The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

sam has quiet a few green 1TB drives, that all work perfectly fine.


personally i think, SSD for the OS drive, a small (like 80GB) for the PAge file, and a nice 1.5TB 5400RPM Drive for storage, (possibel one more externally for backup)

 

^ I would agree with that. Currently I have a 80GB OS drive (half linux, half windoze) and and some storage drives. Would like to get a SSD but they still cost too much for me.

 

I think most of us would love to get our paws on a new SSD. Heck, I'd like a dozen. Just so I could stare at the other eleven LOL!!!

 

The only thing I regret about my SSD is that I jumped at the 30GB while it was on sale. Granted it works astoundingly well, its just a little small now that the new car smell has worn off. I'm too cheap to buy the size I want so I turn my attention to other things.

 

I think your forgetting the Semi Ancient systems that have ran it. My 1.4Ghz Athlon for instance... with only 512Mb ram.

 

Creaky seeing as you are the premier Linux user here, do you know of a good source for 32-bit VIA Linux drivers? Specifically the KM400 chipset???

I have an older AMD-based Slimline Laptop with an Athlon Xp 2200+ and 1GB of RAM. It's an Averatech 3200 but drivers from their(Averatech/TriGem) site won't work for most of the hardware and even the drivers from the site archives and third party sites won't work. I figured I'd try Win 7 on it to see if it auto loads them but Linux might be better suited for it due to its lightweight nature. Any recommends on where to find drivers and which flavor of Linux might be suited for a light duty surfing/movies machine?

 

I'm simply playing is all. My bro bought a 40" 1080P LCD tv, and we hooked is POS Dell up to it. It looks good. But the XP installation on it is running like MOLASSES! Even Windows 7 would run better. Yes, it's running that slow LOL! I guess im gonna find out. If only for curiosity sake. I'll definitely bring an XP installation disc with just to be sure. It's gonna act as a temporary media center. What IS the best OS for a media center anyway? I love windows 7 enough to make it as such... but I imagine there are better suited.

 

Maw: I don't use any stability tests. As far as I'm concerned, if my PC doesn't crash, it's stable. I have yet to find any stability test that can replicate real-world usage.
Jeff: Well, what can I say, I like my storage
Will: The power bill is nice, in terms of energy costs it does make a difference though not a huge one unless you use as many of the drives as I do. The low power spin-up however is very handy as it means you can use a low-rated PSU to run lots of drives - My 380W EarthWatts has no issue spinning up 9 drives when 5 of them are WD Greens.
As for temps, it has everything to do with voltage. I used to run my CPU at 1.40625V, a legacy from the attempts to get 4Ghz. I've since cut back to 1.300V and the impact on temps is incredible, idling at 32C instead of 40 is certainly a lot nicer, and I can get away with reduced CPU fan speed on load as well.
Russ: If everthing panned for high failure rate on newegg actually failed as often as they said, I would have RMA'ed twice as much stuff as I actually have. Likewise if the amount of stuff rated 5 eggs on there was actually reliable, I'd have RMA'ed (or stomached the loss of) half the amount of hardware I actually have. The high failure rate for WD Green drives just doesn't really seem to exist. I have 6 of the drives without issue, and between my friends we must own 20, if not more. The only drives ANY of my friends have had to RMA lately, with the exception of Rob here, are Samsungs. 6 of them.
With regard to the CPU energy usage, the same goes for any CPU. Unless you stress every single transistor it has, the power usage is nowhere near as high as it suggests. Graphics cards are much the same. Work my CPU as hard is it would normally get and I'll draw an extra 50 or 60 watts off normal. Run Linpack and it's more like 100-120. Play a game that maxes all 4 of my GPUs and 2 of my CPU cores and my A.C. draw is typically 750-810W. Run OCCT stress test on the GPUs and CPU and I broke 1060.

Shaff: Given the way pagefiles work, I would use an SSD for both the OS and the pagefile, along with a few regularly accessed programs, maybe some small games. SSDs don't degrade in performance as they fill like HDDs do, nor do they care about fragmentation, so technically you can brim one and get like-new performance, TRIM excluding.
Personally, a thorough system design would include an SSD for the above purposes, a 7200rpm drive for games, and a 5400rpm drive for multimedia and backups, etc.
Deadrum: I owned an original 30GB controller-less SSD, and I regret buying it. Completely unusable on its own without RAID.
Omega: Some fail logic there! That'd be like saying a donkey pulling a caravan is so slow it'd be quicker pulling an aircraft.... :S

 

I wouldn't call my logic fail. Windows 7 FOR ME, has been at least 20% smoother at install than XP. Although thats with proper hardware I suppose. My Older machine ran XP slightly quicker. But I'll say this for it. With only 512 ram, and 1.4 processor, it ran pretty steady! Although it had to disable aero...

 

Having run a competent PC on XP, there's no comparison, Win7 would still be much slower than an old PC once you load programs. Remember, I use more than 2GB of RAM when I have several chrome tabs open. Granted, some of that is due to it being 64-bit, but there's no way a 512MB system wil run Win7 properly with ANYTHING running (Oh, and FTR Win7 still uses a gig less than Vista - If I pushed it, I could break 4GB with Vista just by browsing the web)

 

My brother doesn't do anything PC exhaustive. And this system has 1Gb. I was merely comparing that this Dell SHOULD be able to run it slightly better. The old PC I ran it in used 87% of the ram(512), I wouldn't call it sluggish with how it was running. But I realize you're correct. Running to many windows/programs are gonna tax the ram quickly. Ahh, but isnt that where the pagefile comes in...

 

Also remember Windows will never intentionally fill all of the RAM, it will start paging shortly before the end (about 60-100MB) to avoid the risk of entire system lockup due to lack of usable memory for shuffling. However, if a program is attempting to use a large amount of memory beyond what you have installed, the shuffling process may take a while. If, for example Crysis Warhead or GTA4 are running and exceed the RAM limit (which they will), because they exceed it by as much as 2GB in some cases, the shuffling process can freeze the PC (Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt-Tab, the lot) for up to 20-30 minutes.

 

Thanks for the useful info guys. I really do appreciate it. This particular computer really is only gonna browse youtube, Crazy$h!t, etc. It's not gonna do much else. I guess calling it an HTPC was a bit over the top LOL!