The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Hmm, I once thought that the 1.4 ran kinda on the warm side. Ive seen its cpu temp upwards of 60C running Dr. Divx(CPU Exhaustive - single core)
I like a little competition myself. I dont care who wins really. Cause when two companies go at it, the consumer usually wins. A good friendly competition is QUITE healthy. So GO amd. LOL! Since there the ones that currently have to pick up the pace, GO GO GO! LOL!

 

Indeed. If they could produce a CPU as powerful as the i7 920 with a sensible motherboard design reliable for Quad crossfire, I'd buy it even if it cost more than the i7, as I would prefer the system.

Oh, and of course it would have to OC as well as the i7...

 

Totally agree. It would have to fair in EVERY bench.

Well...I tested the PSU in the only way I could, for the Pentium 4 machine, EVEREST! Unfortunately, it appears to lack a sensor for reading the 12V rail. Cause it only showed the CPU 1.5V, and the 3.3V rail which was ample. I still wonder about it though. A fan has been threatening to go out in it. It was making a VERY obnoxious noise a few weeks ago. I smacked it LOL! It hasn't done it since. I dont take things like that lightly. It tells me that its aging. Ive told my mother the owner of the machine that she NEEDS to upgrade and join the times LOL! Its a wonder that its keeping up now. And from what ive seen in her taskbar, she REALLY does need to be running more like a dual or quad core, and more memory. Which her board, OF COURSE, does not support!

 

Fans often do that when they get old, ball bearing ones at least. Sleeve bearing fans are less obtrusive (but that also means they're less obvious to spot when they go wrong - that noise coincides with a massive drop in speed, often a 2500rpm fan makin that noise will be spinning at 400-600rpm)

 

I know what you mean, as I got 83% out of my 4300 on a daily basis! 3.373GHz, if I remember rightly! As far as the old 64x2 chips, don't sell them short. Many are finding out they have a lot more life in an inexpensive 780GX chipset MB! Corporate sales should meet between Phenoms and Dual Cores in about a month or so. Thanks to the Phenom II and the B3 stepping for the phenoms, AMD will soon produce more Phenoms than Dual Cores.

Like you said the other day, Intel is switching it's thinking away from consumer i7's and back to servers. It's sales are dismal on the consumer side and it barely beats out the Celeron in total sales 10.8% to 10.1%. Even the P4 outsells it at 13.9%! Great system, just developed at the wrong time! Hopefully i5 will be the right move, but the reference motherboard looks a bit like "Old Mother Hubbard's Cupboard". Bare, would be a kind word! LOL!! It has to be the cheapest looking motherboard I've seen in years! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Intel's own boards always were naff like that though, I'll wait and see what the retail boards look like.

 

No offense, but I've heard more screeching noises out of sleeve bearing fans than I've ever heard with ball bearing ones! I've never gotten a sleeve bearing fan to last out the warranty, which is a joke as it costs more to send the fan back than to buy a new one! I have two Silverstones that are over 2 1/2 years old, and one of those is over three years old. Given the amount of hours a day that I use my computer, I don't think I will be running out and buying any more sleeve bearing fans. The fine dust here eats them alive, while it doesn't seem to bother the ball bearing ones. Even the magnetically sealed sleeve bearing ones suck! The fine dust wears off the teflon coating on the mating surface of the magnetic seal, and they start making noise! Something to consider if you live in a very dusty environment!

Russ

 

Yeah, but it's a Foxconn! LOL!!

Russ

 

Well I've had four ball bearing fans do that (having owned about a dozen) versus no sleeve bearing or fluid dynamic fans (having owned two dozen) - the problem you have with sleeve bearing fans is relatively specific to the area you live in, it is not a major problem for most.

I'm not especially fond of Foxconn designs either, really.

 

That's very true, it is specific to here. I've been all over the world and I've never seen such a dry place. Just a couple of miles away they have Gully Washers for rainstorms. Look to the South when Riverside is having severe thunderstorms, and you can watch the clouds go up and then down the mountains between us. There's no moisture left to come out of them at our altitude. They pass right over us and the clouds are all white and fluffy. I saw it one night when there was a full moon! Clear as a bell out too! One little cloud kept sticking little lightning bolts out of it, but not strongly enough to escape the cloud. A very weird sight to see! They continue on to the NW and the show starts all over again, 15 to 20 miles away as the clouds climb to about 5000 feet. The only time we get rain here, other than sprinkles, is if a storm comes in from LA, and it follows Interstate 10 East! Those are rare! Other than that we are surrounded by hills and mountains about 320 degrees around us. Fires are a major problem from June to the end of September. Last year the fires got so close to us We had the dogs and cat leashed and were ready to leave at a moments notice. It got within 100 yards before the Firemen caught up with it! Too close! Pretty scary when you find out it's burning less than a football field away, and the first notice you take is feeling the heat through a closed window!

Foxconn makes some average motherboards, and occasionally some good ones. This one says "Foxconn Reference Design" on it!

Russ

 

An off topic discussion, but certainly interesting
being even close to a big fire is a surreal feeling, the heat of it is incredible, and it really gives you a feeling of just how much energy is involved. Re the lightning, isn't that just cloud-cloud lightning? That's pretty much all we get here, very rarely does it strike ground targets.

 

No! As they say in the Country, "It comes a cropper" here with violent thunderstorms! A lot of forest fires are started that way! The cloud I was referring to was about 5-6 feet in size and it looked like something out of a Comic Book the way the tiny lightning boots were popping out all around it. It was so surreal! Crystal clear night and all that you can see is this tiny cloud making it's way along. It would flash inside it and the little bolts would be sticking out all around it. Double Bonus that night Too, because I got to see the stealth Bomber on it's way back to it's home base from an Air Show in San Diego. I just happened to look up at the right time and in the right place. It flew directly over us! When I say it's hard to see and very quiet, I'm not kidding. No lights, no nothing! The airspace must have been closed or they would have had to use navigation lights or a strobe or something! Big sucker too!

Russ

 

Wow, just goes to show how boring England is

And I was just surprised cos that PC cost me a measly £300 two years ago ^.^

 

Lol was going to test my E6600 later this week, thanks for saving me the trouble. Just going to bench after it's OC is restored. Wish my E6600 build only cost ~300£ lol.

 

Shokz,
You need to keep in mind that all these tests are pretty meaningless, as they don't really reflect the work that the computer can do, or the games that it can play. It all depends on what your needs are. I do a lot of Video Encoding with DVDRB/CCE, and there, it beats my old E6750 by a good margin, in spite of a lower clock speed. I went from a fast E6750 to the 7750BE, and I wouldn't want the E6750 back. I had it for more than a year, and it was a good machine, but for my purposes, the 7750BE is the better of the two! I use my computer between 14 and 17 hours a day, and the performance benchmarks aren't that good, yet it seems to get the work done just as fast and in many instances, faster than the E6750 did. I'm seriously considering the Phenom II x3 720 triple and waiting on better pricing on the Phenom II quad!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Oh I dont know. I think their pricing is within reason. But I REALLY needed the switch from the dual core. Rather disappointed with the limited support though. Heck, even 7-zip doesnt seem to support more than Dual core. I compressed something just a short time ago, and it averaged 33-50% cpu usage! WTF!!! Quads have been out HOW LONG! And im a complete A-hole for saying that. Because my programming expertise is EXTREMELY limited. So I can't do better LOL!

I dont know about the 955's performance/price ratio, but mine sure is good. I dont know if the 955 deserves that much extra cash. Probably yes, for its DDR3 and AM3 support.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2E16819103472,N82E16819103674,N82E16819103675

 

Oman7,
Another case of the benchmarks being meaningless, as it can only do what the software supports. If it only supports two cores, it's not making very much use out of being a Quad!

Russ

 

Considering it was £300, you can tell it's for nothing more than everyday tasks; browsing the net, music, video, photo editing, MSN, Office etc, it also handles a few older games (Half Life 2 etc) The PC in my sig is for the gaming, though it's getting a little long in the tooth and will do a completely new build late this year or early next with an i7 most likely.

 

I believe some one is (or will be soon) looking into why it doesn't work with the OSX version of apache so with luck it will be up soon. These days I usually use y-cruncher instead of superpi and it's really just to have some fun.

 

Hmm, it wasn't working when they acquired it, and that was over 6 months ago. It hadn't worked for 4 or 5 months before that! Should I hold my breath? ROFLMSOAO!! It's just a guide, useful within chip families to determine a certain level of performance. I remember when the guy from Apple designed the NEXT chip. It sucked at every benchmark in the country because of it's RISC commands on chip, but it flattened every Intel, Cyrix and AMD at the time in real world performance. As I recall, AMD wound up buying it and the Company.

It was more fun in the old days when two people had the same chip and each was trying to outdo each other in a friendly way. Hell, today all you have to do is build an i7 940 or 965, put it all together and you're King of the Hill! All you need to be able to do is afford it! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ