New System Build

[Sergeant Thorne]

Just for fun. I've been using a Dell XPS 1640 17" laptop for everything during the last few years, and with a few issues popping up here and there, and feeling the need for more power, I've decided it's time for a new system. This will be my first build! I've done my share of component internet window-shopping over the years--this isn't the first time I've considered building my own. My plan was to figure out what I want, and then watch the prices over the holidays, and ultimately just buy it peace-meal. I'm not exactly sure when I will buy the final components, and I may draw it out into early spring if the internet retailers are miserly with the discounts. Obviously the components are interdependent to a certain degree, which makes peace-meal a little challenging... Here goes! This is what I want, what I have, and what I have yet to buy.

Please come back later for added links, photos, etc! (posting from work)

System Use: Web-oriented graphics design and programming, Video editing (not a lot yet, but I have plans), Video Converting and Encoding, Gaming (can play Retrovirus finally!), the odd BlueRay. Secondarily I have had an eye toward possibly setting up a few Zero-Client Virtual Desktops around the house and using this machine to power those. Lastly, and ever in the back of my mind, is the goal of rising up to peer out at the cutting edge (consumer cutting edge) of modern computing--I'm tired of hearing people (family members) who buy cheap-sh** hardware complain about how software is getting too bloated (partly true), and computers "used to be fast." I know companies cut all kinds of corners, and create all kinds of bottlenecks to bring that price down to entice the ignorant masses, and IMO for the amount of time spent waiting on it and being annoyed by it it's just not worth saving that money.

Budget: ~$1500.00

Specs (purchased)
Case: Fractal Design Arc XL (bought on sale for cheaper than the mid-size)
Power Supply: Corsair CX600 (bought on sale, but regret not stepping up to the next line for +$20)
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K Quad-Core
Motherboard: Asus Z87-Pro
CPU Cooler: Corsair H110 (Dual 140mm fan) Closed Water Cooler (bought on sale)
RAM: 2x8GB G.Skill Trident X Series DDR3 2400MHz Cas 10
Main Drive(s): Dual Seagate 600 240GB SSDs in Raid 0 (bought on sale)
Additional Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200rpm HDD
Optical Drive: LG 14X Blu-Ray Burner w/M-Disk support
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate (from a friend)
Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K70 Cherry MX Brown


Upgrade (down the road)
Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 760 or 770 2GB
Display (or 2): High-quality AH or P IPS 23"-27" display
Mouse: Gaming-grade laser mouse
PCI-e: PCoIP Driver Card (EVGA), Discrete Sound Card

Like I said, this is for fun, so feel free to throw in your critiques, experiences, approval, warnings (Krom? ). I'll bump the thread every time I add a component, and then start in with a play-by-play (or nearly) when I do assemble and fire it up! Thanks!

[Krom]

Skip the LGA 2011 socket and instead drop down to LGA 1150 with a i7-4770K instead. The CPU is roughly the same cost, but the motherboard and a 2x8GB RAM kit can be a lot more reasonable and it gives up almost zero performance compared to the 4820K (leave multicore turbo on in an Asus motherboard BIOS and a 4770K is effectively faster than the 4820K stock). Basically unless you are using a i7-4960X or its predecessor the 3960X, you shouldn't bother with LGA 2011 (unless you REALLY need the extra memory bandwidth and PCIe lanes). And since the 4960X alone would easily consume over two thirds of your budget, I wouldn't consider it a real option. Added bonus: the 4770K has integrated video, not the greatest since almost any EVGA Nvidia card would beat it, but adequate for casual gaming.
Option 3: an i5-4670K, 95% of the performance of an i7-4770K for 73% the price.

Additionally, this is just me, but I'd never boot from a RAID0. SSD or not, it still doubles the chance of losing all data on the volume from a drive failure. Also a number of features of SSDs do not work when used in RAID unless you jump through a few hoops and make sure you use Intel Rapid Storage Technology when setting up the array. Also it makes setting up Windows 7 a pain in the ass because it won't even recognize or be able to access your disk array until you load the appropriate driver for it manually. (Where as everything just works in single disk AHCI mode.) Of course now might also be a bad time to point out that early-mid next year at the latest SATA Express SSDs will hit the market, and just one of them will be almost twice as fast as your RAID array.

As for the zero-client virtual desktops; the amount of time and effort you would save by not doing it would be worth way more than the amount of money you probably cant save anyway by doing it.

Mouse suggestion: I have a Logitech G500 and I love it, its refresh the G500S is an easy mouse to recommend for any use gaming or otherwise and is reasonably priced.

Other things to keep in mind for future upgrades: a monitor with G-Sync (would also require Kepler based or newer Nvidia video card) will totally blow you away in 3d gaming. Onboard sound is probably fine for almost everyone, discrete soundcards basically don't do anything for you and most people that buy one would probably be better off using a 8 channel digital output (HDMI) to a real amplifier instead of relying on the noisy PC to drive the analog signals. Alternatively, AMD is planning on shaking up the PC audio space with their TrueAudio feature in future video cards.

[Duper]

Mouse? If you have large hands...

R.A.T. 7


or

R.A.T. 7 (MMO)

[flip]

I'd also try and get the mobo, cpu and memory all at once.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Damnit, Krom, what makes you think I want to save myself all kinds of time, money, and frustration? Really appreciate your opinions. The i7-4770K was the other CPU on my radar. The Quad-Channel memory was what really tipped the balance for me, even though I've read in a number of places that the 4770K just about paces the 4820K, the off-board power management, the additional 2MB of cache, and the additional PCI-e bandwidth were pluses. Now that you bring it up, it may be the perfect way to keep the system under budget. The i5 is disqualified for lack of hyper-threading, IMO.

Noted on the Raid 0 SSD setup. If I didn't want bleeding-fast speeds for just $260, with a reasonable backup scheme, I wouldn't risk it. I still may not. I'll have to give it some more thought. They only cost me $130 apiece, so if they're outdated next year it's no big deal. I'm pretty sure they're faster than the SSD on this laptop, and it's pretty speedy. Have you seen the expensive PCI-E options online right now?

I hear you on the Virtual Desktops. It's something that has come up at work, so the two interests are sort of converging. We're coming forward in history by a good 30-40 years by upgrading to a new Point Of Sale system (unfortunately Microsoft WIndows-based). I'm trying to steer us toward a Zero-Client based IT solution instead of purchasing all new Windows 7, 8 compatible PCs, or going with expensive, less than full-featured Thin Client On-Site or Cloud-based solutions. It may not be worth licensing Windows Server 2012 for my personal use, but the interest is there for me.

Logitech G500 is high on my list. That's a neat one, Duper, and I do have large hands... how do you like it? How is that thumb wheel?

[Duper]

Sarge, I like it a lot. I've had it for like 3 or 4 years. It has weights if you like a heavier mouse (I do). It takes some tweaking in. You basically extend everything out and adjust it in until it feels right.

The thumb wheel isn't generically recognized by most games natively. If you use their profiling software (which is pretty stable) you can map it to do most anything.
Take some time and watch the vids they have on the mouse. There are a number of attachments that come with it and each provides a different feel.
(ps) the images are links to the product pages.

[Grendel]

The 4820 only makes sense if you run a LOT of threads. For your usage pattern the 4770 will do just fine. Plus, the latter comes w/ Intel's Quicksync engine. And w/ the saved money you can get a good keyboard

[Sirius]

Yeah the options for running Server 2012 for personal use aren't very good. If you want to run virtual desktops you can't use Server Essentials (the more "reasonable" $400 one), you would have to go with Server Standard at least, which I seem to recall might be in the ballpark of $1k. It's an awfully huge investment for something that isn't likely to provide value in the near future. There might be FOSS/Linux-based tools you could put something together from for less money or possibly free, but even then - while "thin client" smart devices might be the way things are going, it's far from clear that that will wind up being streamed-video clients. I would wager it probably isn't.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Still weighing the two processors. I was leaning toward i7-4770k, but I still think I may end up using this thing for VDI, and the i7-4820k certainly has better bandwidth. I feel like I'm in Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka--"Gotta go forward to go back... better press on". It's odd to be looking at using dated motherboard technology to run a Q3 2013 CPU. I've gotten a pretty good idea for why they did it (it just baffled me at first), at least from a retail perspective. It allows a lot of people to upgrade processors using their existing board. Still, in the end it seems dumb to put that kind of power at the mercy of the trailing edge of technology, while simultaneously crippling the processor that actually uses a new board.

This will push my budget, but here's my thinking. Please criticize! The i7-4820k is the only one of the two able to achieve true PCI-e 3 16x SLI (that's gotta be worth something for when I eventually throw that second card in, even if it's only a GTX 760). Quad-Channel memory should benefit a multi-user environment, besides being overkill for regular use (I really have no idea where the line is here, or when it may be crossed). Finally I wonder if the on-board graphics of the i7-4770k would actually mean that there might be more raw processing power available from the i7-4820k once the system is using a dedicated video card. I haven't seen any data to back this up, and maybe I'm all wet since these are two different architectures, but I tend to assume that a multi-tool, as it were, is never as good at any one task as the tool that was designed solely for that purpose.

I decided on my keyboard, and missed a $30-off Amazon sale by a day. Doh!! The Logitech G710+ has Cherry MX Brown switches (good tactile feedback, but quiet for when I'm working at night), and the white back-lighting is what I've always liked so much about this laptop keyboard. Will probably go with the Logitech G500S as a companion. I'm going to look closely at the cyborg mouse, because it's actually one that caught my eye way back when, but it's hard enough to drop $100-$150 on a keyboard.

On another interesting note, I happened to find out that the 240GB SSD in this laptop is an old Samsung model, and the speed comparison with more modern drives actually finds it to be extraordinarily slow (probably SATA 3GBs, but I don't remember), despite a noticeable increase in speed and responsiveness over my old 7200 HDD. This is the Crystal Disk Mark Benchmark



The Seagate 600 240GB is rated at 530MBs/440MBs Seq. Read/Write, by comparison. I'm looking forward to seeing the difference once I get a system under this thing.

[Krom]

Your theory that the 4820k would be faster because it doesn't have onboard video is, well, wrong. The 4820k remains an ivy bridge quad core CPU, the 4770k is a haswell quad core, it just happens that it had extra space in the die so they used it for integrated video. As for the PCIe x16 SLI on both slots advantage, it makes a difference...if you were aiming for quad SLI. With only a pair of 760s you would be lucky to find a benchmark that would notice and not still favor the 4770k's slightly higher IPC.

Additionally, your SSD is 95% full which is going to cause some significant performance problems on it. Free up some space till the drive is closer to 50%, run TRIM on it, then give it an hour or so for its garbage collection routines to defragment itself and I bet your numbers will improve significantly. Pretty much every SSD out there except for some of the super expensive enterprise drives will start to chug when they drop below about 20-25% free space, optimally you never want to fill one past 60-70% in order to maintain peak performance and to give wear leveling the breathing room it requires. Your new Segate drives would also suffer the same fate if you filled them to more than 80% capacity, they would definitely drop performance. At 95% a lot of SSDs are going to slow down to almost the level of a mechanical hard drive and the 0.797 on the 4k QD32 write test on yours is close to what one could get from a mechanical hard drive. (Some enterprise class drives are immune because they have close to 50% spare area, so what you see in capacity is actually only half of the actual flash memory on the drive, which they do specifically to avoid a worst case performance scenario like what you have going in that drive.)

[Sergeant Thorne]

Thanks again, Krom. I had heard that SSDs don't perform well at full capacity, but I guess I never felt that I noticed much of a slow-down. It's probably just because of the gradual nature of it--I didn't just fill it up all at once. I'll do what you suggested and run another benchmark!

Do you think I'll see any significant performance gain from the SLI 3.0 x16 and quad-channel memory running 3-4 users simultaneously, or am I just shooting too high? For me it would be worth a couple hundred extra if there might be a ~20% gain there. I know that's a lot of variables to easily make a calculated estimate, but what's your opinion? I'm thinking about the possibility that two people might be gaming at the same time (not Crisis 3 or anything, but maybe Portal, a racing sim, or strategy game), while a third is watching videos, and a fourth browsing the net. I'm talking high-performance Zero Clients, not Thin Clients.

[Sirius]

You probably also want to check that the virtual desktop host (whether PCoIP or RDP) can make use of the GPUs in a remote session. I'm not sure that's always the case. It'll work for the "console" session (the one not using a zero client) obviously.

[Grendel]

Still weighing the two processors. I was leaning toward i7-4770k, but I still think I may end up using this thing for VDI, and the i7-4820k certainly has better bandwidth.

It just looks that way -- the 4820 memory system is optimized for concurrent throughput with multiple threads. This almost exclusively happens only on servers under high load. The effective memory throughput for workstation setups is the same or higher w/ a 4770 in most cases. Just dig around in Anandtech or Xbitlabs for in deep comparisons.

I decided on my keyboard, and missed a $30-off Amazon sale by a day. Doh!! The Logitech G710+ has Cherry MX Brown switches (good tactile feedback, but quiet for when I'm working at night), and the white back-lighting is what I've always liked so much about this laptop keyboard.

I owned the 710+ for a very brief period of time, don't do it -- it's a POS: shoddy soldering (as usual, net is full of ppl bitching about LED drop-outs), bad key-caps (their stems break), very thick, and the extra keys on the left make it very wide. I constantly kept hitting caps-lock when typing an "a". The board doesn't have on-board memory so the extra keys won't work w/o running Setpoint (which has it's own set of problems w/ regard to the board. Couldn't get it to save the setup.. ) Also, the backlighting is fixed, ie. you can have all keys lit, the WASD and arrow cluster, or all off. If you want these features done better (except the extra keys), take a look at the Corsair K70 (Newegg) or maybe the CM Storm QuickFire Ultimate. But please, do yourself a favor and don't get the 710 (or the Razer Black Widow, another POS) !!

This will push my budget, but here's my thinking. Please criticize! The i7-4820k is the only one of the two able to achieve true PCI-e 3 16x SLI (that's gotta be worth something for when I eventually throw that second card in, even if it's only a GTX 760).

Nope, worth diddely squad You will need 3x 780 to even have a small impact.

Finally I wonder if the on-board graphics of the i7-4770k would actually mean that there might be more raw processing power available from the i7-4820k once the system is using a dedicated video card

It's actually the other way round -- the 4770 video subsystem is an additional module to the die, nothing got sacrificed from the CPU cores. It also contains Quicksync that gives you a very substantial boost in MP4 encoding (needs software that makes use of the module.)

The Seagate 600 240GB is rated at 530MBs/440MBs Seq. Read/Write, by comparison. I'm looking forward to seeing the difference once I get a system under this thing.

A mechanical drive will always crawl in comparison to an SSD. Fastest mechanicals are hybrids.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Thanks, Grendel.

I decided on my keyboard, and missed a $30-off Amazon sale by a day. Doh!! The Logitech G710+ has Cherry MX Brown switches (good tactile feedback, but quiet for when I'm working at night), and the white back-lighting is what I've always liked so much about this laptop keyboard.

I owned the 710+ for a very brief period of time, don't do it -- it's a POS: shoddy soldering (as usual, net is full of ppl bitching about LED drop-outs), bad key-caps (their stems break), very thick, and the extra keys on the left make it very wide. I constantly kept hitting caps-lock when typing an "a". The board doesn't have on-board memory so the extra keys won't work w/o running Setpoint (which has it's own set of problems w/ regard to the board. Couldn't get it to save the setup.. ) Also, the backlighting is fixed, ie. you can have all keys lit, the WASD and arrow cluster, or all off. If you want these features done better (except the extra keys), take a look at the Corsair K70 (Newegg) or maybe the CM Storm QuickFire Ultimate. But please, do yourself a favor and don't get the 710 (or the Razer Black Widow, another POS) !!

Wow, thanks! Funny thing is I just started to notice how many refurbished G710+'s there are floating around the net, and that had me wondering. Looks like the Cooler Master you linked would be a good substitute, as they have an MX Brown w/White back-lighting option!

[Sirius]

Anyone ever had any trouble with this? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6823109191
Seemed like half the people who went to DKH's LAN had one, it seems to last pretty well, and considering it costs half as much as most of the other gamer keyboards (sometimes less), it's hard to see how they can compete with the X4...

I guess the one difference is that most of the others have thicker keys, although I imagine that's a matter of taste. It sure wasn't worth paying $50+ extra for in my case.

[Grendel]

Eew, rubber dome. Wouldn't touch it w/ a 10ft pole Once you go MX switch you never look back.

[Sirius]

okay, preference/feel thing I guess. All I really cared about was that it doesn't hold me back.

[Grendel]

Rubber domes do hold you back by design.

[Sirius]

Well, not in a way that matters or is discernible in D1/D2... I mainly just need anti-ghosting.

[Grendel]

Funny thing is I just started to notice how many refurbished G710+'s there are floating around the net, and that had me wondering. Looks like the Cooler Master you linked would be a good substitute, as they have an MX Brown w/White back-lighting option!

The Ultimate's OEM is iOne, they are upper middle-class so to speak If you are looking for more high-end boards and can live w/o the back-light get a CM Quick Fire XT, their OEM is Costar (also OEM for Filco.)

[Sergeant Thorne]

Cool. Lookin' at all of 'em. That Corsair K70 all black with red back-lighting actually caught my eye. That looks really sharp, but I wonder if I would get tired of looking at red all of the time (obviously I could turn it off during the day if I wanted to). Funny how many nice mechanical keyboards are "sold out" right now!

I was thinking the other day about how to make the best use of these two 240GB SSDs I bought--taking into account Krom's warning about just running them in Raid 0. I had two ideas. The first was to run a Raid 0 partition on 1/3 of each drive, so that I end up with 3 160GB partitions, one in Raid 0. The second is to buy a couple of 1-2GB 7200 HDDs, run them in Raid 1, and use one of the SSDs as a cache for that setup while running the OS (or multiple OSes) off of the other. I thought I'd throw that first one out here before I delve into it too much. Is that possible?

[Krom]

Generally the best thing to do with a SSD is to run just the OS and programs off it, then put everything else (pictures, videos, music, most games, etc) on a mechanical hard drive. I have a 160 GB SSD, a 2 TB RAID1, and a 3 TB single drive. The SSD holds the OS and all my programs, the 2 TB array holds mostly downloads, pictures, some installers, and various other bits of data that isn't archived yet. The 3 TB drive further mirrors some stuff from the array, contains a regular system image backup of the SSD, and also holds games (steam is installed there). The SSD holds pretty consistently at about 85 GB used (it used to be a bit lower, but an upgrade from 8 to 16 GB of memory caused the page file and hibernation file to double in size).

The main reasoning behind leaving only the OS and stuff like office and my web browser on the SSD while keeping games and media on a mechanical drive has to do with how these different programs access the drive. The OS and office/web browsers/etc are the most common source of random disk accesses in a system, where as all media like music/movies/pictures/etc are strictly sequential in access patterns and the majority of games are also mostly sequential. A SSD might be 100+ times faster than a HDD at random access, but for sequential access a fast hard drive can easily close in on or even outpace an entry level SSD, so basically putting a movie or library of music or most games on a SSD is a waste of $1/GB space when it would work just as well on a HDDs $0.05/GB space.

Of course such options are rarely available for laptops (although a few can do dual drives), but basically there is no excuse for ever running a desktop PC with only a SSD and not also having a HDD for the sequential access or bulky stuff.

I always recommend just having a good backup solution and booting off a single drive, my system runs automatic backups of the SSD to the 3 TB drive at a regular interval, but given that basically nothing of importance is stored on the SSD anyway it is mostly there to save time restoring the system should something happen to the SSD. There is nothing particularly important on any of my drives really, the actually important stuff like collections of pictures from various trips/gatherings, etc are instead stored on ALL my drives, and also a few at my brothers house, and written to optical media, and on a couple other computers in the house too and...well, you get the picture.

How effective your backup solution is going to be mostly depends on how much effort you put into it, throwing everything on a RAID1 and calling it safe is basically only protecting against a single disk failure, it does absolutely nothing for every other way you can lose data (malware, user error, natural disasters, theft, etc).

[Grendel]

The SSD holds pretty consistently at about 85 GB used (it used to be a bit lower, but an upgrade from 8 to 16 GB of memory caused the page file and hibernation file to double in size).

Both files are really a waste of SSD resources. Set a custom page file size of 400MB to ~2GB and turn hibernation off. Booting of a SSD is almost as fast as waking up from hibernation. (See also this.)

[Grendel]

Still weighing the two processors. I was leaning toward i7-4770k, but I still think I may end up using this thing for VDI, and the i7-4820k certainly has better bandwidth.

It just looks that way -- the 4820 memory system is optimized for concurrent throughput with multiple threads. This almost exclusively happens only on servers under high load. The effective memory throughput for workstation setups is the same or higher w/ a 4770 in most cases. Just dig around in Anandtech or Xbitlabs for in deep comparisons.

Here we go:

[Conclusion]

The desktop LGA2011 platform is an adaptation of a server solution, which means a lot of issues like the low performance of the memory controller at single-threaded loads or the high power consumption.[..]

As we've seen in our performance tests, the Core i7-4820K, the junior quad-core Ivy Bridge-E model, cannot compete against the Core i7-4770K and thus looks completely pointless. The midrange Core i7-4930K with six cores is on average comparable to the senior quad-core Haswell-based model except for the final rendering and video editing tests. The senior $1000 Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition deserves its flagship status, yet its advantage over the Core i7-4770K is small in most of benchmarks while the price difference is substantial. Thus, an LGA1150 configuration with a top-end CPU is going to be more optimal in most cases, even for gamers and enthusiasts.[..]

It should also be added that the Intel X79, the only chipset for Ivy Bridge-E CPUs, hasn't been updated since times immemorial. It doesn't support USB 3.0 and offers but two SATA 6 Gbit/s ports.[..]

So, we can only recommend the current implementation of the LGA2011 platform with the six-core Ivy Bridge-E processors to users who need maximum multithreaded performance or high amounts of system memory (as this platform can offer as many as eight DIMM slots). In other words, today’s LGA2011 CPUs are optimal for workstations rather than for ordinary desktop PCs. And when it comes to workstations, Intel’s Xeon E5 v2 series may be a better choice as they offer eight or even ten computing cores.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Thanks, Grendel. That makes sense. I've pretty much decided to go with the 4770K. Incidentally, Asus has Z87 'WS' (workstation) motherboard for the 4770K which allows for a full dual PCI-e 3.0 x16, or up to quad-SLI PCI-e 3.0 x8! I may not spend the extra money, but it's interesting that the option is available. Right now the only things I have left to figure out are the motherboard and the monitor!

[Krom]

That motherboard reaches 32 PCIe lanes by method of a PLX chip, it gets the full bandwidth to each slot but comes with a mild latency penalty compared to using the lanes that come directly off the CPU. However, for a 2 card SLI application having dual x16 slots is pretty much irrelevant compared to dual x8 slots, it only makes a difference for triple and quad SLI because the crosstalk between 3-4 cards gets ridiculous to the point where it really needs all the bandwidth it can get and even quad x16 slots probably wouldn't be enough (which is why there are often cases where 3x and 4x SLI setups are slower than 2x or even single cards).

One thing you have to keep in mind is that 2x SLI worked perfectly fine on a pair of PCIe 1.0 x8 slots, and the 16 lanes that come off your CPU are PCIe 3.0 spec which has almost 4x the bandwidth. So basically a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot is equivalent to a PCIe 1.0 x32 slot, there is plenty of bandwidth there for a two card SLI. Of course all of this is skipping over what a terrible waste of time SLI is to begin with, but that is for another thread somewhere down the line.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Heh. Cool. Thanks again.

I've been looking at HDD options, and in doing so I was curious to know just what kind of sequential read/write I might get with a 7200 drive. It looks to me like my Seagate SSDs are going to be a good 100%-300% faster than a 7200rpm HDD when it comes to sequential read/write. Is ~100-200MB/s really the sequential ceiling for HDD?

[Krom]

Heh. Cool. Thanks again.

I've been looking at HDD options, and in doing so I was curious to know just what kind of sequential read/write I might get with a 7200 drive. It looks to me like my Seagate SSDs are going to be a good 100%-300% faster than a 7200rpm HDD when it comes to sequential read/write. Is ~100-200MB/s really the sequential ceiling for HDD?

Yes and No, HDDs get faster sequential speeds as density increases, so 5 years ago the fastest HDDs topped off at ~80-100 MB/sec, today they hit ~180-220 MB/sec, in 5 years they might be pushing 300+ MB/sec.

But before you start thinking that unless it does 550 MB/sec sequential it will feel slow, you need to keep things in perspective here. Just what is your every day sequential disk access? It would be stuff like watching a movie, listening to music, scanning through some pictures or copying around said videos/music/pictures. If it is watching a movie, then the highest standard would be a straight bluray movie rip. Bluray movies have a maximum bitrate enforcement of 54 mbps, which translates to all of 6.75 MB/sec and its pure sequential, so basically irrelevant on a modern disk. Music is even less than that, even lossless audio tops off at ~200 KB/sec for playback (16 bit Stereo PCM WAV @ 48 KHz is 1.5 megabits: 187.5 KB/sec), the highest quality for MP3s is 40 KB/sec. As for loading images, unless you are using uncompressed TIFF images from your camera, any modern HDD will be able to load dozens per second.

Now I'll bring in a couple benchmarks from anandtech:
http://krom.sploitz.com/DBB/RaptorvsSSD3.png
http://krom.sploitz.com/DBB/RaptorvsSSD4.png
This is sequential performance of a bunch of hard drives with one SSD thrown in for comparison. In these lists you can see a Seagate 3 TB 7200 RPM drive, and a Intel 320 / 160 GB SSD which are both drives that I use in my system. As you can see, my SSD is marginally faster than my 3 TB drive, but would actually lose to the 1 TB Raptor in sequential write speed. Granted, this is an older SSD and modern ones would easily win this benchmark by a comfortable margin. But HDDs ultimately remain very competitive here.

Which brings us to random access, this is stuff like booting your computer, loading your web browser, installing updates, or running a virus scan on your C: drive. It is thousands, to tens of thousands of tiny 4KB reads and writes, spread all over the place on the drive. When you hear a HDD thrashing, it is because it is performing random accesses. Unlike sequential which is a whole bunch of data from one place, random is a relatively small amount of data from a lot of different places. So lets look at the same set of drives in a random 4 KB write test:
http://krom.sploitz.com/DBB/RaptorvsSSD1.png
http://krom.sploitz.com/DBB/RaptorvsSSD2.png
As you can see, a relatively slow SSD by today's standards quite thoroughly annihilates even the 10,000 RPM raptor. This is why booting, loading programs, installing updates or virus scans from a SSD are so much faster than from a HDD, not because of sequential which is basically good enough from a HDD for 99% of the usage scenarios out there, but because a modern SSD can be 600 times faster than a HDD at random reads/writes.

Sequential is demanding on throughput, random is demanding on latency. Compared to HDDs, a SSD has a mildly higher throughput, but a massively lower latency. So basically don't worry about sequential speeds from a modern hard drive, they will be good enough at anything sequential, you only need the SSD for the stuff that isn't.

[Sergeant Thorne]

*Bump* (OP updated)

Ordered the last component today. Going with on-chip video for the time-being, unless some really great deal on a GTX 760 or 770 crops up. Waiting on the monitor also because the one I want is a little salty, and I'm leery of moving on a cheap IPS (would really like a min. 8-bit panel). I really like the idea of a 144Hz monitor, but I'm not sure I'm willing to sacrifice the contrast/color. Gonna squeeze another few months to a year our of my old 19" LCD while I wait for 'em to come down in price.

Planning a keyboard purchase, but the blue back-lighting it appears I'm stuck with is not terrible motivating, so I'm dragging my feet (not so sure about the anti-ghosting of the Cooler Master). I'm certain I want cherry MX brown.

Also took the opportunity to upgrade the home network to Gigabit from the old 10/100!

More when the stuff arrives!

[Sergeant Thorne]

Upon further exploration, I think I can set the Asus display aside in favor of a Yamakasi! Definitely going to save up for one of those. I wonder if 120Hz at 5-6ms is worth much...

[Grendel]

Planning a keyboard purchase, but the blue back-lighting it appears I'm stuck with is not terrible motivating, so I'm dragging my feet (not so sure about the anti-ghosting of the Cooler Master). I'm certain I want cherry MX brown.

Don't worry about anti-ghosting -- all modern mechanical keyboards have a diode on each switch that prevents ghosting. Ghosting is really only a problem in keyboards w/ a matrix w/o diodes, ei. most rubber-dome boards. The marketing goons just think that it's such a nice catchy phrase...

Personally I prefer red back-lights, but ever since the Deck Legend Fire manufacturers seem to have reserved it for red switches (eew.) Well, w/ the exception of Ducky boards (pick your color/switch combo), but the main importer seems to be out of stock on anything but black switches (not very popular for a reason..) :/ If you can live w/ the price, take a look at the Deck Hassium (Deck). Personally I really like the design of the K70, makes cleaning the board a breeze, great media controls, additional USB pass-through, and I have come to terms w/ the blue lights (using no-transparent caps for a true back-lit effect )

[Sergeant Thorne]

But even a mechanical keyboard has a matrix, doesn't it? What I want is 10-15+ keys at once.

[flip]

I think USB itself imposes certain limitations?

[Krom]

10-15+ keys at once?

The USB limit for HID devices is 6 normal keys plus 4 modifier keys (control, alt, shift & function). So basically there is a hard limit of 10 keys there, more than that is pretty much pointless because the vast majority of people don't have any more fingers then that.

[Grendel]

It's actually 6 keys + 8 modifiers (left and right shift, alt, ctrl, gui) However, all boards I mentioned have diodes in their matrixes (no ghosting/jamming) and all have NKRO (n-key rollover.) Some over USB (yes, can be done. These include the K70, Hassium, Ducky, CM Ultimate), some over PS/2 (w/ an adapter. The QuickFire XT is an example.) Logitech & Razer have some half-assed "more than 6 but less then n" KRO implementation.

In general, if a mechanical keyboard supports the PS/2 interface via a passive adapter it will be 6KRO w/ 8-10ms poll interval on USB and NKRO w/ a 1-2ms latency on PS/2 (really should use the latter port w/ that board.) If a keyboard only supports USB, it most likely is a USB 2.0 implementation and will do >6KRO at a 1ms poll interval.

Edit: Heh, Deck ad.

[Grendel]

Now, here's something different (fresh in, probably will be gone quickly) -- the Ducky DK2108S OMG Limited Edition Blue/Brown MX Orange LED Backlit Mechanical Keyboard (Hybrid Cherry MX).

[Sergeant Thorne]

"OMG" what an ugly keyboard! The keys look awesome, though!

[Sergeant Thorne]

*Bump*

Ordered the Corsair K70 Gunmetal Cherry MX Brown (blue backlighting was the only option). I've heard about LED failures with Corsair, but none of the competition had the same options and I just like the overall appearance of this one better. Would have liked to get the K95, with it's white key lights and blue backlighting in Cherry MX Brown, but all they have is Red for that one.

Once my Arctic MX-4 and Arctic Silver 5 get here I'll be taking some pics and putting it all together! Hoping to get up-and-running this weekend. I just did a Blu-Ray video conversion/encode on this laptop at 1080p from the Blu-Ray files to Mp4 (from 29GB to 6GB), and it took ~10 hours. I'll run the same conversion over the weekend on the new system and report the numbers!