Tips for a Beginner?

[tedmihu]

Hello, I'm relatively new to the hardware game and back in 2012 I made the mistake of having a friend build me a custom system instead of learning how to do so myself. I've had nothing but problems with the system ever since and though I don't have the money to invest in a new system right now, I'd like to start learning more about this area of things. Software and code has kind of been my area, and hardware was never something I dabbled in too much. I can understand a lot of Linus's videos especially with the help of Techquickie, but a lot of it goes above my head and I was hoping I could look at some resources, be it videos or articles, to get the basics of the PC hardware game so I can judge for myself what's best for my needs. 

 

The issue is that a lot of what I see is geared towards gaming rigs and I really don't need that. I want a workstation. Something that runs Premiere and After Effects extremely well and a 3D program pretty swell too. Something with the capacity for a three screen display, At least 32GB of RAM and above average amount of cores. I used to think NVIDIA had the best cards for Adobe but I'm starting to see that AMD's benchmarks are making a lot more sense for the dollar. I just feel like there's nothing for my kind of needs. Either it's people looking to build gamer rigs or companies that can lay down tens of thousands like ILM. I'm basically just looking to learn. Any tips of where I can go would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Sorry if this is redundant or placed in the wrong thread. 

 

Ted

[Amazingasian]

What's your budget and location?

[StevenSensei]

_{You are totally in the right place. Building a workstation isn't much different than a gaming pc. The parts are all basically the same (Motherboard, Processor, Ram, Video Card(s), power supply). The differences come in with the types of components you choose. In general your work will be more processor bound so you would want to look at something like an X99 series motherboard or server grade boards that run high end Xeon processors (some boards even allow multiple processors). Look at the builds that Linus has done for the video editors as an example...or the render farm...}

 

Just keep reading and watching...but this should point you more in the direction of your needs. 

[tedmihu]

Really? Everything Adobe keeps releasing seems to be much more GPU oriented than CPU. CPU is still that important?

[tedmihu]

From my research into this I'd say 1500-2500. I live in Toronto at the moment but will be living in Romania for a few months in a couple of weeks. I'm also conflicted as to whether I should go for a mobile workstation, if a good option exists for that, or if I should stick to a desktop. 

[Mark77]

So what system do you have right now precisely?

 

Its quite possible that you don't really need to buy/build a whole new system, but can merely do a few tweaks to what you already have.

 

For example, SSDs were only starting to go mainstream in 2012.  You may very well accomplish a lot simply by upgrading to a SSD, and perhaps un-doing an overclock that your "friend" implemented on  your system if you're running into stability issues.  And bumping up the RAM if you're stuck on something crazy like 4gb.

 

Sure, you can buy all new stuff (and I'm sure there's 100 people on these forums who can help you out with that!), but if you don't understand what the bottleneck in your existing setup is, you may as well be just throwing money away.

[tedmihu]

The issue isn't a bottleneck it's stability. When the system runs correctly it flies. I have an NVIDIA Quadro 4000, 32GB Kingston RAM (I was told it's not the cheap stock ram, it cost about 200$). A "1 x GIGABYTE GA-X79-UP4 LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard" (Newegg), an "1 x Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 6-Core 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W BX80619i73930K Desktop Processor" which at the time I was told was one of the most powerful without spending a few thousand more. Also a 128GB SSD which originally was used as the boot drive, but ran into space issues for some reason so I kept it in but added two 250GB SSDs running in RAID 0 I believe (that did a lot for boot times, load times, etc). And for cooling I have a Fantek cooler which I bought the optional third fan to put in the middle of the two enormous vents, and that brings down the entire system a fair amount. 

The one embarassing thing about all of this is that a few years ago it had this issue where if I let it go into sleepmode, every few nights I'd wake up to one of the SSD drives not working, and because it's raid, I had to format and reinstall windows. Issue being that the old windows was never uninstalled, and I couldn't find any partition or Windows.old files on my hard drive to erase. So right now there are 7 windows OSes on there. I've been told that this could be a contributing factor to my issues. 

[tedmihu]

6 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

What is your budget? That is going to be very important in determining what PC you should build

 

12 minutes ago, tedmihu said:

From my research into this I'd say 1500-2500. I live in Toronto at the moment but will be living in Romania for a few months in a couple of weeks. I'm also conflicted as to whether I should go for a mobile workstation, if a good option exists for that, or if I should stick to a desktop. 

 

[Mark77]

14 minutes ago, tedmihu said:

The issue isn't a bottleneck it's stability. When the system runs correctly it flies. I have an NVIDIA Quadro 4000, 32GB Kingston RAM (I was told it's not the cheap stock ram, it cost about 200$). A "1 x GIGABYTE GA-X79-UP4 LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard" (Newegg), an "1 x Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 6-Core 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W BX80619i73930K Desktop Processor" which at the time I was told was one of the most powerful without spending a few thousand more.

That's still incredibly competitive hardware.  What's unstable about it? 

 

14 minutes ago, tedmihu said:

The one embarassing thing about all of this is that a few years ago it had this issue where if I let it go into sleepmode, every few nights I'd wake up to one of the SSD drives not working, and because it's raid, I had to format and reinstall windows. Issue being that the old windows was never uninstalled, and I couldn't find any partition or Windows.old files on my hard drive to erase. So right now there are 7 windows OSes on there. I've been told that this could be a contributing factor to my issues. 

 

I'd be inclined to memtest it overnight,  find a clean SSD, turn it to AHCI mode (ie: remove those RAID'ed SSDs), and do a fresh install of Windows.  Seriously, buying new hardware isn't going to yield a lot of performance improvement for you.  Maybe look into a PCI-E SSD if you really want more performance from the SSD/storage subsystem (RAID-0 is really over-hyped and over-rated, IMHO), but that machine "should" be incredibly capable, even by today's standards.   Unless, of course, something's broken, in which case, fixing that would be probably a good idea.

 

BTW, if the 3930k is overclocked, I'd suggest turning off the overclocking if you know how.  Something that might have worked decently on the day it was delivered, may not work so well today with the thermal paste being more dried up, and everything being a bit older.  That might be some of the source of the instability as well. 

[tedmihu]

I'm worried about physical damage to the motherboard. Every time I've had this diagnosed that's the one common thing. When I originally installed it I used a "1 x CORSAIR Hydro Series H60 (CWCH60) High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler" and unfortunately it was faulty, meaning my CPU was running at 90C. Fortunately the 3930K from what I saw online is built like a tank and can go up to 125 without issue, but I know for a fact it ruined the initial ram sticks and I'm concerned it may have done damage to the motherboard. About a year later the PC also went through a power surge. Parts of a hard drive were corrupted as a result and I replaced the PSU with a more capable one on the advice of MyTech (Wal Mart's in house tech), but I'm not sure that fixed things. 

 

Unfortunately I don't have the resources to bench test my motherboard. I will try the above though.