Your Processor Setup?

[Taleric]

Two years after my most recent PC purchase I am finding an incredible disparity in what software runs well.

I chose a setup with several less powerful cores for the first time and it shows. Games that are written multithreaded run incredibly! My PC whispers and you would think it was off.

Unfortunately more standard games that I play the heck out of punish my poor PC as the rest of the cores go unused :(

What is your rig setup, how is performance and does it impact your plan for your next PC?

[Nabetsu122]

I have a HP Pavilion p6-2014, which I got in 2011. Initially, it was decent, especially compared to my previous computer-turned-server, which only had 1GB RAM and a single core, but its age is showing very rapidly. I recently got an AMD R7 265 (Sapphire brand), which was the only decent card that could fit into the frame, but it is enough to extend its life for a while longer (that, and Linux Mint. Windows does not like my card for some reason).

List for those who care

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• AMD A6-3600 APU 2.1GHz
• 2x4GB DDR3 RAM (1333)
• Sapphire Dual-X R7-265 Graphics card(2GB)
• Corsair 600M PSU

[magikeh]

I am running the AMD FX-8350 4.0Ghz Octocore with a Noctua NH-D14 cooler sitting on top. My computer is quiet, absolutely love it to bits. Main reason I have the octocore though, is because I wanted to do lots of things at the same time, and not loose any performance. Many computers these days can be built to what a user usually does (or wants to be able to achieve) I for instance was hoping to do youtube/twitch recording and so I went way over the top in speed and cores, however if someone were to say want to play only a game at a time, and maybe have a couple low cost programs (low cost as in programs that use not too much processing power, such as chat programs) I would think of getting an Intel duo core. As from what I've seen Intel does a fantastic job of running one program very quickly. As for my future PCs I think I will change out my AMD video cards for Nvidia, try out some of the features that they have included in Blender 3D (live scene rendering)

Current PC Specs

[Renegrade]

What is your rig setup, how is performance and does it impact your plan for your next PC?

Well, I have an i7-3820. That's from the SandyBridge-E line, which is a couple of years old. It performs fairly well, although the AAA games can stress my video card (A GTX670 from that same era) from time to time. It has four real cores (which have dual SMT each), but they're also powerful modern post-Netburst ("Netbust") Intel units running at 4.2ghz, so it's able to do both.

It was a bit of a splurge when I bought it, and I was also rather hasty as I was desperately doing an emergency upgrade away from the awful Nehalem chips (i7-920, which could cook a potato in eight seconds and works well in the winter as a backup space heater), but it turned out to be a really solid investment. The succeeding chips all use a thermal-grease construction internally, and are showing up with single-digit performance improvements that tell me that either Intel is going Netbust again, or Moore's Law has died. The succeeding chips are in theory up to 12.36% faster (ie, up to 6% twice), but they've dropped in terms of mhz and thermal capabilities.

My long term plan is to upgrade the video card, end of story. At the current rate of "progress", it will take decades before the machine's core capabilities are obsolete. In fact, the only real big upgrade that I've experienced during all of this is that I moved from cheaper cases to expensive, fancy ones like a Cooler Master HAF932 or Antec P183: the fit of stuff inside is much better and they're much roomier, plus they are devoid of sharp, hand-biting edges.

A word of caution about going nuts with cores: there's limits to what can be made parallel. You've gotta be able to break code into independent sections that don't depend on each other to be able to make any real use of multithreading. My favorite example of something that can be easily threaded is the rendering of a Mandelbrot fractal; each pixel can be calculated totally independently from any other pixel, and it's generally only tight loops that cache easily, so you can pretty much throw cores at it until the cows come home and it'll happen faster. Other things are less divisible, such as collision detection (the positions of objects depend on the positions of other objects, and you get into a lot of locking/mutexes etc), and things that are more or less indivisible (like calculating the Fibonacci sequence in order). Ahmdal's Law goes into the abstracts of the results of multiprocessing sections of code (or optimizing sections of code), although it's ignoring things like thread synchronization overhead, memory bus/controller limits, etc, as it's a maximum limit, not a minimum ;)

Or, put more simply, many things are already as parallel as they can be. Don't expect a magical SMP/SMT/multi-core future of infinite processing.

[Daisjun]

My setup that I built about two years ago is:

M/B: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H
CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K
RAM: G-Skill Rip Jaws 16GB 1600
VIDEO: Gigabyte GV-R787OC-2GD
PSU: Antec VP-550P
CPU COOLER: Antec KUHLER-H2O-620
CASE: Thermaltake V9 ATX Midi Tower Case
DRIVES: 2TB Seagate, 120GB Kingston SS, Pioneer Multi
Running at 1080p

Runs most modern games at full specs. I'm not tempted to upgrade it anytime soon just because I haven't found a game that really tests it yet.

I was looking at getting into iRacing sometime soon and getting a multi-monitor setup which would require a bit more heft in the graphics department.

I'd want my next PC to be silent too. I want to run it at night and I'm a bad sleeper.

Depends on what you need really, my mate runs about 14 EVE accounts at once and his system never chuggs so you can imagine what he's got going on there.

[dawnraider]

I built my own computer about three months ago and I have not run into anything that can slow it down (just for the hell of it I tried Skyrim loaded with graphics mods and it ran surprisingly well. And holy shit did it look good, but that's off topic. It can handle any modern game I've played on max specs, and it also handles video editing and CAD very well)

Specs:
CPU: Intel i7-5820k 6 cores hyperthreaded overclocked to 4.5 GHz
GPU: Asus Strix OC Nvidia GTX 970
RAM: Crucial PC4-17000 24 GB (2x 4GB + 2x 8GB, I fucked up when I expanded) DDR4-2133 MHz
Motherboard: ASRock Extreme4 X99 ATX
Drives: Seagate 2TB HDD + Crucial 120GB SSD
Cooling: Corsair Hydro H55 liquid cooling
PSU: Corsair CX750M 750W
Case: Corsair Spec-02 ATX mid tower
Display: Dual 1080p monitors, can't remember which ones

Total cost was about $1700

Once I have the money after working this summer I plan on upgrading my GPU to (hopefully) a Titan X (though I'd settle for 2 SLI 980s)

[Nyoike]

What is your rig setup, how is performance and does it impact your plan for your next PC?

My nearly 5 year old rig:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Quad-Core 3.4GHz
CPU Cooler: Scythe SCMG-2100
GPU: SAPPHIRE 100283-3L Radeon HD 5770 1GB
MoBo: ASUS M4A87TD EVO
RAM: 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR3 1600
PSU: RAIDMAX Blackstone series RX-700AC 700W
Monitor: 1920x1080 23.6" (ASUS VH242H)
Case: NZXT Apollo Black

I updated the HDD to a 3TB and added a 120GB SSD for boot drive a few years ago.

This PC still works with most games that are coming out. But I'm having to drop settings to the absolute minimum, play at 30fps, and sometimes drop to 720p instead of 1080p.

Checklist for my next PC:
Water cooled CPU (either prebuilt cooler or in a custom loop with GPU)
32GB of RAM (I'm tired of running out, gonna fix that for a long time)
Near Top-of-the-Line GPU (I got a 5770 after it was out for 2 years)
Modular PSU (Wiring in my tower is a mess because of all the unused wires on the PSU)

[FaceFoiled]

Will be 4 years old in a months time, but still works well enough:

Case: Cooler Master HAF X
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K 3.40GHz @ 4.60GHz
Cooler: Corsair A50 CPU Cooler
GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Mobo: Asus P8P67 Intel P67
RAM: Corsair XMS3 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 750W V2 High Performance Power Supply
HDD: OCZ Vertex 3 120GB 2.5" SATA-3 SSD (x2, one for OS, one for games), a 1TB barracuda and an old 750GB(7200rpm) for storage.

Mainly using 2 screens with it:

ASUS VK278Q 27" (1920x1080) @120hz
Samsung.. old (dont remember model :P) 26" (1920x1200" @ 60hz

I have my TV connected as well (Toshiba 42" full HD (1080p)) but only set that up for watching movies.

Oh, checklist for updates:

Well, I would like to update at some point. :P But saving money for wedding and house. If anything, the GPU will likely be upgraded this year.