SSD PCI-e ? , which intel i7 for my new PC

[mmirot]

I am about order a new PC.

The SSD PCI-e specs seem impressive. Is it worth the extra 250-300 verses a SATA SSD?

I am looking at 32 gig ram with an i7 5920x .

Is it worth paying a bit more for the 5930x or 5960x? 
 
Max

[NGC7789]

PCI-e is very temping withs specs twice (or better) than a traditional SSD. But in a PI workflow storage access is only 10 or 20 percent of total performance. So that becomes a 5 to 10 percent gain for that money. So a one minute task will still feel like one minute.

For the CPU I go the other way. CPU speed and memory bandwidth are key. I'd go for at least the 5930.

If you skip PCI-e you could go for 64GB ram. Then you'd have enough for a nice ramdisk/SSD swap!

[mmirot]

Thanks for you input.  I was thinking that the impact might not be that big.
I have a 4K chip so hopefully 32GB with 16GB for a Disk will be enough.

[mmirot]

This is what I ended up with.   I think I will configure Linux dual boot just for PI. 


CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Six-Core 3.50GHz 15MB Intel Smart Cache LGA2011-V3

HDD: 480GB OCZ Trion 100 Series 480GB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s SSD - 550MB/s Read & 520MB/s Write

MEMORY: 32GB (8GBx4) DDR4/2400MHz Quad Channel Memory

HDD2: 1TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 32MB Cache 7200RPM HDD

MOTHERBOARD: MSI X99S SLI Krait Edition ATX w/ Intel GbE LAN, 4x Gen3 PCIe x16, 2x PCIe x1, 1x M.2, 10x SATA 6Gb/s

OS: Windows 10 Pro (64-bit Edition)

OVERCLOCK: Extreme OC (Extreme Overclock 20% or more)

POWERSUPPLY: 800 Watts - Standard 80 Plus Certified Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX Ready

TUNING: Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Performance Tuning Protection Plan by Intel

VIDEO: AMD Radeon R5 230 1GB GDDR3 PCIe 3.0 x16 Video Card [-132] (Single Card)

_PRICE: (+2126)

[NGC7789]

That's awesome. It's only $600 more than my 4770k rig I build a year and half ago. 6 cores vs 4 and your SSD is twice as big as mine. I look forward to seeing the benchmarks you post (please do!). Maybe I need to consider an upgrade  But I've got to dual boot with OS X so I can't do Haswell-E yet.

Linux is the way to go for PI for top performance, no doubt. Consider moving your /tmp directory to RAM. I think it's a better option than a ram disk. Also don't forgot to set noatime on your SSD in Linux. Not only does it extend the life of the SSD but I got about 3% better performance on my benchmark.

What flavor of Linux are you targeting? I'm a Ubuntu man myself.

[mmirot]

I will be posting my Benchmarks as soon as possible. It will take about 2 week to get the machine.
I will start with Windows. I will have to figure out how to specify ramdisk space.

Linux : I don't have a clue which flavor. Thanks for all your recommendations.

(We should have some forum sticky notes for best performance settings)

Max

[mmirot]

 
I got the CPU on Thursday. The apps and Windows 10 are installed on the SSD. I made a Ramdisk using 16GB.
The 5930K is over clocked to 4.4GHz. No special tweaks to memory (DDR4  2400
I get Benchmarks around 10,000 total with this config.

There may be away to tweek it more. Can I make more than one Ramdisk for Swap? Will this do anything.?

I might try a dual boot with Linux next. It would be the best bet for a performance boost.  Windows is clearly flying as it is and I am pretty pleased.

 (FYI Cyberpower makes a nice PC but they installed Windows on the HDD data drive not on the SSD. So I had to spend a few hour reinstalling on the SSD.)

Max

Windows 10 Pro
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Six-Core 3.50GHz 
SSD- 480GB OCZ Trion 100 Series 480GB
MEMORY: 32GB
MOTHERBOARD: MSI X99S SLI Krait Edition

[lucchett]

Max ,
my Fedora 22 scores 7700 vs 5700 on windows 10 (vs 6900 on W7).

I started using a ram disk of 16GB but I realized that con be short if you work using projects and cloning your images.

Andrea

[NGC7789]

There's no need to set up multiple RAM disks and as Andrea says 16gb may not be enough. Combining your RAM disk with a source on your SSD should be a good compromise. That will give you 32GB of swap (smallest swap source times number of sources). The recommendation is at least 60gb so even that may not be enough. If so you'll have to add more SSDs or give up your RAM disk. Sometimes capacity is more important that speed.

And Linux should always outperform Windows or OS X.

[mmirot]

If I add a SSD location to the swap list performance goes way down.

[lucchett]

In my Experience cpu performance is much more important than swap. One ssd under Linux is enough.
Pci ssd is faster but not worth in my case.
But I would appreciate a revo drive as a gift :-)

I think you got a great cpu

[NGC7789]

Perform three tests: RAM disk alone, SSD alone and both. You should find the combination performs between either alone. As I said it's a trade off of speed over capacity. Don't forget to experiment with threads per source too.

But I would also agree with Andrea. You're talking about eking out the last bit here.

[Andres.Pozo]

I think that the swap performance is only important for very large images. For images up to perhaps 15MPixels the write speed of a SSD is enough for making nearly irrelevant the time spent swapping.
For larger images (usually mosaics) the swap performance is important but in this case a 16GB RAM disk probably is not enough.

IMHO, it is better to keep the RAM available for the processing and operative system than to lock it in a RAM disk. The benchmark over-represents the performance of the swap. In most cases swap speeds over 1GB/sec don't improve the user experience.

[jkmorse]

For what its worth, I just switched to Linux and use a 16Gb ramdisk.  With it on, every process ran remarkably quick, even drizzle integration that was running at a crawl in Windows.  I tried running the same without the ramdisk and things definitely slowed down, though not intolerably so.  But the ramdisk does make a difference at least on my system (which is new and not too dissimilar to mmirot's, though I don't overclock and went with an NVidia Geforce 960).  I will test again tonight and try to put some times to this.  For info, this was on a nb image of the Veil West made up of 75 4 minute subs (though each drizzle integration was only working with 25 subs at a time for each separate channel).  For information, when I did my benchmark, here were my numbers, again using the ramdisk only (which I point to 4 times):

Total:       8310
CPU:        7099
Swap:     28217
Transfer:  5094

At a transfer rate of over 5gb/sec its way faster than anything I could achieve with windows.

Best,

Jim

[mmirot]

Finally got Ubuntu configured. It it increased the Benchmark by 15-18% verses Windows 10 best configuration using Ramdisk.

Performance Indices
Total performance ...... 11566 !!!!
CPU performance ........ 10445
Swap performance ....... 20966

The configuration : created a 16 GB ram disk in the home directory and set networking in PI to this location.
Notes:  adding multiple Ramdisks entries in in PI the Swap goes way up but processor speed goes way down and total performance score is decreased.
Adding a SSD location hurts swap time.

I notice that the CPU score always drops 4-5% the second and third time the Benchmark is run. This occurs in both PI and Windows. Anyone seen this?

Max