We build a machine that’s red and
black to hopefully beat our benchmarks black and blue
The Mission
Variety is the spice of the Lab, so this month we decided to eschew our
traditional builds and go with one you don’t see every day—an all AMD computer,
built with (most of I the best parts we could get our hands on. Were sure some
of you will question the purpose of this build, so our preemptive answer is we
built it because we could, and we were curious to see how a balls-out AMD build
would benchmark, as we haven’t seen an over-the-top AMD rig since The Matrix:
Revolutions let us down. Plus, everyone is always ragging on us for ignoring
AMD. so here you go. AMD enthusiasts an entire PC built just for you.
Plus,
everyone is always ragging on us for ignoring AMD. so here you go. AMD
enthusiasts an entire PC built just for you.
The build was timely, since AMD has just
released its new Vishera’ Piledriver CPU, the 4GHz FX-8350 (or “Octomom, as we
like to call it). We paired it with a totally jacked HO 7970 from Asus and a
small army of AMD-ish components, which we figured would make for an
interesting build. Finally, we’ve heard your feedback about how you don’t need
to see another picture of RAM being inserted into its slot, so this month we’re
going to talk about our component selection and the building process instead of
showing you how we actually built it.
It’s time to choose
The impetus for this system was the release
of the new Vishera CPU from AMD, along with an updated version of the Asus
Cross-hair V Formula Z motherboard running the 990FX chipset. We had just
received both of these brand’new parts, so we knew what we had to do take a
Lunch break to consider our options. While tossing back root beers, we
formulated the basis of the system an AMD processor and motherboard were a
given, but what else? We had yet to sample the overclocked HD 7970 DirectCU II
TOP from Asus, so we added that to the equation. We then remembered AMD-branded
RAM had just been announced, so we added that to the ticket as we ordered
another round of brewskies. To finish the system, we settled on the Thermaltake
V3 AMD edition chassis. Some red band Corsair AF12O case fans, and a red
Corsair Force GS SSD, as well, to tie the room together.
The
impetus for this system was the release of the new Vishera CPU from AMD, along
with an updated version of the Asus Cross-hair V Formula Z motherboard running
the 990FX chipset.
The CPU And Motherboard
Aamd’s new CPU is the first proc we’ve ever
seen that comes docked from the factory at 4GHz, and it’s a surprisingly
affordable eight-core processor, too. Though 4GHz is the highest stock-clock
speed we’ve ever seen, don’t get too excited. The FX-8350 is not even in the
same universe as something like a Hexa-Core Intel Core i7-3960X, despite having
two additional cores and a clock-speed advantage.
The motherboard is the latest version of
the Asus Crosshair V and has every feature imaginable, including an actual
digital kitchen sink. Its running the AMD 990FX chipset and dishes up a total
of eight SATA 6Gb/s ports and two eSATA 6Gb/s ports as well as a new SupremeFX
III audio chip and three PCI Express x16 slots for three-way SLI or CrossFire.
Plus, the paint job is totally righteous.
Our Top Pick
Of Course we went with a Radeon HO 7970 for
this build you would do the same thing if you were in our statically shielded
shoes. But instead of just going with a Nilla Wafer card, we rang up Asus and
requested its overclocked bitch-maker, the HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP. In English,
this means the card is a 7970 but it has the company’s ludicrously huge
DirectCU II triple-slot cooler and TOP means its core clock speed is nudged up
to 16Hz from its stock speed of 925M Hz. This card requires two 8-pin
connectors and can power up to six displays at once, and did we mention its
effing massive?
We Make Our Case
We can already hear the smack-talk about
taking a $50 case and stuffing two grand worth of gear into it. Point taken and
yes, we chose it for its color scheme. But since our build wasn’t too
ambitious, the case actually worked out OK, though we did experience a few
issues. The first sign of trouble was a warning in the manual not to use a
video card that exceeds 10.4 inches. We stared at our 11-inch GPU, gritted our
teeth, and wedged it into the PCIe slot with.., no problem at all. It worked
perfectLy. The second issue was the rear-facing 3.5-inch hard drive bays, which
we haven’t seen in a white and did not miss. Installing drives once the mobo
and GPU are inside is a PITA, plain and simple. The biggest issue we had was a
lack of holes to route our PSU cables, so please cut us some slack on that (we
know you won’t).
Computer
Case
More Power
Our PSU Choice Was made interesting by the
fact that the original no-name model we chose failed during testing. The system
would boot fine and run normally until we really stressed it out, at which
point we found ourselves staring at a matrix of orange squares on our LCD. We
tried updating the mobo’s BIOS. updating our video drivers, and even swapping
the power cables, but nothing worked. Finally, we grabbed the Corsair TX75OM
and plugged it into the 24-pin and 8-pin connectors leaving the original PSU
attached to the CPU, and everything worked just fine. Eventually, we yanked the
original PSU out and went with Corsair. This just reinforces an age-old lesson:
Don’t get cheap when it comes to your rig’s power supply. It’s not worth the
headache.
Storage Duties
Our SSD Selection will probably be another
controversial choice, but we picked it for two reasons. First, it’s red.
Second, it’s fast. The second part is crucial, because if the drive was red and
slow. it would not be in this rig, period. But since its fast, and red, in it
went. Though we never officially reviewed this drive, it’s the flagship of
Corsair’s previous Force lineup, and features fast MLC Toggle NAND and a
SandForce SF-2281 controller, so it’s got some hardware cred. In testing, it
hummed right along at 464MB/412MB read and write speeds.
Since no man can survive on an SSO alone,
we paired it with WD’s cavernous 4TB RE enterprise drive, which spins at
7,200rpm and is big enough to hold our multimedia stash, barely. Since the
Thermaltake case only has 4 3.5-inch drive bays, we figured we had better go
big on this one.
Red Ram
AMD has begun selling branded memory, so we
figured we’d plop some sticks into the machine to see if anything bad would
happen. The RAM is made by Patriot and VisionTek but is validated by AMD for
use with its CPUs and chipsets, so take that for what it’s worth. The company
is offering branded sticks in 2GB, 4GB. and 8GB modules in four flavors: Value,
Entertainment, Performance, and Radeon. We used 8GB of Performance RAM, which
was clocked at 1.600M Hz at 1.5V out of the box. Even though AMD warns users
against overclocking, it also indicates on its website that it can be safely
run at 1.65V in order to achieve more aggressive timings.
AMD
Memory
The Number Aren’t Pretty
As you look at the benchmark chart below,
you should hear the sad trombone sound from The Price is Right playing in your
head because this system got smoked by our zero-point rig, which has a
hexa-core Sandy Bridge-E and GeForce GTX 690 video card. Its best result was in
the x264 HO 5.0 encoding test, where our AMD rig Lost by 30 percent to Core
il-3930K, its Least punishing defeat, which was likely the result of the AMD
part’s higher clock speed. In every other test the extra cores and clocks that
AMD brings to the table didn’t make a difference against Intel’s more efficient
microarchitecture, even if it’s an older generation. We witnessed a beat down
in all the CPU-based tests, including Adobe Premiere Pro 6, where the Vishera
system took almost 1.5 hours to complete a test that took our SNB-E machine
just 33 minutes. We saw the same disparity in every other test, but it’s not a
surprise since Vishera was not designed to go head-to-head with a $1,000 Intel
Core il CPU. Sadly, our HO 7970 also got smacked around in both 3OMark and
Batman, where it was picked on by the zero-point’s GTX 690 GPU. You can
interpret this two ways: the first is, hey, it’s not so bad, considering that
the ZP’s CPU and GPU cost twice as much as the AMD’s parts. The other way is,
damn, those Sandy Bridge-E CPUs are fast.
