The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

spamual,
I'm sorry that I failed to apologize before this. You know I have no problem with things like that. Thank you for accepting though.

I think that all the bigger motherboard companies have had their moment in the sun at one time or another. I've seen outstanding motherboards from Asus, Biostar, DFI, Gigabyte and Abit. Even Foxconn got into the act a few years ago and had a record holder.

I don't take a lot of stock in 3DMark 06. It's useful, but not representative of CPU/MB performance.

I never asked you to stop posting about Asus. All I asked was for all the nit picky stuff to stop. It's kind of unfair as there's a substantial difference in price, say between a $169 BioStar or $184 GigaByte and a $288 Asus Rampage formula. Is it worth the price difference? That would be up to the person doing the buying and his/her needs. I just think it's unfair to extol the virtues of a motherboard that costs over $100 more as a comparison. Not all motherboards give you the same features in the bios, no motherboard company does. As the price goes down, so do the extra bells and whistles, but those posts leave people with the idea that they all are the same, when they are not. My personal outlook on the Asus bios and the GigaByte bios is that they do things in different ways, but always seem to wind up with pretty much the same results for any given chipset and CPU! Probably being more dependent on the individual choices in hardware and the binning of the CPU and memory than anything else.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

tbh i cant remember when we didnt see eye to eye lol!

asus fanboys stick together (though without soph, as he will bring his watercooling, which i do nto have yet , when i do he can join haha)

and lively lol, i change accounts more times than i have changed my CPU LOL, thats the only lively thing, to see what name i can come up with next week haha.

this one is a playfull pun on sam's name, intergrated with his spamming, mr 20k posts

still love you though
(no homo)

 

worth the price difference, thats a good question, and one im debating atm with my future build, which due to sams forward thinking about paying for accomodation and living real life, has been pushed to january atm, which may mean i could be the first with i7?

is the extra £50 worth the extra 1-200 MHz, it water cooling worth the extra 1-200 MHz?

for me yes, but that is nto an answer for most. i get my please, not just from gaming, but from the actuall overclocking, and its long proccess, and pushign the last mhz out of my system, ofcourse i have to stay within budget.

infact i dont game that much, bar about the 800+ hours i have racked up in cod4 over the last year, but with a better GPU i would, but i have gotten more happy just looking at my bios and trying to tweak it. other people will not think its worth to based on real life scores, and too right, im just crazy LOL.

now ofcourse if i do recomend a mobo, the needs of a user are looked at aswell as a budget, and if OCing is involved.

but i mainly let sam do that on aD as he can put up with the n00bs (no offence we were all one, but not any more, just liek id find it hard putting up with 5 year olds, desptie having the mental age HAHA)

btw your right about 3dmark, but as most GPUs are the same, it depends on the CPU clock, and that will be due to the CPU and the mobo, but it just shows what the LN2 EXTREME OCers choose.

but forget that, for everday use, and mild OCing, a mids range P45-DS3R or P5Q pro are the meal of the day atm. both are wonderfull and youd be hard to find better board in their price ranges, and choosing either one, most people would be completely happy with, as it wouldnt make a difference get the cheapest one avaiable.

higher end, is where most things count as to the last few MHz, or running a CPU with a lowest voltage at a certain speed etc. and not many people opt for the uber high end boards.

i hopefully, god willing, by january the most, will be able to have ahigh end board, stupmed with watercooling, and a brilliant OCing Qc chip, be its i7 or penryn, and a 4870X2 with w/c unless a better card props up on the market.

then finally ill have the taste of blood of uber high end, and naturally, ill swap the mobo out the next month for the next best one and move to phase change cascade cooling (one day, a nice distant dream) haha

 

true and you make a very good point. kinda like the choices when buying a new car. manual or electric windows, cloth or leather interior. they will both get you from point A to point B but the one with the better options package will cost you more money. it all depends on what a person wants and what their budget is. the bios in asus mobos is worth the extra money to me but I'm sure that doesn't apply to everybody.

I do have to admit I've been a little on the grouchy side with the events pertaining to the upcoming presidential election and the extremely one sided media coverage and celebrity support. it's not looking very good for my political party. OK carry on. I'll go back in my hole.

 

:O republican....in this day and age of an inevitable black president...WELL I NEVER!!!!!





haha.

 

skin color has absolutely nothing to do with it. we can't go here. sorry I brought it up.

 

twas a joke lol.

(and it wasnt even a subtle one.... americans ¬_¬...) hehe

 

I seem to recall having purchased used a Gigabyte before Russ became a Gigabyte spokesperson.In I've used a lot of boards over the years and I remember a time when Asus wasn't a blip on the screen, but they have a proven track record of building consistent high quality boards, but I could care less which boards others use.

In regards to AMD or Intel, I will recommend the one that offers the most performance for the dollar and right now that's Intel.

 

Likewise here (about AMD vs Intel)
It was Asus or nowt for me when building my recent PC for the first time, but the reason why I typically go for Gigabyte first is the poor reliability of all 3 of the boards I had. That can't affect current decisions though as all the boards I had date back to Q1 2007 at the latest.

 

Mort,
Please check your PMs. You can make it public if you like, I just wanted you to read it first!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Sophocles,
I agree to a point. If you are just buying the CPU, I would agree. If you need both the CPU and a motherboard, then I would choose the combination of a Phenom 9850 Black Edition 125w and a $99 BioStar motherboard, only because the cheapest Intel Quad and the Phenom 9850 perform about the same and the cost would be about the same, which leads me to a question since I know very little about AMD 64x2s and nothing about their Quads. How does the Phenom which is some 7000 MIPS slower manage to stay with the Q6600 in almost all applications? 7000 MIPS is a lot of difference, or at least it is with an Intel, so like the TV show, how do they do it?

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I think the AMD chips have a higher Multimedia benchmark?

 

Has anyone noticed that Foxconn has been quietly making some pretty decent looking high end Intel motherboards. They have an X38 that's the weirdest looking thing. When you first look at it, it looks like there's a covered wagon without wheels, sitting where the NB heatsink should be. Makes for a pretty strange looking heat pipe system, Check it out!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186134

Russ

 

Interesting board, but the lack of any RMA facility seems a little concerning...

 

question for everyone.

how long do you leave your puters up and running?
is it good to leave them runing for long period of times with no down time? not talking about shutting it down to get into bios to tweak something then fire it back up.or something like that.. i mean shutting it down for a few hours even a day or so????

the reason i ask, ive had mine up and running not counting shutting down to play in bios(didnt mean to say bios..lol) for 3 weeks or so... ever since i got my new board bout 3 weeks ago. is this good for it or should i have some down time?

actually shutting down now t oclean out the case.. take some air to it. dust it off to say..

 

If you're shutting down windows, it doesn't really matter. As long as you don't have any heat issues you won't run into issues with hardware much sooner than usual leaving the system on 24/7, but I tend to find after a couple of days straight windows tends to become unstable a bit, or there'll be something you do that insists upon a restart.

 

It's normally good I think to shut it down every now and then to give it a refresher or the opportunity to "repair" itself. I don't know that much about windows but it seems to run "cleaner" and "faster" if given this opportunity.

bios, bios, bios... there I said it!!!

....gm

 

well i currently have no ratios to keep up....lol

well its been down a little over a hour now..wow...big difference in things... this is the longest i have gone without shutting down to clean the case and fans. 9 fans is alot to clean..lolbut the fan on the GPU man was that dirty. i actually had to take the card out and clean it I can see the Evga on it now..lol plus its a little quieter to. i can tell a big difference in the noise level..not that its noisy

here is a shot of everest after the great clean out. don't look at my stuck sensor on Core 1.. the rest is awsome...almost 10c less on my gpu.



its funny speaking of windows shutting down to repair itself or what not.. it was acting sluggish somewhat but now it seem smoking fast again..maybe the HDD its on is cooler than before and is a happpy camper..lol... might just be me idk.

i dread mentioning this. but when i fired it back up i went into bios. just checking things out.. went into PC health the temps in there were even lower than whats showing in everest.
mobo=16c
cpu=30c

which should i go by?all are good temps so I'm not worried.. well haven't been since i got the new CPU (and mobo) id say what the bios say is more truthful...

 

From cold your PC will probably say less in the BIOS as there's even less load on the CPU.

 

gonna play some COD4 and check it again in bios.
Sam
i did set AA to high. i actually have a 2 & 4 to choose from i put it on 4 and a couple other game settings to high.. my gpu did get a little sluggish