The (new) Official PC building thread!

I don't think that's really the right tone here to be fair - Rob seems genuinely upset at having been insulted (though I don't know who or when it was) and if we're not careful, we may lose him from aD.

 

Mort81,

Terrific MB! My first serious overclock with the P4 3.0/800 Prescot. Those motherboards were being sold for as much as $400 on line after they were discontinued by Asus! The first of the 3 best motherboards I ever owned!

sammorris,

Come on now! You don't honestly believe that do you? Rob and GM are two of the biggest practical jokers here! You saw the way he twisted my words to make it look more insulting, and I never said or implied that these were the only people who bought Compaq or HP!

If I'm wrong, then I apologize as I certainly never intended to insult anyone!

Russ

 

I do think that Rob was probably insulted but I doubt that an insult over a piece of electronics is going to chase him away from anywhere.

Rob knows that there is a difference between performance and reliability or he wouldn't have ventured into building for himself.

I've never owned a store bought computer but I know plenty of people who have and who are not disappointed with their purchases. They've proven reliable and have worked for years without failing. Just because they can't effectively do what our homemade rigs can doesn't mean they are of poor quality, it just means that they are low performers.

 

That's the grand irony of it - my first PC lasted me nearly five years, with only a GPU and HDD upgrade 3 years after purchase. My second PC started out as a prebuild, and was a bit of a disaster, but only turned that way after modifying it - I was a noob back then, but thinking about it, if I wasn't a noob, would I have put up with the thing for so long?

 

looking back, I hated the socket 478. didn't matter how carefull I was, I always bent some pins when I removed the cpu and they were a pain in the a$$ to get them staightened good enough to go back in the socket. thank goodness for the socket 775.

Soph,

the asus P5W DH Deluxe not only was a great mobo but still is imo. I didn't list it earlier because it would be considered a high end mobo at the time of it's release by most.

my pc with the P5W DH Deluxe and E6600 is setting in my bedroom unhooked collecting dust. it used to run @ 3.6ghz daily but it's now set back to 3.2ghz. eventually my bro is gonna get it and my mother is gonna get the pc I sold him with the asus P4P800 SE and P4 northwood 3.4ghz OC'ed to 3.6ghz.

 

There was another golden board, the P5W DH Deluxe. As for the sockets, I still seem unable to put the black plastic cover on socket 775 boards without bending the pins. never removed a CPU on anything other than 775 or 939, so I wouldn't know about the others.

 

I would recommending lowering the speed of any of those that you're not using unless you want to make an unwanted repair, especially the Northwood. The life of a processor under normal use is about 10 years before Electromigration begins to occur. A moderately overclocked computer will last about 70% to 80% of that time before failing, and I estimate that my Northwood is about 8 years old. It isn't that highly overclocked and it has great cooling so I'm not concerned about it, but 3.6 GHz was excessive for that processor in any time even with water cooling.

I never cared for socked 478 processors either except for encoding video. At the time the only competition was AMD's Barton (XP series) cores which were better for gaining but slower for encoding.

 

8 years? Willamettes have only been out for 7 years, let alone Northwoods...

 

Those little chunks of black plastic are annoying and I've always been concerned about bending a pin on my 775 boards, but I have my own little safety plugs. I have 3 unused socket 775 processors so when I replace board with new board I protect it with an used Prescott or D840. If I RMA it, which I've only done once in all my years of building then I wrestle with the darned thing.

I can't remember all of the sockets that I've used over the years. Some memorable ones were, socket 3, socket 5, Socket 7 and super socket 7, Socket A, and socket 478 to current sockets.

 

Soph,

my unused E6600 is set back to 3.2ghz with the vcore under 1.4v and has a zalman CNPS 9500 on it. the P4 3.4ghz northwood isn't OC'ed very much. only to 3.6ghz and it gets used daily. although not considered a great cooler, especially by todays standards, it has a zalman CNPS 7700 on it.

 

Lol a dual core socket cover, I like it...

 

Sam! It was an estimate not a historical quote. Believe it or not I do that all the time or I would have to do as you just did and use Google for all my posts. You need to stop nitpicking at pointless bits of information, it doesn't make you sound smarter or more knowledgeable it just makes you unnecessarily annoying.

 

Actually Soph, I didn't google it, I knew it. I'm not showing off, but Northwoods at speeds of 2.4 and above are probably barely more than 5 years old - so the point you were making that they were close to the end of their lifespan if overclocked becomes significantly less valid.

 

I don't believe for instance that you knew that but go ahead and say it. You've been a Goolge expert since you had your first and second computers built by someone else. Giving advice to others based on virtually zero experience, and you're still doing that now. How many builds have you actually done on your own?

 

I've had enough of this. I knew something you didn't and you're livid, trying to bring in all the ammunition you can to question my credibility. I'm not going to answer that question on this basis.

 

this isn't about what you know and I don't, this about your constant looking for little faults in posts that do nothing but annoy. You do this all the time and to what end? What point does it serve? Who does it help? It doesn't make you more knowledgeable it still just makes you annoying.

 

Annoying is telling people not to overclock their CPU because you think it's twice as old as it actually is. I don't just defile posts for the fun of it, if there's a criticism to be made, it's so that it helps someone out.

Now using wikipedia (for the first time this page), the 2.4Ghz Northwood was released in April 2002 - so the oldest the CPU could possibly be is six years.

 

Now you can't even get this right. I never told him not to overclock I suggested tht he tone it down a bit if he wants to extend the life of his processor. Now this may come s shock to you (you can always Google it), but what I said was true. The life a processor at stock settings is about 10 years. Overclocking one can shorten its life by as much as 70% to 80% or even sooner due to electromigration even with effective cooling.


I've seen some of the advice that you given lately such as set voltages to auto and 4 gigabytes using 4 sticks of memory is ok (as long you don't mind memory performance that is slower than a Northwood).

Here is a quote from me regarding memory several years ago. I even once wrote a guide on overclocking memory.

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/2/83263#463658

 

I don't really know how you expect me to respond to all this, I know it, and am not contradicting it, with the exception of the statement that I go around telling everyone to use four sticks of RAM when overclocking. Just because I tell people it works for me doesn't mean I tell everyone to use it. I've been recommending 2x2GB of RAM for quite some time now, and typically recommended 2x1GB before that.

 

On a forum if you tell one to do something then you've told everyone. Then after I suggested it was not wise to use 4 sticks of memory you, surprise surprise, came in and contradicted me. Yet again another unqualified piece of advice.