The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Wow! the UD5's got 6 mem ports. CRAZY. I didnt know that NON server boards supported that much. This must be fairly cutting edge then. I suppose the i7 can handle it though, Ehh. OMG, 10 sata ports. Well... this appears to be the Godlike board at present. WAYYYYYYYYYYY too much money to justify the speed though. the board I can see spending that much, but the i7 is a grand for the extreme edition!!! Ok... i'll stick with AMD with that kinda cost! If I had the money, THEN it could be an interesting comparison FOR MYSELF.
Black and white is all fine and good, but first hand in my face experimentation is what really tells me something.

 

Almost all i7 boards have 6 RAM slots, as i7 uses triple channel memory, so technically 6 slots for i7 is like 4 slots for 775.

The i7 965 sure is expensive, but have you seen the new price of the Q9550 and Q9650?
$340 for a chip nearly 20% faster than AMD's best at stock, and once overclocked, 40-50% faster than an overclocked AMD. Sign me up!
Take 10% off those numbers and you get the $280 Q9550.

 

russ i have asked about how they stress test the OCs. just wait for them to answer

sam, when recently have ASUS done that with BIOS upgrades?

infact for one of theirs they added more OCing features for my old P5K-E.

as for the OCing, they tested the P6T deluxe a LONG time ago, (therefore very early bios, and the MSI SLI aswell) and they beat the more mature GBs.

 

P5K, P5N, Striker, and a few others I'm sure.

 

links?

 

Oman7,
I have a silly question. Why would you even care who makes any drive if it all works well? You sound like you feel that you are being somehow cheated? It's not like Sony/NEC/Optiarc puts together bad drives! I've been using Optiarc drives since before the S/N/O deal even started, with the AW models and regardless of who made them, they were excellent drives! I've sold dozens of them and never had a single failure or complaint. The only failure I ever had personally was caused by a Faulty Thermaltake PSU, and Newegg replaced the drive with an AD-7170! It's not like you are spending $55 for the cheapest Plextor, and getting a $20 lite-On for your money. The value isn't in the name of the manufacturer, It's in the quality and performance of the drive for the money spent. I'm fixing to order two Samsung SH-S222A drives because I want IDE drives. I've yet to see any difference in scan quality using IDE, so why waste the interface? GM seems to like the Sammi's, so I thought I would give them a try. Never bought one before, but I've heard enough good things about them, to warrant my purchasing a couple. I have no idea who makes them, nor do I care as long as they do the job intended, and at $23 each, the price is right!

As far as the AD-7220 goes, Optiarc has told me personally that it's an NEC. The only one I've ever seen, Everest reports as an NEC Chip, so I'm inclined to believe Optiarc. I know a number of people have reported them as Lite-Ons that have some cosmetic differences. I don't buy that at all! Why make separate plastic parts, just to make it look marginally different. It costs more money to do it that way, so it makes no sense to me at all! It's not like doing something like that gives the drive a different look of distinction! LOL!! The only drives that ever gave me that feeling were the Silver Optiarcs, and that's only because the Silver brought out the raised print on the front cover better. Looked very classy!

Russ

 

You seriously aren't telling me you need links for that? The P5K was infamous for it, and we had a discussion about that a while back - BIOS updates were your defense of the board after I put it down in a customers build voting in favour of the EP35-DS3R, for this very issue.

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/01/26/intel-core-i7-memory-performance-review/9

intesting, for gamers, you can get 999 24 1066 DDR3 RAM and itll be fine

for most things ram speed/ timing is no problem. they said low latency DDR3 1333MHz.

looks liek buying overly expensive RAM for i7 is not needed and with i7 aparently need less RAM, you wont need to buy to much.

thought IMO id want more programs to take up more ram, becuase then you use less HDD, and therefore itll be much quicker.

if only DRAM wasnt volitile and was cheap! 1TB of DRAM and there would be no bottleneck in our systems due to HDD

 

well how come no discussions of the sort with the P5K or the P5B on the OcUK forums. not that i have heard anything liek that from GB boards, only that their lower models arnt as good clockers as other manufacturers lower boards, (nor their higher)

 

Yeah, because memory speed and latency has no effect on games
Have you seen the new Serial ATA RAID RAM boxes? The big ones support up to 24GB with a large rechargeable battery pack (including charge meter) and would be awesome. Sadly, the box and all 12 sticks of RAM would set you back at least £500.

 

Google results 1-10 of over a million for 'P5K post' are all problem threads, one of them from OcUK. You probably won't find many threads on the boards any more as they're getting on a bit, and a lot of them will probably have failed altogether or people moved onto newer boards like the P5Qs.

 

you realise serching for a problem actually gets you it.....

 

You will note I did not include 'problem', 'won't', 'fails', 'fail' or 'fail' in my search.
Searching for "X38-DS4 POST" exactly as I have with P5K earns me only 3/10 problems, one of which has nothing to do with POST faults, it was picked up due to the sentence 'you may not post new threads, you are not logged in'.

 

funny but i didnt think the P5K was the lowest of the X38 boards.....

p5e post

2/10, and one the guy decided to upgrade the bios form within windows....

 

It isn't. Your point?

The EP35-DS3R scores 5/10 for problems, the P35C-DS3R 4/10, and the P35-DS3L 5/10 (ish). All far from the 8/10 P5K gets you.

 

Russ
i myself have a 7220S it has all the traits of a liteon other than the name on it.i havent and wont open it up to see what chip it has in it. im not complaining about it cause i am a liteon fanboy..lol like omegaman i want a drive to be what it is sold as.. i bought the 7220S cause i thought it would have the NEc chipset in it and be as outstanding as the 7200S. granted i dont know for 100% if it has the mediatek chip that liteons have, but it is a great burner and yes i would recommend it it anyone. if it is a liteon in disguise im more than happy with it just for the fact the more media you run it the better the learning curve. NEC and others dont learn the media like liteons do. they have a standard and go buy it.

where in everest does it show the chipset of a drive? i wanna know now...lol

COOLERMASTER #1

EDIT:
found this in everest...doesnt say much of anything for the 7220S and what it is compaired to what the 7200S says.

 

Hey russ, The reason I want an NEC chip is ALL nec drives ive had, have had a nack for burning EVEN cheap media well. NEC in short knows how to build a burner. I suppose I can agree with ROB. If it is indeed a lite-on, No big deal! Lite-on hasn't wronged me yet. Except for the bug in the iHAP422 right off the bat. Seemed to have a corrupt F/W from the factory. Flashed to an update, and presto. Does EVEREST tell you what chipset is in an Optical drive??? Regardless, Im gonna have to get me that program, LOL. Looks like it knows its stuff. I've heard of it before, never really gave it another thought. And I suppose at 23$ average burner cost, I really cant complain. My first NEC drive cost me 50$ in late 2005. I got my moneys worth, before it got cancer, LOL

 

spamual,
With all due respect!
Why are you constantly going on about i7? Do you see our membership here flocking to buy them the way they did with the Conroes? Sales for i7 have been flat, and aren't going to improve in the near future! The $1000 965 outsells the 940 by about 2 to 1, and the 940 has almost no sales at all! Even the 920, which outsells the 940 by about 9 to 1 doesn't sell enough to keep the platform alive. The very rich buy the 965, The rapidly shrinking middle class buy the 920 and the poor buy Celerons. At $549 for the 940 vs $295 for the 920, the simple answer is that people can't afford the 940's price tag! Of course, the other side of that coin is Intel won't continue to build them if they can't make a profit on them. Intel has already decided to cut 5000 jobs in the US and will probably under-produce like AMD is planning to do. Just to stay in business, Intel is going to have to go after a lower priced market where the competition is stiffer, because that's all that people are going to be able to afford. Nehalem is dead! (2008-2009) R.I.P. It won't last out the year. Great system and a technological Tour de Force, but it's just not affordable for the hardly anybody. Worse yet is the Server market for Intel's i7 Xeon! It is almost non-existent now, and as the economy grows worse, there will be no market for it at all! There's also no way that all of this is all going to change overnight. It took years to get us all into the mess the economy is in, and it will take years to get back to some semblance of normality. Truthfully, it's going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better. People are worrying more about eating and keeping a roof over their heads, than about buying a fast computer, no matter how good it is!

Look for a major shift in computer component sales. People will be upgrading what they have, instead of buying new. Socket 775 and AM2+ CPU and memory sales are picking up, which is an indication that people have less money to spend, so they are putting their money where it does them the most good, by buying faster CPUs and more memory to put in their existing computers. I've had a number of customers inquire about upgrades, but I have no new system builds coming up at all! People are no longer able to buy what they want, and have to settle for what they need or have to have. Look at me! I am able to do my new AMD build because I was able to get enough for my computer to pay for it. If I had to take any money away from the house, I wouldn't be doing one at all! As it is, I will be without a computer for the next week or so until I get it all built. I'll check my emails once in a while, but I won't be on line for the better part of a week.

I built 59 systems last year, but I had built 57 of them before November first. The last two months of the year, I only built two, out of a planned 7! The other 5 were canceled!

During the great Depression, people sold Apples on street corners in major city's, for a penny each. Most times they didn't sell a single one. Their only saving grace was that even though they didn't make any money, they still had something to eat! Please keep in mind that most of us here can't afford an i7 build, and it's going to be a very long time before most of us can! Most of us are no longer able to afford to stay on the cutting edge of the technology!

Respectfully,
Russ

 

Well spoken russ. DITTO! I would rather buy (at this point) an amd phenomII, have SOME bragging rights, It would still be a respectable computer (built right). Compared to what I have, it would seem GODLIKE. Im sure alot of you laugh at my sig. And thats ok. Im not really a POWER user. I wouldnt know what to do with an i7. And besides, ive heard of something that will put the i7 to shame, when they get the kinks, and support worked out. If im mistaken, I shamefully hang my head. The Nvidia TESLA based on Cuda technology
http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html
Now THERE is a freak I would love to get my Paws on, LOL

 

Rob & Omegaman7,
I honestly don't remember where I saw the chipset listed. It might have been Sandra, but I thought for some reason that it was Everest. I didn't think a whole lot about it at the time because it wasn't an issue back then. I know when I physically talked to Optiarc, they said that it was an "NEC based drive". I really didn't think very much about it until all the discussion started about the drive. I just looked in Everest and I didn't find it for this computer. All I found was the Model and firmware. I don't have Sandra on this machine and I've already pulled the 250, which has all my software on it because it's being picked up tomorrow afternoon. I'll take a look as soon as I get the new one running and let you know. Wherever it was, it was in parenthesis, and looked like this (NEC). I will make an honest attempt to find it. Had it been an issue at the time I would have taken a screen shot of it.

I also looked on VideoHelp and it says it's an NEC when I entered it into their database!

Best Regards,
Russ