time my uncle showing me these servers he got from Dell which had a USB port right on the motherboard, and he was using it to load router software or something off a USB drive. M.2 could be radically better for a scenario like that, but for a desktop PC it kind of misses its mark IMO.

i aint totally sure you understand what a pci e ssd is dude, i kinda think you're the one missing the mark here. maybe your uncle could explain this better?

 

[cameronh779]

i aint totally sure you understand what a pci e ssd is dude, i kinda think you're the one missing the mark here. maybe your uncle could explain this better?

Or maybe you?

 

[hat]

i aint totally sure you understand what a pci e ssd is dude, i kinda think you're the one missing the mark here. maybe your uncle could explain this better?

I understand a PCI-E SSD is faster, yet much more expensive than the SATA equivalent in size. Same goes for M.2 except it gets to sit in an itty bitty slot right on the board (still uses PCI-E). I find the need for such throughout in a desktop PC questionable when existing SATA SSDs are doing so well (just my opinion however).

 

[cameronh779]

I understand a PCI-E SSD is faster, yet much more expensive than the SATA equivalent in size. Same goes for M.2 except it gets to sit in an itty bitty slot right on the board (still uses PCI-E). I find the need for such throughout in a desktop PC questionable when existing SATA SSDs are doing so well (just my opinion however).

Makes perfect sense to me. I'd rather put the money into CPU or GPU considering if I already had a SATA SSD.

 

[vega22]

idk the quadrupling of throughput at what is now about 40/45% increase in cost is more than acceptable to my wallet.

as i look at game textures, movie files, even crappy little apps and web pages all growing at stupid rates their need is only going to grow imo. more so as we move away from 1080 being "high def".

but yea, ssd are fine, so are hdd really if you don't mind waiting those extra few seconds for things to load. for me it is those moments i hate the most. the wasted moments.

so hat please tell me more about how m2 and pcie ssd are like usb ports on old servers? i still don't get that part.

 

[hat]

I didn't really compare PCI-E SSD to the USB port I mentioned (although I do understand M.2 basically is PCI-E SSD, but when I think PCI-E SSD I think of a traditional PCI-E card that goes in a regular slot). M.2 however is a neat little slot where you can install your SSD right on the board with no connections (no power/data cables) and it's a done deal. I compared that to the USB port I mentioned for it's small, convenient size. It just plugs in and goes and it's like it's not even there.