Solid Snake - Foxhound Unit

[MarshallD3Framp]

Intel Core i7-5960X 3.0GHz 8-Core Processor (£839.99)
Noctua NT-H1 3.5g Thermal Paste (£22.21)
Kingston Savage 64GB (8 x 8GB) DDR4-2800 Memory (£442.67)
Samsung 850 PRO 2TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£647.87)
Western Digital Red Pro 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£129.99)
Corsair 900D ATX Full Tower Case (£269.99)
Samsung SH-224FB/RSMS DVD/CD Writer (£11.75)
LEPA LP-BOL12P-BL 81.5 CFM 120mm Fan (£15.13)
LEPA LP-BOL12P-BL 81.5 CFM 120mm Fan (£15.13)
LEPA LP-BOL12P-BL 81.5 CFM 120mm Fan (£15.13)
LEPA LP-BOL12P-BL 81.5 CFM 120mm Fan (£15.13)
LEPA LP-BOL12P-BL 81.5 CFM 120mm Fan (£15.13)
LEPA LP-BOL12P-BL 81.5 CFM 120mm Fan (£15.13)
Aerocool Touch 2100 Fan Controller (£47.09)
Logitech G910 Orion Spark Wired Gaming Keyboard (£163.55)
Mad Catz R.A.T. 9 Wireless Laser Mouse (£101.97)
Logitech Z506 155W 5.1ch Speakers (£73.99)
Asus ROG SWIFT PG278Q 144Hz 27.0" Monitor (£535.99)
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI) (£609.98)
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI) (£609.98)
EVGA 220-T2-1600-X1 80 PLUS Titanium 1600W (£301.99)
Asus RAMPAGE V EXTREME X99 USB3.1 (£379.19)
EK-KIT X360 (£276.98)
1x Metal Gear Solid Fox Hound (£4.31)
6x EK-Cable PWM Fan Extension (30cm) (£13.38)
Total: £5554.06

[Qwinn]

As someone who has likewise spent over $5000 for his current system, let me throw a bit of advice your way:

1) Why 6 1TB hard drives? That's going to use up pretty much all room you have in your case which will make any attempt to do watercooling brutally difficult. Only reason I can think of for it is if you're looking to do RAID 5 for disk failure protection. If that's what it's for, go for it, though I prefer just doing regular backups personally. If you're just planning on using RAID for performance, better to go with an NVME drive like the Intel 750 or Samsung 950 instead. It'll get you the same or better performance, you can practically remove your entire drive cage to make room for better airflow and any future watercooling you might want to do, and you won't have to deal with the pain in the ass of redoing your RAID setup every time you want to update the BIOS.

2) I'd recommend going with 980Ti's instead of the TITAN X's. With any kind of overclock, the 980TI's pretty much match or exceed Titan reference performance, for a LOT less money. Like half what you're planning to pay up there.

[MarshallD3Framp]

Qwinn wrote:
As someone who has likewise spent over $5000 for his current system, let me throw a bit of advice your way:

1) Why 6 1TB hard drives? That's going to use up pretty much all room you have in your case which will make any attempt to do watercooling brutally difficult. Only reason I can think of for it is if you're looking to do RAID 5 for disk failure protection. If that's what it's for, go for it, though I prefer just doing regular backups personally. If you're just planning on using RAID for performance, better to go with an NVME drive like the Intel 750 or Samsung 950 instead. It'll get you the same or better performance, you can practically remove your entire drive cage to make room for better airflow and any future watercooling you might want to do, and you won't have to deal with the pain in the ass of redoing your RAID setup every time you want to update the BIOS.

2) I'd recommend going with 980Ti's instead of the TITAN X's. With any kind of overclock, the 980TI's pretty much match or exceed Titan reference performance, for a LOT less money. Like half what you're planning to pay up there.

I've actually been thinking about changing the Setup, to a singe 8TB or 6TB HDD, but I want at least 2 HDD's for storage, and what's this samsung 950? Never heard of it... also I've never been too fond Of RAID and have never needed it before, what's so great about it?

[Qwinn]

Well, I just assumed you wanted RAID because of the 6 1TB hard drives, there's no other real reason for spreading them out like that. You can implement RAID in various ways. Raid 5 would allow you to set one of those 6 disks as a checksum disk, such that if any one of them failed, the data on it could be reconstituted from the other 5 discs. It would also perform somewhat faster than disks in a non-RAID format, though probably not as much faster as even a regular SSD. There's also RAID 1 which just sets up each pair of your disks as a mirror of one another, this would give you great protection against disk failure but wouldn't increase performance at all (and in fact might hurt it slightly).

The Samsung Pro 950 and the Intel 750 are NVMe PCIe drives. (The former is M.2, the latter is just a PCIe card that plugs into a regular PCIe slot). I have the Intel 750 1.2Tb drive, but that one is pricey, at almost $1000, there's a cheaper 400Gb version, and the Samsung Pro 950 is 512GB.

These are relatively new drives that have speeds of about 5x that of regular SSD drives, which themselves are 5 times faster than regular hard drives. You *can* get speeds similar to a regular SSD with a RAID 0 setup, but I don't see the point in it. An NVME drive will blow away any RAID setup performance wise, and blows away regular SSD's as well.

Note that the Intel 750 drives are also designed for both enthusiast and data center use, and as such they don't boot very quickly (about the speed of a regular hard drive, really), while their performance after boot is fantastic. The Samsung 950 isn't as rigorous about data integrity (and if you're not running it for a business, there isn't much need to be so rigorous), but it boots a lot faster by all accounts. Performance after boot between the various NVMe drives is comparable.

IMHO, the price point of regular SSD's has fallen to the point that there's no good reason to get regular old platter hard drives anymore, except for serious low budget systems. The system you're setting up clearly isn't low budget. NVMe may not be necessary, but at least go all SSD.

[MarshallD3Framp]

Qwinn wrote:
Well, I just assumed you wanted RAID because of the 6 1TB hard drives, there's no other real reason for spreading them out like that. You can implement RAID in various ways. Raid 5 would allow you to set one of those 6 disks as a checksum disk, such that if any one of them failed, the data on it could be reconstituted from the other 5 discs. It would also perform somewhat faster than disks in a non-RAID format, though probably not as much faster as even a regular SSD. There's also RAID 1 which just sets up each pair of your disks as a mirror of one another, this would give you great protection against disk failure but wouldn't increase performance at all (and in fact might hurt it slightly).

The Samsung Pro 950 and the Intel 750 are NVMe PCIe drives. (The former is M.2, the latter is just a PCIe card that plugs into a regular PCIe slot). I have the Intel 750 1.2Tb drive, but that one is pricey, at almost $1000, there's a cheaper 400Gb version, and the Samsung Pro 950 is 512GB.

These are relatively new drives that have speeds of about 5x that of regular SSD drives, which themselves are 5 times faster than regular hard drives. You *can* get speeds similar to a regular SSD with a RAID 0 setup, but I don't see the point in it. An NVME drive will blow away any RAID setup performance wise, and blows away regular SSD's as well.

Note that the Intel 750 drives are also designed for both enthusiast and data center use, and as such they don't boot very quickly (about the speed of a regular hard drive, really), while their performance after boot is fantastic. The Samsung 950 isn't as rigorous about data integrity (and if you're not running it for a business, there isn't much need to be so rigorous), but it boots a lot faster by all accounts. Performance after boot between the various NVMe drives is comparable.

IMHO, the price point of regular SSD's has fallen to the point that there's no good reason to get regular old platter hard drives anymore, except for serious low budget systems. The system you're setting up clearly isn't low budget. NVMe may not be necessary, but at least go all SSD.

Da. I could go all SSD, but I like at least one HDD in my arsenal, and if I had an all SSD Set up, It's cost me a lot, and since I do major rewriting, it's possible i'd blow through the SSD so I'd rather an SSD for OS and Games/Programs, but an HDD or two for rewrite storage, also, I don't think I'd like a PCIe SSD or an M.2 SSD, since they don't fit my needs so well.

[Qwinn]

Okay, that's fine. I'd go with a single bigger HHD than half a dozen littles ones though. You'll totally choke the airflow in your case with that many hard drives, which would be a shame in a system that high end. And if you ever decide to go custom loop for cooling, where would you fit your pump and reservoir?

Also, I'll reiterate that you could save over $1000 by doing 980Ti's instead of Titan X's, for almost no performance loss. That's money you could use to move up to all SSD or otherwise find something that gets you a lot more performance bang for your buck. Heck, you could take that extra money to siliconlottery and make sure you get a CPU that is already professionally delidded (lowers temps 5-10c) and can overclock well instead.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-and-geforce-gtx-titan-x-review-4k-...

"It's notable that Nvidia hasn't reduced speeds for the GPU or the RAM, cache size, or any other specification - you're getting what is pretty much 99 percent of the useful parts of a Titan X at a serious discount."

"Verdict
At the end of our game runs, we are left with no compelling reasons to consider the Titan X over the 980 Ti at current prices. While it is no doubt a tiny bit more powerful, it isn't worth 50 percent more money. In our minds, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is the far more sensible option for anyone unless they just really want to brag about having the best of everything, or they envision hitting the 6GB RAM limit with multiple monitors or some other such highly specialised use case. "

And since you're getting two cards, you'd actually have to break a 12GB RAM limit to lose anything. I can't think of many situations that could do that, maybe trying to run 4x surround monitors at a high resolution, but you didn't list those.

Note also that this is a comparison of reference 980Ti to reference Titan X. Some of the non-reference cards like the Gigabyte G1 Gaming or the EVGA 980Ti's are factory overclocked and do significantly better than what they compared to the Titan X in that review.

BTW, for a system like that, look into getting a 3D Vision capable monitor like the ROG Swift. 3D Vision is frikkin' breathtaking for games it works well on. Witcher 3 is a work of 3D art. I could never go back to 2D gaming.

[MarshallD3Framp]

Qwinn wrote:
Okay, that's fine. I'd go with a single bigger HHD than half a dozen littles ones though. You'll totally choke the airflow in your case with that many hard drives, which would be a shame in a system that high end. And if you ever decide to go custom loop for cooling, where would you fit your pump and reservoir?

In about 10 minutes I'm Updating with an improved edition.

[MarshallD3Framp]

MarshallD3Frampton wrote:
In about 10 minutes I'm Updating with an improved edition.

Replaced 2 GTX Titan X's with 3 GTX 980TI's (Which shall be getting SOC'd)

[MarshallD3Framp]

Qwinn wrote:
Okay, that's fine. I'd go with a single bigger HHD than half a dozen littles ones though. You'll totally choke the airflow in your case with that many hard drives, which would be a shame in a system that high end. And if you ever decide to go custom loop for cooling, where would you fit your pump and reservoir?

Also, I'll reiterate that you could save over $1000 by doing 980Ti's instead of Titan X's, for almost no performance loss. That's money you could use to move up to all SSD or otherwise find something that gets you a lot more performance bang for your buck. Heck, you could take that extra money to siliconlottery and make sure you get a CPU that is already professionally delidded (lowers temps 5-10c) and can overclock well instead.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-and-geforce-gtx-titan-x-review-4k-...





And since you're getting two cards, you'd actually have to break a 12GB RAM limit to lose anything. I can't think of many situations that could do that, maybe trying to run 4x surround monitors at a high resolution, but you didn't list those.

Note also that this is a comparison of reference 980Ti to reference Titan X. Some of the non-reference cards like the Gigabyte G1 Gaming or the EVGA 980Ti's are factory overclocked and do significantly better than what they compared to the Titan X in that review.

BTW, for a system like that, look into getting a 3D Vision capable monitor like the ROG Swift. 3D Vision is frikkin' breathtaking for games it works well on. Witcher 3 is a work of 3D art. I could never go back to 2D gaming.

Also, Looked at a nice little benchmarking test, and it seems that the 980 TI Outperforms the Titan X http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-TITAN-X-vs-GeForce-GTX-980-Ti

[Qwinn]

I would stick with 2. I'm a regular at the Nvidia forums and folks with 3 and 4 way SLI are constantly complaining. SLI doesnt scale that well past 2 and it seems to hav3 tons of issues not playing well with other technologies. With 2 cards its been running pretty much flawlessly for me.

My two 980Tis can run Witcher 3 at maximum settings at 2560x1440 in 3D Vision (which effectively halves your frame rate) very smoothly at 60+ FPS. I'd recommend spending the money for that third card on an ROG Swift monitor, or maybe a 3D projector if you have the wall space, instead.

[MarshallD3Framp]

Qwinn wrote:
I would stick with 2. I'm a regular at the Nvidia forums and folks with 3 and 4 way SLI are constantly complaining. SLI doesnt scale that well past 2 and it seems to hav3 tons of issues not playing well with other technologies. With 2 cards its been running pretty much flawlessly for me.

My two 980Tis can run Witcher 3 at maximum settings at 2560x1440 in 3D Vision (which effectively halves your frame rate) very smoothly at 60+ FPS. I'd recommend spending the money for that third card on an ROG Swift monitor, or maybe a 3D projector if you have the wall space, instead.

So 2 980TI's with Hybrid Cooling would technically be better than 3? With better or similar performance?