The New AMD Building Thread

Will,
My point was that the performance you gain from tweaking the memory, is minimal at best. The question is, is it worth the money to upgrade from what I have now, to what you have? I don't think so!

I just upgraded to the latest bios (F10a), but remember, I'm running Everest 5.30, and I think your Everest is newer. It's funny, CPUZ sees the stepping, but Everest doesn't!

As far as the MB & CPU goes, the motherboard is great, but I would opt for The phenom II x3 720 @2.8GHz. With 3 cores guaranteed, It's faster than the 3.2GHz Callisto with two cores. There's also no guarantee that you will be able to unlock any cores on the Phenom II xII, or overclock them if you do. The x3 720 Deneb is the better chip by far! I know two people who bought the 720, and both unlocked the 4th core, and are running at 3.8GHz.

I like these quotes from the newegg reviews,
"$100 Dual Core"? "What the heck was I thinking"?

"If you get lucky and yours unlocks, you'll have a great value. If not, you're stuck with an over priced dual. :-("

I also read all 288 reviews, and a good number of people were unable to unlock the two cores, or get them to run stable if they did! With three cores guaranteed, the 720 is the better buy for the same money!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Need a little help here!

I just installed Win 7 Home basic. All the drivers installed, but I can't get either the Coax or the optical sound to work, only the analog. Any ideas?

T.I.A.
Russ

 

Go to the control panel and switch your default sound device to digital.

 

Estuansis,
Thanks Man! I'll eventually be using Win7 in my computer, as it's all activated, so I can re-install it any time I want to. Sadly, you don't get the option of XP Mode with Home Basic, but it's still easier to navigate than Premier or or the Ultimate versions. I wish they would bring back "Burning at the stake", as I would nominate the idiot that laid out the Control Panel, as a candidate for it. Want to see a classic case of abject stupidity, just check out the control panel in classic mode, with all the unfamiliar names and you will understand! The Execs are even stupider, as they OK'd and authorized it! 15+ years of familiarity, thrown under a bus for no good reason! You know what Snoopy says! If you can't dazzle them with Brilliance, Baffle them with BS!

Thanks again,
Russ

 

I agree with the layout being cumbersome, but have had no problem finding things by simply typing a few letters into the search bar and it usually works a treat. Also I've tried many different programs and have only found 1 that had a bug in it keeping things from working. XP MODE is overrated, a resource hog and remember there is "compatibility mode".

 

dunno, I mean I prefer the new layout, once you switch the view to large or small icons, than its just like classic.

thing is us people who like to tinker in the control panel are a very minor percentage, where as MOST people if they do go to the control panel want something very very easy to navigate.

 

Shaff,
Deadrum33 was talking about the Control Panel, same as me. I got the Home Basic because I didn't want all the excess crap that goes with the Premier and Ultimate versions. I just change to small icons, copy My Computer and My Documents to the desktop, and it's just like XP. I can't say that I'm very happy with the graphics though. I installed the latest Win7 drivers for the 7300GS, but my video still doesn't look anywhere near as good as it does with the same card and XP-Pro. I'm sure when I get my 9500GT back, it will be better.

As far as the control panel goes, it's the main reason that XP is still with us and will be for another 4 years. There's far too many unnecessary Icons that were well taken care of in XP with far less difficulty, and a great many less icons. Had they left it alone, people would never have raised such a stink about wanting XP, and it would have died a nice peaceful death! What M$ did to the Control Panel with vista and Win7 was stupid, counterproductive and totally unnecessary. Some things do get designed properly, and should be left alone. The Windows Control Panel was one of them!

Russ

 

I fully agree with that. There are a lot of functions that were just plain easier in XP because the method itself was simpler. But like others have said I find the search bar very effective if I'm lost.

As far as sound goes, just remember that Vista and 7 differ from XP because of the new universal sound engine. No matter what you do with the sound, it has to pass through the Windows engine. It's actually to the point where sound quality is different between 7 and XP. This is mostly a good thing though because it makes switching output and configuring surround setups and whatnot much simpler. It also has a software noise filter built in which has a great benefit for integrated sound.

As far as IQ goes I don't know what to say. Windows 7 does have a much different way for calculating DPI so everything ends up being a different size anyway. I would imagine a more modern card such as said 9500GT would be much better suited to IQ intensive tasks.

 

To be fair, XP was exactly the same in that regard. The XP not-classic mode control panel was just the same.

 

I plan on running windows 7 on my new AMD build which so far includes:
Asus M4A89GTD PRO series Mobo
ATI 5870 HD GPU
AMD 6 core processor
12 GB Corsair Dominator RAM

I recently purchased the first 4 GB of RAM from Microcenter and ended up deciding on the cheapest set (2 x 2GB for $150). It went through the post test fine (or so I'm told, I honestly have no idea if they actually tested anything in that back room...) but I later realized that on the fron of the package it says that it supports inteli7 dual channel processors, I then paged through the mobo's user guide and found that it was not under the list of qualified vendors list. The RAM is the CMX4GX3M2A1600C7 xms3 series and has a timing of 7-8-7-20 which is so far not found amongst any other approved RAM packages seen in the user guide. I'm worried that they lied to me about the post test and that, in fact, this type of RAM is not compatible with my motherboard.
Could anyone tell me whether this memory is going to work or not and furthermore what kind of memory I should buy to go from 4GB to 12 or 14 GB?

new egg page for memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145285&Tpk=CMX4GX3M2A1600C7

motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131633&cm_re=M4A89GTD_PRO-_-13-131-633-_-

Sorry about edit, I had double posted the question.

 

I wouldn't buy the Asus board, Asus stuff is pretty low quality and will likely fail prematurely. Are you going to use the 6-core CPU? Most people don't really use any more than four cores of a CPU properly, so you may be better of with a Phenom II X4 or an Intel Core i5. The RAM you've chosen is compatible with any decent (e.g. Gigabyte, Biostar, MSI) board for either i5s or Phenom IIs. AMDs do not require 'AMD compatible memory' - Intels however do require i5/i7 compatible memory, this is why that is printed on the box.

 

Thanks for the advice but unfortunately it's a bit late, I bought the parts on Friday. D'oh!

 

If it's unused you should be able to return it.

 

Well, I got my replacement MSI GDDR3 9500GT today, and it worked fine for about half the day. It has the same problem as the one I sent in for repair or replacement! The guy kept asking me about the Drivers for it, and I kept explaining that the anomaly only happens at the Post. There is no software involved at the post! Basically, there's little sparkling dots underneath the text of the post. You have to Ctrl-Alt-Del a few times until it doesn't have the anomaly, and it will work fine as long as you don't turn the computer off. Even then it may work for days without a problem. MSI is replacing it, on their dime, and are having UPS pick it up from me! Hopefully, they will check the new one out thoroughly before they ship it to me! LOL!!

Russ

 

Heh, two RMAs for the same product. Sounds familiar!
but for the fact that my card was £840, not $60

 

Any last minute thoughts on setting up a Win7 Dual boot with XP-Pro. I have the partition software, XP is installed already, and I have more than enough space on my current Boot drive to make the partition. I have all the extra Win7 drivers I need, and I'm installing Win7 Home Basic as the primary, with XP selected from the Boot Menu.

Any words of wisdom here?

TIA,
Russ

 

As long as Win7 is the OS installed second, no real issues. However it's much easier to not dual boot, and simply change drive boot priority in the BIOS instead. If you do this, I'd recommend unplugging the XP drive beforehand just in case.

 

My file server/LAN rig is on and usually running bittorrent or F@H. But I hardly use it for anything else. I find myself using the gaming rig more and more for general use. I can't imagine maintaining an entire fleet of machines like you do Creaky. I can barely justify running the two.

On another note I scored a new Laptop today. Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with a 2.26GHz Core 2 T8400, 2GB DDR2 667, 160GB WD SATA, Intel GMA X4500HD. Business grade machine purchased in auction from a software development firm my friend works for. Very nice quality steel casing, built like a rock, and a new battery thrown in to boot. Only $100 with a broken LCD that took all of ~15 minutes to replace from another junked one. Epic win