The main reason to have an i7-920 is simply that when it was released, there weren't any i5s at all for another year, because the Bloomfield core was high-end only. It was indeed the best choice for a while.
Lynnfield, which came in the form of both i5s and i7s, used a different socket and had dual-channel instead of triple-channel memory. However, you will find that the i7-860, which had a similar price point, typically outperformed the i7-920, and also had the advantage of using cheaper motherboards. As such, unless you could get the hardware more cheaply, it wasn't really worth buying the i7-920 after the i7-860 came out.
Note that I also have six slots for RAM. They are all full.
I also cared about the specific benchmark of "encoding video." Encoding video is CPU bound, but also IO bound. Lots of RAM, plus hyperthreading, can mitigate the latter to a substantial degree. Benchmarks showed a nice difference between i5 and i7 for that task.
The amount of RAM matters a little, but past 8 or 16GB you're not really going to see a difference any longer. Also, video encoding actually isn't particularly I/O bound once you have a decent amount of RAM and a modern memory controller. See these benchmarks, for example.
Also, Hyper-Threading doesn't do anything for you if you're I/O bound, so I don't understand why you're claiming the opposite. In fact, it's precisely because video encoding is bottlenecked almost exclusively by the CPU that Hyper-Threading does, in fact, help significantly (perhaps an extra 20% speed) with video encoding.
You want 64-bit Windows 7 no matter what. If you have more than 8GB of RAM you will need Home Premium. If you have more than 16, you need Professional.
If there are two parallel processes for the edit, and one of them is blocked on IO but the other isn't, and you have a virtual and real "core," there is optimization that can (not saying it necessarily does) happen. I agree, however, that the situation where that would be both apparent and meaningful is a vanishingly rare one.
I charted the full performance profile of an encode a while ago. It would bounce every few minutes between IO bound and CPU bound, right up until it no longer accessed the third disk from where source videos existed. When it was only accessing two disks, it became solely IO bound for a long stretch. Once it got down to only accessing one disk (the SSD), it was solely CPU bound until the end.
RAM had an effect up to 12GB, but no effect after that. Though, certain encoding settings will fully utilize all 12, but I don't use those for any videos I actually make for real. A panel encode (60 minutes of 1080p60 to h.264 from, say, three scaled sources) will hover around 10GB consistently for the entire run.
When I bough the i7, however, I only installed 6GB of RAM. On top of that, I had an ancient video card, so live rendering of anything was CPU-bound.
I think it has the i7 and 8GB of RAM. It has the crappier non-HD screen and I added a blu-ray drive to it later. Runs all the games I play with no problems.
My daughter has the same machine from about 6 months ago. Also an i7 but with 12GB of RAM and an nVidea GPU with 1.5GB VRAM. I pointed her towards that one thinking her mom would never buy it for her yet she did! She also has the HD screen.
We will be building a dedicated HTPC in the future but no rush.
I think I paid $1200 for mine and hers cost around $1800. I have definitely gotten my monies worth and expect to continue using this machine for one or two more years.
That would mean there weren't any i5s at the time either ^_~.
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Ah, you're right; for some reason I thinking about memory rather than HDDs with regards to I/O, although as we've agreed Hyper-Threading makes little difference either way. The hard drive would indeed be a bottleneck much of the time, but the only way to make a significant difference there is to increase hard drive bandwidth (whether via SSDs, faster/denser HDDs, or RAID).
Maybe when the GTX 780 comes out, but then the 680 will probably be outperformed by the 770 anyway.
I'm pretty sure I saw a benchmark that showed the 580 still outperforming all 600 series cards besides the 680. The 480 was also better than a lot of 500 and 600 cards. Let me see if I can find that, or if my memory is crazy wrong.
I just want a 680 after the price drops for Premiere live rendering support. A 770, even if it were faster for gaming, isn't useful to me in that regard unless I use possibly unstable hacks.
That would mean there weren't any i5s at the time either ^_~.
Well, the timeline for the computer is complicated. I specced it out over the course of a couple months (I was in no rush). Processors were being announced around that time. More importantly, the i7s had a price drop that made the 920 appear at a price/performance plateau.
I ended up buying two identical ones within a short span, since Emily also needed a new computer. We actually have completely identical rigs except that she has a GTX660 and I have a GTX260, and that I have an extra spinning disk and a 32GB SSD for scratch space.
If I dig out the two invoices, I can figure out exactly when I bough each computer, and what I paid for the i7 on each of them at the time. It would be harder to know what the going price was for other processors at the same time, but I'll bet I could figure it out.
This was also the first non-ABIT motherboard I ever bought, and I have no regrets with ASUS.
Maybe when the GTX 780 comes out, but then the 680 will probably be outperformed by the 770 anyway.
I'm pretty sure I saw a benchmark that showed the 580 still outperforming all 600 series cards besides the 680. The 480 was also better than a lot of 500 and 600 cards. Let me see if I can find that, or if my memory is crazy wrong.
I'm fairly sure you're wrong. I looked at these two sets of charts and the overall conclusion is that the 670 is actually ~17% faster than the 580, while the 570 is roughly equal to the 480.
I'm pretty sure I saw a benchmark that showed the 580 still outperforming all 600 series cards besides the 680. The 480 was also better than a lot of 500 and 600 cards. Let me see if I can find that, or if my memory is crazy wrong.
This is a compassion of a stock 580 vs 660 Ti. They seem to trade trade wins, but if you are a overclocker who knows what you can do with a 580. Though keep in mind the 580's TDP is 244 watts, the 660 Ti is 150 watts, your going to need a PSU to back that up.
I'm pretty sure I saw a benchmark that showed the 580 still outperforming all 600 series cards besides the 680. The 480 was also better than a lot of 500 and 600 cards. Let me see if I can find that, or if my memory is crazy wrong.
This is a compassion of a stock 580 vs 660 Ti. They seem to trade trade wins, but if you are a overclocker who knows what you can do with a 580. Though keep in mind the 580's TDP is 244 watts, the 660 Ti is 150 watts, your going to need a PSU to back that up.
It seems like the 580 has more horsepower, but games that use the added features of the 600 series will be slower on the 580.
I too was recently asking the same question: I need a desktop that can run AutoCAD and Inventor and Rhino and Maya and other 3D productivity programs... but I also really need to play Minecraft at 250fps, so what do I choose? I had been looking at the low end Quadro cards, but they are somewhat expensive, and fairly wimpy, for anything but doing 3D CAD, so I opted for a 660ti and it runs circles around the Quadro 600 I use at work.
I have thought about loading in a Quadro 600 down the road in my second PCIe slot, and manually switching over from the GTX660 when I definitely just want to do CAD vs gaming: however I have a feeling it won't work too well.
I've been thinking of overclocking my CPU a bit, but I don't know how well that would work with CAD longterm either, so I might have to switch between different speeds depending on tasking.
It looks like standard desktop GPUs are, in fact, perfectly capable of solid GPU acceleration in most of these 3D programs. Of course, the driver differences mean that the workstation GPUs can sometimes be faster, and would probably tend to be more precise.
I've been playing around on NewEgg this week because for some reason I got it in my head that I need a windows box again. I want to be able to play next year's games with high settings, and the cheapest I could manage was about $950, which still feels a bit too high.
I'm told that the upgrade cycle is longer now. Back in the day I'd upgrade every 6 months for about $500. I don't have that kind of "young and rich" cash anymore.
But I'm working from absolute scratch, no case, no PSU, no copy of Windows, etc..
I would hope you use your monitor for more than gaming and watching movies. 1920x1200 is pretty much the bare minimum these days. The preferable resolution would be something in the Apple Retina or Chromebook Pixel level.
1080p is a terribly resolution for PC use in general. There's not enough vertical real estate, and there aren't enough pixels. It's worse resolution than I had on my CRT in the early 2000s!
It's low res and not tall enough, while simultaneously being too wide.
16:10 is a much better aspect ratio for any real use of computers beyond just watching movies.
16:9 would be OK, but ONLY if it were much, MUCH higher resolution than 1080p. As it stands, 1080p means huge pixels and not enough of them.
Comments
Lynnfield, which came in the form of both i5s and i7s, used a different socket and had dual-channel instead of triple-channel memory. However, you will find that the i7-860, which had a similar price point, typically outperformed the i7-920, and also had the advantage of using cheaper motherboards. As such, unless you could get the hardware more cheaply, it wasn't really worth buying the i7-920 after the i7-860 came out. The amount of RAM matters a little, but past 8 or 16GB you're not really going to see a difference any longer. Also, video encoding actually isn't particularly I/O bound once you have a decent amount of RAM and a modern memory controller. See these benchmarks, for example.
Also, Hyper-Threading doesn't do anything for you if you're I/O bound, so I don't understand why you're claiming the opposite. In fact, it's precisely because video encoding is bottlenecked almost exclusively by the CPU that Hyper-Threading does, in fact, help significantly (perhaps an extra 20% speed) with video encoding.
Windows 7 Memory Limits
You want 64-bit Windows 7 no matter what. If you have more than 8GB of RAM you will need Home Premium. If you have more than 16, you need Professional.
I got bit by this.
If there are two parallel processes for the edit, and one of them is blocked on IO but the other isn't, and you have a virtual and real "core," there is optimization that can (not saying it necessarily does) happen. I agree, however, that the situation where that would be both apparent and meaningful is a vanishingly rare one.
I charted the full performance profile of an encode a while ago. It would bounce every few minutes between IO bound and CPU bound, right up until it no longer accessed the third disk from where source videos existed. When it was only accessing two disks, it became solely IO bound for a long stretch. Once it got down to only accessing one disk (the SSD), it was solely CPU bound until the end.
RAM had an effect up to 12GB, but no effect after that. Though, certain encoding settings will fully utilize all 12, but I don't use those for any videos I actually make for real. A panel encode (60 minutes of 1080p60 to h.264 from, say, three scaled sources) will hover around 10GB consistently for the entire run.
When I bough the i7, however, I only installed 6GB of RAM. On top of that, I had an ancient video card, so live rendering of anything was CPU-bound.
I think it has the i7 and 8GB of RAM. It has the crappier non-HD screen and I added a blu-ray drive to it later. Runs all the games I play with no problems.
My daughter has the same machine from about 6 months ago. Also an i7 but with 12GB of RAM and an nVidea GPU with 1.5GB VRAM. I pointed her towards that one thinking her mom would never buy it for her yet she did! She also has the HD screen.
We will be building a dedicated HTPC in the future but no rush.
I think I paid $1200 for mine and hers cost around $1800. I have definitely gotten my monies worth and expect to continue using this machine for one or two more years.
I ended up buying two identical ones within a short span, since Emily also needed a new computer. We actually have completely identical rigs except that she has a GTX660 and I have a GTX260, and that I have an extra spinning disk and a 32GB SSD for scratch space.
If I dig out the two invoices, I can figure out exactly when I bough each computer, and what I paid for the i7 on each of them at the time. It would be harder to know what the going price was for other processors at the same time, but I'll bet I could figure it out.
This was also the first non-ABIT motherboard I ever bought, and I have no regrets with ASUS.
Asus P9X79 mobo
Intel Core i7 3820
ram, gpu and new backup hdd next month
I have thought about loading in a Quadro 600 down the road in my second PCIe slot, and manually switching over from the GTX660 when I definitely just want to do CAD vs gaming: however I have a feeling it won't work too well.
I've been thinking of overclocking my CPU a bit, but I don't know how well that would work with CAD longterm either, so I might have to switch between different speeds depending on tasking.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-AutoCAD-2013-GPU-Acceleration-164/
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-Maya-2013-GPU-Acceleration-166/
It looks like standard desktop GPUs are, in fact, perfectly capable of solid GPU acceleration in most of these 3D programs. Of course, the driver differences mean that the workstation GPUs can sometimes be faster, and would probably tend to be more precise.
Also on the shopping list, IPS monitor for gaming.
I'm told that the upgrade cycle is longer now. Back in the day I'd upgrade every 6 months for about $500. I don't have that kind of "young and rich" cash anymore.
But I'm working from absolute scratch, no case, no PSU, no copy of Windows, etc..
4k-8k film/ graphics aren't mainstream yet
It's low res and not tall enough, while simultaneously being too wide.
16:10 is a much better aspect ratio for any real use of computers beyond just watching movies.
16:9 would be OK, but ONLY if it were much, MUCH higher resolution than 1080p. As it stands, 1080p means huge pixels and not enough of them.
Since IPS monitors typically have lower response rates, they're intended for mainly professional use.
If there's another gaming IPS monitor, with higher resolution, at a reasonable cost, I'd go for the higher resolute screen.