first off i just gotta say, thank you all of you guys for putting your two cents in.... or in zzz2496's case, his two dollars and change in... hahaha
First off let me tell you guys how i'll be using my pc... It will be a high end gaming machine and it will be used for rendering and publishing videos to the internet... Alot of work will be done on it aswell... The main thing performance wise I want out of this pc is to be able to play the most current games (bfbc2 and the such) on high level graphic settings AND record the gameplay with FRAPS while still achieving atleast 60fps... This is a "way out there" goal... And i still have my doubts as to wether or not i'll be able to achieve this with my upgrade that's coming by wednesday...
My current build has a core2quad (q9300 45nm) clocked at 3.5ghz with 8Gb of G.Skill ddr2 1000 (PC2 8000) ram, and two WD 500gb caviar 7200 rpm hard drives (not in RAID 0).... I previously had a 4870hd, but I upgraded to two Saphire hd5970's... And I am using Windows Vista 64bit
Now, I know that two 5970's might be overkill, but i am at a loss for what is the culprit in the slowdown when i record video in-game... When gaming currently I achieve an average of 60fps on max settings and running an in-game resolution of 2560x1600... But when I hit the record button the framerate gets cut in half or worst...
Now, I'm thinking the main two culprits are the CPU, maybe the RAM, but mostly the hd write speed performance... I really don't know if RAID0 will help with write speed performance, or if recording uncompressed video to SSD's will increase the performance while recording...
What i'll be getting on wednesday is the new 6core cpu from intel... the core i7-980x... an Intel 80gb SSD (X25-M Mainstream).... And 8gb of DDR3 2200 (PC317600) ram...
Their are reason's I made these choices for parts... When I run 3dmark Vantage currently, obviously the 3d card score is double that of the CPU score... So my mind tells me that the 5970 was made to be paired with current generation technology... I also found other stats for the i7-980x and they have a score that is up to 7x better than my core2quad @3.5ghz... I also chose this RAM speed because the Rampage 3 can handle it, and it is twice the speed of my old ddr2 ram...
So what I am hoping for is enough performance to game on current generation games with atleast a 60fps while recording video... What I'm looking for here is hard-drive advice and any other advice i could get with achieving this...
as for the killerNIC... I noticed the difference when I had my CPU clocked at 2.5ghz (stock settings)... When I overclock my CPU to 3.5ghz, that speed can handle the networking work etc... I believe that was the only advantage if anything that the killerNIC offered, was offloading the networking from the CPU to the NIC itself... I could be wrong though... ZZZ that was an excellent post you made, I learned a great deal from it, thanks a ton bro... Makes me want to upgrade my router, although this linksys has treated me well imo... To me, Lag has never really been that big of an issue for me, aside from those random times that everyone in my house is downloding/uploading everything they can... that really sucks... So I mean, every once in a while you're gonna get lag no matter what you do... I just figured that the KillerNIC would reduce the frequency of times i'd get that super lag... it might of, but probably not...
If you guys think that going with the SATA pci-e card will give me a better chance of having a high performance system that will get me the performance I want then let me know...
Wow, I see now... I don't know about FRAPS, and I don't really "care" about it either. But here's the thing, recording a video stream that's HIGHER than HD video (that sounds wicked, but all normal in computer world) is quite taxing, but mostly it's at the your storage (uncompressed video), if the video is compressed on the fly, then the burden will shift to your CPU instead HDD. But that's that. I think with i7-980X, it will help quite a bit
. Btw, why not go multi socket proc mainboard? If you are to do a lot video rendering, the extra cores will help a lot (dual octo core hyperthreaded Xeon monster looks very enticing...).
As for KillerNIC, I'd still stay away from them. Here's why, other than the technical aspect I've told you earlier, since they bypass everything ever known in Windows network stack, if for some reason they are to close their doors, very remote possibility of anyone can help you. I personally will go with server NICs, the one that's proven and is supported at least 5 years. There is a TOE engine in Intel NICs, the one that has iSCSI support usually have a powerful TOE, and Intel's driver is known for it's stability (well, some aren't too stable, but it's the minority), and well support from Intel. They won't close down their door without some ground shaking earth shattering news... Yet you're using i7-980X, CPU usage for network processing overhead is so minuscule, you can safely ignore the overhead (trust me, it's not even registering in Task Manager). See, the network code of a game is independent of it's UI code. The rate you can spew data to the network over time doesn't increase even if you jump + shoot someone on the head + reloading + grabbing an item while in the air + at the same time you turn your head 180 degree to shoot another player, and killed him/her with a head shot... The data size most of the time is roughly the same. The rate your PC spew that data is most of the time constant too. The overhead latency of a game to move from one layer to another in Windows network stack is in microsecond, it's undetectable. If a user's data sent to the server is fluctuating, what will happen to the server when there's 50.000 users connected and killing each other? It'll stop responding in effort of processing those mountains of data... So... KillerNIC is really not making any sense, any reason to be purchased, it's just not that needed.
As for your storage controller, go with SAS card, it can interface with SATA without any problem, and you'll be able to upgrade to SAS 6Gbps disks if you need to in the future. And the RAID implementation in SAS cards are the "proper" one. Some of the higher end SAS card even have dual core processor for RAID checksum/parity calculation, some have memory slots (several cards can support up to 2GB DDR2 RAM as buffer) so you can buffer the random data your computer generating in high speed and write it at max storage device speed at it's leisurely time. At times, you'd be able to make an external box, filled with just HDDs and a power supply, and connect to them using the SAS interconnect... Direct Attached Storage on a SEPARATE box, running at 6Gbps per storage device, ain't that speedy enough?
As for the HD5970, go for it if you really need to play everything above 60fps, and live with the micro stuttering in the process... Enjoy your build. Good luck
zzz2496
