new PC advise, ~£1300
Discussion
I've decided its time to upgrade from my Inspiron 545 with GT220 of ~2010 vintage. Budget of ~£1300. Any advise on the options below, given what I (think) I will use it for would be much appreciated!
Will be used mainly for boring stuff (browsing, office, etc) with occasional PS and LR.
Also want to use the opportunity to get something a bit more capable in the gaming department, although will by no means be its main application. Most likely racing sims, maybe COD-like games (I'm completely out of touch with what is available!).
Also some productivity stuff, in particular matlab and possibly other simulations. I suppose this is the driver for the beefy CPU options I've arrived at below.
I'd like W10 pro for bitlocker, but not a biggie.
Will use existing Samsung SSDs in whichever new machine.
I'm up to speed on 10th gen i7 / i9 vs Ryzen 9 3900x. I'd weight the productivity requirement slightly higher, so leaning towards 3900x.
This Dell XPS 8940 is available to me for just over £1300.
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/desktops-and-all-i...
10900k
RTX 2060
16gb
1tb m.2.
Seems to me a competitive price for that spec, albeit the internet says thermals are questionable, and not sure about GPU upgrade-ability (if the bug bites) given the small case and tight packaging (no room for 30xx cards in there).
Haven't found any equivalent 3900x machines at anywhere near the same price. 3900x bundles are either out of stock or not listed on the likes of Scan, overclockers, etc. I've priced up a self-build with slightly compromised spec at just over £1200 (amazon, arrived at this spec / price by swapping out a 2070 super for the 1660):
(ETA this link) https://share-a-cart.com/get/F547R
Corsair 275Q case
Asus TUF gaming X570 wifi mobo
Corsair RM650 PSU
Ryzen 3900x
Corasir Vengeance 2x8gb DDR4 3200MHz RAM
970 Evo 500gb m.2 SSD
Aurus GTX 1660 OC GPU (the world of AIB is a confusing one to me)
W10 pro
misc 120mm fans, thermal paste
Anything missing?
important differences in bold
I figure that the 1660 is a reasonable compromise while dipping my toes in the gaming water so to speak, and perhaps worth it given limited upgrade options in the XPS (primarily space limited). 500gb drive should be plenty for OS with matlab and a few games (how large are they these days?!), and always have the option of additional SATA SSDs.
Dell or self-build? I'm I overlooking anything? Any other options I've missed?
Thanks!
Will be used mainly for boring stuff (browsing, office, etc) with occasional PS and LR.
Also want to use the opportunity to get something a bit more capable in the gaming department, although will by no means be its main application. Most likely racing sims, maybe COD-like games (I'm completely out of touch with what is available!).
Also some productivity stuff, in particular matlab and possibly other simulations. I suppose this is the driver for the beefy CPU options I've arrived at below.
I'd like W10 pro for bitlocker, but not a biggie.
Will use existing Samsung SSDs in whichever new machine.
I'm up to speed on 10th gen i7 / i9 vs Ryzen 9 3900x. I'd weight the productivity requirement slightly higher, so leaning towards 3900x.
This Dell XPS 8940 is available to me for just over £1300.
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/desktops-and-all-i...
10900k
RTX 2060
16gb
1tb m.2.
Seems to me a competitive price for that spec, albeit the internet says thermals are questionable, and not sure about GPU upgrade-ability (if the bug bites) given the small case and tight packaging (no room for 30xx cards in there).
Haven't found any equivalent 3900x machines at anywhere near the same price. 3900x bundles are either out of stock or not listed on the likes of Scan, overclockers, etc. I've priced up a self-build with slightly compromised spec at just over £1200 (amazon, arrived at this spec / price by swapping out a 2070 super for the 1660):
(ETA this link) https://share-a-cart.com/get/F547R
Corsair 275Q case
Asus TUF gaming X570 wifi mobo
Corsair RM650 PSU
Ryzen 3900x
Corasir Vengeance 2x8gb DDR4 3200MHz RAM
970 Evo 500gb m.2 SSD
Aurus GTX 1660 OC GPU (the world of AIB is a confusing one to me)
W10 pro
misc 120mm fans, thermal paste
Anything missing?
important differences in bold
I figure that the 1660 is a reasonable compromise while dipping my toes in the gaming water so to speak, and perhaps worth it given limited upgrade options in the XPS (primarily space limited). 500gb drive should be plenty for OS with matlab and a few games (how large are they these days?!), and always have the option of additional SATA SSDs.
Dell or self-build? I'm I overlooking anything? Any other options I've missed?
Thanks!
Edited by DudleySquires on Wednesday 30th September 17:53
anonymous said:
[redacted]
PS doesn't scale well at high core counts:https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photosh...
LR does scale somewhat, but there are definite diminishing returns:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightro...
It's the matlab simulink (and other such toolsets) use case.
Speeding up simulation run times.
Reducing the compromise necessary on model complexity to achieve real-time. For that matter, GPUs can also help to increase simulation speeds. Although I'm not doing anything like machine-learning so my understanding is that that is probably of limited benefit.
Pre- and post-processing of large data sets.
I'm working on the basis of the vague guidance from Mathworks that it can take advantage of extra cores, and the GPU. RAM also of course, but the choice of RAM is not quite as 'baked in' as CPU (and motherboard) and GPU.
Hence I mention I give productivity a higher weighting than gaming. Reviews / benchmarks all indicate 3900x wins out here. Unless I have misunderstood something!
AM4 motherboard of Ryzen will also be compatible with their next gen CPUs (by all accounts), whereas upgrading an intel CPU would require a new motherboard.
There is also an element of newer, bigger, shinier. Future-proofing - who knows what else I may want to use the machine for.
Any thoughts on that XPS?
Speeding up simulation run times.
Reducing the compromise necessary on model complexity to achieve real-time. For that matter, GPUs can also help to increase simulation speeds. Although I'm not doing anything like machine-learning so my understanding is that that is probably of limited benefit.
Pre- and post-processing of large data sets.
I'm working on the basis of the vague guidance from Mathworks that it can take advantage of extra cores, and the GPU. RAM also of course, but the choice of RAM is not quite as 'baked in' as CPU (and motherboard) and GPU.
Hence I mention I give productivity a higher weighting than gaming. Reviews / benchmarks all indicate 3900x wins out here. Unless I have misunderstood something!
AM4 motherboard of Ryzen will also be compatible with their next gen CPUs (by all accounts), whereas upgrading an intel CPU would require a new motherboard.
There is also an element of newer, bigger, shinier. Future-proofing - who knows what else I may want to use the machine for.
Any thoughts on that XPS?
pessimal said:
How much/complicated is you matlab/simulation stuff
Hard to quantify, but essential its physical system simulations, fluids mainly but also mechanical / multibody stuff, and looking into flexible bodies. Control development on top of those plant models. It's associated with my employment, but something I am happy to invest in myself.DudleySquires said:
I'm working on the basis of the vague guidance from Mathworks that it can take advantage of extra cores, and the GPU. RAM also of course, but the choice of RAM is not quite as 'baked in' as CPU (and motherboard) and GPU.
Matlab for general computation uses the Intel MKL library, which can effectively parallelise across maybe 4 cores without you doing anything explicit. Im don't deal with Simulink, so I don't know if that holds true there.If you've got access to a licence for the Parallel Computing toolbox and you're able to use parfor in your code then in the thread based parallel environment you get very good scaling with core count (see https://www.mathworks.com/help/parallel-computing/... Similarly if you have a CUDA capable GPU then there is scope for performance gains there, but it is code base dependent.
Generally, performance benefits fall away dramatically after your thread or process count exceeds the no of physical cores - Matlab doesn't seem to benefit significantly from hyperthreading.
Have you looked at top or task manager on your existing hardware to see how many cores it is currently using?
Worst case, if you've got enough RAM and your workflow suits it, you can resort in simply running multiple instances of Matlab.
However, I reiterate it's worth looking at this decision after the 8th of October. The expectation is a ~15-20% increase in single threaded performance, and Amdahl's law always applies.
anonymous said:
[redacted]
The performance is great. I used to render overnight. Now I'm drumming my fingers if it takes more than a couple of hours. The fans come on occasionally, but infrequently, when rendering.
If AMD prices do drop with their new range, then I'd recomment the Ryzen 9.
DudleySquires said:
No love at all for the XPS then?
Have a read of the conclusion of this review:https://www.anandtech.com/show/15785/the-intel-com...
and then think about running significant CPU bound computations in a (as you observed) relatively small, possibly not fantastically cooled case. I wonder if you'd see thermal throttling problems pretty quickly.
It'd be worth you understanding how many cores your code scales to, as if it doesn't usefully scale past 8 threads that at least tells you how many cores it is actually worth spending money on.
xeny said:
Have a read of the conclusion of this review:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15785/the-intel-com...
and then think about running significant CPU bound computations in a (as you observed) relatively small, possibly not fantastically cooled case. I wonder if you'd see thermal throttling problems pretty quickly.
It'd be worth you understanding how many cores your code scales to, as if it doesn't usefully scale past 8 threads that at least tells you how many cores it is actually worth spending money on.
I've got in touch with Mathworks so I'll see what they can say about my specific use case. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15785/the-intel-com...
and then think about running significant CPU bound computations in a (as you observed) relatively small, possibly not fantastically cooled case. I wonder if you'd see thermal throttling problems pretty quickly.
It'd be worth you understanding how many cores your code scales to, as if it doesn't usefully scale past 8 threads that at least tells you how many cores it is actually worth spending money on.
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