Tested In-Depth - Building a PC with Haswell-E, X99, DDR4

# Building a High-End PC: A Comprehensive Guide to Components and Performance

## Introduction to High-End PC Components

When it comes to building a high-end PC, the components you choose can make a significant difference in performance, speed, and future-proofing your system. This guide will walk through the key components of a top-tier PC, focusing on the CPU, motherboard, RAM, storage, cooling systems, and overclocking.

## The CPU: The Heart of Your System

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is often referred to as the brain of the computer. For high-end builds, Intel's Haswell-E series, such as the Core i5-4690K and Core i7-4790K, are excellent choices. These CPUs offer significant performance improvements over older models, with features like hyper-threading and higher clock speeds.

The Core i5-4690K is a Dev’s Canyon chip that provides exceptional performance for gaming and general use. It clocks in at 3.5 GHz base frequency, with a boost up to 4.2 GHz, making it a great option for those who want high-end performance without the premium price of an i7. The Core i7-4790K is even more powerful, offering quad-channel memory support and eight cores, which are ideal for multi-threaded tasks like video editing and rendering.

For those looking for a balance between cost and performance, the Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition is a budget-friendly option. It offers two cores and four threads with a very low power consumption, making it perfect for light gaming or office use.

## The Motherboard: x99 and DDR4

The motherboard plays a crucial role in connecting all components and supporting advanced features. The Intel X99 chipset is designed to support quad-channel DDR4 memory, which allows for faster data transfer rates compared to traditional dual-channel setups. With 40 PCIe lanes, the X99 motherboard can handle multiple high-speed devices like graphics cards, storage solutions, and expansion cards.

DDR4 memory offers several advantages over DDR3, including lower voltage requirements (1.2V vs. 1.35V), higher transfer speeds, and better power efficiency. When selecting RAM for your system, prioritize capacity first. If you're not overclocking, non-XMP DDR4 modules can be a cost-effective option.

## Storage Solutions: SATA and PCIe Options

Storage is another critical component of any high-end PC. While traditional SATA SSDs are still reliable and affordable, the future lies in PCIe-based storage. These drives connect directly to the motherboard's PCIe lanes, bypassing the slower SATA interface and delivering faster read/write speeds.

The article discusses both SATA and PCIe storage options in detail. For those who prefer traditional connectivity, there are 10 SATA 6G ports available on most X99 motherboards. Additionally, four of these ports support SATA Express, which uses a wide connector to provide more bandwidth.

For users looking for cutting-edge performance, M.2 slots offer a compact and efficient way to install PCIe-based NVMe SSDs. These drives are not only faster but also take up less space in your case.

## Cooling Systems: Liquid vs Air

Keeping your high-end components cool is essential for maintaining performance and preventing thermal throttling. While air coolers like the Cooler Master 212 can be effective, liquid cooling is often recommended for systems with high-power CPUs like the Core i7-4790K.

The Corsair H80i is a popular choice for liquid cooling. It features a compact design with a built-in pump and radiator, making it easier to install compared to older models. While it does require two case fans, the noise level can be managed with high-quality fan options.

## Overclocking: Maximizing Performance

Overclocking allows you to extract even more performance from your components. With the ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero motherboard, users have access to AI Suite software that simplifies the overclocking process. The tool uses an adaptive algorithm to find the optimal voltage and frequency settings without risking stability.

Manual overclocking is also possible by adjusting the base clock or multiplier in the UEFI BIOS. For those who prefer a more hands-on approach, manual adjustments can provide additional performance gains, though they require careful monitoring of system temperatures and voltages.

## Prescriptions for Different Users

For gamers looking to build a balanced system, the Core i5-4690K paired with a Devil's Canyon cooler is an excellent choice. Its high clock speeds make it suitable for gaming while remaining affordable. Those who want more power should consider the Core i7-4790K, but be prepared for higher costs and the need for robust cooling solutions.

The article also highlights the importance of considering your specific needs when building a PC. If you're not doing intensive tasks like video editing or 3D rendering, a mid-range CPU and motherboard combination might suffice. Additionally, upgrading to an SSD is one of the most impactful improvements you can make for overall system performance.

## The Future of PC Components

As we move forward, new architectures like Intel's Broadwell are expected to offer better power efficiency and smaller form factors. While these chips won't provide significant performance improvements over current-gen CPUs, they will likely be more suitable for mobile devices and low-power systems.

The article concludes by hinting at the upcoming release of new graphics cards, which promise faster performance and better power efficiency. With these advancements on the horizon, it's an exciting time to be a PC builder.

## Final Thoughts

Building a high-end PC is a complex but rewarding endeavor that requires careful consideration of each component. From selecting the right CPU and motherboard to choosing the best cooling system and storage solutions, every decision impacts the overall performance and longevity of your system. By following this guide, you can build a PC that meets your specific needs while staying within budget.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys I'm will from tested I'm Norman from tested Norman Chan what is this this is monstrosity I thought PCS were small and we're supposed to be the future PCS the Nu nuck the nuke I thought it was they they call it the Nook they should have called it the nuke nuke is a much better name um today we want to talk about PC Technologies we're PC experts we spent 10 years at Maximum PC bu we've built a lot of P we have more than 45 years of PC Building experience combined Will Smith the Norman Chan with over 15 years of PC building experience uh so we haven't done a ton of PC testing I built a PC when we started tested and then haven't really touched it except for upgrading the video card wow so you're due for an upgrade I put um a video card in SSD in a four-year-old PC totally happy great that's if you upgrade your video card and you upgrade your storage from a hard drive to an SS those are the two things right now that are going to give you the most uh bang for your buck improvements if you're a gamer um and an SSD or even if you do like light video edits and stuff like that if in an SSD bar on if you're on a hard drive and you want to upgrade get SSD I mean you hit the button and it boots like it takes longer for the bias to get through all of its nonsense than it does for the for the for Windows to start after the fin day change and games load faster apps load faster you just you when you go back to a machine that doesn't have an SSD after you've used an SSD for a while it just sucks it's terrible but turns out um there's a lot of exciting new pc Technologies and right now is a great time to kind of refresh what you know about PCS and the new stuff that's coming out and new stuff that's already out um because we've kind of reached this this Milestone um okay so Broadwell's out and we're ready for new Intel chips it's 20 14 NM 7 NM where where we at still 22 NM oh my God still 22 neter sounds the process this doesn't seem like the giant leap you know Broadwell we've been hearing about Broadwell for a long we're expecting like 25 hours of battery life for something insane on laptops on mobile yes on mobile yes but what what are we looking at here this is not mobile So today we're talking about building a desktop PC and this one's obviously Built This is actually the PC that I built last week's uh a 90% upgrade uh to what I was using at home this is a this is a raven a Silverstone Raven case it's the sideways case it's a Silverstone Fortress F okay yeah I still like a lot it's really dirty in there Norm uh the the fan the bottom fans actually the filters are could have could have blasted the dust out a littleit yeah the filters are clean um there's a bunch of new Hardware in here that I want to talk about and the stuff that just came out that um I don't think most people are going to buy but it's good for people who are building PCS to know about and to know what's out there because it's going to lay the path going forward as to what their PC upgrade Cycles might look like right um and of course on the PC side the most important thing is this the CPU um whether you're doing gaming or just it's the heart and the brain of your computer and inel right now is really dominating in in its uh in its in desktop CPUs and until you know and also the mobile you most of the MacBook airs are all buil Intel chips um and on the desktop side while AMD still has desktop ships um it's the general consensus that if you're doing anything for gaming or editing or you're building anything that's going to be multiple cores and with hyper threading Intel is the way to go if you're at the really low end or want really low P low power consumption maybe look at AMD but for high-end gaming Intel or bust yes right if you're the discret graphics um and on the highend side So today we're looking at the highest end Intel Desktop CPU it's called Haswell e now we've heard of Haswell last year Haswell came out there was Ivy Bridge Sandy Bridge s brid Ivy bridge and Haswell and this year uh we didn't get a new name uh we got something called Devil's Canyon which was a Haswell refresh and it's still 22 NM process it's just clock tier has well they changed some of the the uh the way the cooling's done on the on the on the side so this means this means though that Broadwell Pro presumably Broadwell should have shipped by now and we should be buying laptops and stuff using Broadwell at this point but they had some problems with their process or some some issue along the way I'm not exactly sure it's unclear incling their road map Broadwell is still next year okay um well they can change their road map as they go kind of the neat way about that works when you have the document on your server um so uh clearly the PC is built right now so I don't want to take the CPU out but we're I did take some video of the components before so Haswell e uh this is their extreme Line This is the highest the high-end desktop so it's not the fifth generation hasell this is the E the E is for extreme extreme how many X's are in extreme uh there's actually only one X this is okay in terms of the chip it's the 5960x okay and this uh Intel always does you know their cons I5 I3 I5 i7 and then the highend of i7 $1,000 CPU and just just be clear the highend and Intel CPU since I've been building PC starting like 1994 has been $1,000 that's kind of their their price they're like hey guys this is the good one it's probably 10% faster than the next one and traditionally maybe not with this one but it's 1,000 Bucks versus 500 and decision for highend PC Builders is you know they know if they're going to build every two years and they're going to build and spend $1,000 on CPU is it worth it to spend $1,000 are you getting really that much more so let's let's take a step is it worth building a new pc every two years at this point Lloyd does it L Lloyd has a basement filled with computers you've been over there no it's no it's not uh but if you're someone like Lloyd and you you do spend a $1,000 on a CPU um and lot some people do some video editors you know every 3 years like from ivybridge is it worth if they have IV Bridge or Sandy Bridge e is it worth then jumping to a Haswell e well and if this is a work machine for you and getting 20% more video encode performance means you can do 20% more work you're getting paid by the job like there's there's real reason to spend money on Hardware if if you want 20% faster load times in your video game maybe not so much so the chip itself um the difference in this year's has well in this year's extreme thousand processor is that it's Intel's first processor with eight cores first desktop process first desktop processor with eight cores and the way CPUs work is on the inside uh you know you've had dual core CPUs for a long time quad cour CPUs for a long time on the high end on the server Market of course we're talking about 812 PL on the high desktop the most we've had since in the Hal days six now we had of two two processor on a chip before don't Intel doesn't really do that skull Trail Stu not anymore for desktop well skull Trail was different skull Trail was two two chips two sockets we don't do that anymore and then they did packages with two yeah that was a bad idea too this is in one piece of silicon with uh eight CPU cores inside and they can all connect to each other over some sort of high-speed bus some magic happens we have friends who can explain this much better than us but the upshot is it's eight when you open up task manager you see actually 16 CPU cores I'll show ma right so this is Task Manager and you can see there are 16 boxes here 4x4 Grid it's because they're eight course and then because it's i7 it also has hyperthreading right so if you're looking at a CPU and you're buying the core I3 stuff it's going to be low two core with Hyper four cores I5 is four core with no hyperthreading i7 you have four cores that double to eight and then here with the the i7 extreme industri 5960x it is uh eight cores so um what hyper threading is in case people don't know is a technology that lets Intel kind of segment an individual CPU core so that one part of the core can be active and then another thread can be using a different part of the same core at the same time which at the time it was introduced like 10 years ago was kind of revolutionary now it's just kind of expected on Intel stuff um when it was originally announced it wasn't particularly efficient all way especially with a relatively low number of cores um how how did did you try hyper thring on and off when you were benchmarking this you don't really turn on and off you can enable in certain applications how many actual virtual cores you use um but scale but does it is it aware of the difference between hyperth threading cores and regular okay no um you can turn it off in the Bios you can turn it off in the Bios yes you can and you can actually turn off you can turn off cores if you want in the Bios um and you can clock them differently but uh in terms of the efficiency of hyperthreading and applications that make use of hyper threading were much better now it actually when you're talking about doubling the adding two more cores and four more threads it actually adds a significant performance as we'll talk about in the bench and it lets the it lets the applications use it lets the the CPU assign tasks to cores based on what's available when there's more cores available there's more opportunity to have overlap and and stuff not being used at the same anyway so8 cores 2.6 billion transistors if you look at the chip and compare it to an i5 a massive massive die uh cuz they fit a ton of cores in there um in addition the new thing that x99 or the uh the new thing that hasell introduces um is we have to use a new chipset uh you you can't use your z97s your Z87 with this this is a high-end it's a socket 2011 okay which means there's 2011 pin connects on the bottom contact points that plug in your socket now Sandy bridge and Ivy Bridge e also socket 2011 uh but that those version two this is version three this is a different 2011 different 2011 so you can't just take your old Sandy bridge out and drop this bad boy in not not so compatible so if they're doing a new chipet now on the eve of what we presume is the eve of Broadwell this has got to be the chipset for Broadwell too right no because this is the high-end one and Broadwell won't unless you're using Broadwell e which will use maybe 2011 and maybe a bios update um Broadwell but they're not committing to supporting anything going forward this could be the only CPU this motherboard which 10 years ago is a problem now doesn't matter at all I don't think people upgrade CPUs midc and bios have been I mean the uh the chipset chipset makers and the uh motherboard makers have been good about updating bioses to improve CPU support at least in the mid-range okay um so there's a new chipset and that's what I want to talk about next um this is the it's called x99 mhm and I'm using an Asus x99 Deluxe board here which is a high-end so with a high-end chip it's a mostly a high-end board the chip we're using is $1,000 now there's also two uh two hasell e that don't have eight cores okay there's two six core ones um the old hexacore the old the old quote unquote hexacore yeah I think the model numbers are the 5930 and the 5820 and those are much cheaper the 5930 is $580 about 600 bucks and the 5820 is only 390 bucks so these are both higher clock speeds than the than the octacore kind of to be expected cuz I guess there's a management issue when you're dealing with this many cores on this big a chip 140 W TDP CPU which means that at load it's going to use at at stock load it's going to use 140 Watts which is more than a high7 uses about 80 84 Watts right and if you're looking at like the lower end mid-range chips you can get all the way if you get into the ultra low voltage chips you can get down to like 15 watts in some cases so all the has e use 140 Watts the previous extreme Edition CPUs uh were 130 Watts um Sandy bridge I Bridge even the halem um so it's a little beefier uh but you can overclock it so this is a 3 gz chip um and it has a turbo which means that it it will Intel has built an overhead turns off cores turns up clock speed basically up up of clock speed and that goes up to 3.5 GHz okay um everyone I've talked to that has tested has e and everyone that has tested as well e and the board makers and in my own experience you can clock this up to easily over 4 G 4 GHz is like kind of your Baseline for overclocking so is this is this 4 GHz janky or 4 GHz you don't notice that there's any difference between this and the normal you know no no I mean performance is great all I care stability stability 4 gz stable it's might as well call it a 4 GHz ship and when it's overclocked if you have proper Cooling and we'll talk about Cooling in a second also 4 GHz is like where you should start at when you're over um that's a that's a 25 that's more than that it's a 33% jump oh yeah oh yeah that's a that's a big first step out of now the the caveat in terms of also needing cooling is also uh Power also it's 140 Watts once you go to 4.4 GHz 41 GHz that's extra 100 Watts needed and and I mean were you seeing the CPU overheating and and starting to throttle down and turn stuff off when you're 4 gz at 4 gigz at load we're talking about like at idle 29 degrees CI at load with this cooling system which we'll talk about it's actually only like a mid-range cooling system yeah 58° not even passing 60° so what were you seeing a 30% jump in benchmarks yes wow that's nice yes it is it is actually that fast um so x99 as I was talking about is a new chipset this is an assus motherboard x99 supports the hasbell E and also as you can see right here ddr4 ooh one more than DDR3 that's right it's finally in terms of technologies that have been forever uhuh right DDR3 that's like a what 7year old technology now DDR3 was in video cards and like the early gdrd r3s they were doing DDR3 then they went to gddr3 what um usually when you get new memory it means one thing it's a little tiny bit faster and then crazy expensive it is well there are uh practical feature differences right so uh ddr4 the main advantages is one speed yeah uh whereas D and DDR3 got really fast DDR3 started at 1033 MHz and you can get DDR3 in you know 2800 PC 2800 PC3 people overclock it these are clock speeds for the ram y uh ddr4 starts at PC 2133 MHz so it's okay um and but most uh ddr4 makers now are actually releasing as ddr4 at launch in the high range two 2666 or 2800 stable now do you have perform do you have any reliability problems when you over memory or Z so I'll talk about speeds I'm using Corsair ddr4 right now they're Dominator chips they are the high-end chips cuz they're the most readily available if you're building a Haswell e system and you're overclocking you want to get 2666 or 2800 Ram now if you're not overclocking you're one at the low end you can get 2133 and crucial makes that and it's 100 bucks cheaper um for 100 bucks cheaper on a $300 purchase or 100 bucks cheaper on $200 300 it's 300 versus 400 wow that isra 300 gigs oh oh right cuz it's quad Channel yes that's other thing so ddr4 quad Channel now higher densities so uh we're talking about 8 gabt per dim at start we're going to see 16 gabes in a little bit but you're talking about across the whole system because there're eight channels or four Channel memories eight slots 64 gigs of RAM you can put in the system right now no problem so you're building a small server for you're Bitcoin mining but you don't have a custom Bitcoin mining if you're doing like rendering you can always use more memory if you're doing 3D rendering if you're using photogrametry stuff more memory is also so this is a workstation yes I mean most people gamers are not going to need that um when you say most you mean most Gamers or most people Gamers don't need this most people comma gamers are not going to need this um now this clocks up stably with with the with the CPU up like 3 uh 33100 MHz PC 3100 for 3800 Rock Solid no problem um in terms of buying Ram regardless if you're buying ddr4 or DDR3 there are a couple things you should know um and I don't know if people most people know this uh one if you're buying Ram some are marked XMP which is Extreme memory profile you need to enable out in the Bios you're not going to get the speeds of your even if you buy PC 2800 XMP is a little memory chip on the BIOS on the ram that says hey here's what I can do to the bios so your motherboard just sets it up automatically and you don't know what have to have cast to latency timings and all that stuff the uh the standards institution that regulates speed of memory and stuff um jedc j j g j deck uh they cap this at 2133 which is what the CPU technically so if you look inside the CPU it says the Ram uh the memory is supported up to 2133 when clearly I'm not using 2133 Ram yeah one peasant would run 2133 RAM and the memory here is uh when I look at the my uh oh that's not what I wanted show that in a second but anyway um this PC 2800 Ram close of 3100 you need an enable XMP when you're buying Ram the things you need to know capacity matters the most MH like big is better we're Americans we know that well you're going to run out of capacity before you reaching the speed are you realistically going to run out of capacity when you're upgrading if you have 4 gigs right now instead of buying faster memory buy more memory first as a prescriptive thing it depends on what you're doing though like you're to run 16 gigs of RAM is a ton if you're just playing video games I'm I'm saying that if you're at 4 gigs yes and you're if you're looking either buy faster 4 gigs oh yeah memory fair enough the things you should prioritize in terms of buying yes capacity first then after that the distribution to maximize your channels M so if you run a tri Channel system and you're option are buying two sticks of 4 gigs or three sticks of 2 gigs get three sticks of two gigs is better than 8 gig in this case yes exactly and then making sure your channel your memor is in the right channels the proper channels and then speeds and then your clock timings I mean ultimately the speeds and clock timings and stuff only really matter if you're going to get serious about overclocking I mean otherwise you can go buy the cheapest stuff from a reputable manufactur yeah and and people go on new EG all the time and they search Ram they search you know DDR3 16 gigs and then they see 50 listings and didn't know what they're looking for uh here's what you should look for capacity the channel splitting whether you number of modules if you have most systems these days are dual Channel systems you need two sticks to make that work if you have a tri Channel system which is rare you need three sticks and if you have one of the new Quad Channel systems you need one two three four sticks four sticks exactly um what about fancy boxes and like if you look at that memory it has some cool plastic shells and stuff on the outside doesn't matter doesn't matter that's all it's all value add the colors you can change the lights you can change that's pretty cool um and then speeds of course matter and then memory timings usually say like C C8 C9 C10 uh those are your memory timings lower better okay lowers a lot better more more the number of Cycles it takes to reset some feature inside the r yeah um right now these are c c15s um that's pretty slow pretty slow but what you care about is the memory speed divided by the timings and that ratio is what what matters for Ram so does ddr4 transfer more stuff per cycle than just like is it is it multiple multiple transfers per clock cycle or is it just one two trans same same as DDR it's just faster exactly it's just faster higher density it's a little lower latency now um but and then expandability and and lower power management you can right now I think it starts at uh 1.2 volts is uh is lower P like it's I think 1.3 was what DDR3 was using um power consumption so that's ddr4 um yeah 400 bucks is expensive the guy have't paid 400 bucks for memory since since the Taiwanese memory Factory of the early 2000s right um the cooler so I'm using a h80 here it's a Corsair cooler now if you're building any Haswell E Systems um you have to use a liquid cooler that's what Intel recommends because they generate that much heat because they're 140 Watt and so an air cooler even like a awesome cooler The Cooler Master 212 which was like it's a really popular um copper cooler yeah you don't want to run that here um now in terms of water coolers actually yeah I was going to say this is a this is a unified design water cooler the on top of the CPU block there's a pump there's not really much of a Reservoir in this thing it's just the amount of water that's in the radiator and the whole whole thing right and and even though this is branded Corsair they actually Source from like ACH or a bunch of other companies and Intel does the same thing um they're super reliable easy to install these days um and and like you don't have to worry about filling liquid or anything like I mean that hasn't been the case for a long time they they're all self-contained so I would actually recommend I know they're a little more expensive there $80 cooler versus what 35 vers like $40 really nice um Cooler Master you can even cheaper if you find a deal but the installation process is fantastic this and and for this uh socket no backing board necessary n no clips no snapping in we're talking about just two screws and thumb screws and tightened do you have to have the back of the motherboard off no really you can just put thumb screws into the thumb screws on the top oh cuz it go into the whole in the in the back of your motherboard tray no no it doesn't it oh it screws into the plate that Intel has glued on the back of the motherboard oh that's it's the E it was the easiest cooler install I've ever had your case has to have you have two fans hooked up to that and that it comes with two fans because this is a relatively small radiat so when you're shopping for a wait so it sucks and blows no this this one t takes takes it it's sucking in from the outside in the back okay and that's that's the air flow you want cuz you want it's not cool air over the radiator exactly you don't want the hot air um when you're looking at uh water coolers and I don't have the best Air Management right now uh the size of the the radiator matters a lot the thickness and uh of course there does sell one the higher end one the h110 h100 which are double wide uhuh um but uh for the h80 which is like their mid-range uh you want to put the two fans on you need fans on both sides and this is basically um this will go basically in any machine that has a 120 CM 12 CM fan Mount exactly 120 mm on top uh which is why I'm using that one for this case uh this case doesn't support I mean I guess some people have done taken out the bottoms and put a the radiators in the bottoms well then there are some people that like you'll have a thing on a side that has aund it's basically two 120 m f mat side by side for a larger and some even go up to three it's that even that much more expensive to buy the higher-end liquid cooler from Corsair it's like 20 bucks 20 bucks more this is 70 70 Bucks versus 80 bucks 80 bucks over about 100 uh but whatever your case supports like my case doesn't support that how's with the two fans what what's the noise level with this thing it gets it gets pretty loud when when you crank up all it all 12 SE course yeah so it keeps it cool and I didn't reach speeds over 65° um 68° that's one point but Celsius Celsius but it's it's uh it gets pretty loud these fans and some people have just replaced the fans yeah I mean you can get lower quieter fans that move a little bit less air yeah um back to the motherboard uh x99 also supports uh now in the front I I have a piece of coverage shot that shows this uh there's a ton of USB 3 so there's six native USB 3 with Intel controller there's a lot of usb3 um in the back and then and uh Seuss actually uh put four more in do these do these are these are the four more they put on a second controller or they on the second controller yeah they're using a as media controller which is better than just splitting off from The Hub right do they have um front mounted ports they do so they're addition it's 14 total it uses that terrible connector still it uses this terrible connector still if you want front mounted USB um so there's USB there's 40 Lanes of pcie with supported by the CPU okay uh with the the second tier hasbell e the 59 uh 30 um that is 40 Lanes also but a lower clock speed and only six cores and then the 5820 only has 28 Lanes of PC those are built into the CPU um so so explain what PCI lanes are PCI lanes are um so that's the uh the connection for your like all all these Lanes here all the video cards all the support cards even storage now okay and and even stuff like if you have a thunderbolt port or something like that'll Connect into that as well so this motherboard also theoretically supports Thunderbolt you'll need an adapter card that is Su sell separately but they will have thunder Port uh Thunderbolt Port um it's pcie right now um the lanes when you're talking about uh distribution of lanes uh 40 Lanes get split off like there AR actually 40 actual physical Lanes right that's because a lane is like 16 video card is 16 slots the the the longer the slot is on the the board the more Lanes it supports generally um generally but then a long Lane could be I mean one long slot could be 16 or eight well it'll it uses what depending what yeah if you put a sound card into a 16 slot a 16 Lane slot it's going to be a on Lane sound card regardless of what what um and that's something you should notice when you're building a PC too read the motherboard manual cuz where you put the video card matters cuz sometimes distribution of lanes and the allocation um is different because is this machine I assume this is designed for so they can sell expensive ass gaming pieces with 40 Lanes it's designed for you know three Tri SLI you run Tri s 1616 and or 8816 or something um with SLI you need to put them in special slots as well now one of the cool things that I got with this computer and it's something that's supported new is pcie storage uh there's a new connector called the M2 m.2 M um this is the thing that's been in laptops for a while yeah so M SATA and M2 there's all these standards kind of converge um and you can't see it here because I've built it in already but I do have a a piece of coverage shot for that as well but my storage for my hard drive is basically a stick of gum yeah it's a 22 nanometer or millimeter wide stick not nanom I wish it was 22 n you had to get you you had to get a pair of micro micro manipulators to install it that's funny 22 n millimeters and then the it's stacked up high so the larger the storage is the higher it is um it came out last year you can actually buy it in PCI lanes and they Su includes an adapter if you if you want to shove that into um an actual PCI oh so it's just a it's a physical connect the the adapter that you use is a physical connector adapter not a um it doesn't there's not like a controller on the card and then it has to go through an extra layer CU it's just PCI and so and so the M2 it doesn't provide Power or it does provide Power um but the M2 slot is just a a smaller slot there's a bracket is there one on the board there there one the board oh that's nice yeah so my memory my storage is plugged in right there it's just like a stick of gum sticking up so you use those for the for the like small machines like the bricks in the nuke and stuff like that as well when you when you want a machine that's smaller then you can fit even a 2 and half inch hard drive in now in terms of new technology is pcie based storage is also expensive it's been around for a long time on the server side starting with like Ram drives you just loaded a bunch of DDR3 into and then if the power went off that stuff went away so people only use that in data centers and stuff there's power redundancy this new stuff though works just like a normal SSD it just happens to be a much smaller size and has a faster connection to the PC right yeah so uh ssds as we talked about in the very beginning it's like the easiest upgrade you can make and it's surprising how cheap ssds are now if you want to buy a good one you know from Sand uh from Samsung uh we're talking about like around 50 cents a gigabyte yeah you can get a 500 that means you literally can buy 500 well a 500ish gigabyte SSD for like 250 bucks right um terms of PCI eBay storage it's about still a dollar a gigabyte a little less than dollar for 256 gigs which I have here it's about 230 bucks that's still a I think a pretty fair price um now we've been recommending for a long time that people don't get too freaked out about the difference differences between ssds because they were all gated by the SATA SATA 6G bus like the speed that that interface uh was capable of was limiting the performance of the drives has that changed now with the PCI yeah with PCI and only like two manufacturers really make I think it's it is SanDisk and plexer who make these sticks PCI a lot of people make them for laptops but it's kind of a different market and they're more concerned about power NE and the people who make them for laptops a lot of those are actually SATA based they're using the same M2 Port it's not actually you're not tapping into the pcie lanes so that's something if you search online for m.2 and you want to buy the m.2 storage if you buy a SATA one it's going to be the same as if you plug into your standard old SAT so this will work with the SATA one as well yeah yeah can plug in so will this work with the Apple because Apple's been using PCA ssds and newer laptops but those are soldered on directly are they yes with the MacBook ones there solder on directly there's not they're not actually ones you can extract or replace in so that and that's just because they build the hard I'm pretty sure that's not true but p is soldered in they're absolutely sold 100% soldered in directly um and then in terms of storage there's 10 SATA 6G ports in addition to having six normal sat you can't see them because they're actually in the front right here and having six SATA 6G there actually four of them uh that are sat Express which sat Express again a new type of connector um it looks like two SATA ports plus a separate little thing so it's a almost think of it like a USB 3 style really wide connector cable okay it's backwards compatible in the sense that there are two SATA 6G ports next to each other you can use each of those ports as a SATA 6G Port M or you can plug in one SATA Express and it just Taps into pcie storage oh five passes the controller just like this and it gives you up to 10 G gabit per second theoretical now with the M2 though U because you can take up four lanes of pcie that gives you up to you know theoretically 32 gbits per second in the future Crazy Fast yes Crazy Fast no ssds are going to take advantage of 32 g g a second right now 10 GBS per second absolutely and I'm getting that those speeds with this chip I'm getting in terms of sequential reads over 700 megabytes per second compared to a Samsung SSD where you're hitting about 500 510 megabytes per second so you're you're paying more almost double for storage but you're getting you know a 20% boost which I mean 20% paying double for a 20% boost isn't again a great deal unless you have something that actually uses it and this is another one of the situations where the you'll have the benefits of the access time on the SATA on the SATA uh SSD you know your machine's going to boot just as fast your applications are going to load just as quickly your files are going to launch just as quickly it's literally just the the max the very high end when when you're transferring huge files for long periods of time that it makes a big difference yeah um one thing I want to talk about is overclocking for sure okay uh if we switch back to the desktop here the assus boort and and Intel really kind of encourages overclocking especially with their K if you look at if you shop for I5 or i5 and i7 you see that K monor on the back no reason to buy these unless these expensive CPUs unless you're going to take advantage of the fact that they're unlocked going to overclock them and this one is unlockable uh assus includes software called the AI suite and what you can actually do and I have it overclock right now to 4.1 which I find it to be really stable for me uh 4.3 was also stable 4.1 it says 24% if you do to the math it's actually a little more I think they're basing it on the turbo okay um they have a basic Auto overclocking you can actually go in this menu and uh two ways you can overclock you can change the the base clock ratio which for this one standards 100 or you can uh base clock speed or the ratio um and then actually it will overclock itself and go to a point where the PC shuts off and then step down one step below that or two steps below that and and do a couple rounds of testing and give you what it recommends as it speci and this is this application that you're in right now is basically a front end for the UEFI bios oh yeah exactly so when you say these changes it's a it's you know people call it a software overclock but it's a basically going to the BIOS and changing those settings do you have to reboot for that stuff to take effect or does it take effect it takes effect immediately okay yeah um and then have you gotten into trouble like when you when you push too far and windows crashes it just rolls back automatically when you the next time and you can save profiles and you can actually clock per core too so what it'll do is it'll test all eight of the cores and clock them to CU some of them will scope faster some of them will be used more frequently and that will be can all be adjusted um you mentioned ufi bios and that's one of the last things I want to talk about but uh I'm actually going to restart this PC uh to show you that um shut down hyphen R now or I'll just do it manually there it goes yeah um Windows 8.1 of course um the speeds for adding eight core matter in very specific uh use cases what what do you mean the CPU clock speeds having having this CP Having Eight cores in the CPU the paying $1,000 for this you're only going to see the advantages in very specific use cases it seems like hold on let me guess we've been telling this for years well I can I can tell you where you're not going to see the use cases the benefits games no games are going to take advantage of eight cores no games don't take advantage of six cores in my experience most GES four but most of them are two yeah not even four hyper threading an i5 right now is going to perform with a with a good video card is going to perform almost the same it'll probably be better because it's going to be a higher clock speed yeah and and yeah you could probably clock it higher too you get 5 gz if you really wanted to um so where are you going to see the benefits you're going to see them in video editing mhm and rendering probably more in the rendering than the editing yes and in in in trans coating so the uh I did four benchmarks blender there's a benchmark you can download it's called Cycles to a rendering of a BMW car uh extremely fast under if you want to compare it under under two minutes like a minute and a half and that also takes advantage of CPU or GPU encoding as well did you test this against your old desktop as well uh yes against the six I had a six core beforehand it was a old like 990x and a halem based six core um and back then that 3.5 G score also pretty fast yeah yeah I mean there I mean it's still like it's still yeah if you have if you have a a Sandy Bridge e you don't need to upgrade to this in in my experience if you're doing stuff that's multi-threaded it's less about the the individual performance of the cores and more about the number of cores you can throw at it the number of if you're using FFM Peg to transcode video having six cores is much much is is is a it scales fairly linearly with the number of cores you add um until you reach memory bandwidth and stuff like that so handbrake saw direct correlation which is FFM Peg direct correlation between speed cores and performance uh I tested they don't do any GPU accelerated en coding with with handbrake it's just yes raw CPU power a number of cores so a six core is going to do much better than a four core a four core with hyperthreading is going to do better with just PLO four core and eight cores with hyper threading extremely fast how long does it take to transcode a Blu-ray with handbrake uh with my benchmarks uh a 1080p let's say 1080p video file and this is uh using the high the h64 high profile it was 120 FPS so we're talking about 120 FPS okay meaning uh a 30 Fram per second movie 24 frame per second movie if it's an hour long it's going to take 15 minutes that's pretty good that's pretty good for yeah sorry for 1080p Blu-ray yeah for 1080 and that's going from 30 megabit Blu-ray down to what like to to uh to whatever runs on your iPad so okay so you did the iPad profile iPad preset which is the high preset okay yeah U if you're doing a 4K in code I had a 4K 3D uh file which is like you know 3100 that's the thing everybody's going to use I just wanted that the biggest resolution um that was about 30 FPS so about a 1: one um which I thought was also pretty good um the thing that you're going to see the advantages of not only cores and clock speed but also the memory is a thing like uh photo scan so uh photo scan is a piece of software professional software which we actually use to do the photogram achieve you saw the big heads the tested big heads and the nanch actually uses it now because it uses all multi-threaded hyper threads and also it's very memory intensive okay um and there's a batch process you take like import 50 images it creates a mesh a do Cloud a mesh and textures um and also direct correlation between cores and um and and performance did you do any like raw CU raw processing is another one of those places that multiple cores generally kind of shine uh raw developing basically like a batch like if you're if you go out to to a field someplace take 300 pictures at the same afternoon lights RA photos Lightroom not that doesn't take too much Advantage Lightroom Lightroom while does tax the cores is not optimized for it's not you're not going to see a uh straight 2x performance by doubling the cores okay um and at at that point Lightroom it really peaked out at a four core system so you have to use a more specialized piece of software that that is designed for that do you know like I know Gordon at Maximum PC always likes to run some d noising uh stuff right right so now you're talking about like Premiere and where where visual effects matters and there you're going to see a combination of having that when you're exporting um to something like uh h264 that is extremely taxing on the CPU but when you're actually doing your video editing and adding D noise effects a Premiere is now accelerated with open CL which supports Cuda so you have the right video card I there's two different it's open C and Cuda right but anyway with their Mercury andine that actually those those uh effects render in real time and so you able to see your denoising and your smoothing effects your weird transition effects all that stuff without having to wait you know with four times length of the clip um so to sum it up cuz yeah we've been talking about this for a while uh this is an amazing trip it's an ddr4 and Haswell e and x99 at launch seemed really stable um if I were to recommend someone wanting to buy a Haswell E-class chip like they had you know $2,500 a spend I would recommend actually the lowend Haswell e the six core the six core 28 Lane uh 5820 which is 400 bucks 400 bucks less than half the price of this you're going to get six cores 28 Lanes is good enough for SLI even and plenty enough if you're going to put one card in and a bunch of and you know pcie storage fine for that and and then you get it but you do have to buy a new motherboard and you have to buy DDR I mean and I assume typically new chipsets new motherboards with quad Channel memory this has got to be like a 15 layer motherboard or something insane it's going to be expensive right and the motherboard is $400 they have $300 versions without you know the built-in Wi-Fi um $300 is still a lot of money for a motherboard exactly it's still a highend system so you're looking at 300 you're looking at a mother an expensive motherboard which you may or may not get with a different chipset ddr4 is crazy expensive per gigabyte right now 400 bucks for DDR 3 or 400 bucks for ddr4 and then 3 or 400 bucks for 400 bucks for the CPU it it almost seems like unless you really specifically need a workflow that has that needs either massive bandwidth or massive CPU uh performance probably better off sticking with a with a even going back to to IV right so I want to get some prescriptions for people who are never ever going to buy $1,000 CPU if you're building a system right now and you're doing only gaming say only gaming I I would say there are two options for you one Intel released a pendium anniversary edition it's actually a two core but clock extremely high very low power if you're never going to do ever any video encoding that is an amazing chip if you are going to do or living room PC maybe yes if you're going to build a balance system and you want to build on the budget the core i5 um uh what's the model I have actually I think I had it written down uh I5 49 $ 4690k which is a Devil's Canyon chip it came out earlier this year it's I5 it doesn't do hyperthreading it's a $240 CPU clocks very high over four 4.7 GHz that one I would get an overclock the hell out of so if if I mean but if you have a Sandy Bridge or newer PC you kind of don't need to upgrade right now unless unless I mean if you're if you're video editing and Like You video you edit video twice a twice a month or three times a year or something like that you can afford to match in code and then leave the machine running all night and come back the next morning and let it be done you you don't need this like this is for people who are doing 4K video or doing CAD work or with you know millions and millions of polygons millions and millions of of points um it this seems like a really super specialized computer it's a very super specialized again the I5 4690k which you can overclock that $240 CPU is my pick if you need hyperthreading that means if you're going to do some video editing the 4790k Devil's Canyon one the Step Up is is my i7 pick right now and and we expect to see new a whole new architecture next year because the Broadwell is going to be this is the the this is the evolution of the previous generation broad Broadwell's oh actually no I'm sorry Broadwell is the is the next Evolution this is the talk not the is the talk this is the tick yeah um this is higher clock speeds little more efficiency so we'll see more power efficiency and smaller chips and probably you know better integrated graphic better integrated graphics and stuff like that uh the one thing we didn't talk about I know people have been asking about it what about graphics cards what about gpus uh that's a huge component uh I'm using a 780x right now or 780 GTX 780 right now not even the ti or the Titan um we're not ready to talk about those yet well not that we're not ready to talk I totally talk about it but nobody's told us you know what I haven't we haven't signed any ndas and no one's told us anything uh but my guess is very soon we're going to see some big news with I mean it's it's the 780 series is more than a year old my guess is that they'll have new cards out by Christmas time but we like I said we I would put eggs on it I'm not going to put eggs on it I would put eggs on it hell yeah I put eggs on it oh man that would be so good so stay tuned uh when when new graphics cards are announced we'll go through the whole process again we'll talk about uh gaming performance that's that's when we'll build our next PC to it's been it's been a while yes I think we did the last one right around the time the 780 came out it's I feel like it's time let's let's go now we know the highend we can trickle down and uh and Speck it out so that's it for a big overview and and maybe an in-depth overview of uh the latest and greatest in desktop PC technology if you have a PC right now and you want it to be faster buy an SSD yeah buy and you don't have an SSD and you don't have an SSD buy an SSD buy an SSD yeah we'll see you guys later byehey guys I'm will from tested I'm Norman from tested Norman Chan what is this this is monstrosity I thought PCS were small and we're supposed to be the future PCS the Nu nuck the nuke I thought it was they they call it the Nook they should have called it the nuke nuke is a much better name um today we want to talk about PC Technologies we're PC experts we spent 10 years at Maximum PC bu we've built a lot of P we have more than 45 years of PC Building experience combined Will Smith the Norman Chan with over 15 years of PC building experience uh so we haven't done a ton of PC testing I built a PC when we started tested and then haven't really touched it except for upgrading the video card wow so you're due for an upgrade I put um a video card in SSD in a four-year-old PC totally happy great that's if you upgrade your video card and you upgrade your storage from a hard drive to an SS those are the two things right now that are going to give you the most uh bang for your buck improvements if you're a gamer um and an SSD or even if you do like light video edits and stuff like that if in an SSD bar on if you're on a hard drive and you want to upgrade get SSD I mean you hit the button and it boots like it takes longer for the bias to get through all of its nonsense than it does for the for the for Windows to start after the fin day change and games load faster apps load faster you just you when you go back to a machine that doesn't have an SSD after you've used an SSD for a while it just sucks it's terrible but turns out um there's a lot of exciting new pc Technologies and right now is a great time to kind of refresh what you know about PCS and the new stuff that's coming out and new stuff that's already out um because we've kind of reached this this Milestone um okay so Broadwell's out and we're ready for new Intel chips it's 20 14 NM 7 NM where where we at still 22 NM oh my God still 22 neter sounds the process this doesn't seem like the giant leap you know Broadwell we've been hearing about Broadwell for a long we're expecting like 25 hours of battery life for something insane on laptops on mobile yes on mobile yes but what what are we looking at here this is not mobile So today we're talking about building a desktop PC and this one's obviously Built This is actually the PC that I built last week's uh a 90% upgrade uh to what I was using at home this is a this is a raven a Silverstone Raven case it's the sideways case it's a Silverstone Fortress F okay yeah I still like a lot it's really dirty in there Norm uh the the fan the bottom fans actually the filters are could have could have blasted the dust out a littleit yeah the filters are clean um there's a bunch of new Hardware in here that I want to talk about and the stuff that just came out that um I don't think most people are going to buy but it's good for people who are building PCS to know about and to know what's out there because it's going to lay the path going forward as to what their PC upgrade Cycles might look like right um and of course on the PC side the most important thing is this the CPU um whether you're doing gaming or just it's the heart and the brain of your computer and inel right now is really dominating in in its uh in its in desktop CPUs and until you know and also the mobile you most of the MacBook airs are all buil Intel chips um and on the desktop side while AMD still has desktop ships um it's the general consensus that if you're doing anything for gaming or editing or you're building anything that's going to be multiple cores and with hyper threading Intel is the way to go if you're at the really low end or want really low P low power consumption maybe look at AMD but for high-end gaming Intel or bust yes right if you're the discret graphics um and on the highend side So today we're looking at the highest end Intel Desktop CPU it's called Haswell e now we've heard of Haswell last year Haswell came out there was Ivy Bridge Sandy Bridge s brid Ivy bridge and Haswell and this year uh we didn't get a new name uh we got something called Devil's Canyon which was a Haswell refresh and it's still 22 NM process it's just clock tier has well they changed some of the the uh the way the cooling's done on the on the on the side so this means this means though that Broadwell Pro presumably Broadwell should have shipped by now and we should be buying laptops and stuff using Broadwell at this point but they had some problems with their process or some some issue along the way I'm not exactly sure it's unclear incling their road map Broadwell is still next year okay um well they can change their road map as they go kind of the neat way about that works when you have the document on your server um so uh clearly the PC is built right now so I don't want to take the CPU out but we're I did take some video of the components before so Haswell e uh this is their extreme Line This is the highest the high-end desktop so it's not the fifth generation hasell this is the E the E is for extreme extreme how many X's are in extreme uh there's actually only one X this is okay in terms of the chip it's the 5960x okay and this uh Intel always does you know their cons I5 I3 I5 i7 and then the highend of i7 $1,000 CPU and just just be clear the highend and Intel CPU since I've been building PC starting like 1994 has been $1,000 that's kind of their their price they're like hey guys this is the good one it's probably 10% faster than the next one and traditionally maybe not with this one but it's 1,000 Bucks versus 500 and decision for highend PC Builders is you know they know if they're going to build every two years and they're going to build and spend $1,000 on CPU is it worth it to spend $1,000 are you getting really that much more so let's let's take a step is it worth building a new pc every two years at this point Lloyd does it L Lloyd has a basement filled with computers you've been over there no it's no it's not uh but if you're someone like Lloyd and you you do spend a $1,000 on a CPU um and lot some people do some video editors you know every 3 years like from ivybridge is it worth if they have IV Bridge or Sandy Bridge e is it worth then jumping to a Haswell e well and if this is a work machine for you and getting 20% more video encode performance means you can do 20% more work you're getting paid by the job like there's there's real reason to spend money on Hardware if if you want 20% faster load times in your video game maybe not so much so the chip itself um the difference in this year's has well in this year's extreme thousand processor is that it's Intel's first processor with eight cores first desktop process first desktop processor with eight cores and the way CPUs work is on the inside uh you know you've had dual core CPUs for a long time quad cour CPUs for a long time on the high end on the server Market of course we're talking about 812 PL on the high desktop the most we've had since in the Hal days six now we had of two two processor on a chip before don't Intel doesn't really do that skull Trail Stu not anymore for desktop well skull Trail was different skull Trail was two two chips two sockets we don't do that anymore and then they did packages with two yeah that was a bad idea too this is in one piece of silicon with uh eight CPU cores inside and they can all connect to each other over some sort of high-speed bus some magic happens we have friends who can explain this much better than us but the upshot is it's eight when you open up task manager you see actually 16 CPU cores I'll show ma right so this is Task Manager and you can see there are 16 boxes here 4x4 Grid it's because they're eight course and then because it's i7 it also has hyperthreading right so if you're looking at a CPU and you're buying the core I3 stuff it's going to be low two core with Hyper four cores I5 is four core with no hyperthreading i7 you have four cores that double to eight and then here with the the i7 extreme industri 5960x it is uh eight cores so um what hyper threading is in case people don't know is a technology that lets Intel kind of segment an individual CPU core so that one part of the core can be active and then another thread can be using a different part of the same core at the same time which at the time it was introduced like 10 years ago was kind of revolutionary now it's just kind of expected on Intel stuff um when it was originally announced it wasn't particularly efficient all way especially with a relatively low number of cores um how how did did you try hyper thring on and off when you were benchmarking this you don't really turn on and off you can enable in certain applications how many actual virtual cores you use um but scale but does it is it aware of the difference between hyperth threading cores and regular okay no um you can turn it off in the Bios you can turn it off in the Bios yes you can and you can actually turn off you can turn off cores if you want in the Bios um and you can clock them differently but uh in terms of the efficiency of hyperthreading and applications that make use of hyper threading were much better now it actually when you're talking about doubling the adding two more cores and four more threads it actually adds a significant performance as we'll talk about in the bench and it lets the it lets the applications use it lets the the CPU assign tasks to cores based on what's available when there's more cores available there's more opportunity to have overlap and and stuff not being used at the same anyway so8 cores 2.6 billion transistors if you look at the chip and compare it to an i5 a massive massive die uh cuz they fit a ton of cores in there um in addition the new thing that x99 or the uh the new thing that hasell introduces um is we have to use a new chipset uh you you can't use your z97s your Z87 with this this is a high-end it's a socket 2011 okay which means there's 2011 pin connects on the bottom contact points that plug in your socket now Sandy bridge and Ivy Bridge e also socket 2011 uh but that those version two this is version three this is a different 2011 different 2011 so you can't just take your old Sandy bridge out and drop this bad boy in not not so compatible so if they're doing a new chipet now on the eve of what we presume is the eve of Broadwell this has got to be the chipset for Broadwell too right no because this is the high-end one and Broadwell won't unless you're using Broadwell e which will use maybe 2011 and maybe a bios update um Broadwell but they're not committing to supporting anything going forward this could be the only CPU this motherboard which 10 years ago is a problem now doesn't matter at all I don't think people upgrade CPUs midc and bios have been I mean the uh the chipset chipset makers and the uh motherboard makers have been good about updating bioses to improve CPU support at least in the mid-range okay um so there's a new chipset and that's what I want to talk about next um this is the it's called x99 mhm and I'm using an Asus x99 Deluxe board here which is a high-end so with a high-end chip it's a mostly a high-end board the chip we're using is $1,000 now there's also two uh two hasell e that don't have eight cores okay there's two six core ones um the old hexacore the old the old quote unquote hexacore yeah I think the model numbers are the 5930 and the 5820 and those are much cheaper the 5930 is $580 about 600 bucks and the 5820 is only 390 bucks so these are both higher clock speeds than the than the octacore kind of to be expected cuz I guess there's a management issue when you're dealing with this many cores on this big a chip 140 W TDP CPU which means that at load it's going to use at at stock load it's going to use 140 Watts which is more than a high7 uses about 80 84 Watts right and if you're looking at like the lower end mid-range chips you can get all the way if you get into the ultra low voltage chips you can get down to like 15 watts in some cases so all the has e use 140 Watts the previous extreme Edition CPUs uh were 130 Watts um Sandy bridge I Bridge even the halem um so it's a little beefier uh but you can overclock it so this is a 3 gz chip um and it has a turbo which means that it it will Intel has built an overhead turns off cores turns up clock speed basically up up of clock speed and that goes up to 3.5 GHz okay um everyone I've talked to that has tested has e and everyone that has tested as well e and the board makers and in my own experience you can clock this up to easily over 4 G 4 GHz is like kind of your Baseline for overclocking so is this is this 4 GHz janky or 4 GHz you don't notice that there's any difference between this and the normal you know no no I mean performance is great all I care stability stability 4 gz stable it's might as well call it a 4 GHz ship and when it's overclocked if you have proper Cooling and we'll talk about Cooling in a second also 4 GHz is like where you should start at when you're over um that's a that's a 25 that's more than that it's a 33% jump oh yeah oh yeah that's a that's a big first step out of now the the caveat in terms of also needing cooling is also uh Power also it's 140 Watts once you go to 4.4 GHz 41 GHz that's extra 100 Watts needed and and I mean were you seeing the CPU overheating and and starting to throttle down and turn stuff off when you're 4 gz at 4 gigz at load we're talking about like at idle 29 degrees CI at load with this cooling system which we'll talk about it's actually only like a mid-range cooling system yeah 58° not even passing 60° so what were you seeing a 30% jump in benchmarks yes wow that's nice yes it is it is actually that fast um so x99 as I was talking about is a new chipset this is an assus motherboard x99 supports the hasbell E and also as you can see right here ddr4 ooh one more than DDR3 that's right it's finally in terms of technologies that have been forever uhuh right DDR3 that's like a what 7year old technology now DDR3 was in video cards and like the early gdrd r3s they were doing DDR3 then they went to gddr3 what um usually when you get new memory it means one thing it's a little tiny bit faster and then crazy expensive it is well there are uh practical feature differences right so uh ddr4 the main advantages is one speed yeah uh whereas D and DDR3 got really fast DDR3 started at 1033 MHz and you can get DDR3 in you know 2800 PC 2800 PC3 people overclock it these are clock speeds for the ram y uh ddr4 starts at PC 2133 MHz so it's okay um and but most uh ddr4 makers now are actually releasing as ddr4 at launch in the high range two 2666 or 2800 stable now do you have perform do you have any reliability problems when you over memory or Z so I'll talk about speeds I'm using Corsair ddr4 right now they're Dominator chips they are the high-end chips cuz they're the most readily available if you're building a Haswell e system and you're overclocking you want to get 2666 or 2800 Ram now if you're not overclocking you're one at the low end you can get 2133 and crucial makes that and it's 100 bucks cheaper um for 100 bucks cheaper on a $300 purchase or 100 bucks cheaper on $200 300 it's 300 versus 400 wow that isra 300 gigs oh oh right cuz it's quad Channel yes that's other thing so ddr4 quad Channel now higher densities so uh we're talking about 8 gabt per dim at start we're going to see 16 gabes in a little bit but you're talking about across the whole system because there're eight channels or four Channel memories eight slots 64 gigs of RAM you can put in the system right now no problem so you're building a small server for you're Bitcoin mining but you don't have a custom Bitcoin mining if you're doing like rendering you can always use more memory if you're doing 3D rendering if you're using photogrametry stuff more memory is also so this is a workstation yes I mean most people gamers are not going to need that um when you say most you mean most Gamers or most people Gamers don't need this most people comma gamers are not going to need this um now this clocks up stably with with the with the CPU up like 3 uh 33100 MHz PC 3100 for 3800 Rock Solid no problem um in terms of buying Ram regardless if you're buying ddr4 or DDR3 there are a couple things you should know um and I don't know if people most people know this uh one if you're buying Ram some are marked XMP which is Extreme memory profile you need to enable out in the Bios you're not going to get the speeds of your even if you buy PC 2800 XMP is a little memory chip on the BIOS on the ram that says hey here's what I can do to the bios so your motherboard just sets it up automatically and you don't know what have to have cast to latency timings and all that stuff the uh the standards institution that regulates speed of memory and stuff um jedc j j g j deck uh they cap this at 2133 which is what the CPU technically so if you look inside the CPU it says the Ram uh the memory is supported up to 2133 when clearly I'm not using 2133 Ram yeah one peasant would run 2133 RAM and the memory here is uh when I look at the my uh oh that's not what I wanted show that in a second but anyway um this PC 2800 Ram close of 3100 you need an enable XMP when you're buying Ram the things you need to know capacity matters the most MH like big is better we're Americans we know that well you're going to run out of capacity before you reaching the speed are you realistically going to run out of capacity when you're upgrading if you have 4 gigs right now instead of buying faster memory buy more memory first as a prescriptive thing it depends on what you're doing though like you're to run 16 gigs of RAM is a ton if you're just playing video games I'm I'm saying that if you're at 4 gigs yes and you're if you're looking either buy faster 4 gigs oh yeah memory fair enough the things you should prioritize in terms of buying yes capacity first then after that the distribution to maximize your channels M so if you run a tri Channel system and you're option are buying two sticks of 4 gigs or three sticks of 2 gigs get three sticks of two gigs is better than 8 gig in this case yes exactly and then making sure your channel your memor is in the right channels the proper channels and then speeds and then your clock timings I mean ultimately the speeds and clock timings and stuff only really matter if you're going to get serious about overclocking I mean otherwise you can go buy the cheapest stuff from a reputable manufactur yeah and and people go on new EG all the time and they search Ram they search you know DDR3 16 gigs and then they see 50 listings and didn't know what they're looking for uh here's what you should look for capacity the channel splitting whether you number of modules if you have most systems these days are dual Channel systems you need two sticks to make that work if you have a tri Channel system which is rare you need three sticks and if you have one of the new Quad Channel systems you need one two three four sticks four sticks exactly um what about fancy boxes and like if you look at that memory it has some cool plastic shells and stuff on the outside doesn't matter doesn't matter that's all it's all value add the colors you can change the lights you can change that's pretty cool um and then speeds of course matter and then memory timings usually say like C C8 C9 C10 uh those are your memory timings lower better okay lowers a lot better more more the number of Cycles it takes to reset some feature inside the r yeah um right now these are c c15s um that's pretty slow pretty slow but what you care about is the memory speed divided by the timings and that ratio is what what matters for Ram so does ddr4 transfer more stuff per cycle than just like is it is it multiple multiple transfers per clock cycle or is it just one two trans same same as DDR it's just faster exactly it's just faster higher density it's a little lower latency now um but and then expandability and and lower power management you can right now I think it starts at uh 1.2 volts is uh is lower P like it's I think 1.3 was what DDR3 was using um power consumption so that's ddr4 um yeah 400 bucks is expensive the guy have't paid 400 bucks for memory since since the Taiwanese memory Factory of the early 2000s right um the cooler so I'm using a h80 here it's a Corsair cooler now if you're building any Haswell E Systems um you have to use a liquid cooler that's what Intel recommends because they generate that much heat because they're 140 Watt and so an air cooler even like a awesome cooler The Cooler Master 212 which was like it's a really popular um copper cooler yeah you don't want to run that here um now in terms of water coolers actually yeah I was going to say this is a this is a unified design water cooler the on top of the CPU block there's a pump there's not really much of a Reservoir in this thing it's just the amount of water that's in the radiator and the whole whole thing right and and even though this is branded Corsair they actually Source from like ACH or a bunch of other companies and Intel does the same thing um they're super reliable easy to install these days um and and like you don't have to worry about filling liquid or anything like I mean that hasn't been the case for a long time they they're all self-contained so I would actually recommend I know they're a little more expensive there $80 cooler versus what 35 vers like $40 really nice um Cooler Master you can even cheaper if you find a deal but the installation process is fantastic this and and for this uh socket no backing board necessary n no clips no snapping in we're talking about just two screws and thumb screws and tightened do you have to have the back of the motherboard off no really you can just put thumb screws into the thumb screws on the top oh cuz it go into the whole in the in the back of your motherboard tray no no it doesn't it oh it screws into the plate that Intel has glued on the back of the motherboard oh that's it's the E it was the easiest cooler install I've ever had your case has to have you have two fans hooked up to that and that it comes with two fans because this is a relatively small radiat so when you're shopping for a wait so it sucks and blows no this this one t takes takes it it's sucking in from the outside in the back okay and that's that's the air flow you want cuz you want it's not cool air over the radiator exactly you don't want the hot air um when you're looking at uh water coolers and I don't have the best Air Management right now uh the size of the the radiator matters a lot the thickness and uh of course there does sell one the higher end one the h110 h100 which are double wide uhuh um but uh for the h80 which is like their mid-range uh you want to put the two fans on you need fans on both sides and this is basically um this will go basically in any machine that has a 120 CM 12 CM fan Mount exactly 120 mm on top uh which is why I'm using that one for this case uh this case doesn't support I mean I guess some people have done taken out the bottoms and put a the radiators in the bottoms well then there are some people that like you'll have a thing on a side that has aund it's basically two 120 m f mat side by side for a larger and some even go up to three it's that even that much more expensive to buy the higher-end liquid cooler from Corsair it's like 20 bucks 20 bucks more this is 70 70 Bucks versus 80 bucks 80 bucks over about 100 uh but whatever your case supports like my case doesn't support that how's with the two fans what what's the noise level with this thing it gets it gets pretty loud when when you crank up all it all 12 SE course yeah so it keeps it cool and I didn't reach speeds over 65° um 68° that's one point but Celsius Celsius but it's it's uh it gets pretty loud these fans and some people have just replaced the fans yeah I mean you can get lower quieter fans that move a little bit less air yeah um back to the motherboard uh x99 also supports uh now in the front I I have a piece of coverage shot that shows this uh there's a ton of USB 3 so there's six native USB 3 with Intel controller there's a lot of usb3 um in the back and then and uh Seuss actually uh put four more in do these do these are these are the four more they put on a second controller or they on the second controller yeah they're using a as media controller which is better than just splitting off from The Hub right do they have um front mounted ports they do so they're addition it's 14 total it uses that terrible connector still it uses this terrible connector still if you want front mounted USB um so there's USB there's 40 Lanes of pcie with supported by the CPU okay uh with the the second tier hasbell e the 59 uh 30 um that is 40 Lanes also but a lower clock speed and only six cores and then the 5820 only has 28 Lanes of PC those are built into the CPU um so so explain what PCI lanes are PCI lanes are um so that's the uh the connection for your like all all these Lanes here all the video cards all the support cards even storage now okay and and even stuff like if you have a thunderbolt port or something like that'll Connect into that as well so this motherboard also theoretically supports Thunderbolt you'll need an adapter card that is Su sell separately but they will have thunder Port uh Thunderbolt Port um it's pcie right now um the lanes when you're talking about uh distribution of lanes uh 40 Lanes get split off like there AR actually 40 actual physical Lanes right that's because a lane is like 16 video card is 16 slots the the the longer the slot is on the the board the more Lanes it supports generally um generally but then a long Lane could be I mean one long slot could be 16 or eight well it'll it uses what depending what yeah if you put a sound card into a 16 slot a 16 Lane slot it's going to be a on Lane sound card regardless of what what um and that's something you should notice when you're building a PC too read the motherboard manual cuz where you put the video card matters cuz sometimes distribution of lanes and the allocation um is different because is this machine I assume this is designed for so they can sell expensive ass gaming pieces with 40 Lanes it's designed for you know three Tri SLI you run Tri s 1616 and or 8816 or something um with SLI you need to put them in special slots as well now one of the cool things that I got with this computer and it's something that's supported new is pcie storage uh there's a new connector called the M2 m.2 M um this is the thing that's been in laptops for a while yeah so M SATA and M2 there's all these standards kind of converge um and you can't see it here because I've built it in already but I do have a a piece of coverage shot for that as well but my storage for my hard drive is basically a stick of gum yeah it's a 22 nanometer or millimeter wide stick not nanom I wish it was 22 n you had to get you you had to get a pair of micro micro manipulators to install it that's funny 22 n millimeters and then the it's stacked up high so the larger the storage is the higher it is um it came out last year you can actually buy it in PCI lanes and they Su includes an adapter if you if you want to shove that into um an actual PCI oh so it's just a it's a physical connect the the adapter that you use is a physical connector adapter not a um it doesn't there's not like a controller on the card and then it has to go through an extra layer CU it's just PCI and so and so the M2 it doesn't provide Power or it does provide Power um but the M2 slot is just a a smaller slot there's a bracket is there one on the board there there one the board oh that's nice yeah so my memory my storage is plugged in right there it's just like a stick of gum sticking up so you use those for the for the like small machines like the bricks in the nuke and stuff like that as well when you when you want a machine that's smaller then you can fit even a 2 and half inch hard drive in now in terms of new technology is pcie based storage is also expensive it's been around for a long time on the server side starting with like Ram drives you just loaded a bunch of DDR3 into and then if the power went off that stuff went away so people only use that in data centers and stuff there's power redundancy this new stuff though works just like a normal SSD it just happens to be a much smaller size and has a faster connection to the PC right yeah so uh ssds as we talked about in the very beginning it's like the easiest upgrade you can make and it's surprising how cheap ssds are now if you want to buy a good one you know from Sand uh from Samsung uh we're talking about like around 50 cents a gigabyte yeah you can get a 500 that means you literally can buy 500 well a 500ish gigabyte SSD for like 250 bucks right um terms of PCI eBay storage it's about still a dollar a gigabyte a little less than dollar for 256 gigs which I have here it's about 230 bucks that's still a I think a pretty fair price um now we've been recommending for a long time that people don't get too freaked out about the difference differences between ssds because they were all gated by the SATA SATA 6G bus like the speed that that interface uh was capable of was limiting the performance of the drives has that changed now with the PCI yeah with PCI and only like two manufacturers really make I think it's it is SanDisk and plexer who make these sticks PCI a lot of people make them for laptops but it's kind of a different market and they're more concerned about power NE and the people who make them for laptops a lot of those are actually SATA based they're using the same M2 Port it's not actually you're not tapping into the pcie lanes so that's something if you search online for m.2 and you want to buy the m.2 storage if you buy a SATA one it's going to be the same as if you plug into your standard old SAT so this will work with the SATA one as well yeah yeah can plug in so will this work with the Apple because Apple's been using PCA ssds and newer laptops but those are soldered on directly are they yes with the MacBook ones there solder on directly there's not they're not actually ones you can extract or replace in so that and that's just because they build the hard I'm pretty sure that's not true but p is soldered in they're absolutely sold 100% soldered in directly um and then in terms of storage there's 10 SATA 6G ports in addition to having six normal sat you can't see them because they're actually in the front right here and having six SATA 6G there actually four of them uh that are sat Express which sat Express again a new type of connector um it looks like two SATA ports plus a separate little thing so it's a almost think of it like a USB 3 style really wide connector cable okay it's backwards compatible in the sense that there are two SATA 6G ports next to each other you can use each of those ports as a SATA 6G Port M or you can plug in one SATA Express and it just Taps into pcie storage oh five passes the controller just like this and it gives you up to 10 G gabit per second theoretical now with the M2 though U because you can take up four lanes of pcie that gives you up to you know theoretically 32 gbits per second in the future Crazy Fast yes Crazy Fast no ssds are going to take advantage of 32 g g a second right now 10 GBS per second absolutely and I'm getting that those speeds with this chip I'm getting in terms of sequential reads over 700 megabytes per second compared to a Samsung SSD where you're hitting about 500 510 megabytes per second so you're you're paying more almost double for storage but you're getting you know a 20% boost which I mean 20% paying double for a 20% boost isn't again a great deal unless you have something that actually uses it and this is another one of the situations where the you'll have the benefits of the access time on the SATA on the SATA uh SSD you know your machine's going to boot just as fast your applications are going to load just as quickly your files are going to launch just as quickly it's literally just the the max the very high end when when you're transferring huge files for long periods of time that it makes a big difference yeah um one thing I want to talk about is overclocking for sure okay uh if we switch back to the desktop here the assus boort and and Intel really kind of encourages overclocking especially with their K if you look at if you shop for I5 or i5 and i7 you see that K monor on the back no reason to buy these unless these expensive CPUs unless you're going to take advantage of the fact that they're unlocked going to overclock them and this one is unlockable uh assus includes software called the AI suite and what you can actually do and I have it overclock right now to 4.1 which I find it to be really stable for me uh 4.3 was also stable 4.1 it says 24% if you do to the math it's actually a little more I think they're basing it on the turbo okay um they have a basic Auto overclocking you can actually go in this menu and uh two ways you can overclock you can change the the base clock ratio which for this one standards 100 or you can uh base clock speed or the ratio um and then actually it will overclock itself and go to a point where the PC shuts off and then step down one step below that or two steps below that and and do a couple rounds of testing and give you what it recommends as it speci and this is this application that you're in right now is basically a front end for the UEFI bios oh yeah exactly so when you say these changes it's a it's you know people call it a software overclock but it's a basically going to the BIOS and changing those settings do you have to reboot for that stuff to take effect or does it take effect it takes effect immediately okay yeah um and then have you gotten into trouble like when you when you push too far and windows crashes it just rolls back automatically when you the next time and you can save profiles and you can actually clock per core too so what it'll do is it'll test all eight of the cores and clock them to CU some of them will scope faster some of them will be used more frequently and that will be can all be adjusted um you mentioned ufi bios and that's one of the last things I want to talk about but uh I'm actually going to restart this PC uh to show you that um shut down hyphen R now or I'll just do it manually there it goes yeah um Windows 8.1 of course um the speeds for adding eight core matter in very specific uh use cases what what do you mean the CPU clock speeds having having this CP Having Eight cores in the CPU the paying $1,000 for this you're only going to see the advantages in very specific use cases it seems like hold on let me guess we've been telling this for years well I can I can tell you where you're not going to see the use cases the benefits games no games are going to take advantage of eight cores no games don't take advantage of six cores in my experience most GES four but most of them are two yeah not even four hyper threading an i5 right now is going to perform with a with a good video card is going to perform almost the same it'll probably be better because it's going to be a higher clock speed yeah and and yeah you could probably clock it higher too you get 5 gz if you really wanted to um so where are you going to see the benefits you're going to see them in video editing mhm and rendering probably more in the rendering than the editing yes and in in in trans coating so the uh I did four benchmarks blender there's a benchmark you can download it's called Cycles to a rendering of a BMW car uh extremely fast under if you want to compare it under under two minutes like a minute and a half and that also takes advantage of CPU or GPU encoding as well did you test this against your old desktop as well uh yes against the six I had a six core beforehand it was a old like 990x and a halem based six core um and back then that 3.5 G score also pretty fast yeah yeah I mean there I mean it's still like it's still yeah if you have if you have a a Sandy Bridge e you don't need to upgrade to this in in my experience if you're doing stuff that's multi-threaded it's less about the the individual performance of the cores and more about the number of cores you can throw at it the number of if you're using FFM Peg to transcode video having six cores is much much is is is a it scales fairly linearly with the number of cores you add um until you reach memory bandwidth and stuff like that so handbrake saw direct correlation which is FFM Peg direct correlation between speed cores and performance uh I tested they don't do any GPU accelerated en coding with with handbrake it's just yes raw CPU power a number of cores so a six core is going to do much better than a four core a four core with hyperthreading is going to do better with just PLO four core and eight cores with hyper threading extremely fast how long does it take to transcode a Blu-ray with handbrake uh with my benchmarks uh a 1080p let's say 1080p video file and this is uh using the high the h64 high profile it was 120 FPS so we're talking about 120 FPS okay meaning uh a 30 Fram per second movie 24 frame per second movie if it's an hour long it's going to take 15 minutes that's pretty good that's pretty good for yeah sorry for 1080p Blu-ray yeah for 1080 and that's going from 30 megabit Blu-ray down to what like to to uh to whatever runs on your iPad so okay so you did the iPad profile iPad preset which is the high preset okay yeah U if you're doing a 4K in code I had a 4K 3D uh file which is like you know 3100 that's the thing everybody's going to use I just wanted that the biggest resolution um that was about 30 FPS so about a 1: one um which I thought was also pretty good um the thing that you're going to see the advantages of not only cores and clock speed but also the memory is a thing like uh photo scan so uh photo scan is a piece of software professional software which we actually use to do the photogram achieve you saw the big heads the tested big heads and the nanch actually uses it now because it uses all multi-threaded hyper threads and also it's very memory intensive okay um and there's a batch process you take like import 50 images it creates a mesh a do Cloud a mesh and textures um and also direct correlation between cores and um and and performance did you do any like raw CU raw processing is another one of those places that multiple cores generally kind of shine uh raw developing basically like a batch like if you're if you go out to to a field someplace take 300 pictures at the same afternoon lights RA photos Lightroom not that doesn't take too much Advantage Lightroom Lightroom while does tax the cores is not optimized for it's not you're not going to see a uh straight 2x performance by doubling the cores okay um and at at that point Lightroom it really peaked out at a four core system so you have to use a more specialized piece of software that that is designed for that do you know like I know Gordon at Maximum PC always likes to run some d noising uh stuff right right so now you're talking about like Premiere and where where visual effects matters and there you're going to see a combination of having that when you're exporting um to something like uh h264 that is extremely taxing on the CPU but when you're actually doing your video editing and adding D noise effects a Premiere is now accelerated with open CL which supports Cuda so you have the right video card I there's two different it's open C and Cuda right but anyway with their Mercury andine that actually those those uh effects render in real time and so you able to see your denoising and your smoothing effects your weird transition effects all that stuff without having to wait you know with four times length of the clip um so to sum it up cuz yeah we've been talking about this for a while uh this is an amazing trip it's an ddr4 and Haswell e and x99 at launch seemed really stable um if I were to recommend someone wanting to buy a Haswell E-class chip like they had you know $2,500 a spend I would recommend actually the lowend Haswell e the six core the six core 28 Lane uh 5820 which is 400 bucks 400 bucks less than half the price of this you're going to get six cores 28 Lanes is good enough for SLI even and plenty enough if you're going to put one card in and a bunch of and you know pcie storage fine for that and and then you get it but you do have to buy a new motherboard and you have to buy DDR I mean and I assume typically new chipsets new motherboards with quad Channel memory this has got to be like a 15 layer motherboard or something insane it's going to be expensive right and the motherboard is $400 they have $300 versions without you know the built-in Wi-Fi um $300 is still a lot of money for a motherboard exactly it's still a highend system so you're looking at 300 you're looking at a mother an expensive motherboard which you may or may not get with a different chipset ddr4 is crazy expensive per gigabyte right now 400 bucks for DDR 3 or 400 bucks for ddr4 and then 3 or 400 bucks for 400 bucks for the CPU it it almost seems like unless you really specifically need a workflow that has that needs either massive bandwidth or massive CPU uh performance probably better off sticking with a with a even going back to to IV right so I want to get some prescriptions for people who are never ever going to buy $1,000 CPU if you're building a system right now and you're doing only gaming say only gaming I I would say there are two options for you one Intel released a pendium anniversary edition it's actually a two core but clock extremely high very low power if you're never going to do ever any video encoding that is an amazing chip if you are going to do or living room PC maybe yes if you're going to build a balance system and you want to build on the budget the core i5 um uh what's the model I have actually I think I had it written down uh I5 49 $ 4690k which is a Devil's Canyon chip it came out earlier this year it's I5 it doesn't do hyperthreading it's a $240 CPU clocks very high over four 4.7 GHz that one I would get an overclock the hell out of so if if I mean but if you have a Sandy Bridge or newer PC you kind of don't need to upgrade right now unless unless I mean if you're if you're video editing and Like You video you edit video twice a twice a month or three times a year or something like that you can afford to match in code and then leave the machine running all night and come back the next morning and let it be done you you don't need this like this is for people who are doing 4K video or doing CAD work or with you know millions and millions of polygons millions and millions of of points um it this seems like a really super specialized computer it's a very super specialized again the I5 4690k which you can overclock that $240 CPU is my pick if you need hyperthreading that means if you're going to do some video editing the 4790k Devil's Canyon one the Step Up is is my i7 pick right now and and we expect to see new a whole new architecture next year because the Broadwell is going to be this is the the this is the evolution of the previous generation broad Broadwell's oh actually no I'm sorry Broadwell is the is the next Evolution this is the talk not the is the talk this is the tick yeah um this is higher clock speeds little more efficiency so we'll see more power efficiency and smaller chips and probably you know better integrated graphic better integrated graphics and stuff like that uh the one thing we didn't talk about I know people have been asking about it what about graphics cards what about gpus uh that's a huge component uh I'm using a 780x right now or 780 GTX 780 right now not even the ti or the Titan um we're not ready to talk about those yet well not that we're not ready to talk I totally talk about it but nobody's told us you know what I haven't we haven't signed any ndas and no one's told us anything uh but my guess is very soon we're going to see some big news with I mean it's it's the 780 series is more than a year old my guess is that they'll have new cards out by Christmas time but we like I said we I would put eggs on it I'm not going to put eggs on it I would put eggs on it hell yeah I put eggs on it oh man that would be so good so stay tuned uh when when new graphics cards are announced we'll go through the whole process again we'll talk about uh gaming performance that's that's when we'll build our next PC to it's been it's been a while yes I think we did the last one right around the time the 780 came out it's I feel like it's time let's let's go now we know the highend we can trickle down and uh and Speck it out so that's it for a big overview and and maybe an in-depth overview of uh the latest and greatest in desktop PC technology if you have a PC right now and you want it to be faster buy an SSD yeah buy and you don't have an SSD and you don't have an SSD buy an SSD buy an SSD yeah we'll see you guys later bye\n"