Time for new computer

[RL-inc]

It's been about 6 years and the old girl is staying to wear down. Was looking at pairing the unit in the link below with a couple 29" 4k monitors.

Whole package should run just under 2500.00

 

Any comments appreciated.

 

http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-desktop-computers/xps-tower-special-edition/spd/xps-8930-se-desktop/ddcwvmax003h

[HumbleChief]

I'd upgrade the hard drive set up - maybe the 1TB M.2 PCIe x4 SSD     otherwise it looks pretty good.

[Richard_Morrison]

From a productivity standpoint, I'd consider replacing one of the 29" monitors with a 43" UHD 4K TV. I got a TCL brand recently for under $300, and it's awesome. Having dual monitors is nice, but the screen real estate with at least one large monitor makes life so much better.

[Rpadge]

I would consider upgrading the memory (32 gb) and graphics card.

 

[RL-inc]

Thanks for all the input.

Rpadge- what graphics card would you suggest

[madcowscarnival]

What are you going to do with the graphics card you already have?  Its no slouch and more than the minimum already.  I just dropped a GTX1070Ti into my rig ($400 store sale and mail in rebate); for a few hundred more the 11GB models should future proof you for a good long time.  If you do go with a 1070, take into account the available real estate in the case; its gigantic.

[para-CAD]

1.  What does your business need and what can you justify as an investment to making that happen?

2.  Contact Chief and ask their future ops people where they are thinking about being in 3-5 years and what types of hardware they will be coding for.  (If they want to share that info)

3.  The M.2 NVMe SSD drives are really great.  They are about the size of a RAM stick.  The Samsung 960 Pro NVMe is almost 6 times faster in read/writes than the 850 Pro SATA SSD and WAY more faster than a spinning platter HD.

4.  I like the idea of a single large 4K monitor.  With screen position snapping you can have open apps snapped to positions as if they are on separate monitors.......WITHOUT THE TWO TOUCHING BEZELS IN THE MIDDLE.  This is a personal thing though.  Sometimes I like a dedicated screen to have a spreadsheet open or whatever.  Maybe someday I'll go solo monitor.

5.  I am hearing crypto-coin mining has skewed the graphics card market....that's a pain.  My mac is only 2GB and works okay.  The PC upstairs has the 1080 Ti 11GB.  It is a WORLD of difference in rendering 3D, rotation, zooming.

 

I wish you the best in whatever you decide.

[RL-inc]

4 hours ago, madcowscarnival said:

What are you going to do with the graphics card you already have?  Its no slouch and more than the minimum already.  I just dropped a GTX1070Ti into my rig ($400 store sale and mail in rebate); for a few hundred more the 11GB models should future proof you for a good long time.  If you do go with a 1070, take into account the available real estate in the case; its gigantic.

I thought of trying to swap it out but the upgrade is only 150.00 and I doubt I can buy the unit with out a video card and still keep a warranty.

 

[RL-inc]

2 hours ago, para-CAD said:

1.  What does your business need and what can you justify as an investment to making that happen?

2.  Contact Chief and ask their future ops people where they are thinking about being in 3-5 years and what types of hardware they will be coding for.  (If they want to share that info)

3.  The M.2 NVMe SSD drives are really great.  They are about the size of a RAM stick.  The Samsung 960 Pro NVMe is almost 6 times faster in read/writes than the 850 Pro SATA SSD and WAY more faster than a spinning platter HD.

4.  I like the idea of a single large 4K monitor.  With screen position snapping you can have open apps snapped to positions as if they are on separate monitors.......WITHOUT THE TWO TOUCHING BEZELS IN THE MIDDLE.  This is a personal thing though.  Sometimes I like a dedicated screen to have a spreadsheet open or whatever.  Maybe someday I'll go solo monitor.

5.  I am hearing crypto-coin mining has skewed the graphics card market....that's a pain.  My mac is only 2GB and works okay.  The PC upstairs has the 1080 Ti 11GB.  It is a WORLD of difference in rendering 3D, rotation, zooming.

 

I wish you the best in whatever you decide.

Business is good here - time to spend some $$$ on upgrading my tools.

 

The upgrade to the 2 TB SSD drive (solid state I am assuming) is a pretty big hop= 600.00

what is the big advantage to that over the 1TB PCIe x4 SSD + 2TB 7200 RPM HDD.

 

Been a 2 monitor user for years and very comfortable with it- probably stay that route.

[Rpadge]

I would buy a 1070 graphics card as a minimum. 

 

[CARMELHILL]

It might be a good idea to reread this thread I found. It talks about the prime setup needed to prevent bog down on the computer because of the way Chief does Autosaves and Undo history. I might build a new AMD Threadripper machine this winter.

 

 

[CARMELHILL]

Just for kicks, and to revive this thread, my new rig is complete. I still need to tweak the RAM settings because they aren't running at fill 3200 mghz speed yet. I'm goign to setup the undo file on the Rocket SSD to see how much faster the read/write is, and see if there is still a lag.

 

Cooler Master Mastercase H500M, AMD Ryzen 9 3900x, Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming, Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 1TB SSD, Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 gb M.2-2280 SSD, Western Digitial Caviar Black 1tb 7200rpm HD, G.Skill Sniper X 32gb DDR4-3200 ram, MSI GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB Video Card, Corsair 750w power, Dual Hisense 43" 4k monitors

[MarkMc]

34 minutes ago, CARMELHILL said:

Just for kicks, and to revive this thread, my new rig is complete. I still need to tweak the RAM settings because they aren't running at fill 3200 mghz speed yet. I'm goign to setup the undo file on the Rocket SSD to see how much faster the read/write is, and see if there is still a lag.

 Cool, I'm thinking along similar lines, waiting till after we move and get settled. Be curious how the undo set up works out. Maybe if you get a chance you might do one or two of Grahams stress tests?

[HumbleChief]

1 hour ago, CARMELHILL said:

Just for kicks, and to revive this thread, my new rig is complete. I still need to tweak the RAM settings because they aren't running at fill 3200 mghz speed yet. I'm goign to setup the undo file on the Rocket SSD to see how much faster the read/write is, and see if there is still a lag.

 

Cooler Master Mastercase H500M, AMD Ryzen 9 3900x, Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming, Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 1TB SSD, Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 gb M.2-2280 SSD, Western Digitial Caviar Black 1tb 7200rpm HD, G.Skill Sniper X 32gb DDR4-3200 ram, MSI GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB Video Card, Corsair 750w power, Dual Hisense 43" 4k monitors

 

Nice rig, good price, my new spec's in sig below. So far very good and I already had my old SSD and 1080 video card so I only spent around $1200.

 

Curious about the 3 storage solutions? 1TB SSD PCIe 4.0; 500 GB SSD PCIe 3.0; and the 1 TB HDD? Can you share why and purpose of each? And how would you set up the Sabrent SSD for 'undo'?

 

Thanks

[CARMELHILL]

Some new food for thought. Disk drive tests of the read/write from the 2 drives in the new Ryzen 9 build that use PCI 4.0. The Samsung is last years model and not maximumized for PCI 4, but the Sabrent Rocket uses the PCI 4 to it's fullest extent.

 

The remaining test is my Samsung SSD drive from my 2014 build that uses PCI 3.0. 

EDS RYZEN CRYSTAL MARK E SAMSUNG EVO DRIVE.pdf

2014 build i7-4960 DISK MARK.pdf

EDS RYZEN CRYSTAL MARK C DRIVE.pdf

[HumbleChief]

More food for thought...none of the new PCIe 4.0 SSD's outperformed the PCIe 3.0 drives in real world tests - smoked the synthetic tests, but didn't show any improvement in productivity, again, in real world tests. There's a few tests out there showing similar results. Kinda not so happy about that and waiting to upgrade to PCIe 4.0 when perhaps they show real world gains...

 

"Curious about the 3 storage solutions? 1TB SSD PCIe 4.0; 500 GB SSD PCIe 3.0; and the 1 TB HDD? Can you share why and purpose of each? And how would you set up the Sabrent SSD for 'undo'?"

[CARMELHILL]

Without being a computer engineer, this is the best I could think up......

 

The faster read write should theoretically not be a bottle neck for the programs undo feature anymore. I was told a few years ago that Chief saves a copy of the plan for every undo. One of the older undo settings had an undo save feature that you setup Chief to save a backup at your preset time frame, in microseconds. Setting it for anything useful slowed the program down tremendously.

 

So I set up my system to have my core programs like Chief, Photoshop, and video editing on the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 SDD. I keep all my client folders on the old style spinning HDD. Whenever I work on a project I copy that client folder into a specific folder on the SDD. I have my Preferences set up so all the backup, autosave, and plan/layout template folders are on the Rocket PCI 4.0 SSD.

 

The extra Samsung Evo SDD was a screw up. I was buying the parts for the computer and didn't think I'd be able to get my hands on a newer PCI 4 SDD in time to do the build, so I bought the Samsung. Then the Sabrent popped up on Amazon. So I'll use the Samsung for commonly used stuff like some symbols, macros, Sketchup symbols, textures, etc...

[MarkMc]

1 hour ago, CARMELHILL said:

The faster read write should theoretically not be a bottle neck for the programs undo feature anymore. I was told a few years ago that Chief saves a copy of the plan for every undo

From what I can tell based on the amount of data written when I monitor it undo does not save a complete plan. I believe it saves a set of instructions.

AFAIK the important numbers are the ones inside the red boxes and I'm not sure which one. For undo it will be the read speed. Again from  monitoring it does not appear that the bottleneck is in the drive itself but I could be wrong. I have a hunch it is after the drive -hoping it is the PCIE lanes. Which is why we'd like some real world idea if you can get one.

 

Attached a shot of your benches and some of mine-I find they vary quite a bit both over time and what's been going on with the machine. No idea why.

[HumbleChief]

1 hour ago, CARMELHILL said:

Without being a computer engineer, this is the best I could think up......

 

The faster read write should theoretically not be a bottle neck for the programs undo feature anymore. I was told a few years ago that Chief saves a copy of the plan for every undo. One of the older undo settings had an undo save feature that you setup Chief to save a backup at your preset time frame, in microseconds. Setting it for anything useful slowed the program down tremendously.

 

So I set up my system to have my core programs like Chief, Photoshop, and video editing on the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 SDD. I keep all my client folders on the old style spinning HDD. Whenever I work on a project I copy that client folder into a specific folder on the SDD. I have my Preferences set up so all the backup, autosave, and plan/layout template folders are on the Rocket PCI 4.0 SSD.

 

The extra Samsung Evo SDD was a screw up. I was buying the parts for the computer and didn't think I'd be able to get my hands on a newer PCI 4 SDD in time to do the build, so I bought the Samsung. Then the Sabrent popped up on Amazon. So I'll use the Samsung for commonly used stuff like some symbols, macros, Sketchup symbols, textures, etc...

Thanks Edward for the update, really appreciate you taking the time...No computer engineer here either and I wished I understood the technicalities a bit better. There's been more than one anecdotal "NVMe drives are great for Chief, post," and I can't make an argument against such claims and really can't wait to get an NVMe drive but the real world performance of the 4.0 drives leaves me a bit cold on them for now, plus I don't really need one other than new stuff is cool.

 

Are you happy with your new system in general? My system is now acceptably fast which is a huge relief and have all the overclocking turned off as there seems to be no performance gains from that either as far as I can tell from reading a lot of tests. I do run the Ryzen Master software which seems to be faster at least on the hardware monitoring stuff but I don't know if I could tell a difference real world. I'll get a NVMe drive one of these days but for now it's just money I don't need to spend.

 

Thanks again for the post

[HumbleChief]

21 minutes ago, MarkMc said:

From what I can tell based on the amount of data written when I monitor it undo does not save a complete plan. I believe it saves a set of instructions.

AFAIK the important numbers are the ones inside the red boxes and I'm not sure which one. For undo it will be the read speed. Again from  monitoring it does not appear that the bottleneck is in the drive itself but I could be wrong. I have a hunch it is after the drive -hoping it is the PCIE lanes. Which is why we'd like some real world idea if you can get one.

 

Attached a shot of your benches and some of mine-I find they vary quite a bit both over time and what's been going on with the machine. No idea why.

Appreciate the analysis Mark, however don't really understand any of it and how it relates to Chief's real world performance. Really wished they would/could publish some spec's that we could use to configure our systems for top performance. I understand why they won't/don't, but it would nice to know what hardware component affects which operation, similar to GPU for renders, CPU for RayTrace kinda info.

 

Thanks again

[Renerabbitt]

On 5/24/2018 at 2:21 PM, para-CAD said:

you're making my cord management OCD skyrocket right now!! take it that last 10%!!! 

[Renerabbitt]

On 5/24/2018 at 9:41 AM, RL-inc said:

It's been about 6 years and the old girl is staying to wear down. Was looking at pairing the unit in the link below with a couple 29" 4k monitors.

Whole package should run just under 2500.00

 

Any comments appreciated.

 

http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-desktop-computers/xps-tower-special-edition/spd/xps-8930-se-desktop/ddcwvmax003h

What are you doing with the Alienware in your sig? 

[Kbird1]

On 8/1/2019 at 2:12 PM, HumbleChief said:

More food for thought...none of the new PCIe 4.0 SSD's outperformed the PCIe 3.0 drives in real world tests - smoked the synthetic tests, but didn't show any improvement in productivity, again, in real world tests. There's a few tests out there showing similar results. Kinda not so happy about that and waiting to upgrade to PCIe 4.0 when perhaps they show real world gains...

 

"Curious about the 3 storage solutions? 1TB SSD PCIe 4.0; 500 GB SSD PCIe 3.0; and the 1 TB HDD? Can you share why and purpose of each? And how would you set up the Sabrent SSD for 'undo'?"

 

Typically NVME SSDs are about 4 times faster  (upto 6x) than the Older SATA based SSDs like your 850 Pro Larry ,ie with Read and write speeds for SATA Drives are about  eg 550 mb/s vs 2500-3000 mb/s for Samsung's 970 series NVME drives....but after the 1st few days the extra speed seems "normal" and you don't notice it in everyday use.......at least that was my experience a year or two ago when I got my 1st Samsung Evo NVME. However Ed has a spare one he can sell you    they have come down ALOT in price in the last 6 months, so they are no longer budget Killers.

 

Several years ago I made two new Folders on my 970 SSD for the CA-Temp Folder and CA-UNDO Folder and Point Chief in Prefs>File Management>Folders to use these new Folders instead of the Default Folders, though that may not help much if CA is Installed on the NVME SSD as Chief Defaults to using the Install Drive for Undo I believe ( can't check as I changed it ages ago and don't remember the Default Folder assigned. The CA Temp folder by default may just used the Windows assigned Temp Folder which maybe on the NVME SSD anyway too if Windows is also installed on it.

 

Mick.

[CARMELHILL]

On 8/2/2019 at 11:07 AM, HumbleChief said:

Are you happy with your new system in general? My system is now acceptably fast which is a huge relief and have all the overclocking turned off as there seems to be no performance gains from that either as far as I can tell from reading a lot of tests. I do run the Ryzen Master software which seems to be faster at least on the hardware monitoring stuff but I don't know if I could tell a difference real world. I'll get a NVMe drive one of these days but for now it's just money I don't need to spend.

 

During my last upgrade in 2014 I noticed a bigger jump in performance. On this upgrade, not as much. But there is a difference in my office usage that affects the apparent performance..... I don't do the design work as much as I did in 2013. I don't use the 3d rendered views as much. Now I spend half my day redlining my employees work, trying to search out new clients, and balancing the financial books.

 

I REALLY needed this recent upgrade because one of my two new employees I hired in April was using an old off the shelf (B.J's Wholesalers I think) Dell XPS 8400. It was SOOOO SLOWWWW. I promised him a new computer very soon. So when the 3900X came out, it was time. It probably would have been much easier to give him the new rig (drivers and office sensitive files are a pain in the ass to move/reinstall), but what fun would that be? My other new employee uses a rig identical to my 2014 build (built 3 months apart).

[HumbleChief]

16 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

 

Typically NVME SSDs are about 4 times faster  (upto 6x) than the Older SATA based SSDs like your 850 Pro Larry ,ie with Read and write speeds for SATA Drives are about  eg 550 mb/s vs 2500-3000 mb/s for Samsung's 970 series NVME drives....but after the 1st few days the extra speed seems "normal" and you don't notice it in everyday use.......at least that was my experience a year or two ago when I got my 1st Samsung Evo NVME. However Ed has a spare one he can sell you    they have come down ALOT in price in the last 6 months, so they are no longer budget Killers.

 

Several years ago I made two new Folders on my 970 SSD for the CA-Temp Folder and CA-UNDO Folder and Point Chief in Prefs>File Management>Folders to use these new Folders instead of the Default Folders, though that may not help much if CA is Installed on the NVME SSD as Chief Defaults to using the Install Drive for Undo I believe ( can't check as I changed it ages ago and don't remember the Default Folder assigned. The CA Temp folder by default may just used the Windows assigned Temp Folder which maybe on the NVME SSD anyway too if Windows is also installed on it.

 

Mick.

Thanks Mick, trying to avoid the 'buy new stuff because it's new stuff' bug that bites me pretty hard. The numbers are undeniable in favor of the NVMe drives and the prices are not outrageous but what real world change would be noticeable? If I need a new drive or more storage it will, of course, be an NVMe drive but for now I think the speed improvements won't be worth the effort. That could change tomorrow and I could find a reason for a new NVMe but for now I'll test my patience...