spec me a machine bitches.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » December 5th, 2006, 14:47

woot!

Final spec:

CPU: Intel E6600
Mobo: Asus Striker Extreme
Ram: Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5
DVD: Samsung SH-S183A Black SATA
PSU: Enermax Galaxy 1kw.
Fans: Shitloads
Case: LianLi Gonk

Post by **Dog Pants** » December 5th, 2006, 16:56

Nice. Anything to declare sir?

Ummmm, no....

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » December 5th, 2006, 16:57

Dog Pants wrote:Nice. Anything to declare sir?

Ummmm, no....

that's the plan

only mobo, cpu and ram were bought here.
each costing $50

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » December 5th, 2006, 17:00

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:Fans: Shitloads

Put them all on the bottom and see if you can make it hover.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » December 5th, 2006, 17:04

spoodie wrote: Put them all on the bottom and see if you can make it hover.

pffft, more likely it'll hoover

Post by **Dog Pants** » December 5th, 2006, 17:05

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:
pffft, more likely it'll hoover

Meh, semantics.

Post by **FatherJack** » December 12th, 2006, 22:28

PC Upgrade Teim GO.

Okays, I want a new box that play Crysis and DX10 Eve. Oh, I only have a grand to spend in total, not that much on each component. Scratch that, then.

There's nothing in my current box other than the DVD writer that's worth transferring - there's 1.5 terabytes of IDE disk, but that's cheap enough to either replace with SATA or upgrade my switches to gigabit and slave off the old box. Mobo's an 865GLC with a 2.7G Northwood stuck to it, 2GB of random PC World DDR SDRAM, and a 128M 6600 in the AGP slot. PSU and 3/4 tower case are adequate, but I'll probably get a newer PSU anyway, and the case is looking a bit grubby.

"Spares"-wise a I have box that's got a 945GTP with a 3G Prescott on it, a gig of 266M DDR2-SDRAM and onboard gig ethernet, but nothing else worthy of note. I only mention the specs of the stuff I have already, so that relative merits of newer stuff can be gauged against it - I really have little knowledge of the Core Duo (for example) and the impact it has on gaming performance specifically.

I recently built a box for my Dad based off the Celeron D and the 7600 as per the £500 gaming rig spec, and it has to be said it runs BeeF2 and Oblivion at max res with ease - so I'm loath to spend masses more, but I will be playing next year's games on it, not just Flight Sim, Colin McRae and GTR.

So any and all advice welcome on what I suppose is a mid-range spec and price - £300+ each for CPUs and GPUs just seems daft to me given units half the price deliver 80% of the perfomance. (rough guess, there, not based on any facts or anything)

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » December 12th, 2006, 22:36

Wait, just wait.

anything you spec now will be way overpriced compared in a month or 2. (which will also bring about affordable DX10 cards)

Post by **FatherJack** » December 12th, 2006, 23:09

Figured as much, might just find a cheap 7600 and slip it in the 945 box to keep me ticking over - Might & Magic's the only thing that's utterly unplayable on my current rig atm.

Post by **FatherJack** » January 21st, 2007, 3:33

Priced up a few ideas, to keep my excitement up while I wait for a few more DX10 cards to appear - could probably afford these now, but would be nice to factor in a couple of nice LCDs.

First one was kind of picking stuff just below big price rises, second a half-arsed attempt at an AMD/ATi setup to bring the cost down and squeeze a PhysX card in, third is the better mobo/faster memory version.

Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail 205.61
Zalman CNPS9700-LED Aero Flower (Socket AM2/939/754/775) CPU Cooler 35.24
Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard 85.59
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail 287.86
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit 173.89
Zalman ZM600-HP Heatpipe Cooled 600W Modular PSU 99.86
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM 104.56
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM 104.56
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000KS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM 117.49
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Professional Soundcard - Retail 89.29
Gigabyte Poseidon Aluminium Gaming Case - Black 58.74
NEC ND7173 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer LabelFlash ReWriter (Black) - OEM 21.74
Sony Floppy Drive - Black 5.86
1390.29

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+ 2.60GHz (Socket AM2) - OEM 193.86
Zalman CNPS9700-LED Aero Flower (Socket AM2/939/754/775) CPU Cooler 35.24
Abit KN9 Ultra nForce 570 Ultra (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard 64.61
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail 152.74
BFG Ageia PhysX Accelerator - Retail 129.24
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit 173.89
Zalman ZM600-HP Heatpipe Cooled 600W Modular PSU 99.86
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM 104.56
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM 104.56
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000KS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM 117.49
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Professional Soundcard - Retail 89.29
Gigabyte Poseidon Aluminium Gaming Case - Black 58.74
NEC ND7173 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer LabelFlash ReWriter (Black) - OEM 21.74
Sony Floppy Drive - Black 5.86
1351.68

Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail 205.61
Zalman CNPS9700-LED Aero Flower (Socket AM2/939/754/775) CPU Cooler 35.24
Asus P5N32-E SLi nForce 680 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard 164.49
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail 287.86
CellShock 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 PC2-8000C5 1000MHz Dual Channel Kit 229.11
Zalman ZM600-HP Heatpipe Cooled 600W Modular PSU 99.86
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM 104.56
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM 104.56
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000KS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM 117.49
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Professional Soundcard - Retail 89.29
Gigabyte Poseidon Aluminium Gaming Case - Black 58.74
NEC ND7173 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer LabelFlash ReWriter (Black) - OEM 21.74
Sony Floppy Drive - Black 5.86
1524.41

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 21st, 2007, 3:44

first one looks good to me (as does the 3rd, but the 680i chipset isn't mature enough for me to recommend yet)

I'd probably skip that PSU and go for a hefty enermax, the Enermax Liberty 620W looks like a decent deal to me.

(mainly because I don't like zalman)

also, ISTR a pair of raptors is kinda overkill (i'm assuming you intend to raid-0 them) apparently they perform more than well enough alone to make it not worth doing. i'm sure eion will fill in the gaps at some point.

Post by **FatherJack** » January 21st, 2007, 5:33

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:ISTR a pair of raptors is kinda overkill (i'm assuming you intend to raid-0 them)

Yeah that was plan A, but it was more a try it and see kind of thing, but having a bit of flexibility, either doing RAID0 if tests prove it better, RAID1 if it doesn't hurt too much, or dedicating spindles to OS/Swap/disk-heavy games. I'm more used to building arrays where 10k disks are the cheap option, so the things I see as performance enhancing may well not have much effect in this scenario.

Thanks for the tip on the PSU, the Zalman was a bit of a random choice anyway - that cheeky heatpipe design just caught my eye, but noise isn't really a bother to me, although I've found the OCZ ones to start out quiet, but get a bit more rattly when the dust gets in.

Thing I'm most confused about is the fast RAM. Every mobo I look at - even that one you mentioned you have for the Gonk - seems to quote 800Mhz RAM as its top limit, so what is all this 1Ghz+ RAM for?

MrGreen · Post by **MrGreen** » January 21st, 2007, 13:00

The Samsung Spinpoint T HD300LJ equals most of the raptors, and in striped RAID 0 completely kills them, It's also quite quiet.
http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/chart ... 0&chart=31

Also, go for a 6400 instead of a 6600, and overclock it. The performance difference will be very little.

Lee · Post by **Lee** » January 21st, 2007, 13:13

FatherJack wrote:Thing I'm most confused about is the fast RAM. Every mobo I look at - even that one you mentioned you have for the Gonk - seems to quote 800Mhz RAM as its top limit, so what is all this 1Ghz+ RAM for?

I think its used for overclocking. When you increase the FSB frequency you increase the frequency of everything attatched to the mobo so the 1ghz ram give you a bit extra head room for overclocking. Something like that anyway.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 21st, 2007, 13:38

Lee wrote:I think its used for overclocking. When you increase the FSB frequency you increase the frequency of everything attatched to the mobo so the 1ghz ram give you a bit extra head room for overclocking. Something like that anyway.

that.

especially with core2 stuff, they have such stupid overclocking headroom on the FSB that overspeed memory is a huge bonus

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 21st, 2007, 14:00

MrGreen wrote:The Samsung Spinpoint T HD300LJ equals most of the raptors, and in striped RAID 0 completely kills them, It's also quite quiet.
http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/chart ... 0&chart=31

Picking one chart out of a full range and claiming a drive trounces a raptor seems really, really dumb to me.

i'm fairly sure raptors are the fastest (non scsi etc) drives you'll find (not to mention if you raid0 them, you'll get about double the performance)

MrGreen · Post by **MrGreen** » January 22nd, 2007, 19:15

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:
Picking one chart out of a full range and claiming a drive trounces a raptor seems really, really dumb to me.

i'm fairly sure raptors are the fastest (non scsi etc) drives you'll find (not to mention if you raid0 them, you'll get about double the performance)

Sorry, I meant to say It equals some of them over quite a broad spectrum, Raptors are quite poor when striped compared to the performance boost of striping two usual 7200RPM SATA2 HDs, I forgot to mention that , 2 300GB striped samsungs should equal or better a 150GB raptor, and are a few pounds more. But if where to spend more than £100 any hard drives i would probably decide to wait for solid state or holographic drives.

Oh, and yes, you are right, I wasn't exactly showing a large sample results.