recomendations for parts to be used in an ultimate desktop.

It amazes me that there are people like that still around to be honest, but no time for politics here.

 

Do you remember global cooling? This was going to kill the planet and it was all caused by the fine carbon dust that we were releasing into the atmosphere. hmmmmm sound like global warming? How about we talk about Al Gore for a second. Isn't it interesting that he several businesses that would stand to make a fortune if the country keeps going with this green movement. Also didn't he claim that he invented the internet and lie about about a bunch of other topics over the years? How about global warming in general. It is proven that Carbon not only has nothing to do with the temperature and the trapping of ultraviolet rays in the atmosphere, but that when this planet has had more carbon in our atmosphere the planet seemed to prosper and the vegetation and life on this planet thrived. I am not saying that this changed the temperature, but that the simple fact is that plants need carbon dioxide to survive. If we start limiting it we may as well just burn down the forests and kill the planet quicker. Besides that, even if global warming was real and even if it is man's fault. What good would taxing the hell out of carbon do the world when then all the businesses in the cleaner countries would be shut down due to taxation and production limits and all the jobs would go to china, who has the worst policies on emissions standards and pollution. Pollution is a real issue, but unfortunately everyone thinks that because someone makes a movie that is played in the schools that it is automatically fact. In reality more than half the scientific community deny the "THEORY!!!" of global warming and say that it is simply a sun cycle that the planet ordinarily goes through. It is pathetic to see how many people are moved by pictures of polar bears at the edge of the water as if they are desperate and dying because the ice is melting. When in fact the polar bear population is thriving, because they now have more open waters to hunt for fish in. The earth has been going through cooling and heating cycles for thousands of years and this is just a natural part of the universe. Scientists say that 10,000 years ago glaciers moved through the northern central states of America like Illinois and Wisconsin. Yet there are no glaciers today? Why did all this ice that was so abundant go away? They say they disappeared thousands of years ago and yet there was no human pollution. The people who lived on this planet did not have the ability to produce and manufacture as we do today and had no ways of expelling "green house gasses" as we do today. Wake up people and realize that you have been lied to so that certain groups can tax you to save the earth. Does it make sense for businesses to pay taxes on carbon to a world bank? What gives this bank the right to collect this money simply because every action that we make puts carbon into the atmosphere. If you think that I am nuts then just take a look at some of the legislature that is going through and gone through US congress and senate or other countries.

 

Any more of that and this thread will get locked.
The funny thing is that all it took to start that off was the mention of a 'green' product, which let's face it, is a buzzword for anything these days, no matter whether it saves the environment or not. Green hard drives are pretty low down on the success scale for that, as they only really save about 4-5W per drive, which isn't very considerable when you consider that just using a different motherboard might cost you 20W. The main reason the green drive was mentioned is that at the moment, that is the only way to get a reliable giant drive. They're good value, they're quiet and solid performers. The fact that they use less power and thus "save" the planet is an unrelated bonus.

 

sorry, I tend to rant on certain subjects . just don't get me started on Obama.

 

I won't, and since I'm not a US citizen I don't feel I can really comment anyway.

 

Well I havent looked into the 2TB drives, although I do plan to shortly, the last few benchmarks I recall seeing for the 1 TB WDs showed better performance out the non green drives.

 

That post makes zero sense, but trying to convert it to english, it seems you're saying Black drives are faster than Green ones. Of course they are, Black drives are 7200rpm full noise, heat and performance drives, the Greens are 5400rpm, designed for silence, low heat and energy efficiency. As yet, there is no Black drive bigger than 1TB, you can only get 1.5 and 2TB green drives, but they will be released relatively soon (WD1501FALS, WD2001FALS), keep an eye out.

 

...And yet sammoris still recomends the WD 1.5TB over the Seagate 1.5TB that is available in both speeds (and the more expensive 7200RPM version costs the same as a WD 5400rpm). He must have had a terrible experience with a seagate (made all the worse by the fact that he hates raid).

 

The fact that the vast majority of all current Seagate drives fail within a few months is why I don't recommend them. There is no need for a high performance drive for storage, go high speed for the OS, bulk storage for games. If desperate just buy more WD1001FALS drives instead.

 

Hmmm...the only thing I can think is that they are not being properly cooled (7200RPM seagates tend to make slightly more heat that 7200RPM WD, and a lot more heat than 5400RPM from either brand).

I have been using seagate almost exclusivly for several years (sometimes use other brands for small, quick drives), and have not had any failures. Even I am amazed at that; it is a waist of RAID to have such reliable hard drives. The only problems I have had in this whole time was with the firmware on the first batch of 1.5TB 7200RPM units (this unit and it's firmware are already ancient history, but the firmware can be updated if you somehow manage to get one). Also, it appears that the WD 5400 RPM 1.5TB has higher failure rates than the Seagate 7200 RPM 1.5TB if you go by the ratings on newegg...not only that, but it would apear that there is currently a bad batch being sold (two people in a row reported 2 DOA drives in a row).

 

For making zero sense you certainly understood my point perfectly. None the less I didnt realize at the time the WD I pointed out was a green drive since there typically labeled as "green" in the title and have a green label. It has neither. Thanks for the update on the 2TB Blacks as I may pick some up in the future depending on there price.


Moving on, KillerBug, I have to agree with you. Not on those particular Seagates, but I have an old Seagate Barracuda IDE Drive that was an OEM drive for an old PC I had. Despite that PC dieing(well faulty psu if memory serves me right) that drive is now about 3 years old possibly a bit older, and it has survived the test of time. To top it off I have one of the early 750 GB Seagates that were known to be faulty, although I believe mine shipped with the updated firmware, but none the less, given the specs, it performs quite well and has done so for almost a year now, possibly a bit longer. The Seagates do tend to make me nervous given there recent feedback, but what can I say, they havent failed me yet.

 

No, the fault with Seagates is mostly firmware-based, but there are some hardware issues as well. It only affects the newest drives, but as far as I can tell it has still yet to be fixed. 7200rpm seagates produce noticeably more heat than the equivalent WDs and make a little more noise, but the reliability is the biggest concern. When WD drives are similarly priced, just as fast, and more reliable, I don't see what the deal is, either wait for the 1.5 (or 2TB) black drives to show up, or just use 1TB ones. There's no point knowing drives you know are unreliable just to test RAID.
Old seagate drives were solid as a rock, and they used to be my drives of choice years back before the WDs got popular. Since I had a prebuilt PC with a WD in it, I simply chose to run all WDs in that system and never had any issues, and apart from a slightly dodgy SE16 once (which never lost me any data, just wouldn't write properly) I have never had any issues. The point is, Seagates used to be superbly reliable, now they aren't, and when there are other choices around with less risk, I think that makes them a much better option.

 

fuunny thread.


for i7 cooelrs go for the corsair H50 watercooling. its an all in one watercooler for about £50, but its better than a true with an OCed 4GHz 920. quieter aswell and just one 120mm rad which will fit practialyl on any 120mm fan mount. no messing setting it up, its all ready to go and screw intot he fanmount and mobo.

 

Quieter than a true. not if you put a decent fan on it
As well as the H50 performs, I'm still not entirely trustworthy of any stock WC kits.

 

"for i7 cooelrs go for the corsair H50 watercooling. its an all in one watercooler for about £50, but its better than a true with an OCed 4GHz 920"
Once again, the point of the super cooler is not to overclock the CPU (we can do that with fans for much, much less $). The point is to reclock the CPU. Extreme cold lets CPUs clock well over their stock speeds without any drop in stability or reliability. The i7 Extreme series processors are spec'd to run at a mimumum temperature of 5C, dropping below this temperature makes it safe to feed more power and clock higher. The colder you get, the better this works (sometimes you see a news story about a new 200GHZ chip...they are usualy using liquid helium for cooling).

"7200rpm seagates produce noticeably more heat than the equivalent WDs and make a little more noise, but the reliability is the biggest concern. When WD drives are similarly priced, just as fast, and more reliable, I don't see what the deal is, either wait for the 1.5 (or 2TB) black drives to show up, or just use 1TB ones."

The thing is that they are not available, and I am not sure I would trust any drive when it first comes out (I waited for a couple of months for my 1.5TB drives, and that was clearly a smart move). As long as we are waiting for black 1.5TB drives, we might as well wait for the 3.5GHZ I7 and the HD5870...Anyway, if one of the seagates does die in a few months, then he might be able to get a black 1.5GB to replace it (I hope WD isn't that far behind).

 

The only size you can't get from WD as 7200rpm is 1.5TB+, and since Seagate don't seem to have a 2TB drive yet, there's only one size you're missing out on. You are somewhat missing the point about the lack of availability of the bigger WD drives. We're not just waiting for new tech, we're waiting for reliability. Your argument only makes sense if the reason we want 5870s and i5s is because Core 2s and 4870s keep breaking - they don't. More than that, when a CPU or GPU fails, you don't lose all your data [unless you use RAID]
I have bought two WD drives on first release, neither gave me any major issues.
Also, the logic of your CPU temp statement is questionable - surely if intel give a minimum operating temperature, then it isn't wise to go below it? To be honest, WC doesn't get temps below 5ºC anyway, so once again that doesn't match up with what you're talking about, but let's be honest, to get temps that low (i.e. Dry Ice/Phase change/Liquid Nitrogen) people are going for benchmark records, not 24/7 systems, and thus, they can push the voltages to the sky for ridiculous clock speeds. No harm done if the chip goes pop, the next big thing that turns up, they'll be clocking that instead.

 

Water cooling does not get the chips that cold (or even close) that is why this build did not contain water cooling, but phase change cooling. This can drop temperatures below freezing, even with a considerable watt load.

The cool thing about making chips colder is that they are not hurt by it. AMD even endorsed the old Koolance phase change cooler, saying that it was not overclocking to increase the speed and voltage(to a point) under such low temperatures. The closer you get the absolute zero, the faster chips can run (if we ever got a chip down to absolute zero, it would be capable of an infinite number of calculations per second...only limited by the parts feeding it, as it is, we are able to cool chips to within a few degrees of absolute zero, and they have astounding speeds that will not be seen in ultra-high-end consumer electroncs for another 15 years or more).

Who needs PhysX when you've got physics?

 

That's very true, but the main reason you cool below zero is to push the voltages way up, and if you do that the chip's lifetime is still shortened. The electronmigration effect is exacerbated by extra heat, but even below freezing, if you go crazy with the volts, it's still a big problem.