After almost 3 happy years with my Q6600 modestly overclocked to 2.7 gHz, I bit the bullet and built a new editing/animation computer. I spent a lot of time reading and considering options, and I hope the following can save time for anyone wanting to upgrade their hardware.
Intending to keep my computer for at least 3 years, I chose the older X58 (for 1366-pin CPUs) option instead of the trendy P55 (1156-pin CPUs) - mainly because the potential bandwidth is twice as great and, hopefully, I can pop in an affordable 6-core chip with 32 nm traces as soon as one is released by Intel. Generally, it is believed that the X58 provides better future-proofing than the P55 alternative.
Having made that decision, I looked for an i7 920 CPU, for there apparently is no difference, on average, between the 920, 930, and 940. However, I found several 940s that were cheaper than any 920 that I could find, so I bought one for $225 - a steal (from Amazon.com).
These Bloomfield CPUs generally overclock to about 4 gHz, and, at that speed, should perform almost as well as a stock Intel 980X (see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-980x-gulftown,2573-6.html and notice that the 920 at 2.66 gHz is 97 seconds, a bit more than 50% slower than the 60 seconds of the 980X on the Mainconcept render test; so at 4 gHz, which is about 50% faster than 2.66 gHz, the two should be fairly close).
Having read the reviews, I put it on an ASRock X58 Extreme (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cheap-x58-motherboard,2368-3.html, that turned up on sale at Newegg for $180. It has 8 SATA ports (2 of them SATA 6), an eSATA port on the rear with an option to use one of the internal SATAs as a front eSATA, numerous USB-2s and a pair of USB-3s, several PCI and PCIe slots (iincluding a pair of widely-spaced PCIe-16s, in case you want a pair of good graphics cards in SLI in order to benefit from the presumed GPA utilization in the next release of Vegas), and other goodies.
After choosing the CPU and motherboard, the heat sink is the next most important decision. I chose the Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170472724197&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT, for $60. Others show slightly better performance IF you lap their rough interface with fine-grit sandpaper. In contrast, the Tuniq arrives with a mirror finish, ready for business without any needed funny business.
Another important decision relates to the thermal paste that conducts heat from the CPU case to the heat sink. Despite terrible reviews posted by Newegg users, a YouTube video convinced me that I could get better performance from the TX-3 past, which is supplied with the Tuniq heat sink. The video showed that its superiority results only from applying a thick coating of paste.
Easier said than done! My paste rolled up like a carpet each time I tried to apply a thick coat.
I settled for a thin coat and booted up. The temperatures were terrible, especially on Core #0. I pulled it off, and sure enough, I could see the impression left in the paste by the cooling tubes only on 3 of the 4 quadrants of the case's surface. No wonder Core 0 was running hot. But the other cores also were running too hot.
So I pulled off the Tuniq, scraped off the TX-3, and applied Artic Silver 5, carefully following the online instructions .PDF (http://www.arcticsilver.com/methods.html). Incidentally, its a good idea to do all initial testing on the kitchen table - getting at the CPU once it's buried deep in the bowels of a case is tricky. Also, my first ASRock had 2 bad RAM slots, so I had to send it back (Newegg had another in my hands in just 4 days or so). It's a lot easier to do that if you haven't mounted the MB inside the case.
If you have old Arctic Silver 5, don't hesitate to use it. I used a bit of my 4-year-old 3.5-gram tube for tinting (working the paste into the pores of the metal), and I couldn't notice any difference between it and the new tube.
This time I fired up and got pretty good performance - 3.92 mHz before temps rose to 73 degrees C under 100% load - the max working temperature, according to Intel. Again, my Core 0, at peaks of 73 degrees, was running around 7 degrees hotter than the coolest core - despite the fact that I applied what normally would be a too-thick layer of Arctic Silver paste AND rotated the heat sink 180 degrees. Apparently, the CPU case isn't quite flat (a common malady, from what I've read). I guess the OC fanatics lap their CPU cases to a mirror finish with a thick piece of flat glass for a reason.
The Tuniq is so heavy that I worried it might ruin my motherboard during an earthquake (in California). So I fashioned a little metal plate, put a couple of holes through it into the top lip of the case, and mounted one corner of it with a screw that holds on a top plate on the Tuniq. It was an easy job with the case that I bought (Rosewill Challenger), which puts the motherboard at the very top of the box (the power supply is intended to go on the bottom, but I mounted it with industrial Velcro on top of the case - thereby sending its heat up and away from the computer underneath it). That leaves a nice open space at the bottom of the computer box where I can pop in a hard disk or two as needed for projects.
It's important to get a good power supply that will provide stable voltages under load if you want to avoid crashes during rendering. I found an OCZ 600-watt PS with 80%+ efficiency that I suppose is OK - on sale for around $40.
Memory speed doesn't affect rendering or editing much, so I chose 1600 instead of some of the faster RAM that this motherboard could use. I saw some G.Skill "Eco" low-voltage memory (intended for P55 motherboards) that uses less power than others and runs cooler. I wanted it, but it wasn't on ASRock's list of approved RAM. I emailed G.Skill, and next day they told me it would not work.
But I read some reviews on Newegg who said they were using it on their X58 motherboards; I bought it (). Works great at low voltage, pretty fast according to CPU-Z, runs cool, very stable. It comes in 4-gig sets - appropriate for 8-gig p55 motherboards; but in order to get the ASRock motherboard to run the RAM in DDR3 mode, you'll need either 6 or 12 gigs. I got 12 - probably more than needed; but future-proof (I hope).
I also got a low-power VGA card, that not only produces little heat, is mercifully short and slim (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134087) - $44 after rebate and Newegg $20-off sale. The GT240 chip is not the latest and greatest, but it's about 40% faster than my old GSO9600 (it rates 6.8 on Win7's performance meter, out of a max possible of 7.9).
Once upon a time, the worst part of building a new rig was installing all the programs. I had 110 icons on my desktop, most of them programs. I couldn't face re-installing all of them. Poser alone probably would take at least a day - maybe two - in order to install all the content.
So I first tried Paragon's migration utility. After you create a WinPE bootable disk with it, it will look over your hardware in order to know what drivers are needed for operating system (Win7-64, in my case). The it opens the DVD tray so that you can pop in the motherboard CD, which Paragon then searches for finding the needed drivers. This procedure worked the first time I tried it for my WinXP-32 boot hard disk (I dual boot), but not for Win7.
No matter what I did, each Win7 migration would result in USB ports that would recognize neither a USB keyboard, nor a USB hub. . . even with drivers chosen by DriverWhiz. Terrible!
In desperation, I formatted the solid-state drive (the best upgrade I've done in years), then re-installed the old Win7 OS (I use either Paragon or the free Drive Image XML to save boot disk images and to then reconstitute my failed boot disks). Then I plugged the SSD into the ASRock, but booted to the original Win7 upgrade installation DVD instead of to the SSD. From there, I re-installed Win7 on top of the old Win 7 that was on the SSD.
It worked, BUT: I couldn't activate over the internet. Following a tip from another forum, I used the automated phone activation process and FINALLY, done! If you do this, you MUST tell the machine that you have this OS on only one computer; 10 minutes after I said "one," that little white lie became 100% true (anyone want a nice Q6600 computer with no OS?).
Lot's of programs needed to be re-activated, including Vegas - very fast. And everything worked except the WinXP virtual machine - it totally disappeared. No matter, it's a free install that comes with Win7 Pro. I'll just re-install it and the few apps that I had installed on it - maybe an hour's work, at most; presumably . . .
I also installed a couple of utilities that came with the ASRock - an OC timer, and a power-saving utility called IES. The former is a waste of disk space, but the latter is a delight. I set my CPU for 3.92 mHz (185x21) in the BIOS, then enabled the IES. It reduces the CPU speed to around 2 gHz when not under load, then bumps it back up when needed. Seems to have almost no effect on rendering speed, according the RENDERTEST-2010. The CPU drops from a full-load power while rendering of 124 watts down to around 15 watts when nothing is running. With VMWare Player and a few other apps running, the power for the CPU is only 18.5 watts.
The cost of my computer: around $900 (not counting all the hard disks), plus a couple of days of work on the bench, and hours of reading.
The benefit of all this work? About 2.3 up to 2.7 times as fast as my old computer, depending on what I'm doing (rendering from Vegas, or rendering from Twilight for Sketchup, etc.). Worth it? Probably not yet. Maybe later - if I get a nice 6-core CPU that can be overclocked as much as this 940. Definitely not as beneficial as when I replaced the spinning boot disk with the Intel X-25 SSD - now THAT made a huge difference in my delight while working on the computer (programs load SO much faster, boot time is so much faster).
Intending to keep my computer for at least 3 years, I chose the older X58 (for 1366-pin CPUs) option instead of the trendy P55 (1156-pin CPUs) - mainly because the potential bandwidth is twice as great and, hopefully, I can pop in an affordable 6-core chip with 32 nm traces as soon as one is released by Intel. Generally, it is believed that the X58 provides better future-proofing than the P55 alternative.
Having made that decision, I looked for an i7 920 CPU, for there apparently is no difference, on average, between the 920, 930, and 940. However, I found several 940s that were cheaper than any 920 that I could find, so I bought one for $225 - a steal (from Amazon.com).
These Bloomfield CPUs generally overclock to about 4 gHz, and, at that speed, should perform almost as well as a stock Intel 980X (see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-980x-gulftown,2573-6.html and notice that the 920 at 2.66 gHz is 97 seconds, a bit more than 50% slower than the 60 seconds of the 980X on the Mainconcept render test; so at 4 gHz, which is about 50% faster than 2.66 gHz, the two should be fairly close).
Having read the reviews, I put it on an ASRock X58 Extreme (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cheap-x58-motherboard,2368-3.html, that turned up on sale at Newegg for $180. It has 8 SATA ports (2 of them SATA 6), an eSATA port on the rear with an option to use one of the internal SATAs as a front eSATA, numerous USB-2s and a pair of USB-3s, several PCI and PCIe slots (iincluding a pair of widely-spaced PCIe-16s, in case you want a pair of good graphics cards in SLI in order to benefit from the presumed GPA utilization in the next release of Vegas), and other goodies.
After choosing the CPU and motherboard, the heat sink is the next most important decision. I chose the Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170472724197&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT, for $60. Others show slightly better performance IF you lap their rough interface with fine-grit sandpaper. In contrast, the Tuniq arrives with a mirror finish, ready for business without any needed funny business.
Another important decision relates to the thermal paste that conducts heat from the CPU case to the heat sink. Despite terrible reviews posted by Newegg users, a YouTube video convinced me that I could get better performance from the TX-3 past, which is supplied with the Tuniq heat sink. The video showed that its superiority results only from applying a thick coating of paste.
Easier said than done! My paste rolled up like a carpet each time I tried to apply a thick coat.
I settled for a thin coat and booted up. The temperatures were terrible, especially on Core #0. I pulled it off, and sure enough, I could see the impression left in the paste by the cooling tubes only on 3 of the 4 quadrants of the case's surface. No wonder Core 0 was running hot. But the other cores also were running too hot.
So I pulled off the Tuniq, scraped off the TX-3, and applied Artic Silver 5, carefully following the online instructions .PDF (http://www.arcticsilver.com/methods.html). Incidentally, its a good idea to do all initial testing on the kitchen table - getting at the CPU once it's buried deep in the bowels of a case is tricky. Also, my first ASRock had 2 bad RAM slots, so I had to send it back (Newegg had another in my hands in just 4 days or so). It's a lot easier to do that if you haven't mounted the MB inside the case.
If you have old Arctic Silver 5, don't hesitate to use it. I used a bit of my 4-year-old 3.5-gram tube for tinting (working the paste into the pores of the metal), and I couldn't notice any difference between it and the new tube.
This time I fired up and got pretty good performance - 3.92 mHz before temps rose to 73 degrees C under 100% load - the max working temperature, according to Intel. Again, my Core 0, at peaks of 73 degrees, was running around 7 degrees hotter than the coolest core - despite the fact that I applied what normally would be a too-thick layer of Arctic Silver paste AND rotated the heat sink 180 degrees. Apparently, the CPU case isn't quite flat (a common malady, from what I've read). I guess the OC fanatics lap their CPU cases to a mirror finish with a thick piece of flat glass for a reason.
The Tuniq is so heavy that I worried it might ruin my motherboard during an earthquake (in California). So I fashioned a little metal plate, put a couple of holes through it into the top lip of the case, and mounted one corner of it with a screw that holds on a top plate on the Tuniq. It was an easy job with the case that I bought (Rosewill Challenger), which puts the motherboard at the very top of the box (the power supply is intended to go on the bottom, but I mounted it with industrial Velcro on top of the case - thereby sending its heat up and away from the computer underneath it). That leaves a nice open space at the bottom of the computer box where I can pop in a hard disk or two as needed for projects.
It's important to get a good power supply that will provide stable voltages under load if you want to avoid crashes during rendering. I found an OCZ 600-watt PS with 80%+ efficiency that I suppose is OK - on sale for around $40.
Memory speed doesn't affect rendering or editing much, so I chose 1600 instead of some of the faster RAM that this motherboard could use. I saw some G.Skill "Eco" low-voltage memory (intended for P55 motherboards) that uses less power than others and runs cooler. I wanted it, but it wasn't on ASRock's list of approved RAM. I emailed G.Skill, and next day they told me it would not work.
But I read some reviews on Newegg who said they were using it on their X58 motherboards; I bought it (). Works great at low voltage, pretty fast according to CPU-Z, runs cool, very stable. It comes in 4-gig sets - appropriate for 8-gig p55 motherboards; but in order to get the ASRock motherboard to run the RAM in DDR3 mode, you'll need either 6 or 12 gigs. I got 12 - probably more than needed; but future-proof (I hope).
I also got a low-power VGA card, that not only produces little heat, is mercifully short and slim (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134087) - $44 after rebate and Newegg $20-off sale. The GT240 chip is not the latest and greatest, but it's about 40% faster than my old GSO9600 (it rates 6.8 on Win7's performance meter, out of a max possible of 7.9).
Once upon a time, the worst part of building a new rig was installing all the programs. I had 110 icons on my desktop, most of them programs. I couldn't face re-installing all of them. Poser alone probably would take at least a day - maybe two - in order to install all the content.
So I first tried Paragon's migration utility. After you create a WinPE bootable disk with it, it will look over your hardware in order to know what drivers are needed for operating system (Win7-64, in my case). The it opens the DVD tray so that you can pop in the motherboard CD, which Paragon then searches for finding the needed drivers. This procedure worked the first time I tried it for my WinXP-32 boot hard disk (I dual boot), but not for Win7.
No matter what I did, each Win7 migration would result in USB ports that would recognize neither a USB keyboard, nor a USB hub. . . even with drivers chosen by DriverWhiz. Terrible!
In desperation, I formatted the solid-state drive (the best upgrade I've done in years), then re-installed the old Win7 OS (I use either Paragon or the free Drive Image XML to save boot disk images and to then reconstitute my failed boot disks). Then I plugged the SSD into the ASRock, but booted to the original Win7 upgrade installation DVD instead of to the SSD. From there, I re-installed Win7 on top of the old Win 7 that was on the SSD.
It worked, BUT: I couldn't activate over the internet. Following a tip from another forum, I used the automated phone activation process and FINALLY, done! If you do this, you MUST tell the machine that you have this OS on only one computer; 10 minutes after I said "one," that little white lie became 100% true (anyone want a nice Q6600 computer with no OS?).
Lot's of programs needed to be re-activated, including Vegas - very fast. And everything worked except the WinXP virtual machine - it totally disappeared. No matter, it's a free install that comes with Win7 Pro. I'll just re-install it and the few apps that I had installed on it - maybe an hour's work, at most; presumably . . .
I also installed a couple of utilities that came with the ASRock - an OC timer, and a power-saving utility called IES. The former is a waste of disk space, but the latter is a delight. I set my CPU for 3.92 mHz (185x21) in the BIOS, then enabled the IES. It reduces the CPU speed to around 2 gHz when not under load, then bumps it back up when needed. Seems to have almost no effect on rendering speed, according the RENDERTEST-2010. The CPU drops from a full-load power while rendering of 124 watts down to around 15 watts when nothing is running. With VMWare Player and a few other apps running, the power for the CPU is only 18.5 watts.
The cost of my computer: around $900 (not counting all the hard disks), plus a couple of days of work on the bench, and hours of reading.
The benefit of all this work? About 2.3 up to 2.7 times as fast as my old computer, depending on what I'm doing (rendering from Vegas, or rendering from Twilight for Sketchup, etc.). Worth it? Probably not yet. Maybe later - if I get a nice 6-core CPU that can be overclocked as much as this 940. Definitely not as beneficial as when I replaced the spinning boot disk with the Intel X-25 SSD - now THAT made a huge difference in my delight while working on the computer (programs load SO much faster, boot time is so much faster).