Is a hexacore x79 setup overkill for me?

[sprnva]

Thanks for all the input guys, it's been a huge help. I reckon I'm on the home stretch now. Just need to settle on a PSU. Something reliable and quiet that will power the 3930k at 4.2GHz. I don't plan on OC-ing any higher than that as the performance gain vs heat output probably won't be worth it. I'm thinking about a Seasonic G Series 650w. Even though I struggled to get the Cooler Master power calculator to break 500w I think it's best to have a bit extra juice in reserve.

As it stands, here's my shopping list:

Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl Mid-Tower Case
Asus P9X79 PRO S2011 Intel X79 DDR3 ATX
Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz S2011 12MB
Thermalright True Spirit 140 CPU Cooler
Crucial 32GB (4 x 8GB) Ballistix Tactical LP DDR3 UDIMM 240pin CL8
Asus GeForce GT 210 589MHz 1GB PCI-E HDMI
WD Western Digital Black 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB
MacBook WiFi card and mini-PCIe->PCIe adapter (both from ebay)

A lot of the hackintosh 3930k builds I see are using beefy gfx cards. I won't need anything that powerful so I opted for a fanless card.

Crucial's site recommended the Ballistix Tacticals for the P9X79 Pro. I found a post on the Adobe forums talking about memory compatibility with the 3930k. The recommendation was to aim for low-voltage (1.35v), claiming that the 3930k isn't as compatible memory-wise as the more expensive 3960x. This kit is low-voltage and low-profile. For a little bit less there's the Ballistix Tracer kit. The Crucial site mentions that this kit can be problematic with some x79 boards, but lists it as guaranteed compatible with this Asus board. For the same price as the Tacticals, another option is the 32GB GSkill Ripjaw Z kit. It's not low-profile or low-voltage but I've seen it used in a few builds.

[Kaine]

Thanks for the info mandolarian. I found a cooler comparison on Tom's Hardware last night and they had a similar Thermalright cooler on test. It cleared the RAM, but obstructed the PCI-E slot (why do they jam all the slots so close to the CPU on these boards...). The really interesting part in that article was they used GSkill RAM that isn't qualified for x79 at all. I'm definitely not going the Noctua route. I don't care how awesome everyone says it is, it weighs almost a kilo. The Hyper 212 Plus came up as another possible candidate, but some people question how good a "cheap" cooler like it is at cooling a 3930k, especially if overclocking is added into the mix.

The Thermalright unit in Tom's test is the Archon SB-E, which is bigger and wider than the True Spirit 140. By at least 10mm. The Hyper 212 is great for the price, but the stock fan sucks compared to the silent TY-140 on the True Spirit. And Hyper's mounting system is not in the same league as Thermalright. Altho, on a X79 board, there's usually lots of x16 slots to choose from. Were you planning to SLI your DAW?

We use the Hiper for cheap gaming rigs and never anything more than an i5. It's good but noisy and not something I'd put in a quiet system.

The Archon is my cooler of choice right now and I've tested bloody hundreds of them! Also fairly heavy but then all good coolers are as you need a large amount of metal to cooler effectively. The 150mm fan through is the reason it works well through and it's also nice and quiet as far as stock fans go.

Nope server boards aren't conducive to a good DAW. If I remember right it has to do with the cores running in parallel as opposed to series and the something I can't remember about the chipsets. You want an x79 chipset for sure.

The difference between xeon and none xeon boards is that the is an extra memory buss that lets the two cpus talk to each other. Apart from that your paying for features like SAS and decent RAID controllers which in a DAW you really don't need.

I'm gonna go with the P9X79 Pro. If the PCI slot on the regular P9X79 isn't native there's not much point in having it over the USB 3 header on the Pro.

That with an Archon are what's in my personal studio rig, I'm happy enough it with it.

I'm thinking about a Seasonic G Series 650w. Even though I struggled to get the Cooler Master power calculator to break 500w I think it's best to have a bit extra juice in reserve.

I'd agree with that. Personally I'm a fan of the Bequiet L10's, the Enermax Revolution series right now but both are premium models. Other than that I'd also go with Seasonic for the obvious reasons that they build their own and tend to get it right.

The recommendation was to aim for low-voltage (1.35v), claiming that the 3930k isn't as compatible memory-wise as the more expensive 3960x.

That is the most important thing to know when doing X79 builds! Get that right and you'll avoid most of the potential headaches.

[sprnva]

Thanks for the info Kaine. I like the idea of the 150mm fan in the Archon. from a look online it seems it should fit in the Define R4 case as well. First I was worried about weight, but now I have to factor in height as well. No wonder people are going towards watercooling!

That with an Archon are what's in my personal studio rig, I'm happy enough it with it.

Seeing as you have this setup, you're in the best position to answer this for me. Does the Archon prevent you from using the first PCIe x16 slot for your graphics card?

[Kaine]

Seeing as you have this setup, you're in the best position to answer this for me. Does the Archon prevent you from using the first PCIe x16 slot for your graphics card?

Depends on the card. Some of the ATI's with crazy coolers are a pain the Nvidia 210 you have listed will fit fine.

[DevonB]

DevonB, what parts did you use there? Board-wise I was considering a Asus P9X79. It still has a PCI slot which could be handy. RAM and cooler are kinda up in the air due to the shortage of low-profile kits. A lot of people seem to be going with closed-loop watercooling like the Corsair H100, but I've heard they're not that reliable. A lot of the air options seem to be insanely big.

Asus used to be my go-to board by default for many years. Their quality has tanked though over the last 8 years. I've been turning to Gigabyte or Intel instead. This build used an Intel DX79SR board. It does have one old skool PCI slot onboard.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... x79sr.html

But I always go read the reviews on like NewEgg or Amazon to get a feel for 'quality' on any of the boards before I buy.

Memory was some high profile Corsair Dominator 1600Mhz DIMM's. As for the cooler, I remembered I hammered into his head to go with a heat sink that would not be bigger than the socket itself to not run into the heat fins on the Dominator memory. He got one and slathered on some Arctic Silver thermal paste to boot. I can't remember if it was Noctua or if the monsterous one he had originally picked was Noctua and he switched to a different one? He certainly saw why I recommended a different heat sink after he got the system together. The DIMM's are awefully close to the CPU socket on that board for a large heat sink to work with high profile memory.

Honestly I can't remember what the BIOS/UEFI actually showed for temps, but I do remember it was lower than my Nehalem which runs at 59C at idle! Mine gets up to a crazy 80C, but the spec for the chip says the range is up to 100C. HiK is a different beast.

Devon

[kmonkey]

i almost ordered Fractal design but then i ordered Coolermaster silencio. A bit better IMHO. And i have similar setup to your

[camsr]

I can recommend a Kepler based video card (nvidia) for a DAW, with it's adaptive power management it is very quiet when not loaded heavily.

[sprnva]

Unfortunately there's no Kepler support in Snow Leopard, but otherwise they would be a good card for a DAW. I have a couple of older nvidia cards lying around but neither are fanless and I want to see how quiet I can keep things.

I ordered the first round of parts earlier including the Asus board. I have a P8Z68 which is doing fine and was it easy to get 10.8 up and running on it. And I tend to check Amazon and Newegg for reviews as well. They can be helpful alright

Had to swap out the Seasonic G for an X due to availability. That one is full modular so should also keep things a bit tidier. I'll take a look at the Coolermaster case in a bit but I've generally heard good things about the Define R4.

It's been a long time since I built a new machine completely from scratch so I'm a bit excited about this project. My daily PC has just been upgraded piece by piece over the last 10 years or so, and generally as cheaply as possible.

[Gonga]

How did it go?

I have no experience with Mac but I just built the following i7-3930K system and it's running super-fast with Windows 8Pro. It hasn't crashed (yet) and has been stable at 4.4GHz for three weeks. 1866MHz mem freq. - this memory fits that 8-slot board beneath the Noctua - highly recommended setup for Windows folks. It's a Gigabyte-tested 32GB 1866MHz setup with this 2011/x79 board. Running the memory at full speed (XMS Profile) and overclocking the CPU to 4.4GHz (easy Gigabyte Windows utility) requires a few simple clicks - it's all automatic with this Gigabyte board.

LIAN LI PC-A75
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 950W
GIGABYTE GA-X79-UP4 LGA 2011
Intel Core i7-3930K
G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (8 x 4GB) 1866MHz F3-14900CL9Q2-32GBZL
Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 140mm and 120mm
SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD512BW 2.5" 512GB
SIIG FireWire 2-Port PCIe Model NN-E20012-S2
Areca ARC-1210 PCIe 4-port SATA Controller Card
EVGA NVidia Ti550 GFX 2GB

This system has 6 140mm filtered intake fans, 3 120mm exhaust fans, and can accommodate 14 hard drives (currently 10). It runs moderately noisy but is cool as a cucumber (the Noctua is inaudible as far as I can tell...). (I do audio recording in another room over balanced cables through my Mackie Onyx). I've never hit 50C yet. Boot time is slow (about 25 seconds), but only because the Areca card is slow to load it's BIOS. I'm still installing my music stuff on this rig, so it's not fully tested musically, but the Firewire Mackie is giving me clean audio with 4ms round-trip latencies on all 16 I/O channels so far, just like Win 7.

My wife's new machine, based on the GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-D3H LGA 1155 with Intel Core i7-3770K and Samsung SSD, boots in 7 seconds, and she has a 20gbps Internets connection within 14 seconds from a cold boot. Windows 8 is pretty cool imho.

This is my third build with this board. The one problem I've run into is the gigabit LAN (Intel chip) can get wonky when the board is overclocked above 4GHz. This happened with 2/3 boards. On one, the LAN went south and had to be RMA'd. But this is otherwise pretty much a "dream board" for the money. On another, I have to keep the freq. at 3.8GHz. On my board, I'm running at 4.4 with no issues. The CPU and memory are stable up to 4.8GHz, but the LAN is not. Go figure.

[sprnva]

It went pretty well. I got everything up and running without much fuss. The Define R4 case fans could be a bit quieter but I might replace them with something else further down the line. Maybe some beQuiets. The R4 has a built-in fan controller where you can set the voltage to control the fan speed. At 5v they're very quiet, at 7 they're audible and at 12 there's nothing quiet about them at all . I tend to run them at 7 to allow for the fact there's only 2 of them. The Archon keeps the CPU nice and cool but I want to ensure the rest of the system stays cool too. The CPU tends to idle around the low 30s and when benchmarking it goes to low-mid 40s. With all this talk of quiet I did end up putting in a noisy-ass hard disk. But I trust the WD Blacks.

The thing that caught me a little off-guard was the PSU. The R4 is designed so that the PSU fan exhausts out the bottom of the case. I've since noticed this in other cases lately. As I have carpet I placed the case on a bit of wood to try to avoid dust etc (there is a dust filter for the bottom of the case). I tried to mount the PSU with the fan exhausting into the case but the screws wouldn't line up. Probably for the best.

I haven't done much overclocking yet as there's plenty of power just running at stock. I did try it briefly just to confirm it worked and to see what kind of geekbench score I would get. It's such a jump from my poor old MacBook. I also ran this Logic benchmark I found and I think I was able to get it up to 113 tracks.

That's interesting about the LAN. I haven't really done any overclocking with my recent builds. I did overclock my old C2D because it needed it. On the X79 I'm only using wireless to connect.

[Gonga]

Running quiet at stock speeds with such a zippy system makes a lot of sense. Good luck with it and have fun making music.

I can't wait to finish installing all my music software, but it's gonna take weeks doing it in my spare time.

[artisan002]

I know I'm way late on this thread. But, having built and thoroughly tested a Hackintosh system, I found it has one critical problem: It is not real-time. At all...

The way they make the Hackintosh work is by faking Apple's custom EFI in a stripe on every hard drive in the system. Music apps ran on a minor delay, both start and stop. It was minor. But, under just the right conditions, this became a real deal breaker for me. There have been some advanced hacks that put the same fake EFI on a USB drive shoved onto a header on the motherboard. But, that still hasn't fixed the latency down to a real Mac.

So, until they hit that point where you can flash the motherboard's EFI with Mac's custom version, you're better off just getting a real Mac or simply go with a Windows PC; Linux still isn't quite a viable option, by my assessment.

[sprnva]

I haven't noticed any issues with timing here but I'm probably not working at the same level you are.

The very latest advance in hackintoshing is Ozmosis which is basically an EFI loader in your BIOS. You add it and any other modules converted from kexts (such as FakeSMC) into your BIOS and flash. I haven't tried it yet as I'm happy with Clover but it's one to watch.

[legendCNCD]

For me it feels, hackintosh osx and "real" osx machines lag as much under heavy duty.