Choosing the right hardware for a new PC

Posted at November 10, 2010

Every few years, there’s that feeling making me nervous: you need to get new computer hardware! But which components? If you don’t follow the technical evolution closely, you’ll get lost in a few months. But especially now, as SSDs got cheaper and new technology like DDR3 and CPUs advances, this is a very interesting topic.

So what’s “the” optimal solution? This depends of course. My optimal solution is a well-balanced, sophisticated system able to deliver high performance (gaming) while being as quiet and power-saving as possible.

This post is a summary of various reviews and I try to list hardware pieces from every needed category that stand out because they’re for example very power-efficient or have a good price/performance ratio.

CPU

I’ll only list Intel CPUs here as my experience with AMD CPUs has faded. This aims to be a simplified summary of Intel’s newer CPUs coming into consideration.

There are currently four different socket types:

So with Sandy Bridge or rather LGA1155 there’s no need to choose the “high performance” or “low performance” road and being stuck on it. All CPUs share the same socket, as LGA2011 isn’t released yet and it will probably be too pricey for just a gaming system. 32nm manufacturing leads to lower TDP. Current i7 are between 82-130W TDP, Sandy Bridge i7 range will be 35-95W, which is a nice improvement in energy usage.

What’s left to choose? I want a 32nm CPU, but if I choose LGA1366 I’m pretty much limited to two “old” CPUs with 130W TDP on a socket which probably won’t receive many new updates. OK, then Sandy Bridge. Which one is hard to decide right now, possible candidates can be found here. One word about the integrated GPU: if you add a second, “real” GPU, the internal one will be deactivated and won’t consume any power.

Update: Which chipset? For end-users there are two variants named H67 and P67. The main difference is quite imporant:

(Source: ht4u.net, anandtech.com)

That’s just silly. I really hope this isn’t true. One might be tempted to wait for the Z68 chipset.

RAM

DDR2 was dual-channel, now with the new DDR3 technology you can triple-channel them. Additionally, they run on 1.5V (DDR2: 1.8V) so this saves some energy. If your budget allows it, choose modules with the maximum frequency supported by your mainboard, it might increase your FPS in some cases.

Mainboard

That’s a hard decision. I built systems with MSI and Asus mainboards, the latter has caused more troubles due to silly automatic overclocking settings. And Asus software is just crappy, the only useful tool is Asus Update utility for BIOS upgrades. My needs are:

There can be pretty big differences in power consumption between different mainboard manufacturers (hint: MSI seems to lead in this area based on past reviews (1, 2).

Power supply (PSU)

Buy one that is 80 PLUS certified (they list every certified PSU there). This ensures that the energy waste of your PSU is minimized to 20% or less measured on three different load levels.

Additionally, make sure you don’t just buy the cheap 1200W PSU to be on the safe side. Check your requirements first to get an idea which amount of wattage you need, then go to 80plus.org and select an affordable PSU with a high efficiency in your wattage range. Also read this guide (german).

Graphics (GPU)

Personally I’m no fan of SLI or Crossfire. Seems the micro stuttering problem still exists (video demonstrating that issue). Based on the fact that the Sandy Bridge CPUs won’t be available before 2011, it’s not a good idea to make GPU decisions right now. I tend more to AMD at the moment, though.

Update: due to a hardware failure I had to decide right now. Based on raw performance, NVIDIA seems to lead again. Only CrossFire setups can beat a single GTX 580 at the moment. As this is not an option money- and power-wise, I won’t consider those dual-card setups. The separation is pretty clear right now, as AMD/ATI cards tend to suck less power but not being able to beat single-card GPUs like GTX 570/580. Just follow the rule of thumb “less power consumption+less performance = ATI, higher power consumption+more performance = NVIDIA”.

Why don’t go for the max? Many of the current games are released for consoles then ported to the PC platform. They won’t require the latest GPU performance/features, so for me personally there’s no need to buy a monster. I just want to make sure the card has DX11 and is not drawing too much power in idle or 2D.

This led me to the HD 6950 which was released mid-December 2010. Additionally, if you get one while it’s hot, you’ll be able to unlock extra shaders, making your HD 6950 almost an HD 6970. You’ll need ATI Winflash to extract your current BIOS, then apply a patch to unlock extra shaders (run the script run.bat) and then flash the modified BIOS with ATI Winflash again. The original article told to flash a HD 6970 BIOS which is absolutely possible, but might break some cards (see the table at the bottom of the article).

Disk

My tactics are: rather small and fast (access time) SSD with high MTBF for OS and programs, big and pretty fast harddisk for games, downloads etc. Most SSDs use significantly less power than normal harddisk drives (exception: Crucial RealSSD). If you buy one in an aluminium case, the already low temperature will drop again compared to an SSD in a plastic case.

Look for these specs when choosing an SSD:

Below you’ll find most relevant controllers I could find with pro and cons. 
SandForce
+ Higher write performance than others
+ Lower power consumption
+/- newer models don’t use any cache
- Higher access times

Intel
+ Performance
- Price
- X25-M G1/G2: sequential write speed

Indilinx
+ is growing
+ good but not best performance

JMicron
- Had (has?) issues with stuttering, general bad performance

Samsung
- slow (used in MacBooks and generally OEM systems)

The list